Google says it’s used balloons to help “tens of thousands” of people get online in Peru after flooding hit connections in rural areas. It was an unplanned expansion of an ongoing experimental project. Project Loon (which is technically run by Google parent company Alphabet) uses 49-feet wide helium balloons flying 12 miles above earth to […]
An Indian teen has designed a satellite weighing just 64 grams. It will spend 12 minutes in micro-gravity next month to test how well the design works. Rifath Sharook’s ‘Kalamsat’, named after former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam, was the winner of Cubes In Space, a joint competition run by NASA and education company I […]
Smartphones with batteries that recharge inside five minutes could be on sale next year according to a company that’s been working on the technology for several years. But ongoing mysteries about how exactly it works means there’s still scepticism. We covered the claims by StoreDot back in 2014, noting that it had explained that: The […]
The latest version of Amazon’s Echo will have a seven inch touchscreen that can double up as a videophone. The addition of a screen on the $230 device fulfils three main roles. The first is to give a visual element to the Alexa assistant while retaining the hands-free convenience. For example, as well as getting […]
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say they can turn virtually anything into a computer touchpad by using a conductive spray paint. The technology is simply a more ambitious implementation of how touchscreens already work. While older ‘resistive’ screens worked by the user physically pressing down a screen until it contacted a second layer beneath, modern capacitive […]
Most American homes don’t have a landline telephone according to newly published figures. Young adults and renters are the most likely to be cell-phone only. The figures come from the National Center for Health Statistics. Twice a year it carries out a wide-ranging survey of around 20,000 households on health issues and asks for a […]
NASA is offering a prize to coders who can help speed up the supercomputer software used to improve aircraft performance. You’ll need to be a US citizen and able to work with Modern Fortran. While many people think of NASA as being a space organization, it also works on aeronautics closer to home. This includes […]
Elon Musk wants a network of subterranean city tunnels carrying cars around at 130 miles per hour. But the project is moving ahead about as quickly as a pet snail he cited. Late last year he tweeted “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” For […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4izQnNE2S2o The robot might not be as complex as Bishop from Alien, but fortunately for the man lending his hand for the experiment, he’s just as agile. Five finger fillet with Staubli TX40 robot speeding up for the second pass. A demonstration of confidence in Staubli speed and precision (and my programming!) by my next […]
Verizon is to offer a Gigabit internet service for the first time, albeit in a limited range of places and not quite at the implied speed. The service is an upgrade to the existing Verizon Fios ‘Instant Internet’ offering of 750 Mbps for both uploads and downloads. The new deal will be available to the […]