There’s that iconic moment in many a Superman story in which the Man of Steel is soaring through the sky when, thanks to his super hearing, he picks up the faint, frightened voice of a person calling for help. Without a second thought, Supes zeroes in on the audio source and flies off in that Read more
“Seagulls,” said Andy Stanford-Clark, excitedly. “They’re quite a big obstacle from an image-processing point of view. But, actually, they’re not a threat at all. In fact, you can totally ignore them.” Stanford-Clark, the chief technology officer for IBM in the U.K. and Ireland, was exudingnervous energy. It was the afternoon before the morning when, at Read more
Travis DeShazo is, to paraphrase Cake’s 2001 song “Comfort Eagle,” building a religion. He is building it bigger. He is increasing the parameters. And adding more data. The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. “Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god Read more
If TV producers ever made a version of America’s Funniest Home Videos about virtual reality fails, it would be crammed full of folks taking spills while wearing VR headsets, walking into walls while thinking they’re walking in open space, and knocking out bystanders with controllers. YouTube has no shortage of videos in this department, with Read more
One of my uncles always tells a story about how, when he was a kid, his mom would tell him she could see around corners. They would be out walking someplace, only for his mom to tell him the details of some vehicle or person that was about to appear around a bend in the Read more
In Jurassic Park, cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex involved the discovery of dinosaur blood fossilized in amber, a whole lot of genetic engineering, and a willful disregard for the health and wellbeing of Jeff Goldblum. For a team of researchers at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, copying a T. rex took some state-of-the-art laser Read more
Forty years ago today — as Sheena Easton’s song 9 to 5 (Morning Train) dominated the music charts, California dealt with the immediate aftermath of the Westmorland earthquakes, and the world’s first monster truck (dubbed Bigfoot) crunched over its inaugural row of abandoned cars — the computing world changed forever. Not that too many people Read more
In July 2019, multiple drones were reportedly used to swarm Navy destroyers off the coast of California. The mysterious drones, around six in total, appeared over the course of several nights, flashing lights and performing “brazen maneuvers” close to the warships. They flew at speeds of 16 knots, and stayed aloft for upward of 90 Read more
There are plenty of stylish, tech-heavy speakers doing the rounds in 2021, but not too many are quite like the speaker designed and built by Dakd Jung. A 40-year-old artist living in Ansan, South Korea, Jung has created an unusual speaker that harnesses the power of ferrofluid, a viscous magnetic oil invented by a NASA Read more
TU Wien You’d be hard-pressed to think of a material that’s more contentious than ivory, the hard, white material most commonly taken from the tusks of elephants. Outlawed around the world since 1989, ivory continues to be an extremely valuable commodity, with poachers able to command $1,500 for a single pound of the stuff. In Read more
