Techcitement*

It’s hard to imagine a television show that has had more examples of techfiction becomie techfact than the original Star Trek series. The multimedia franchise has a grip on the collective unconsciousness of geeks on the level of few other things. While the movies and spin-offs have their own assortment of impressive gadgetry made real, the original [...]

Canadian-born astronaut Chris Hadfield hands over command of the International Space Station today, but not before taking the Blue Marble by storm with a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” performed from space. It’s a remarkably well done music video and just about the coolest thing ever. (See the original “Space Oddity” music video from [...]

Remember all the hubbub about 3D printed guns? No? Not even when the U.S. government gave a firearms licence to Defense Distributed, the biggest name in renderable firearms? This past week was another huge one for DD, as it printed and tested the new Liberator gun, an all plastic gun that only needs the addition of a nail to serve [...]

Techcitement touched upon some of Tony Stark’s wardrobe the other day, but we didn’t deal with one of the coolest aspects of the armor — the predictive nature. A lot of what was far-out science fiction in 1962 is science fact today. The first thing you need to be aware of is that in the [...]

Later this year, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) is scheduled to launch on an exploratory and scientific mission for NASA, with support by the University of Colorado Boulder. As part of the spacecraft’s mission, it will act as the first spacecraft to focus primarily on the state of the upper atmosphere, the [...]

An unnamed patient recently had 75 percent of his skull surgically replaced with a 3D printed implant. The patient’s head was scanned, and then a custom digital model of the implant was created before finally being fabricated in a 3D printer. On February 18, Oxford Performance Materials in Connecticut gained approval from the U.S. Food [...]

On the opening day of this year’s Sea Air Space Expo, the wonder con for all things naval aviation, the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command announced a planned 2014 deployment of its long-awaited, functional solid state Laser Weapon System (LaWS).  Scheduled for installation aboard the amphibious transport dock, USS Ponce, the production of an operational [...]

The idea of harvesting resources from asteroids long predates space travel, and NASA is now taking the first steps toward bringing those celestial bodies down to Earth. Plans are being made for an entirely robotic spaceship able to haul a typical nearby asteroid, about 25 feet long and 500 tons, to a position near the [...]

You, and most of the planet, have been hacked. Thankfully, instead of stealing your identity or files off of your computer, the hacker’s main goal was to define a visual representation of what the internet looks like as people log on and off of it. By scanning the IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), the anonymous [...]

Back in November, Techcitement talked about how much technology has changed and how much the 10 and under set have acclimated to this new tech as the baseline norm. Pop culture has plenty of references to tech that existed for kids in the 80s and 90s, leading parents to have to explain things to confused [...]