Let’s get this out of the way early: robots are creepy. Robotics, as a field, is creepy. An entire branch of science dedicated to building increasingly autonomous constructs that are smarter, faster, and stronger than the very creators that have forced them into servitude? Sounds like a great idea! Clearly, humanity’s only chance of survival […]
Back in 2010 when Tom Scott presented a nightmare version of a flash mob gone wrong, it was greeted with rueful awareness that events could coalesce to a dangerous point. The message, that oversharing through social media can have real life consequences, is still being shouted from websites. [yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY’] In one of the more […]
You probably want to file this under “Solution in Search of a Problem” — Nokia has patented the bright idea for alert ink. The idea is to use ferromagnetic ink to create a tattoo that “pairs with your phone” and vibrates when you get an alert. For those not into body art, there’s also the […]
Social media is the first entity to offer life after death and have some tangible proof to back it up. From battles over who controls an individual’s social media accounts after they die to a selection of applications and websites that grant the user a few posthumous last words or even allow them to regularly […]
First of all, I won’t apologize for the pun in the title. Secondly, it seems my first male contraceptive article stirred up a lot of controversy about the hypothetical anti-HIV properties of RISUG (shared from a journal named, appropriately, Medical Hypotheses). After speaking with the makers of the U.S. version, they mentioned that although this […]
British researcher Mark Gasson became the first person to infect himself with a computer virus and spread the infection to a machine, in the name of science. To be fair, this isn’t a case of human flesh actually contracting a virus made of software code. The Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading pulled […]
A start-up company has recently come out of stealth-mode and its technology is going to change how companies think about cloud-computing. Numecent announced new technology they’re calling cloudpaging. It allows companies to turn software, any software, into a cloud app and rent the apps out for whatever length of time they want. The first step […]
If I were going to describe the perfect contraceptive, it would go something like this: no babies, no latex, no daily pill to remember, no hormones to interfere with mood or sex drive, no negative health effects whatsoever, and 100 percent effectiveness. The funny thing is, something like that currently exists. The procedure called RISUG in […]
It’s an advancement in surveillance technology that most of us knew was coming eventually, and it comes from the video monitoring division of Hitachi Kokusai Electric. This surveillance camera system can search through data on 36 million faces in one second. Developed by Hitachi Kokusai Electric, the system can automatically detect a face from either […]
Websites everywhere are voicing issues over a new electronic gun designed by Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University in Japan. The SpeechJammer records the speech of targeted individuals and blasts their own voice back at them with a .2 second delay. This results […]
