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The 'Best Map Ever of the Universe'
A map of the earliest light in the universe -- click to embiggen. (ESA and the Planck Collaboration) What does the universe look like? It looks, it turns out, a little something like the image above...
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Charles A. A. Dellschau Dreams of Flying: The Amazing Story of an Airship...
Charles Dellschau, courtesy of Stephen Romano It was the time of Gold Rush, and people of every nationality were pouring into California in search of that earth that would make them rich. The...
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A Lizard Robot to Delight You and/or Haunt Your Dreams
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the natural world should be positively humbled by the current state of robotics. We have flying robots that mimic birds. We have leaping robots...
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The True Story of the Government Programs That Tried to Build an Atomic Heart
In 1967, the National Heart Institute and the Atomic Energy Agency began a ten-year effort to develop an artificial heart powered by plutonium-238. The atomic hearts would have pumped human blood with...
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Watching Hacking Attempts in Real Time
This animated graphic by T-Mobile is surprisingly interesting. What you see below is a static screen shot; the site itself says it offers a depiction of ongoing cyber-attacks.Here's the policy point:...
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Your Friday Photo Blog: Thumbs and Ammo
Steven Leckart spotted this most excellent blog: Thumbs & Ammo. The conceit? Replace the guns in famous famous movie stills with thumbs. The motto? "Real tough guys don't need guns, they just need...
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Finale for now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem
Early yesterday I mentioned that while Google's new Keep application, a nascent all-purpose notetaker, looked very interesting, I wasn't going to waste time getting used to it. That is because of the...
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The Promise and Limits of Google's 'Data Liberation Front'
I figure I might as well go all-in on this topic. Previous entries here and here. Today, two more reader dispatches concerning which parts of your data you can and can't retrieve if a cloud service...
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Serenity Now: Clear Your Tabs, Clear Your Mind (With One Glorious Click)
Me after I cleared all my tabs, basically (Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock) Is your computer running at a turtle's pace because you have just way too many tabs open? Can you not see the Gchat alert blinking...
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How to Get Beyoncé Out of Your Head: The Scientific Solution
Once she inhabits your mind, she will (almost) never leave. (Reuters) Here are, in no particular order, some of the songs most likely to get stuck in your head when you hear them. Apologies in...
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Making Art Out of Earthquakes
The Hayward Fault runs through the center of the UC Berkeley campus, famously splitting the university's football stadium in half from end to end. It has, according to the 2008 Uniform California...
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The Mythology of the Mainframe
Mainframes occupied an interesting spot in the American imagination. The mainframe, in the movies, was an incantation: it conjured up all the mysterious power and glory of technology. The mainframe...
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The Best Kind of Graffiti Is 3D Graffiti
November 2012 (Settimo Torinese, Italy) The Italian graffiti artist Manuel Di Rita -- nom de street: Peeta -- has been working with graffiti since 1993. And he has, sometimes quite literally, elevated...
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'Ogooglebar' ... and 14 Other Swedish Words We Should Incorporate Into...
Köttrymd! In other words, everything's better in Swedish. (Oliver Hoffman/Shutterstock) Today brought the news that Google has officially objected to one of the best words that has ever graced this...
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Report: Marissa Mayer Might Kill Off Yahoo's Content Business
Reuters Business Insider has an appropriately insidery take on Marissa Mayer's plans for Yahoo. Mayer wants to get rid of its original content business, the report says, in favor of user-generated...
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The Incredible Tale of a 1909 Fight to the Death Inside a Moving Elevator
Not the actual elevator in which this story took place, but you can use your imagination from here (Library of Congress) On a Friday in late March in 1909, perhaps on a day much like today, a Mrs....
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The Doll That Helped the Soviets Beat the US to Space
Ivan Ivanovich, just returned from space (Zvezda Museum) On March 25, 1961, a group of peasants in Izhevsk, a village near the Ural Mountains in the center of the Soviet Union, watched a man fall from...
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You're Eye-to-Eye With a Whale in the Ocean. What Does It See?
Bryant Austin with Scar, a sperm whale (RED One camera video still by Bryce Groark, True Blue Films, 2011)There is almost nothing about a whale's body that we can relate to. They breathe air like we...
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Quiz: Is This a Video of a Human?
Any sufficiently advanced technology, Arthur C. Clarke argued, is indistinguishable from magic. There could be a corollary to Clarke's law, though, when it comes to one particular kind of technology:...
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The First Direct Image of a Tatooine-Like System
Artist's rendering of Kepler-16b (NASA) Last fall, to much geeky fanfare, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-16b or, as everybody liked to call it, Tatooine, because, like the Star Wars world,...
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