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These Flying Quadrotors Are the Robot Versions of the Blue Angels
LAS VEGAS—The International Consumer Electronics Show has just begun, but the trade show has already spawned a dance. But if you'd prefer not to see a conference full of tech industry professionals...
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5 Intriguing Things: Wednesday, 1/8
1. A site that catalogs the code that appears in movies and on TV, then explains what it really is. The lesson? Most code on the screen is gibberish. "The whole intro to the Doctor Who episode The...
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Where Do We Go From Here? 8 Hypotheses About Tech in 2014
Robots at work (Reuters)If there was a feeling that defined the cultural backdrop for 2013, it was technoanxiety. The two big things were the continued rise of doing everything on a screen, and the...
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In Books, Movies, and Media, the Most Popular Title Word Is 'New'
A new study reports that the most common three English words in titles—of books, movies, and other media—are “new,” “report,” and “study.” The development (fourth most popular) came after the...
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'No One Should Die Because They Cannot Afford Healthcare': One Meme's Story
A map of the Facebook meme “No one should die because they cannot afford health care ..." as it mutated. Like phrasings tend to cluster together. The red dots include the phrase "next 24 hours" and...
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What 3D-Printed Cake Tastes Like
3D-printed cakes and cake toppers display themselves. The one on the left was made in collaboration with Duff Goldman, otherwise known as the "Ace of Cakes."LAS VEGAS—Call them Cakerbots. Adding to the...
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Notice That Flicker? Europe's Lights Are Out-of-Tune With Your Phone
It’s not camera-hacking elves: If you take your North American smartphone to Europe and shoot video indoors there, an odd flickering appears in the recording. As intrepid videographer Tom Scott shows...
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What the 150,000 Attendees of CES Are Doing Right Now
ReutersThis year has seen nearly record-setting attendance numbers for the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. According to the CEA, the organization that hosts the event, some...
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The Spread Offense and the State of Digital Media
Texas Tech during the Leach 'Air Raid' era (Reuters).College football season officially ended this week, and the window is rapidly closing during which one can opine on the year that was. So, let me...
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With Great Computing Power Comes Great Surveillance
If an algorithm somehow lands you on a no-fly list, it can be a nightmare to get off. (Reuters)Nearly 50 years ago, Gordon Moore suggested that the number of transistors that could be placed on a...
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5 Intriguing Things: Thursday, 1/9
1. The wardrobes of Songyang, some kind of parable about e-commerce. "In the town of Songyang, a significant number of members of the local community have become electronic merchants on Taobao.com,...
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First as Fake, Then As Reality: When the Polar Vortex Froze Niagara Falls
As the Polar Vortex continued to freeze everything, the photographs of those frozen things marched dutifully online. Hudson River. Chicago River. Midwest lighthouses. Lake Ontario (from space). With...
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Meet 'Mr. Marinator,' the World's Most Mesmerizing Gadget
LAS VEGAS—There are very few things about the International Consumer Electronics Show that one could reasonably call "Zen." The fluorescent lights? Nope. The Strip and Strip-adjacent convention...
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R is for Robot: A Child's Guide to the Consumer Electronics Show
ReutersLAS VEGAS—The International Consumer Electronics Show has longed billed itself as nothing less than a glimpse into the future. The show isn't merely, it suggests, a "proving ground for...
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Oh, Deer: NASA Rocket Gets Photobombed by Hungry Animals
NASA/Bill IngallsYesterday afternoon, at 1:07 pm Eastern Standard Time, the Antares Rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, bound for the International Space Station. The rocket,...
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Court Rules That Yelp Must Unmask the Identities of Seven Anonymous Reviewers
Screenshot of the Hadeed Carpet Yelp review page (Yelp.com)Over the past few years, seven people have been so dissatisfied with the service they received from Hadeed Carpet Cleaning of Alexandria,...
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5 Intriguing Things: Friday, 1/10
1. Perhaps the strangest thing about Bitcoin is that it's made chip development more exciting than it's been since Bob Noyce was still at Intel. "At the heart of the computers made by HashFast and...
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The Glorious Feeling of Fixing Something Yourself
Repair PDX volunteer Bryce Jacobson tries to twist the knob to my broken floor lamp. “We can’t just recycle our way out of overconsumption and resource issues,” Jacobson says. “We have to rethink our...
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The Elegance of Beowulf in 100 Tweets
From Samuel Harden Church's Beowulf. From years of use, people know this: Twitter can be a lot of noise. But sometimes, to get a tweet just right, to make it fit, I stop and consider the language. In...
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The Star That Could Be a Supernova
NASAIn the autumn of 1604, sky-watchers of the world saw something special. Actually, it was more than special: the death of one of our own galaxy's stars, an extremely bright light in the sky that...
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