… Read More → "The death of Windows XP – a countdown"

Someone is leaving coded messages and items such as a plastic leaf with paint dots inside envelopes between the pages of books at Western University. “It’s completely baffling!” says assistant professor Mike Moffatt, who has been tracking the messages on his blog.
via Boing Boing

Read More → "Mysterious coded messages at university library"

It’s easy to praise robots and automation when it isn’t your ass on the line. I’ve done it lots. But I may have to eat my own Cheerios soon enough.

Software is writing news stories with increasing frequency. In a recent example, an LA Times writer-bot wrote and posted a snippet about an earthquake three minutes after the event. The LA Times claims they were first … Read More → "More news is being written by robots than you think"

… Read More → "You can use this plastic tape measure straight out of the 3D-printer"

… Read More → "Turn an ordinary mug into a musical instrument"

It doesn’t seem too long ago that 3D-printers were astounding us by churning out cheeky little trinkets or small replacement parts. But the technology has quickly grown to cater for everything from rapid prototypingto slick-looking commercial products, and a quick snack for astronauts tobizarre models of unborn babies. Jim Smith of Grass Roots Engineering has been designing and building his own home-based, large-scale 3D printer since 2008, and the latest … Read More → "World’s first 3D-printed kayak takes to the water"

Genetic scientists are grappling with a tricky problem that they’ve been unable to conquer: Getting rid of the hairy skin of the kiwi fruit, without also getting rid of the taste. The Wall Street Journal looks at the efforts of researchers trying to genetically modify the kiwi to remove the brown, hairy outside. The research, led by kiwi-exporting company Zespri and supported by the New Zealand … Read More → "Scientists just can’t seem to grow a delicious, hair-free kiwi"

[S]cience fiction has always had a love affair with the idea of living spaceships crafted from genetically engineered material. We’re not at that point yet, but a team at MIT has harnessed E. coli’s natural ability to produce biofilms — the pink slime you find in the shower if you’re not too good at cleaning — in order to build primitive structures. Even better, is that when the team … Read More → "MIT pioneers ‘living materials’ for self-aware chairs"

Computers can kick our butts at math, logic, and chess—by now, that’s a given. But reading emotions, most of us probably would like to believe, is a skill reserved for humans. Isn’t that a big part of what separates us from machines in the first place?

Well, not anymore. In a study published this week in Current Biology, researchers led by the University of California-San Diego’s Marian Bartlett pitted humans against computers in a battle to see who could best … Read More → "Computers see human pain better than you"

Researchers have developed a new technique which uses DNA analysis to determine how genes influence facial shape. In turn, New Scientist reports, that’s allowing them to generate images that predict what someone looks like from biological samples alone.

The team, from Pennsylvania State University and Catholic University of … Read More → "Eerily accurate mugshots created from DNA alone"