Oh, you thought your trip photos from Cancun were great for Facebook? Sorry, next to Col. Chris Hadfield — who is posting his Facebook photos from space — your pics aren’t that special.

Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut on the International Space Station, is one of the most social savvy spacemen ever. He recorded a moving Christmas song on the ISS and posted it to SoundCloud. He’ … Read More → "This astronaut’s Facebook photos are better than yours will ever be"

911 call comes in about a possible bomb in lower Manhattan and an alert pops up on computer screens at the New York Police Department, instantly showing officers an interactive map of the neighborhood, footage from nearby security cameras, whether there are high radiation levels and whether any other threats have been made against the city.

In a click, police know exactly what they’re getting into.

Such a hypothetical scenario may seem like something out of a futuristic crime drama, but the technology is real, developed in a partnership between the nation’ … Read More → "NYPD and Microsoft create high-tech system to fight crime"

Google’s new website showing off Glass—eyeglass frames that insert a display into your peripheral vision—goes some way to explain what the company is planning for the gadget, such as directions and voice control. But the company still hasn’t given us a good sense of what the device will really be like to wear, and is even slightly misleading about it.
via Read More → "We still don’t know what Google Glass will be like to use"

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were … Read More → "The extraordinary science of addictive junk food"

Here’s a brutal, must-read article from Brian Phillips detailing the bizarre, globalized game of soccer-match-rigging, which launders its influence, money and bets through countries all over the world, in what sounds like an intense, sport-themed LARP of a William Gibson Sprawl novel.

Best part? Pro soccer is so corrupt that they don’t give a damn, despite the fact that there is no game there, just a … Read More → "Soccer match-rigging, straight out of a Gibson novel"

If you’ve ever wondered how film makers chop up and reassemble a two hour film into a two minute trailer, you need wonder no longer. The New York Times has visualized the contents of five recent film trailers, so you can see how they’re put together.
via Gizmodo

< … Read More → "Anatomy of a movie trailer"

NASA has announced that it briefly lost contact with the International Space Station on Tuesday. The ISS was out of contact with ground controllers after some sort of computer problem blocked communications. NASA says that the computer issue lasted just under three hours.

The ISS commander said that the space station and crew was fine during the … Read More → "NASA lost communication with the ISS due to computer problems"

Forget asteroids and global warming, because new findings from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider suggest that the end of the world may be more abrupt than you’d think.

As NBC News reports, the proposed doomsday scenario rests upon a particle believed to be the Higgs boson — the so-called “God particle” that CERN scientists discovered last summer. Scientists are still reluctant to confirm that the particle is indeed the elusive … Read More → "Our universe could be swallowed by an alternate one, Higgs research suggests"

Given Maserati’s reputation for exotic, high-performance Italian sports cars, the idea that it would set a world record isn’t very surprising. What is suprising is that the record was set on water, not land. In fact, Maserati has been actively pursuing many world records in a vessel that is about as different from a V8-engined coupe as you can get. It’s been sailing the world in search of prowess and prestige … Read More → "Maserati sets sailing world record"

In the next decade or so, the circuits etched on silicon-based computer chips are expected to shrink as small as they can physically become, prompting a search for alternative materials to take their place.

Some researchers are putting high hopes on carbon nanotubes, and on Monday a group of researchers at Stanford successfully demonstrated a simple microelectronic circuit composed of 44 transistors fabricated entirely from the threadlike fibers.

The development, which was presented both as a paper and a working demonstration at a technical conference here, is the most striking evidence yet that carbon nanotubes … Read More → "Nanotubes seen as alternative when silicon chips hit their limits"