… Read More → "Tower of London keys swiped"Locks had to be changed at London’s 930-year old fortress—and home of the crown jewels—after a man was found trespassing within the walls, keys in hand.
via Boing Boing
Jawbone has given its life-tracking Up bracelet a second chance. The original was promising, but had a sky-high failure rate. The new band, Jawbone hopes, will fix the massive problems of the original, and deliver on its equally massive potential.
The new Up bracelet, like its predecessor, keeps tabs on how much you’re moving around (much like the Fitbit or Nike Fuelband). It also tracks your sleep— … Read More → "The life-tracking Jawbone Up is b ack! (And hopefully it’ll work this time)"
Sorry to see 100-watt bulbs disappear from stores because they were energy hogs? You can now get LED bulbs that roughly match the 100-watters for size and brightness, but use far less energy.
Until recently, your only alternative was a compact fluorescent bulb, which has several drawbacks compared with light-emitting diodes. Most people see the light quality as less pleasing, and the bulbs contain a small amount of mercury that’s released if the glass breaks. LEDs, by contrast, don’t contain any volatile, hazardous substances and are durable. They also last longer.
… Read More → "LED replacements for 100-watt light bulbs hit stores"
Cray’s Titan supercomputer has snatched the title of world’s fastest from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sequoia—and it’s cray fast, as you might expect.
Powered by a mixture of CPUs and GPUs, Titan is home to 18,688 nodes, each of which contains an AMD 16-core Opteron and a NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator. All told, that’s a whopping 560,640 processors, which are capable of 17.59 … Read More → "America’s Titan Supercomputer is the fastest in the world"
Texas Instruments, the company behind the Speak & Spell and the application processor in the Kindle, is joining the ARM-based server crush with a series of processor cores that will use the ARM IP from its cell phone business as well as its own digital signal processing chips to deliver high performance computing power to the data center. What’s most interesting about its foray into the data center market is that its cores also come with networking integrated onto the chip. The server chips are part of a series of chips that TI is calling its … Read More → "Guess who else wants to build ARM-based servers? Texas Instruments"
The clickwheel of the first iPod worked by measuring electric field disturbances in one dimension. The first iPhone touch screen functioned similarly, but in two dimensions.
This week, Microchip Technology, a large U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, says it is releasing the first controller that uses electrical fields to make 3-D measurements.
The low-power chip makes it possible to interact with mobile … Read More → "A new chip to bring 3-D gesture control to smartphones"
Japanese company Omote 3D has created the world’s first 3D-printing photo booth, which allows users to create miniature figurines of themselves.
Conceived as a limited edition pop-up installation, the photo booth is able to print amazingly detailed and accurate reproductions that range from 10-20 centimeters in height.
Using a three-dimensional camera and printer, the process requires users to stand still for 15 minutes while the scanners capture their data. </ … Read More → "3D-Printing Photo Booth Creates Personal Miniature Figures"
… Read More → "Fake William Gibson Twitter feed tells surprisingly good short stories"William Gibson fanfic just took a very interesting turn.
Using the Twitter handle @AuthenticWmGibs, some bright Gibson-ite has been spieling out some lines that sound uncannily like those of the cyberpunk author. Riffing on Gibson’s attention to detail, political leanings and complex sci-fi plots, the tweeter has been composing fascinatingly good 140-character mini-narratives since early November.
via Wired
The semiconductors that act as the brains for everything from our washing machines to our mobile phones are hitting a variety of plateaus — plateaus that could affect their ability to perform faster, longer and in more and more places. But electronics makers might find some short-term answers to these problems by looking at the supercomputer industry and chip researchers could solve the long-term issues by studying quantum physics.
While it seems that chip industry has changed a lot in the last five years or so, that’s nothing compared to what will have to … Read More → "What supercomputers and Schrodinger’s cat can teach the electronics industry"
Toyota Motor Corp. is testing car safety systems that allow vehicles to communicate with each other and with the roads they are on in a just completed facility in Japan the size of three baseball stadiums.
The cars at the Intelligent Transport System site receive information from sensors and transmitters installed on the streets to minimize the risk of accidents in situations such as missing a red traffic light, cars advancing from blind spots and pedestrians crossing the street. The system also tests cars that transmit such information to each other.
In a … Read More → "Toyota tests cars that communicate with each other"
