An ambitious effort to broadcast real-time streaming video of Earth from space is closer to reality, after a new influx of cash and some new partnerships. By spring 2013, everyone on Earth will be able to watch the planet from the most unique vantage point ever built, the International Space Station.

We first told you about the Canadian startup UrtheCast (pronounced Earth-cast) last year, and the first cameras were supposed to launch … Read More → "Upcoming space station cameras will give all humans live imagery of their houses from space"

Talking Heads co-founder David Byrne’s new book, “How Music Works,” is a combination personal artistic memoir and cultural/scientific exploration of music — what it is, how it’s made, and what it means. (Cory’s review of the book is here.) Smithsonian has posted a fascinating excerpt from “How Music Works” that includes … Read More → "David Byrne on silence"

It was about a year ago this time that Fitbit released a new fitness tracker, the Fitbit Ultra, so now would seem like as good a time as any for a refresh. Indeed, the company just announced the Fitbit One, which will replace the Ultra, and which adds a “silent” vibrating alarm to wake you up in the morning. (Hmm, where have we seen that before?) Though the alarm is clearly the marquee … Read More → "Fitbit announces two new fitness trackers: the Fitbit One with a vibrating alarm, and the $60 Fitbit Zip"

Printing blood vessels: the future?
(Photo: Biomedical Nanotechnology Laboratory, Chen Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering)

3D printing technologies have come a long way since their earliest incarnations as rapid product prototype makers. It’s now shaping up as the next disruptive technology and in medical science, 3D printing has huge potential. The latest advance comes from … Read More → "New technique paves the way for instant 3D-printed biological tissues"

More than eight years into its mission, Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is still sending back data and images that consistently fill us with wonder and periodically leave scientists scratching their heads. Consider the image above. … Read More → "Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has stumbled across a field of tiny, mysterious spheres near Mars’ Endeavour Crater that are puzzling mission geologists"

Folding electric bikes may not be a new thing, but they’ve come a long way since 2005, when a game of “spot the battery” was unlikely to provide any more than .6 of a second’s entertainment. More recent models such as the VeloMini, Bik.e and db0 have benefited from advances in … Read More → "NEO VOLT folding electric bike boasts discreet battery, impressive range"

Researchers from the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) team at the University of Iowa have released a new recording of an intriguing and well-known phenomenon known as “chorus,” made on Sept. 5, 2012. The Waves tri-axial search coil magnetometer and receiver of EMFISIS captured several notable peak radio wave events in the magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth. The radio waves, which are at frequencies that are audible to the … Read More → "Sounds of space: new ‘chorus’ recording by RBSP’s EMFISIS instrument"

Professor Simon Cox of the University of Southhampton and his son and system racking consultant,
James, with their Raspberry Pi-based “supercomputer.”

Inspired by the low-cost computing power of the Raspberry Pi, a team at the University of Southampton has used the ARM-based Linux computer-on-a-board as a building block for a low-cost supercomputer—racked and stacked using Lego blocks. And they’ve published a  … Read More → "University builds cheap supercomputer with Raspberry Pi and Legos"

Steel and aluminum are two very different metals, and getting them to bind together in a stable, continuous weld has been next to impossible on any kind of large scale. Honda Motor Vehicles has announced that it’s doing just that.

The solution has come via a variation on friction stir welding, and will allow Honda to join the materials via mechanical pressure in a … Read More → "New welding technique will change how cars are made"

Curiosity may be roving the Martian frontier to find out just how similar the Red Planet is to Earth, but meanwhile NASA’s other Martian explorers are turning up evidence of just how different our neighboring planet can be. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned data suggesting that it snows on Mars just like it snows on Earth, with one key difference: On Mars, it snows dry … Read More → "Today on Mars: it’s snowing dry ice at the Martian South Pole"