What could be more fun than watching brown bears fishing for salmon?

Now you can do so from the comfort of your living room, via two live high-definition webcams beside the Brooks River in Alaska’s Katmai National Park.

The purpose of the project is to reconnect people with nature, said Charlie Annenberg, founder of Explore.org, a nonprofit media organization that set the cameras up. “In one of the world’s largest, most natural cathedrals, the brown bear is the high sage,” Annenberg said.

< … Read More → "Watch brown bears catch salmon in Alaska from the safety of your sofa"

We’re big fans of the Gliese 581 system here at DVICE. It’s been a treasure-trove of potentially habitable exoplanets, and the latest data boosts one of them, Gliese 581g, up to a whopping 0.92 on the Earth Similarity Index. Yes, we now have one of those.

The Earth Similarity Index (or ESI for those in the know) is a mathematical formula that relates a number of planetary … Read More → "Exoplanet Gliese 581g hits 0.92 on Earth Similarity Index"

75 years ago this month, pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart vanished. Today, a group of searchers looking for proof that her plane crashed on a remote Pacific atoll returned to Hawaii, having failed to find evidence that her plane crashed on Nikumaroro. More on the ongoing search: CNN, NatGeo, CSM, Guardian. There are many theories about what happened, but no closure.
… Read More → "75 years ago, Amelia Earhart went missing—and the search for her continues"

When something breaks in space, ordering a replacement part can be an astronomical inconvenience.  Yet, what if astronauts could simply produce the components they needed on demand? NASA is currently testing a new breed of 3D printers that can create pieces of equipment in low parabolic flights on Earth – and they hope to one day send the technology to Mars.
via Inhabitat

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A new underwater drone concept could seek and destroy one of the ocean’s most insidious enemies, while earning a profit for plastics recyclers. This marine drone can siphon plastic garbage, swallowing bits of trash in a gaping maw rivaling that of a whale shark.

Industrial design student Elie Ahovi, who previously brought us the Orbit clothes washer concept, now presents the Marine Drone, an autonomous electric vehicle that tows a plastic-trapping net. The net … Read More → "Platstic-eating underwater drone could swallow the great Pacific garbage patch"

Sally Ride, the first U.S. female astronaut to fly in space, died July 23 at the age of 61 from pancreatic cancer. First launching on the Challenger space shuttle in 1983, Ride has become an enduring inspiration to people everywhere, particularly women working in science and engineering.

Ride’s place as the first American female astronaut was a long time coming. As far back as the Mercury program, NASA considered female … Read More → "Today’s women of space remember Sally Ride"

About 6 years ago the late amazing Richard Gregory said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, “when your robots start telling each other stories, then you’ll really be onto something”. It was a remark with much deeper significance than I realised at the time.

Richard planted a seed that’s been growing since. What I didn’t fully appreciate then, but do now, is the profound importance of narrative. More than we perhaps imagine. Narrative is, I suspect, a fundamental property of both … Read More → "When robots start telling each other stories…"

Everyone, meet Mycoplasma genitalium, the subject of many scientific papers, even more vists to the clinic and now the first organism to be entirely recreated in binary.
via Engadget

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I was in the airport last week surrounded by grumpy delayed travelers, one of whom was brandishing his feature phone with pride. “I just want my phone to be a phone,” he tried to tell a fellow grumpster.
via Gizmodo

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The Power Pwn is a fully-integrated, enterprise-class penetration testing platform. A successor to the popular Pwn Plug, the device features a highly-integrated modular hardware design. Backed and funded by the Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA), it aims to provide corporations and security-conscious individuals with a cheaper and easier means to defend themselves against hackers, by providing them with the same set of tools as their digital assailants.

< … Read More → "Power Pwn: a DARPA-funded hack machine"