Recently, Improv Everywhere brilliantly turned New York City’s Pier 25 Mini-Golf into a major golf championship by bringing in “caddies, commentators, an ESPN camera crew, and a huge crowd”. Throughout the day, they surprised groups of mini-golfers by popping out of nowhere. Jorge Andrés of ESPN interviewed course players and winners got to pose with the actual Claret Jug from The Open Championship. Check out the day’s humorous video and read … Read More → "Mini-golf turned into a major golf championship by Improv Everywhere"

Everyone’s talking about the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover‘s “terrifying” Hollywood-blockbuster-worthy landing: seven knuckle-in-teeth minutes in early August during which its aeroshell-armored bulk will plummet through Mars’ thin atmosphere at incredible speeds, snap apart to shed its back-shell, then fire rockets to slow its descent. It’ll be like Iron Man pulling out of a planetary dive, finally hovering dozens of feet above the designated Martian … Read More → "8 amazing tech tools aboard NASA’s Curiosity Rover"

The tech sector is set to grow faster than all but five industries by 2020. Out of those fields, half of which are related to healthcare, tech pays the best with an average salary of $78,730, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If technology is the future, however, we are doing a woeful job of preparing our kids for it. Computer science is the only one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields that … Read More → "Can we fix computer science education in America?"

Years after we got a look at those soul crushing human power plants in The Matrix it turns out that the idea our fictional robot overlords had may not be so far fetched after all.

A company called Perpetua is marketing a new technology called TAGwear that is claims can generate thermoelectric energy from your body to power your gadgets. According to the company, the power generation … Read More → "Thermoelectric chip generates power from your body heat"

How do you tell if a new technology product is a brilliant breakthrough?

Listening to its creators doesn’t work: Tech companies have an annoying tendency to promote everything as a brilliant breakthrough. And tech journalists have a history of getting irrationally exuberant over stuff that doesn’t end up amounting to much.

Real breakthroughs aren’t always immediately identifiable as breakthroughs. Sometimes, they just go on to change the world without anyone knowing it’s going to happen or even talking about it much. Their … Read More → "Clamshell! The story of the greatest computing form factor of all time"

When Dan Graf got interested in the finer points of bagel making, he was told to pay tribute to his culinary elders, as done by his bosses and his bosses’ bosses before them.

Graf’s boss’s boss, cooking icon Alice Waters, put in time in the global cuisine capital of Paris before creating Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Graf’s boss and Waters’s former cook Peter Levitt, in turn, made a pilgrimage to the iconic delis of New York before taking over Saul’s, a delicatessen a … Read More → "The perfect bagel is engineered in California"

This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.

Hafiz asks:

I am a Web application developer, also responsible for project management. I occasionally manage remote developers, who work for me under a contract basis. Sometimes, this can prove very difficult. A few challenges I have encountered:

• Once, a developer went incommunicado for two days while we had to deliver … Read More → "What’s the best way to manage a team of remote software engineers?"

It is seemingly a fact of life that every new generation of computing gadget will be significantly more powerful than the one before, but a looming technical roadblock threatens to undermine that.

That’s why the world’s largest chip maker, Intel, announced on Monday that it has invested $4 billion in Dutch company ASML, which makes equipment for manufacturing computer chips.

The two companies are trying to instigate a collaboration involving the … Read More → "The Moore’s Law moon shot"

Satellites use solar energy to power their electronics, but they rely on gas to maintain orbit or change position. Once tapped out, dead satellites become space junk, which threatens new orbital ventures. To prevent this, NASA is testing the feasibility of using robots to fuel and repair satellites on the fly or tow them to a new job site.

The agency’s Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office has identified 242 end-of-lifers destined to … Read More → "NASA tests robotic gas station attendant for outer space"

Today on NPR’s Science Friday: Reporting in Science, two teams of scientists say they were unable to replicate the results of a 2010 study claiming to have found ‘alien life’ on Earth–a bacterium that could build its DNA using arsenic. Science journalist Carl Zimmer talks about how the controversy played out online, and how science corrects itself.

via Boing Boing</ … Read More → "What happens when scientists get it wrong?"