Let’s picture a typical moment in my day: I’m minding my own business, with my iPhone in my back pocket. Suddenly, my left cheek is shaking as the phone vibrates and does the bzzt, bzzt, bzzt-ing dance of its people on my backside. I check the phone, and there’s nothing. No call. No text. No email. No one has moved in Words With Friends or liked my pictures on Instagram. Nothing that would have made the phone vibrate, but I swear I felt it.

Read More → "Why do people feel phantom cellphone vibrations?"

Everybody’s favorite autonomous Roomba slave cleaning robot vacuum just got updated with a new “Wireless Command Center” remote. With it, you can now guide the new Roomba 790 over to any patch of crumbs, dirt or dust and start cleaning ASAP.

Using a radio frequency, the Wireless Command Center remote has directional buttons for steering the Roomba, a giant “Clean” button … Read More → "At last, the Roomba can now be wirelessly controlled"

Are you human or a machine? Prove it, by passing the Turing Test — a test of the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior.

In Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, the mathematician posed the question: “Can machines think?” But almost immediately he dismissed that question as too “meaningless” to be worthy of discussion, and swapped it for the much-more specific: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”

… Read More → "How to pass the Turing Artificial Intelligence Test"

The element of the week is—you guessed it—uranium, and this week Bill and his crew take us through the engineering that goes into enriching it, i.e. into producing uranium metal with a much-higher-than-natural abundance of the lighter U-235 isotope. This is the technology that produces the “higher octane” uranium used to produce nuclear power and also, unfortunately, the really “high octane” version used to produce the simplest type of nuclear bomb.
via Read More → "Engineer Guy vs. The Atomic Bomb"

“Falsehoods programmers believe about time” is InfiniteUndo’s riff on Patrick McKenzie’s classic Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. It’s quite an eye-popping and mindbending riff on the malleability of time inside the world of computers, where a minute can last longer than an hour, where clients and servers may disagree about the time by an order of decades, and where production systems might routinely change timezones.
via Boing Boing

< … Read More → "Falsehoods programmers believe about time – riff on the malleability of computer time"

You probably won’t ever set foot on the moon, but you can still daydream about space. And you can also lose yourself in Sky & Telescope‘s lunar globe.

For $100, you get one very accurate, very beautiful piece. In the past, products like these have been based on artistic renderings. However, this one is made from 15,000 real images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Sky & Telescopesays it’s the first time the moon’s topographical data has been updated in 40 years!)
via Read More → "Lunar globe gives you an incredibly accurate look at the Moon"

Your smartphone and/or tablet can do just about everything else, why can’t they help you catch fish? Well, if the Deeper fishfinder ends up being commercially produced, they will be able to. The floating device would be paired with the user’s Android or iOS device, and would let them know if fish were in the area.

To use Deeper, users would attach their fishing line to … Read More → "New device/app could turn your smartphone into a fishfinder"

“Space, the final frontier.” Do I even have to go on? I’m sure many of you know it by heart. Although we haven’t exactly been able to explore strange new worlds or seek out new life and new civilizations, we certainly have gone where no person has gone before. Whether in the cosmos or in our own … Read More → "Spacecraft size comparisons: present, past, future, and fictional"

We’ve seen the development of a number of technologies that could be used to provide robots with a sense of touch, such as proximity and temperature sensing hexagonal plates and artificial skin constructed from semiconductor nanowires. However, perhaps none are as impressive as a tactile sensor developed by researchers at the University of California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The group’s BioTac … Read More → "Tactile robot finger outperforms humans in identifying textures"

OUPblog is celebrating Alan Turing’s 100th birthday with blog posts from our authors all this week. Look for “Turing : the irruption of Materialism into thought” by Paul Cockshott, “Alan Turing’s Cryptographic Legacy” by Keith M. Martin, “Turing’s Grand Unification” by Cristopher Moore and … Read More → "Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing"