Are you too far south or in too bright of a city to catch the spectacular auroras that have been streaking across the sky lately?
Not to worry. The Canadian Space Agency’s AuroraMAX Camera — located in the city of Yellowknife, near the Arctic Circle — can … Read More → "Watch a live feed of tonight’s Northern Lights"
Utilities don’t often invest in new types of technology manufacturing, but then, California’s Pacific Gas & Electric isn’t your average utility. PG&E has requested state approval to enable it to invest $9.9 million of taxpayer money in a solar engineering and manufacturing service center run by commercialization startup SVTC Technologies.
PG&E said the investment in the SVTC project will help reduce the cost of solar and benefit consumers. The startup secured a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy last summer to … Read More → "Should utilities invest in solar tech manufacturing?"
If you’re a runner and you can’t extend your hip well behind you on your stride, Jay Dicharry has bad news: You’re never going to be a great runner.
This doesn’t mean you should hang up your shoes. You can still run, and run well, but not everyone can attain the ideal stride needed to be a truly great runner.
Dicharry is the director of the Speed Performance Clinic and the Motion Analysis Lab Coordinator At The University Of Virginia. In discussing the biomechanics of running … Read More → "The biomechanics of good running"
With processors, it’s easy to get caught up in gigahertz and petaflops and the top-end specs. But blazing fast speed doesn’t mean all that much for, say, your refrigerator. ARM’s says its Cortex-M0+ chip will connect your dumb appliances to a smart grid, and offer “years” of battery life on some of them.
via … Read More → "ARM’s super-efficient new chip can get “years of battery life”"
Tech for astronauts and automotive engineers seldom overlaps, but a robotic glove co-developed by General Motors and NASA could change all that. An offshoot of the Robonaut 2 project from last year, the Human Grasp Assist device – known unofficially as the K-glove or Robo-Glove – promises to make manual labor less intensive as well as reduce the risk of repetitive-stress injuries by cutting the amount of force needed to hold and use tools.
via Read More → "NASA and GM reveal Robo-Glove for astronauts and engineers"
I’m going to show you two kinds of nothing.
The first is a small patch of space, way, way out in the universe, remote from everything, with nothing in it, no stars, no planets, no bits of dust, no debris, no atoms, not even one. It’s as empty as empty can be.
Park previously served a three-year tenure as the CTO for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While there, he helped launch HealthCare.gov, a website that allows American citizens to compare public and private health insurance plans available to them based on their zip code.
Alex Howard, a journalist who covers the intersection of government, the Internet and society, calls Park’s appointment as CTO “extremely exciting.”
via Mashable
Read More → "White House appoints Todd Park as new Chief Technology Officer"
Want to tap into the artificial intelligence (AI) power of IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning Watson supercomputer? In the age of the cloud, there’s only one way: Watson-as-a-Service.
“#IBMWatson is ONLY available as a service…,” IBM said on its @IBMWatson Twitter page in reply to questions following a live chat on Twitter about Watson’s next acts. IBM also said there was no current use cases for Watson-as-a-Service (WaaS), a term IBM is already using.
via Read More → "IBM’s ‘Watson-as-a-service’ ready to crunch big data"
Weighing in at 4 kilograms and standing a proud 22 centimetres tall, this is the world’s first portable digital camera. In 1975, Steve Sasson and his team at Kodak’s Elmgrove plant in Rochester, New York, cobbled it together from existing Kodak parts and other state-of-the-art technology.
via New Scientist
Read More → "The first portable digital camera – cassette included"
“You are a mashup of what you let into your life,”it’s been said. Since creativity is combinatorial, the architecture of mind and character is deeply influenced by the intellectual stimulation we choose to engage with — including the books we read. There is hardly anything more fascinating than the private intellectual diet of genius — like this recently uncovered … Read More → "Alan Turing’s reading list: what the computing pioneer borrowed from his school library"
