Ultimate Tak Ball is an indoor sport wherein you try to deposit a large soccer ball into a goal while the other team tries to stop you with stun guns. As in, you’re running along and then the defender tasers you.
via Kottke
Crowd-sourced technical competitions have been increasingly attracting savvy programmers, eager to take on a big challenge or win a little prize money. But an ew contest announced today offers something else that no open competition has had before: the chance to see their algorithms play out in space.
That’s the premise behind the Autonomous Space Capture Challenge sponsored by DARPA and NASA and … Read More → "Space hackathon: Coders set to compete on NASA/DARPA project"
The problem with privacy on the Internet isn’t so much that companies don’t provide privacy options or tell you that they might share your data, it’s that protecting your privacy often entails wandering the wilds of Facebook’s confusing privacy settings or reading an epic privacy agreement written in a confounding mixture of tech speak and legalese.
Need proof? A couple of Carnegie Mellon researchers recently published a paper suggesting that reading all of the privacy policies an average Internet user encounters in a year would take 76 … Read More → "You’d need 76 work days to read all your privacy policies each year"
One thing we know is NASA knows how to launch a rocket. Now, the agency is upping its game by launching five rockets in five minutes to study the winds swirling in the atmosphere at the edge of space
The suborbital rockets are part of the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) and will reach the jet stream some 60 — 65 miles above the Earth. The launch of the five rockets is scheduled for next week, March 14 — weather conditions permitting — from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.</ … Read More → "NASA goes launch crazy with plans for five rockets in five minutes"
Engineers at the University of California (UC) Davis have invented a so-called nanoglue that could be used in microchip fabrication.
Conventional glues form a thick layer between two surfaces. Prof Tingrui Pan’s nanoglue, which conducts heat and can be printed, or applied in patterns, forms a layer the thickness of only a few molecules.
According to a statement, the nanoglue is based on a transparent, flexible material called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which, when peeled off a smooth surface, usually leaves behind an ultra-thin, sticky residue that researchers had mostly regarded … Read More → "Nanoglue could be used to fabricate computer chips"
By 2017, HP hopes to build a computer chip that includes 256 microprocessors tied together with beams of light.
Codenamed Corona, this laser-powered contraption would handle ten trillion floating points operations a second. In other words, if you put just five of them together, you’d approach the speed of today’s supercomputers. The chip’s 256 cores would communicate with each other at an astonishing 20 terabytes per second, and they’d talk to memory at 10 terabytes a second. That means … Read More → "HP’s laser-powered chip of the future"
The catchiest videogames, the ones that grab players immediately, share a certain set of traits that designers ignore at their own peril, says a veteran gamemaker.
In a Game Developers Conference speech titled “Designing the Five-Second Game,” designer RJ Mical laid out the results of a study he had undertaken recently, in which he analyzed dozens of instantly addictive games from Pac-Man to Plants vs. Zombies. Mical, who co-created the Atari Lynx and 3DO game machines and worked on the PlayStation Vita, found certain elements that persisted across decades of development.
… Read More → "5 things every addictive game needs"
AMD is shedding its stake in GlobalFoundries, the semiconductor foundry that it spun off in 2009. Initially, AMD used GlobalFoundries as its sole manufacturer, but it has increasingly turned to other companies such as TSMC after GlobalFoundries struggled to build working chips on its 32nm process.
At GlobalFoundries’ creation, AMD held a 34.2 percent share. Since the spin-off, AMD has reduced that share, and now it is giving up its final 8.8 percent, leaving GlobalFoundries wholly owned by the United Arab Emirates government, via its Mubadala Development investment vehicle.
via Read More → "AMD gives up its GlobalFoundries stake, gets more fab flexibility"
Shiva Ayyadurai is a shimmering intellectual. He holds four degrees from MIT (where he lectures), numerous patents, honors, and awards. He also says he invented email, and there’s a global conspiracy against him. Guess which one of these statements is true.
In 1978, a precocious 14-year-old from New Jersey invented email. You can see him doing it in the photo at the top right of your screen—the kid glued to his monitor. In that picture, he’s busy showing off his creation—a way for office staff to message each … Read More → "Corruption, lies, and death threats: the crazy story of the man who pretended to invent email"
Trust me, gym rat. Your outrageously badass treadmill workout has nothing on this.
The Pentagon’s far-out research agency, Darpa, has just released a new video of its Cheetah ‘bot — designed to mimic the rapid movements of cheetahs, the speediest animals in nature — absolutely killing it on a laboratory treadmill.
In fact, the ‘bot is running so fast (reaching 18 miles an hour at its peak) that Cheetah actually set a new land speed record, Darpa boasts, for robotic running. The previous record, set … Read More → "DARPA’s robotic cheetah sets racing record"
