Artist and engineer Ishac Bertran has launched a project that invites people to submit poetry written in any coding language. These code poems will be considered for publication in a book.

A code poem is simply a poem written in any programming language including C++, HTML, C#, SQL, Objective C, Applescript and Java. Bertran had the idea when he was discussing with friends how it … Read More → "Creative project invites developers to write ‘code poems’"

The Pentagon’s new Avatar project, unveiled by Danger Room a few weeks back, sounds freaky enough: Soldiers practically inhabiting the bodies of robots, who’d act as “surrogates” for their human overlords in battle.

But according to Dmitry Itskov, a 31-year-old Russian media mogul, the U.S. military’s Avatar initiative doesn’t go nearly far enough. He’s got a massive, sci-fi-esque venture of his own that he hopes will put the Pentagon’s project to shame. Itskov’s plan: … Read More → "Russian mogul’s plan: plant our brains in robots, keep them alive forever"

It’s been slow going for the world’s first commercial passenger space program, but Virgin Galactic is slowly but surely making progress. While it’s already gotten its SpaceShipTwo sub-orbital craft beyond the reaches of Earth’s atmosphere in successful tests before, it only did so with the help of a carrier vehicle, then glided back to earth and landed conventionally. The company hopes to install and test the craft’s rocket engine … Read More → "Virgin Galactic plans powered space flight test within the year"

pmartel: thanks…fixed.

Bad link. It just leads to the picture above.

Much has been said about what makes us humanand what it means to be human. Language, which we’ve previously seen co-evolved with music to separate us from our primal ancestors, is not only one of the defining differentiators of our species, but also a key to our evolutionary success, responsible for the hallmarks of … Read More → "Why remix culture and collaborative creativity are an evolutionary advantage"

Late last year, we showed you a sneak preview of the FXI Cotton Candy; a dual-core computer that’s the size of a USB stick. Well, production is underway, and you can pre-order one right now.

Packed inside its tiny little frame is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor built by Samsung, along with an ARM Mali-400 GPU. It also packs HDMI-out, WiFi and a Micro USB port— and comes with Android or Ubuntu pre-loaded … Read More → "This is the ‘world’s smallest PC’, and you can buy it now"

It’s a story you’ve heard before-a cache of Golden Age comics are discovered and end up being worth a bundle. But this collection, inherited by Michael Rorrer from his aunt, contained 44 of Overstreet Price Guide‘s Top 100 issues, including Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27 (1st appearance of Batman), and Captain America #2, … Read More → "Man inherits million dollar comic book collection"

The strange rules of the quantum world lead to many weird phenomena. One of these is the puzzling process of quantum imaging, which allows images to form in hitherto unimagined ways.

Researchers begin by creating entangled pairs by sending a single laser  beam into a non-linear crystal, which converts single photons into entangled pairs of lower frequency photons, a process known as parametric down conversion. A continuous beam … Read More → "Can the human brain see quantum images?"

I.B.M. is jumping into an area of computing that has, until now, been primarily the province of academia: the quest to build a quantum computer.

A computer that took advantage of the oddities of quantum physics could solve in seconds certain problems that would occupy present-day computers for billions of years. But for now, it is impossible to build such a computer because the bits of information … Read More → "I.B.M. researchers inch toward quantum computer"