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An undercover police officer “chased himself round the streets” for 20 minutes after a CCTV operator mistook him for suspect.

The junior officer, who has not been named, was monitoring an area hit by a series of burglaries in an unnamed market town in the country’s south.

As the probationary officer from Sussex Police searched for suspects, the camera operator radioed that he had seen someone “acting suspiciously” in the area.via < … Read More → "Police officer leads himself on hot pursuit, evades capture"

The number of people playing video games in the U.S. has risen 241 percent since 2008, according to a new study from market research and consulting company Parks Associates.

The study, Trends in Digital Gaming: Free-to-Play, Social, and Mobile Games, claims 135 million people play at least one hour per month compared to 56 million in 2008. Seventeen percent of all gamers have downloaded a title on their smartphones, up from 7 percent in 2008. About 80 percent play free-to-play (F2P) games on the PC or log into Facebook to spend time on the farm or frontier.< … Read More → "U.S. gaming population has nearly tripled in three years"

If you’re old enough to remember green-screen monitors, bulletin-board systems, and the 1983 movie classic “War Games,” you need to check out The Hacker for iOS.

It’s a game, yes, but also a kind of love letter to fans of DOS, text adventures, ASCII games, and old-school hacking.

The app “installs” the Glider Operating System, in all its green CRT glory, on your device. Once you get past the amusingly realistic DOS-style setup … Read More → "Relive computing’s green-screen glory days in The Hacker for iOS"

Ro-Bros, the latest “digital physical mashup” game from the genuises at the Real Art Design Group, lets you control real-life robots in a fight to the death. It’s Real Steel meets Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em meets why-are-you-still-reading-this-go-play-already.

The newest project from the designers who brought you the Santa Claw pits the Barely-Believeable Bot and the Almost-Autonomous Robot in a ferocious battle controlled … Read More → "Play with real-life Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots you control online"

Wolfram Alpha is about to allow users to analyse and manipulate their own data – including pictures and sounds.

The service is part of a new “pro” version of the data search and analysis engine to be launched on Wednesday.

Chief executive Stephen Wolfram said it was his firm’s “biggest single step” since launching the computational tool two-and-a-half years ago.

Users need to pay for advanced features. The firm said it hoped this would become its main source of money.

At present, users of Wolfram … Read More → "Wolfram Alpha unveils premium ‘Pro’ analysis service"

DC fast-charging stations, which make up a very small percentage of today’s charging infrastructure, are the more practical solution, but even these are much slower than gas fueling. These stations are powerful enough to deliver 80 to 100 percent of a battery’s charge within about half an hour – much better than a Level 1 or 2 station, but still a long time to wait for an extra 75 miles (121 km) of range. Even with these … Read More → "Stanford system could allow EVs to recharge from the road, while moving"

With the launch of the Warrior, a large wheeled robot with a hefty mechanical arm, military robots just got significantly larger and more adaptable. The robot rides on caterpillar tracks like a tank. It can climb stairs and cover rough terrain, and perform tasks ranging from the delicate (opening car doors) to the destructive (smashing car windows) with its two-meter-long mechanical arm.

Warrior is the latest invention from iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts, company best known for the Roomba robotic vacuum, and its line of remote-control PackBots, used by U.S. combat forces to disable improvised … Read More → "iRobot’s Warrior robot is strong enough to tow a car and dexterous enough to open its trunk using the handle"

In recent weeks, a pair of high-resolution images of the Earth has captivated the public. Taken by the Suomi NPP satellite, these pictures portray our planet’s incredible beauty with 8,000- by 8,000-pixel and 11,500- by 11,500-pixel detail.

How were these highly detailed images created? The satellite flies 512 miles above the Earth, but the images appear as if they were taken from an altitude of 7,918 miles. This little trick was accomplished by stitching together … Read More → "How NASA makes those incredible high-res images of Earth"

An online petition of over 23,000 signatures had requested the pardon.

Justice Minister Lord McNally dismissed the motion in the House of Lords.

“A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence,” he said.

In 2009 former Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology to Mr Turing, labelling the … Read More → "Government rejects pardon request for Alan Turing"