Tech writer Glenn Fleishman doesn’t mind attractive people trying to get him to pay attention to their products. But “companies that rely on models whose various assets are stress-testing spandex or exposed to air are trying so hard that they fail, he writes in an opinion piece at TidBITS today.
via Wired
Codecademy, the startup that makes an interactive and social web application aimed at teaching people how to write computer code, has gone the platform route.
On Monday, the company debuted Course Creator, a platform that allows anyone to make educational courses to teach programming techniques. Up until now, Codecademy, which launched in the summer 2011 class of Y Combinator, has developed all of its programming courses in-house.
via GigaOM
Continue … Read More → "Codecademy launches platform to let anyone create coding lessons"
I’ve toured this place. It’s amazing.
Air travel nowadays is perhaps best described as dull: it’s possible to make it all the way across the country without even knowing what kind of airplane you’re on. But airplanes are still these giant, magical machines that allow people to fly, and one of the best places to get in touch with everything that goes into making such things possible is& … Read More → "How Boeing makes airplanes in the largest building in the world"
Behold the nerdiest collection to ever grace the InterWeb: Louisiana State University’s Chemistry professor John A. Pojman’s huge collection of pocket protectors. via Neatorama
Lockheed Martin has been hard at work on the Orion spacecraft for a long while. The Orion spacecraft is more like the capsules used in the Apollo era than the space shuttle that has been retired from service. The first big milestone for the Orion project is coming in 2014 when NASA hopes to be able test spacecraft during orbits of the earth.
The specific date in 2014 has not been confirmed, but we do … Read More → "NASA aims for early 2014 test of Lockheed Martin Orion spacecraft"
The cell membrane is one of the most important components of a cell because it separates the interior from the environment and controls the movement of substances in and out of the cell. In a move that brings mankind another step closer to being able to create artificial life forms from scratch, chemists from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and Harvard University have created artificial self-assembling cell membranes using a novel chemical … Read More → "Synthetic cell membrane marks another step towards creation of fully artificial life forms"
As numerous companies continue their push to get us to entrust our data to the cloud, there are many still justifiably concerned about the security of cloud computing-based services. Now an international team of scientists have demonstrated that perfectly secure cloud computing is possible by combining the power of quantum computing with the security of quantum cryptography. They carried out what they claim is the first demonstration of “blind quantum computing,” in which a quantum computation was carried out with the input, computation, and output all remaining unknown to the computer, and therefore, also any eavesdroppers.
… Read More → "Perfectly secure cloud computing possible thanks to quantum physics"
Last week, the European Space Agency released its report on the crash of Russia’s ill-fated Phobos-Grunt probe on Jan. 15. In it, the ESA came to the same conclusion as the other major space players: all pieces of the probe, which was bound for one of Mars’s moons, fell safely into the Pacific Ocean.
But this consensus isn’t reasonable at all.
Instead, a … Read More → "Did Phobos-Grunt debris fall on land?"
