For anyone thinking the big data trend is a flash in the pan, there’s some new evidence to the contrary. A hefty 75 percent of IT pros and developers responding to a new Linux Foundation survey have their eyes firmly on this big data phenomenon.

More than three-quarters of the 428 respondents “expressed concern” about big data, and nearly 72 percent (unsurprisingly) said they will use Linux to support big data applications.  The respondents, while biased towards Linux — this is the Linux Foundation after all – do not work … Read More → "Linux lovers love big data"

Good engineers are tough to come by: That’s a fact of life for many Silicon Valley startups, as a talent crunch has made it much more difficult and expensive to find good job candidates. It’s even more difficult if you don’t have the cash or name recognition to compete with the likes of Facebook or Google, not to mention some of the larger, venture-backed startups in the area.

But one startup has discovered an interesting way of finding potential new employees in an extremely cost-effective manner. Quixey, which created … Read More → "How do you hire great engineers? Give them a challenge"

The nearby Helix nebula just received the piercing infrared gaze of a giant telescope in Chile, and the resulting image reveals cold gas normally hidden among warmer star-lit material.

Helix’s central star once resembled the Sun, but its outer layers of gas and dust sloughed off. The resulting planetary nebula, located some 700 light-years from Earth, is what telescopes now see.
via Wired Science</ … Read More → "Infrared image shows Helix Nebula in fresh light"

This teenager has never seen a record before. Awesome. via Kottke

… Read More → "This is huge! This is like ten CDs in one. How many songs does it have on it?"

Sure, you may be well-heeled enough to have your very own top-of-the-line espresso machine, but does yours have a fingerprint scanner? Assuming it does NOT, I bet you find yourself using your inferior espresso machine every morning, yelling, “My kingdom for a $3,200 espresso machine that could biometrically scan my finger, cross-reference said scan with a concoction I’ve pre-programmed into the machine and then brew it all for me?! MUST I MANUALLY CONCOCT EVERY TIME I … Read More → "Finally, a $3,200 espresso machine with a built-in fingerprint scanner"

Moving water is fairly straightforward on the human scale: a pump or a bucket will usually do the trick. But in the last couple of decades, various teams have begun to study ways of moving liquids around on the much smaller scale of micrometres. 

Their goal is to create devices, such as a lab-on-a-chip, that can carry out self-contained chemical and biological tests on tiny samples. To that end, researchers have developed various new … Read More → "Demonstration of actuation-at-a-distance effect for labs on a chip"

I had a slot car racing set when I was a kid, but if I pushed the speed just a little too far, the car would fly off the track. That doesn’t seem to be a problem for these middle aged slot car enthusiasts from Finland, who simply floor their cars to race at speeds that make the Tron Cycle race look kind of slow. via Dvice

More … Read More → "Warp speed slot car racing is not for the kiddies"

Iketomu-san, who publishes the great Biped Robot News Japan blog, was able to participate in the 5th KondoLand Multi-Legged Robot Obstacle Race competition held January 8th in Akihabara. The unusual competition features hazards including a large seesaw, moving wall robots that attempt to block or push the competitor off the course, a conveyor belt running against the direction the competitor needs to go, and a swirling whirlpool of styrofoam packing peanuts.

The competition has been going for long enough that some of the builders have started to optimize their robot designs to deliver the best … Read More → "Robot competition spawns unique new designs"

Our eyes are just not built for the future. It sucks, but it’s true. We can’t physically focus on things that are very close to us, which is why we’re not all rocking high-resolution immersive virtual reality displays built into our eyeglasses. How do we fix this problem? Simple: we upgrade our eyeballs.

We’ve posted about head-mounted VR displays a lot around … Read More → "Contact lenses upgrade your eyes to enable true immersive VR"

There’s really no easy way to talk about a camera that you swallow and swims through your colon, so we’ll just forge ahead. All mental discomfort aside, this next generation capsule camera is pretty cool — it has a tiny motor that is guided wirelessly by an MRI that allows doctors to steer it for maximum precision.

The little cam works by receiving magnetic instructions from the MRI that steers a rudder like motor. Because it is wireless it eliminates the need for a more invasive tether guidance system (thank you!).

While … Read More → "Ingestible pill cams now controlled by MRI"