Good grief??? This is absolutely brilliant.

Good Grief……

When you think about the best-loved movies depicting space travel, what names come to mind? Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek – The Motion Picture,Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica? Interestingly enough, all of those enduring films were made decades ago, and utilized hand-built model spaceships for their space-flight sequences. Today, even low-budget productions usually … Read More → "Film-makers doing a sci-fi space flick – without using any computer-generated effects"

These are so cute!

With the holidays right around the corner we thought it would be fun to make some snowflakes. In our hunt we came across some Star Wars snowflakes created by a husband and wife. via Matters of Gray

Go here to download the PDFs and make your own!

Read More → "DIY Star Wars snowflakes"

Profile this week looks at the physicist Peter Higgs who in the 1960s predicted the existence of the so-called “God Particle” which scientists think they glimpsed at CERN this week.

The Higgs boson – which has so excited the scientific community this week – is a subatomic particle which gives mass to all matter and the quest to find it has … Read More → "BBC profile looks at the physicist Peter Higgs"

“A masterpiece of British engineering.”

Now there’s a phrase you don’t hear much. 😉

As the former owner of a Lotus, a Sunbeam, a Tiga, and a Crossle, I’m intimately familiar with British automotive engineering.

Seems doubtful these new double-deckers will be sold elsewhere. The old ones weren’t, were they?

Oh dear!

This is a serious vanity project by London’s Mayor. Each bus is reprted to cost around £360,000 (just over $500,000) to build, 20% more than other buses in use. But there is also a £7.8m ($12 million) NRE charge for design and prototyping, paid for by London residents. The party line is that this will be repaid in royalties when the bus is sold elswhere. Don’t hold your breath guys.

Over the last few years, the passenger car has evolved from a gas-guzzling hunk of steel into what some have called the largest piece of consumer electronics in your life.

So, while it’s fitting that the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2012) will likely be a jumping-off point for the next stage of development on car infotainment, connectivity, and safety technology, I still find it a bit odd … Read More → "CES 2012: The unlikeliest car show"

Machine-learning engineers from the University of Bristol think they might have the master equation to predicting the popularity of a song.

The so-called Hit Potential Equation looks a little something like this:

Score = (w¹ x f¹) + (w² x f²) + (w³ x f³) + (w⁴ x f⁴), etc.

Simple, right? The “w”s are “weights,” or musical features like tempo, time signature, song … Read More → "Pop hit prediction algorithm mines 50 years of chart-toppers for data"

The first of London’s next-gen double-decker buses is a hybrid that officials promise is “most environmentally friendly” and “the latest, greatest masterpiece of British engineering.”

The bus, unveiled Friday in Trafalgar Square, is the first designed specifically for London in more than 50 years. The Routemaster-inspired bus went from the drawing board to a fully functioning prototype in just two years. Transport for London awarded the contract for engineering design to Northern … Read More → "Hybrid bus a ‘masterpiece of British engineering’"