This past Sunday Paris took a monumental step towards the future of green transportation as it kicked off the world’s first large-scale electric car share program. Launched by Vincent Bollore, the Autolib electric car-share is modeled off the city’s popular bike share system, and it will be the largest program of its kind in the world. By December the program will include 250 electric vehicles, and it’s planned to expand in 2012 … Read More → "Paris launches world’s largest electric car share program: Autolib"

Open up your webcam and look at its unblinking eye. If you catch a glimmer of intelligence don’t be surprised – computers are understanding more of what they see every day. Machine vision is a broad category of technologies that extract meaningful information from images so that computers and robots can perform their assigned duties. When your camera automatically detects your smile and places it in focus, that’s machine vision. When a flying robot weaves and dodges around obstacles to get to where it’s going, that’s machine vision too. … Read More → "Machine vision is changing the world"

Chip company Adapteva has a crazy notion: Let’s turn our smartphones into veritable supercomputers. And the way to do it? Up the ante in processing power. Not with just dual-core or quad-core processors. No, their Epiphany IV chip has a monstrous 64 cores.

The Epiphany IV isn’t a system-on-a-chip like, say, the Apple A5 or even the new NVIDIA Kal-El chips. It can’t hold an operating system. Rather, it’s a co-processor that’ll work alongside the chips that already power our phones to provide up to now unheard of power. The idea … Read More → "This crazy 64-core processor wants to be in your smartphone"

In 1979 Kirk Demarais bought a comic book at a neighborhood gas mart. It was a copy of Micronauts #9. Kirk was a kid at the time, and the comic book’s plot confused him. But he was drawn to the advertisements. Mark Frauenfelder over at Boing Boing interviews Kirk about his new book: Mail-Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads.

Read More → "Mail-Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads!"

Today, for the first time since 1996, IBM is worth more than Microsoft.

International Business Machines, which has been around since 1911, saw its market value reach $214 billion yesterday, while Microsoft’s fell to $213.2 billion.

Both companies still fall behind Apple, which had a market value of $362.1 billion as markets closed yesterday. via Venture Beat

Continue reading

From performing household chores, to entertaining and educating our children, to looking after the elderly, roboticists say we will soon be welcoming their creations into our homes and workplaces.

Researchers believe we are on the cusp of a robot revolution that will mirror the explosive growth of the computer revolution from the 1980s onwards.

They are developing new laws for robot behaviour, and designing new ways for humans and robots to interact.

“I think robotics technology will change who we are, just as eyeglasses and fire changed who we were before,” says … Read More → "Are you ready for the robot revolution?"

There is no roar of a 3,000 horsepower V-12 at an electric airplane race. Instead there is only the whir of an electric motor as pilots entered in the NASA Green Flight Challenge take off into the morning sky above the Sonoma County vineyards. via Wired/Autopia

Continue reading

Short of employing a full hybrid system, automakers are finding many ways to improve fuel economy in current, gas-engine cars. Engineers are looking at every part of the drive cycle to determine where savings can be made. via cnet

Continue reading

Read More → "11 technologies that increase fuel economy"

Even if women and men were graduating in equal numbers from technology and engineering degree programs, the technology industry would still favor men.

According to a new report from the Level Playing Field Institute, IT workplaces, including tech startups, can create hostile or unpleasant environments for women and people of color, leading to those employees seeking out other companies or even other industries for work. via Venture Beat

Read the rest</ … Read More → "Why more women aren’t working in tech"

Sports fans will soon be logging more than player statistics during a game. Under Armour and Zephyr Technology have teamed up to create sensor-equipped compression shirt that measures an athlete’s performance, including heart rate, metabolism, body position, and lung capacity. via ecouterre

Continue reading

… Read More → "Under Armour’s biometric compression shirt tracks and broadcasts athletic performance"