According to Edward Snowden, people who care about their privacy should stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Dropbox, Facebook and Google. Snowden conducted a remote interview as part of the New Yorker Festival. Read more…
Futuristic skin-tight spacesuits may shrink-wrap astronauts
The spacesuits of the future might be totally alien-looking. Instead of the bulky-looking spacesuits that astronauts wear today, a group of MIT researchers want to “shrink-wrap” the space flyers of tomorrow. Read more…
How videogames like Minecraft actually help kids learn to read
Minecraft is the hot new videogame among teachers and parents. It’s considered genuinely educational: like an infinite set of programmable Lego blocks, it’s a way to instil spatial reasoning, maths, and logic — the skills beloved by science and technology educators. Read more…
The important details of Tesla’s Model D and how autopilot works
At a high level, there wasn’t much revealed at Tesla’s Model D launch that the Internet didn’t already predict pretty accurately: the Model D is a souped-up dual-motor, all-wheel-drive version of the Model S that can go from zero to 100km/h in just over three seconds. But after talking with Tesla executives and doing a test drive of the car at the launch event, I got a much more complete picture of the new functions and options (and if they’re worth it or not) as well as how the autopilot technology actually works. Read more…
Finding a video poker bug nade these guys rich. Then Vegas made them pay
John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak. On 3 July 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later, the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a US$4 300 jackpot. Kane waited while the slot attendant verified the win and presented the tax paperwork — a procedure required for any win of $1 200 or greater — then, 11 minutes later, ding ding ding!, a $2 800 win. A $4 150 jackpot rolled in a few minutes after that. Read more…
Tim Berners-Lee, Web creator, defends net neutrality
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has big plans for the future of the Internet. Greater use of online data, faster computers to take care of day-to-day tasks and more collaboration among people around the world are all possible, Berners-Lee said. But the British computer scientist warned that this future would happen only if people continued to have unfettered access to the basic infrastructure that powers the Internet. Read more…
The HP split: does half a dinosaur move twice as fast?
Three years ago, as Meg Whitman was taking over as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, I offered her some unsolicited advice on what to do to save the company. Now it looks like she’s taken that advice, albeit a bit too late for the thousands of employees who will now be released into the wild to do something else with their lives. Read more…
Z machine makes progress toward nuclear fusion
Scientists are reporting a significant advance in the quest to develop an alternative approach to nuclear fusion. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, using the lab’s Z machine, a colossal electric pulse generator capable of producing currents of tens of millions of amperes, say they have detected significant numbers of neutrons — byproducts of fusion reactions — coming from the experiment. Read more…
Super-detailed and interactive 3D map of the ocean floor
This super-detailed map of the ocean floor’s topography is based on satellite measurements of subtle lumps on the ocean’s surface. These lumps of water, which are subtle, low and wide on the ocean’s surface, are caused by the gravitational pull of underwater features such as mountains and ridges. The team of scientists wrapped their data around a globe built with the JavaScript library Cesium, so you and I could explore it ourselves. Read more…
Amputees discern familiar sensations across prosthetic hand
Even before he lost his right hand to an industrial accident four years ago, Igor Spetic had family open his medicine bottles. Cotton balls give him goose bumps. Now, blindfolded during an experiment, he feels his arm hairs raise when a researcher brushes the back of his prosthetic hand with a cotton ball. Read more…
