iOS 8 was unleashed on the world this week after debuting earlier this summer at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. CEO Tim Cook is calling it the biggest iOS update ever — and for good reason, as the new operating system has been packed with hundreds of new tools for developers, as well as new features that make iOS devices, quicker, more productive and more seamlessly integrated with Mac than ever before. Read more…
Larry Ellison to step aside as Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison, a college dropout who built Oracle into one of the world’s largest and most prominent technology companies, is stepping down as CEO in a momentous Silicon Valley handover. Read more…
Paper vs plasma: how the digital reading shift is impacting your brain
Would you like paper or plasma? That’s the question book lovers face now that e-reading has gone mainstream. And, as it turns out, our brains process digital reading very differently. Read more…
iPhone 6 Plus teardown
The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus became available for purchase this week and already we have seen the first teardown from the popular website, iFixit. Read more…
MIT’s futuristic space suit works like shrinkwrap
What if astronauts squeezed into lightweight, stretchy suits before venturing into space? MIT researchers are proposing just that. Read more…
Assange on Bitcoin, Google, Isis and censorship
As part of a publicity campaign for his book, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did one of Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” group interviews, and talked about Bitcoin, Google and its chairman Eric Schmidt, and what the US should do about the terrorist group Isis. Read more…
The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station
The story of how two cosmonauts battled extreme cold, darkness and limited resources to save Salyut 7. Read more…
Sub-$1 3D-printed microscope turns phones into science tools
Smartphone cameras are great for a lot of things, but they’re not designed for getting super-duper up close with tiny objects like salt crystals or blood cells. You can give your mobile device a helping hand, though, and open up a world of microscopic adventures. It’s not going to cost you much, either. You just need a 3D printer, a glass bead and some free files from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Read more…
MIT researchers take cheetah robot out for a run without a leash
MIT researchers have released a video of a robot they’re calling “cheetah” making its way across campus. An earlier robot that was also called cheetah was part of a Darpa/Boston Dynamics (now owned by Google) collaboration that was notable for its speed. The MIT version is notable for ditching the tethers that supplied power to it — it goes for runs using onboard battery power and control logic. Read more…
This ant-sized radio is powered by the messages it receives
In the most ambitious minds, the Internet of things would deliver a running catalogue of data from the complete taxonomy of physical objects. Passing these digital tally marks along will be a huge wireless challenge, and the solution may come from a tiny radio that costs pennies to make and draws power from the information it receives. Read more…