29 posts tagged “tech”
The year was 1960. Joe Kittinger, a US Airforce pilot, rode a balloon to the edge of space and jumped. This extraordinary feat was the highest jump ever and made Kittinger the first person to ever break the sound barrier without a craft of some kind. Some would say it technically makes him the first man in space as well.
Remember this article when the robot armies finally torch through the last layer of steel in our underground strongholds. Read on to scare yourself shitless.
"The results...set the stage for the creation of a
neuromemory chip that could be paired with computer hardware to create
cyborglike machines capable of such tasks as detecting dangerous toxins
in the air, allowing the blind to see or helping someone who is
paralyzed regain some if not all muscle use."
-Scientific American
You may have heard some buzz about Photosynth in the past year, but this video showcases a polished (market-ready?) version. This is one of those tools that gives me hope that technology isn't all about mindless diversion, but that great strides are being made to broaden the learning potential of humankind. Really amazing.
Agreed, this contraption is ungainly as hell, but if you give all the hardware about three years to shrink down, this might become a pretty svelt design. Still, the cool thing about this is not what it is now, but what it eludes to for the future. For instance, the interface is pretty kick ass (swivel the umbrella to scroll through a live Flickr feed? Navigate Google Earth? Cool).
I don't see an abundance of Internet-ready umbrellas in our future, that is until the technology becomes so commonplace (i.e. innexpensive) that you don't mind accidentally leaving it on the subway. BUT, I can see a ton of other uses for this kind of technology. What's your take on it?
It's a bit of a brain melt to consider that this machine may be able to recreate the conditions under which the universe, as we understand it, began.
In the coming months (June 2007) the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be switched on. The Large Hadron Collider
promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By
revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of
the deepest secrets of our Universe.
Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: “It is what makes stuff stuff…'
-BBC News
Anyone else afraid this thing might rip a giant hole in reality and suck us all into oblivion?
The best explanation of what dark matter is (or more appropriately, what it isn't) came in a recent issue of WIRED entitled What We Don't Know. Here's a brief excerpt, but you should really read the whole thing for erudite theories on everything from why we sleep to what's at the Earth's core. Also, take a look at the BBC article that broke this story.
[...By contrast, the question of dark energy is wide open. What is its
origin? What determined its quantity? Does the amount stay constant or
vary? These are critical questions. Calculations show that if the
amount of dark energy had been slightly larger, the universe would have
blown apart so quickly that life as we know it could not exist.]
- Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe
Design (industrial, graphic, and otherwise) is featured on one of the most interesting sites out there. Check out this rotating "windscraper." More after the link.
If you've signed up for beta functionality on your Vox, you know about the Embed feature. If you haven't experimented with this yet, it allows you to paste code into your blog that is currently not integrated through Vox's WYSIWYG. Very handy. I just went to Frappr, hit "view source" in my browser , grabbed the .swf code and pasted it into this post.
That aside, I'm really curious where people are visiting my Vox from. Take a second and add yourself to this map.
