Archive for the 'Technology' Category
And The Winner Of The World Food Prize Is… The Man From Monsanto
October 8th, 2013Via: NPR: Ever heard of the World Food Prize? It’s sometimes called the “Nobel Prize for food and agriculture,” but it has struggled to get people’s attention. Prize winners tend to be agricultural insiders, and many are scientists. Last year’s laureate, for instance, was , a pioneer of water-saving “micro-irrigation.” This year, though, the World […]
Aerospace Company Develops Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years
October 8th, 2013Via: CBS: An aerospace company has presented its design “atmospheric satellites” that fly at 65,000 feet and provide drone-like services such as live-mapping and monitoring narcotics trafficking. Titan Aerospace recently offered the Solara series of such drones: which can fly continuously for nearly five years, charging its own battery high above commercial aircraft through the […]
Self-Assembling Robots: MIT M-Blocks
October 7th, 2013Via: MIT News: Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes.
40 Percent of Humanity Online
October 7th, 2013Via: AFP: Around 2.7 billion people — 40 percent of the world’s population — will be connected to the Internet by the end of 2013, the United Nations said Monday. Another 250 million people came online in 2012, but 4.4 billion people remain unconnected, said the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Ninety percent of those […]
Russia Planning ‘Near-Total Surveillance’ of Visitors, Athletes at Sochi Winter Olympics
October 6th, 2013HAHA. Warning, Americans, the Russians will be doing to you what the U.S. Government does to you 24/7. Via: Telegraph: Security measures at the Sochi winter Olympics will include such extensive electronic eavesdropping and surveillance that the US State Department has advised Americans headed to Russia to leave smart phones and laptops at home, an […]
‘Implanted Electrodes Reboot Brain Out of Intractable Depression’
October 5th, 2013Via: Scientific American: Psychological depression is more than an emotional state. Good evidence for that comes from emerging new uses for a technology already widely prescribed for Parkinson’s patients. The more neurologists and surgeons learn about the aptly named deep brain stimulation, the more they are convinced that the currents from the technology’s implanted electrodes […]
Attacking Tor: How the NSA Targets Users’ Online Anonymity
October 5th, 2013Via: Guardian: After identifying an individual Tor user on the internet, the NSA uses its network of secret internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user’s computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and […]
Introducing WildCat
October 4th, 2013Via: Boston Dynamics: WildCat is a four-legged robot being developed to run fast on all types of terrain. So far WildCat has run at about 16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits. The video shows WildCat’s best performance so far. WildCat is being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA’s M3 […]
TellSpec
October 3rd, 2013Via: TellSpec: We are raising funds for the development and manufacture of TellSpec, the world’s first reliable and accurate handheld device that scans and analyzes the composition of food so consumers know the real ingredients before they buy or eat the food. TellSpec brings together laser spectroscopy and a unique mathematical algorithm in a revolutionary […]
NSA Admits Bulk Collection of Cell Phone Location Data, But Don’t Worry, This Was Only a Test
October 3rd, 2013*wink* Via: New York Times: The National Security Agency conducted a secret pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans’ cellphones, but the agency never moved ahead with such a program, according to intelligence officials. The existence of the pilot project was reported on Wednesday […]
