[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Update: Here’s a statement we got from Sprint:

“We did have some disruption to Sprint SMS traffic earlier tonight, but it wasn’t a complete disruption — we lost partial capacity for about an hour. Engineers immediately began rerouting traffic and after about an hour things went back to normal.

There is no significant voice disruption anywhere in the US except for a small part of our Sprint network in the Washington, DC area. That has since been resolved and had no relation to the SMS disruption.”

Sprint network is down in some areas, SMS and voice call services affected (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 May 2011 22:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Sprint network is down, no SMS and voice calls for some of you originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 May 2011 22:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This photo, purportedly taken near Louisiana’s Morganza Spillway, is simultaneously horrifying and kind of amusing. The snake just looks so purposeful, with its head raised like that. As though it’s out running some errands, or on a morning commute.

That said, I kind of hope somebody spots the pixels that prove this image is a fake. Because the idea of giant snakes hanging out alongside American highways gives my feet a terrible case of the crawling willies.

Continue reading here:
Giant snake flees Mississippi floods

Another day, another step closer to quantum dot reality. Today, Nanosys unveiled its new Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF), marking the first time that the nanotechnology is available for LCD manufacturers. According to the company, its optical film can deliver up to 60 percent of all colors visible to the human eye, compared with the 20 to 25 percent that most displays offer. To create QDEF, Nanosys’ engineers suspended a blend of quantum dots within optical film and applied it to a blue LED, which helped get the nanocrystals excited. Once they started hopping around, the dots emitted high-quality white light and a rich, wide color gamut, without consuming as much power as white LED-based materials. No word yet on when we can expect to see QDEF in consumer displays, but Nanosys claims that the film is “process-ready” and easy for manufacturers to integrate. For now, you can amuse yourselves by comparing the two frogs pictured above and guessing which one is covered in quantum dots. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Nanosys unveils Quantum Dot Enhancement Film for LCDs, promises all kinds of colors

Nanosys unveils Quantum Dot Enhancement Film for LCDs, promises all kinds of colors originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 May 2011 13:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When I was a kid I planted a tree that grew over the rooftop of my house. At the time I thought that was pretty cool, but now I have seen this great gallery of The Strangest Trees on Earth, which you will agree are pretty strange. See full gallery at the link.

Link

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The Strangest Trees on Earth

Sometime last week we quietly turned on our latest project. Plansharing: Collaboration for Architects, Engineers, Designers, and their clients is a basecamp like tool for CAD. The idea is to make the communication around plans and large projects clear and simple. We focused on a single feature, marking up plans. You can view arbitrarily complicated CAD files without flash, plugins, or installed software. How do we do it? We copy the way google maps and open street maps work, making tiles instead of rendering full vector images. Last year I built a beach cabin , and in the process i realized that there was something really broken in the communication process between architects, builders, and their clients. To make change requests, talk about what needed to be done, we either had to travel for a face to face meeting, or mark up pdf’s of the plans. Some hacking, brainstorming with Diego , some tweaking, mockups, running code, and now we’ve got plansharing . It’s very focused on the primary task, discussions around plans, viewing changes, communicating visually online what’s happening in CAD files. We’ll be flushing it out, building it in to a collaboration tool. It’s not done, it’s not refined or polished, but it mostly works and we think we’ve got enough of an app to be useful. We’re looking for beta testers. Know somebody who works with CAD, or is getting their kitchen remodeled? Give plansharing a try and tell us what you think.

See the article here:
My latest project, Plansharing: Basecamp for CAD

Stephanie Vetter captured this photograph of an aurora over Jökulsárlón, a glacial lake in Iceland. It won an international competition for landscape astrophotography.

Link via Gizmodo

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The End is Nigh, and It Is Beautiful

Ninety six minutes. Eleven shocks by defibrillator. Two dozen rescuers pounding his chest in shifts to bring vital oxygen to his limp body. A helicopter, even. That’s what it took to revive 54-year old Howard Snitzer this month. Oh, and a little celebrated thing called a capnography machine that let everyone know that he was still capable of being brought back from the brink of death. More

Go ahead and drive your SUV to the plastic factory: The French have discovered the first habitable planet in another solar system. It’s called Gliese 581d, and it’s a mere 20 light years away. More

In the run-up to the releases of the Volt and the Leaf, there was some talk making the rounds that the designers were having some trouble deciding what noise these new cars should make. After all, they’re naturally almost silent, and this presents a serious risk not just to unwary pedestrians but to also to blind people, wildlife, and of course other cars.

The question is whether you make EVs sound like other cars by simulating engine noise, or do you take this chance to give them an entirely new and perhaps more practical and customizable noise?

Some cars, of course, have a distinctive noise that results naturally from the mechanics of the engine and exhaust. Car designers can make their own noise now, even make your Leaf sound like an old Mustang — but should this noise be regulated, and if so, on what level?

Manufacturers and designers are testing out different sounds, from a UFO noise to the sound of a baseball card flapping against bike spokes, attempting to suss out which exactly produces the most awareness without becoming grating. The BBC has a nice video here with some of the noises being looked at by UK researchers.

They’re even simulating intersections with dozens of such vehicles and seeing how certain sounds would interact. Hey, you don’t roll something out to ten thousand vehicles without doing a little checking around, right?

I’m torn on the subject. Obviously there’s a line that needs to be walked between good taste and safety, but there are lots of unanswered questions as well. What about special sounds for certain types of vehicles, or user-selectable sounds? I want mine to sound like a Transformer transforming, all the time.

See the article here:
Car Makers Ponder What To Make Electric Vehicles Sound Like