France’s equivalent of DARPA has a lofty task for you. The National Research Agency is challenging engineers to design and build an autonomous oil-drilling robot that can operate continuously for six weeks at a time. And they’re willing to pay you handsomely . Read more…
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France Will Pay You $5 Million to Invent an Oil-Drilling Drone
In an alternate universe, the feature-length adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! isn’t a live-action film starring Jim Carrey but a CG animated film, with Jack Nicholson voicing the Grinch and designs by Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. Read more…
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Berkeley Breathed’s concept art for a Grinch movie with Jack Nicholson
The Universe is so big that it can be difficult to accurately measure the huge distances between things in it. But no longer, because now a team of researchers working on the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey can measure distances between galaxies with 1 percent accuracy . Read more…
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The Universe Can Now Be Measured to 1% Accuracy
After 10 years of painstaking development, the Gemini Planet Imager has returned its first image of a distant exoplanet. Behold Beta Pictoris b, a massive planet several times larger than Jupiter — and over 63 light-years from Earth. Read more…
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Powerful new planet finder snaps a direct image of an exoplanet
Despite its unassuming looks and gentle temperament, the humble red breasted robin ( Erithacus rubecula ) boasts a superhero-like ability. They can see magnetic fields, giving them an almost perfect sense of direction. Read more…
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Robins Can Actually See Magnetic Fields (But Only in One Eye)
Vimeo is officially launching a new default HTML 5 player that’s 50 percent faster than the the flash module that came before. In fact, you may have already been using it for months as the service has been slowly rolling it out to users. Sneaky, sneaky! Pretty much the only way you’ll use the oldness is on Facebook soon. Did you notice that your videos were loading faster when you press play? Read more…
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Vimeo Secretly Launches an Improved, Super Fast HTML 5 Player
After years of bringing you the horror/glory that is the PadFone and FonePad, Asus is branching out on its phone fone offerings and introducing not one, not two, but three flavors of “ZenFone, ” Android handsets with ultrabook lineage . Read more…
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Asus ZenFones: An Android Army with Intel Inside
Electric-only cars might be envogue right now, but Toyota is pursuing another eco-friendly alternative to gasoline engines with its FCV concept . The company is now claiming the vehicle will be available sometime in 2015—at least if you live in California where (hopefully) hydrogen refill stations will be plentiful by then. Read more…
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Water Vapor Will Be the Only Emission From Toyota’s New Fuel Cell Car
You can brag to your friends about the amazing weekend you had at the track all you want, but without a witness, you might as well be boasting about that monstrous fish that got away. So for the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, GM is including what it calls its Performance Data Recorder which overlays telemetry, speed, and location data over a 72oP video recording of everywhere you’ve driven—basically giving you instant replay of your hoonage so you can back up your bragging. Read more…
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The New Corvette Stingray Will Come With Built-In Instant Replay
Dark Horse has just announced that they are losing the Star Wars comics license, as Disney has chosen to give it to their more-or-less in-house publisher Marvel. Damn. Read more…
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Disney is giving the Star Wars comics license to Marvel in 2015