Tag: black

6 hypermiling cars that get over 100 miles per gallon

By Cat DiStasio Fuel efficiency is one rating that can really set a car apart from the pack. Although you can’t yet walk into just any dealership and drive away in a vehicle that gets more than 100 miles a gallon, there are some sweet rides out there that demonstrate just how incredibly efficient a car can be. To get a better idea of what the uber-efficient car of tomorrow looks like, we’ve compiled some of the most efficient vehicles on the planet, all of which exceed that 100-mpg marker. In fact, most of the cars featured here leave that rating in the dust, and several break into the quadruple digits .Slideshow-342967

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6 hypermiling cars that get over 100 miles per gallon

Stretchable square of rubber doubles as a keyboard

There’s a whole branch of science that’s dedicated to turning flexible surfaces into sensors that can be used as an artificial substitute for skin. These materials could then be used to give robots a sense of touch , or even to restore feeling for people with artificial prostheses. Researchers at the University of Auckland have taken the concept in a slightly different direction after building a square of soft, stretchable rubber that pulls double-duty as a keyboard. It’s hoped that the technology can be used to create foldable, rollable input devices, which reminds us of Nokia’s twisty-stretchy phone concept from way back when. Via: EurekaAlert Source: Smart Materials

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Stretchable square of rubber doubles as a keyboard

Scientists create gold nuggets that are 98 percent air

Researchers at ETH Zurich have accomplished a bit of modern-day alchemy, transforming 20 carat gold into a lightweight foam. Well, technically it’s an aerogel: an exceedingly light and porous matrix of material. It’s so porous, in fact, that the foam doesn’t conduct electricity because, at atmospheric pressure, the gold atoms within the structure don’t actually touch. “The so-called aerogel is a thousand times lighter than conventional gold alloys. It is lighter than water and almost as light as air, ” Raffaele Mezzenga, Professor of Food and Soft Materials at ETHZ, said in a statement. Via: GizMag Source: ETH Zurich

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Scientists create gold nuggets that are 98 percent air

LG’s spending billions to make more OLED things

LG’s OLED 4K TVs are jaw-droppingly gorgeous , but the price still isn’t anywhere near the level it needs to be for mass consumer adoption . Hopefully the company’s new manufacturing plant can help that a bit thanks to economies of scale . A Reuters report says that the South Korean firm is spending some $8.71 billion (around 10 trillion Korean won) on a new manufacturing facility for the display panels in Paju, South Korea. Perhaps this can make up for some of the losses the tech giant suffered by halting production at one of its TV plants due to a gas leak earlier this year. Source: Reuters

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LG’s spending billions to make more OLED things

See Ecco the Dolphin swim in a sea of animated glitches

Ecco the Dolphin was undoubtedly one of the trippiest games to emerge from the early ’90s, a psychedelic ocean adventure about Atlantis, time machines and giant crystals whose gameplay was once turned into a six-hour meditation video . But it’s never looked quite as surreal as it does in エコー ザ ドルフィン Ride the C a t a c l y s m , a series of animated gifs created by Brazilian glitch artist Sabato Visconti . Here, Ecco swims amidst jagged waves of pixel flotsam, often coming face to face with himself as he glides through a current of glitches. The series is billed as “an ongoing gif-roman of systemic failure, corrupted oceans, lush aesthetics, and sad dolphins, made with glitched out scenes from the classic Sega Genesis game.” Visconti’s previous glitch-oriented work has focused Donkey Kong Country , J. Crew catalogs , and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo . See the full gallery of Visconti’s Ecco the Dolphin glitch art here . via Kill Screen

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See Ecco the Dolphin swim in a sea of animated glitches

Ancient adventure texts at last unearthed

Well, this is wonderful—Jason Scott, creator of the GET LAMP documentary and tireless historian in the service of games, is releasing a huge trove of scans from the archives of Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky. Infocom, of course, was a leading developer of mysterious and beautifully-written computer text adventure games in the 1980s. Meretzky’s carefully-kept notes—over 9000 scans, says Scott—document numerous aspects, from design to business, of what was widely considered the company’s golden age, in which it produced famous games like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall , and the remarkable, pioneering A Mind Forever Voyaging , written and made by Meretzky himself, among others. Jason Scott writes of these documents, which will live at The Infocom Cabinet : For someone involved in game design, this is priceless work. Unfettered by the crushing schedules and indie limits of the current industry, the designers at Infocom (including Steve, but not limited to him by any means) were able to really explore what made games so much fun, where the medium could go, and what choices could be made. It’s all here. One of the challenges in the video game space is that design knowledge is often prized tightly behind the doors of competitive game companies, and then lost when the tides of business change or studios close their doors. Software and hardware age, and works younger than a decade can be fundamentally impossible to access. The work of archivists like Scott is often unsung but essential to the memory of the medium, and his TEXTFILES.COM has become a virtual museum of all manner of computer history. Learn more here . Thanks to Alice for spotting this first!

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Ancient adventure texts at last unearthed

An Army colonel is in trouble for complaining that a $500k gas station cost $43 million to build

Army Col. John Hope blew the whistle on a task force that spent $43 million to build a useless gas station in Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction says the useless gas station should have cost about $500,000. As a result of pointing out the doubly wasteful project, Hope has “been singled out for retaliation and retribution” for “speaking truth,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. The gas station is useless because it supplies natural gas to cars that have been converted to run on natural gas. But there are hardly any cars that run on natural gas in Afghanistan, and the cost to convert a car to run on natural gas is $700. The average annual income in Afghanistan is $690, according to the Washington Post . More from the Washington Post : The high cost of the gas station has angered many in Congress. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) has scheduled a hearing on it for next month. And Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said it was one of the worst cases of wasteful spending that she has ever seen. “There are few things in this job that literally make my jaw drop,” she said in a statement. “But of all the examples of wasteful projects in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Pentagon began prior to our wartime contracting reforms, this genuinely shocked me.” The contractor, Central Asian Engineering Construction Company, originally bid $3 million to build the gas station, which is already an order of magnitude too much to charge. How they ended up charging $43 million is a mystery. I wonder who owns Central Asian Engineering Construction Company?

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An Army colonel is in trouble for complaining that a $500k gas station cost $43 million to build

The Keurig Kold: You could just buy a mini-fridge instead

As I took Keurig’s Kold machine out of its box, the first thought that ran through my head was, “Man, Alton Brown would hate this.” You see, the Good Eats and Cutthroat Kitchen host has a vendetta against single-use kitchen gadgets: that is, products designed to do one thing and one thing alone. And it’s usually a purpose that could easily be replicated by another doodad already living in your kitchen. In the case of the Kold, a device that dispenses single servings of cold drinks at the touch of a button, that doodad would be your fridge.Slideshow-339263

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The Keurig Kold: You could just buy a mini-fridge instead

CoinVault and Bitcryptor Ransomware Victims Can Now Recover Their Files For Free

itwbennett writes: Researchers from Kaspersky Lab and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service have obtained the last set of encryption keys from command-and-control servers that were used by CoinVault and Bitcryptor, ‘ writes Lucian Constantin. ‘Those keys have been uploaded to Kaspersky’s ransomware decrypt or service that was originally set up in April with a set of around 750 keys recovered from servers hosted in the Netherlands. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CoinVault and Bitcryptor Ransomware Victims Can Now Recover Their Files For Free

Putting your kettle on the Internet of Things makes your wifi passwords an open secret

The $150 Smarter Ikettle lets you start your water boiling from anywhere in the world over the Internet — and it also contains long-term serious security vulnerabilities that allow attackers to extract your wifi passwords from it. (more…)

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Putting your kettle on the Internet of Things makes your wifi passwords an open secret