In the spirit of making problems go away, sometimes you want to just launch a particular person/problem into the sun. So—could you? And just how big would the canon need to be? Read more…
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Could You Launch Someone Into the Sun With a Big Enough Cannon?
What most often gives away a CG character as fake is their dead, lifeless eyes. It’s a common contributing factor to the uncanny valley effect, but now researchers at Disney have developed a system to perfectly capture a performer’s eyes that promises to make CG characters finally appear more lifelike and convincing. Read more…
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Disney’s Super-Realistic CG Eyeballs Are an Uncanny Valley Airlift
During a court hearing in Oakland, California, it’s come to light that, between 2007 and 2009, Apple deleted tracks downloaded from rival music services off of iPods. Read more…
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Apple Deleted Competitors’ Songs From Your iPod
The most inefficient part of a gearing system is also its most vital: the teeth. While they allow the systems to, y’know, work, they also introduce vast quantities of frictional losses and, in turn, mechanical wear—so this new system uses magnetic levitation to do away with them. Read more…
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This Maglev Gearbox Doesn’t Need Teeth
Gangnam Style fell out of the public eye a while ago (thank god) but people haven’t stopped watching it. It’s been seen so many times that it actually broke YouTube’s view counter, in the nerdiest possible way by busting the code behind the scenes. Read more…
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Gangnam Style Broke YouTube’s View Counter
The US military is undergoing a radical change in its communications capabilities. Not only is DARPA’s Persistent Close Air Support cutting response times by nearly 90 percent, but a new satellite-based comm system will soon deliver a 3G smartphone experience to soldiers anywhere on the planet. Read more…
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This New Global Satellite System Is Bringing 3G to the Battlefield
The Hill reports that today President Obama will propose $263 million in funding to law enforcement to help avoid another disaster like the ongoing mess in Ferguson, Missouri. Read more…
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Obama Calls For $75 Million In Funding for 50,000 Police Body Cameras
When it’s hot out, buildings have a hard time staying cool: bombarded with ambient heat and generating yet more inside, their air conditioning systems have to work hard to keep temperatures down. Now, a new super-thin coating developed at Stanford could be applied to buildings to help them cool themselves more effectively. Read more…
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A New Super-Thin Coating Could Cool Buildings Without AC
Is o nly going up in the elevator getting you down? Not for much longer: ThyssenKrupp, the German steel and engineering company, has announced that it’s building the next generation of elevators that will use magnetic levitation to travel up, down and side-to-side at speed in the buildings of the future. Read more…
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Future Elevators Will Use Maglev to Go Up, Down—and Sideways
The 8.2 version of iOS is still in beta and unavailable to non-developers, but that hasn’t stopped Chinese-based outfit TaiG from breaking it free from Apple’s shackles (and also jailbreaking 8.1.1, the current release, in the process). Read more…