flickering pictures

Burning corpses generates a lot of heat, and a crematorium in East Sussex plans to convert that energy into usable electricity to reduce its own power costs — essentially turning dead bodies into a renewable energy source.
“A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy,” says Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead. “We buy about £25,000 […]

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At least in South Africa.
Frustrated with Telkom, South Africa’s biggest ISP, the cheeky staff at a South African IT company devised a race to see what would be faster: e-mailing a large file from their Pietermaritzburg offices to the city of Durban, 77 km away, or strapping a data stick to a pigeon’s leg and […]

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Smacker: “May I just whack you on the head with this shovel?”
Smackee: “You may.”
A new orange goo called D3O remains soft until you smack it with something (a shovel, say) at which point it becomes extremely rigid — hard enough to protect your head from a tumble over your handlebars, or from a good smack […]

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Antarctica is cold, barren, and an expensive place to send a research team. So what’s the best way to track penguins on the frosty bottom of the world? You rig a satellite to look for giant smears of penguin poop. Duh.
From the Guardian:

Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have used satellite images, […]

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I’ve just passed the dawn of my 28th year, and like the song says, I may be getting old, but I’m not old yet. Still, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve passed some magic age barrier that separates the people who are on top of technology from the people who aren’t. Does anyone […]

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Bruce Branit of Back Alley Films and branit|vfx has put together this stunning short film highlighting the awesome power of CG. In it, a man creates a holographic world to be with his comatose sweetheart — the story is touching, but the real jewel here is the jaw-dropping beauty of it all…
The branit|vfx site […]

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They said it couldn’t be done, but physicists at McGill University in Montreal have managed to amplify laser light with less energy and cooling than ever before, which means that fibre-optic communications, among other things, could get a whole lot cheaper.
From the press release:

McGill University researchers have successfully amplified light with so-called “colloidal quantum dots,” […]

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A creepy-sounding outfit called the Fertility Institutes is offering parents the controversial chance to screen for blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned babies, and lots of people aren’t happy about it. For a fee, the Institutes promise to let you choose your baby’s features through “pre-implantation genetic diagnosis” — sort of implying that ugliness needs diagnosing. […]

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* = may not actually happen
If someone told you that IBM and the U.S. government were building the world’s most powerful supercomputer — one that could perform a staggering 20 quadrillion calculations per second — what would you think its purpose was? If you guessed curing cancer, studying climate change or running Vista smoothly […]

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This is apparently an authentic ad for Microsoft’s Songsmith song-writing program, which I guess is supposed to compete with Apple’s less seizure-inducing GarageBand. If there’s a commercial out there that makes you want to incoherently spew obscenities more than this one, I haven’t seen it.
Microsoft says:

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. […]

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