flickering pictures

Or at least, there will be soon.
The City of Boston is working on an app that uses your iPhone’s accelerometer to detect bumps while you’re driving, and its GPS to tell the city where the bumps happened.
According to the Boston Globe, the iPhone is “sensitive enough to identify cracks and divots,” and test runs […]

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Just a quickie…
For a week now, the world has been Googling Egypt like never before. But not in China, where search engines are blocking search terms like “Egypt” and “Cairo,” keeping people in China from staying up to date on Egypt’s mass revolt. Terms related to the protest are also blocked on Sina, […]

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So it isn’t news anymore that Egypt has followed in Tunisia’s footsteps, in taking to the streets to overthrow a multi-decade dictator. You’ve probably also heard that to prevent protesters from organizing, Egypt has cut off broadband and mobile Internet access to its 80 million residents in the biggest Web blackout the world […]

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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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