Archive for the ‘Sci-Tech’ Category

No one's going to blame you for keeping holiday gifts minimal this year. But if you want to round out your handmade cards, scarves, pickles and jam with a gadget or gizmo, here are a handful of our $100-and-under favorites. ... Full story

Have you ever tried to catch a running cockroach? They’re fast little suckers, and resilient too, which is why scientists at the University of California Berkeley modeled their latest robot after them. DASH or Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod is a six legged robot made from cardboard and polymer. It’s the size of your open hand, weighs just ... Full story

A radio without any knobs. A bathroom where a clear display wirelessly streams vital statistics on your health. And a user interface that takes brain waves and translates them into commands for a computer. These are some of the products in development by Cambridge Consultants, a product design and development company. It showed off some of its ... Full story

“You can print money, manufacture diamonds, and people are a dime a dozen, but you’ll always need land. It’s the one thing they’re not making any more of.” So sayeth Lex Luthor, criminal mastermind and Superman’s nemesis… but despite being evil, he has a point. With more and more land being needed for food production, and an ever-increasing ... Full story

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — the non-profit group that ... Full story

With new releases of several major Linux distributions coming up in the next few weeks, I would like to take a few minutes to debunk some of the more blatant inaccuracies which are circulated about Linux. Many of these will sound absurd to anyone with reasonable knowledge about Linux, but I have seen every one of these ... Full story

Verizon and AT&T have both reported their latest quarterly earnings, and the strength of the iPhone has continued to help AT&T close the gap on the market leader. Update: In a conference call following Monday’s earnings report, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said his company would welcome the iPhone on its network if Apple is interested, according to Digital ... Full story

If you had to choose, would you rather die by gunshot or melting? This is hypothetical, of course. Because I never asked the people I murdered what they would prefer. I just went right ahead and gunned down a prostitute in one game and melted the faces of a bunch of dudes in another. Because nothing ever really challenged me to think about the consequences of ... Full story

It was this day in 1988 that Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album finally dropped off the Billboard 200, ending a phenomenal, record-setting streak that has yet to be broken. Check out their staggering accomplishment and nine other Billboard 200 milestones below. 1. Most weeks on the chart: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, 741 weeks. 741 WEEKS. That’s more than ... Full story

The big music news today is a report from Billboard on iTunes price changes and their negatively affecting chart positions for the top 100 songs. Last week, iTunes introduced variable pricing, with some newer and more popular singles priced at $1.29 while other songs remaining at 99 cents and some older songs reduced to 69 cents. (Some have pointed out the difficulty in finding tracks ... Full story