all-the-other-stuff
Smartphones Can (and Will) Get Smarter
Remember when the iPhone first came out? Steve Jobs was still alive, and he really knocked everybody's socks off with this candybar-sized piece of glass and metal. It's a widescreen iPod with touch controls and a revolutionary mobile phone and an...
Sorry Obama, It Isn't "Made in America"
Last night, if you were listening to the President accept his nomination, and were paying any attention to Twitter storm that happened simultaneously, you might have got a little sensitive to those keywords that Mr. Obama hit without fail. If you read...
Stretchable, Tattoo-Like Electronics Are Here to Check Your Health
earable computing is all the rage this year as Google pulls back the curtain on their Glass technology, but some scientists want to take the idea a stage further. The emerging field of stretchable electronics is taking advantage of new polymers that...
Rank War: Cracking Open the Lid On Militarized Stink Bombs
For all the visible horror and concussive din of combat, smell is war's lingering sting. Burning vehicles, fuel, and flesh. Fresh, spent cordite. Salt water. Opium. Sewage. War reeks. And no matter that so much of war is being robotized to the...
DARPA's Robo-Cheetah Is Now Faster Than Usain Bolt
I really want to get excited about the DARPA-funded robot that's faster than any man on Earth. But then I imagine it's chasing me.
Green Ways to Cool Your Steaming-Hot Server Farm
Few people think about what's happening on the other end of the cord to keep their Internet alive. Among other things is a vast network of data centers that quite literally contain the all of the files that constitute the billions of web pages, mobile...
Watch This Trailer: Republicans Think the How-We-Got-Osama "Zero Dark Thirty" Isn't Fair
In May, 2011 director Kathryn Bigelow (_The Hurt Locker_, _Point Break_, _Strange Days)_ and screenwriter/journalist Mark Boal (_The Hurt Locker_, _In The Valley of Elah_) had just wrapped on a meticulously researched script about the 2001 siege of al...
Science Is Getting Closer to Finding a Cure for Paralysis
A team scientists in Switzerland and the United States must be thrilled after an experimental stem cell treatment they developed helped two paralyzed patients regain feeling in their bodies. The small trial involved injecting three patients with 2...
Why Do We Need Eye-Controlled Electronics?
This week, there's a strange new invention making waves at the IFA technology conference in Berlin: an eyeball controlled TV. It pretty much works just like you'd expect it to. Look at an area on the screen like the channel, for instance, blink and the...
A Grand Tour of the Weirdest Wi-Fi
Jumping off a bus in the middle of the night, I walk down the side of a Vietnamese highway with my friend, Pascal. It's extremely dark and full of crickets outside -- beside the occasional blare of another bus whizzing past. The blinking blue dot on my...
Apple Would Prefer You Didn't Track Drones on Your iPhone
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you're going to have to cancel your mobile drone tracking plans for Labor Day weekend. It was a really fun plan, I know. Pull out the lawn chairs, find a sunny spot in the grass — beer in one hand, iPhone in the...
The World of Prosthetic Art Is Marvelous
Prostheses are a lot of things — practical, functional, useful — but pretty they are not. Your standard prosthetic leg is typically nothing more than flesh-colored hunk of plastic designed, if anything, to be ignored or overlooked. But a handful of...