Articles tagged "do-it-yourself-tech"

You can almost hear the lowly mules--both of whom fled the scene--cry out in that sort of self-deprecating _God damnit_ that only comes when you know you really fucked up.

Most of us have seen the alarmist food documentaries that target giant food companies like Monsanto. Soaring over crops, airplanes spray contrails of fertilizer that often spill into smaller neighboring farms; destroying their seeds and ultimately ca…

Walking through an urban college campus can be an extremely claustrophobic experience. With ever-increasing enrollment are one factor, there are the young and eagerly participatory students, destined to have you join a club or support a cause. "Buy a…

Put this in your holy grail: Deer blood. But markedly the blood of young sika deer, which people are spending their holidays traveling to a rural town in China to get a sip. Hengxi is home of a backwoods deer farm started by a man, Mr. Yang, who with…

On May 28, 1993, a remote and dusty thicket of the Australian outback shook for hundreds of miles around. Deep reverberating explosions could be heard far and wide, the night sky illuminated by sporadic flashes of unexplained light—all this allegedly…

Move over, McMansions. In the not-so-distant future, your studio apartment will also be your gym, your massive dining room, your home office, a yoga studio, house a guest room and function as pretty much any other kind of space you could imagine.

Plenty of people have used Craigslist to hunt down and entrust perfectly amicable roommates (check), to sell cars that were worth less than the work they needed (check), to buy $2 seats to Mets games (check, Shea days), and to trade a bunch of other

When I asked Kevin Parker if he hails from another planet, he paused. And then he laughed. "Not that I know of, no," the 20-something Aussie admitted. "I'm assuming that's a compliment of some description?" You tell me. By this point, Parker i…

_In a new column,_ Tech Support, _we offer three high-tech solutions to an everyday ailment, each somewhat more sophisticated than the next, and all made possible by the magic of science and any extra cash you might have lying around._*Help! My breat…

At last weekend's Beijing's College Student Robotics Competition, some 300 people from 99 teams from across China and Taiwan "showed off robots":http://beijingcream.com/2012/09/robots-do-a-little-dance-make-a-little-love that could play five-a-side s…

There couldn't be anything more satisfying than being Greg Packer last Friday, the first to walk away from Apple's 5th Avenue store with a fresh iPhone 5. Opening that box, I imagine a small string of Packer's drool collecting in a puddle on the devi…

In a place that's become synonymous with all the moral, ethical, legal, and political quandaries posed by the robo-lords of the new "bugsplat" warfare, the thought of insect-like drones buzzing over northern Pakistan may not immediately take on celeb…

The lovely iFixit has gotten its deconstructive hands on an iPhone 5 and already has "the phone's guts up on display":http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-5-Teardown/10525/. There aren't a whole lot of surprises -- the battery is a bit bigger, and s…

The last time we heard from Isaac Wilder, co-founder of the "Free Network Foundation":http://thefnf.org/, he was getting the hell out of New York City. We first met Wilder, whose peer-to-peer, wifi-hotspot driven communications initiative took front

They are overhead, far way, buzzing in the distance, doing their thing. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are "cruising over Benghazi":http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/14/us-protests-libya-airport-idUSBRE88D0PJ20120914 in the wake of attack on th…

Take a minute and go on a quick tour of the massive online art collaboration "Web Canvas":http://webcanvas.com/. It's like a bar bathroom wall as its own planet, complete with its own coordinate system. It's all so much barf and scribble -- but the p…

When I was younger I played soccer this time of year, every year. One of my earliest memories of the sport was being confined to playing indoors, where my brother and I shared a similar disdain for the sealed environment which was that, "Indoor socce…

_"The computer [is] the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it is an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it the wheel is a mere hula-hoop."_ -- Marshall McLuhan, from War and Peace in the Global Village_ Last month,…

It was only a matter of time. When Motherboard "caught up with the so-called godfather of narco subs":http://motherboard.vice.com/2010/7/4/go-inside-a-drug-submarine-with-the-narco-sub-godfather a few years back, the cartel's seaborne coke craft were…

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

Look at the screenshot I shared above. That's what the end of the world will look like, when Skynet finally launches the missiles. The disco drone party is courtesy of a recent by German art collective Ars Electronica, and it may or may not be called…

It'll take you nearly a day and a walking distance of over 50 miles. That's why.

A group of 16 engineers working at Belgium's "Group T":http://www.groept.be/www/?set-lang=en have produced what they're calling the world's first 3D-printed race car. The electric open-wheeler, called Areion, is pretty quick, with a 0-62 mph time of