Tag: FUTURE

In a strange exercise regarding our ongoing fascination with how much crap is actually one the Internet (answer: a lot), U.K.-based photog/artist Robert Matthews printed out all 2,559 featured articles on Wikipedia and bound them in a massive, footstool-sized tome. We have a couple of questions: Why didn't he use a double-sided printer? Is that paper stock unnecessarily thick? Why are his shoes ...

The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn't care what that song says. Other times he doesn't even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon ...

Before she won an Oscar for 'The Hurt Locker,' Kathryn Bigelow made 'Strange Days,' a futuristic sci-fi movie imagining a world where people did "playback," a virtual-reality drug that allowed users to live in another body. Brooklyn art rockers TV on the Radio tapped into Bigelow's tale with 'Will Do,' which puts each of the guys in wire-laden, blinking BluBlockers to experience a techno ...

I, for one, welcome our robot overlords -- especially when they're the ones dispensing meds. UCSF Medical Center's new robotic pharmacist is a massive drug-dispensing machine that removes the "human-error" variable from the sometimes-tedious task of measuring and packaging doses. According to UCSF, the robotic pharmacist hasn't messed up once in 350,000 dispensations. All hail the robots! ...

A group of Memphis-based Teach For America candidates is testing wireless headsets in the classroom. A mentor located in another room provides feedback and support to the teacher through the headset, just like an NFL coach does to a quarterback. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Memphis TFA branch will study how teachers who wear the headsets adjust to leading a classroom ...

By employing Delaunay Triangulation, or the practice of creating wide-angled triangles along a set of given points, designer Mary Huang hopes to democratize the little black dress. With her project 'Continuum,' which is about to hit Kickstarter, she hopes to take her proprietary software, and offer it to any gal who wants a hyper-futuristic dress entirely tailored to her own proportions. "Could ...

After almost two years of steady hype (including a fascinating recent preview on 'Nova'), the 'Jeopardy' battle between mankind and machine finally goes down this week. Beginning tonight, the three-day war for trivia supremacy pits Watson, the IBM supercomputer, against 'Jeopardy' heroes Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson actually vanquished the two humans in a recent practice round, so ...

China and IBM are teaming up to build a massive cloud computing and office complex. How massive? According to Computer World, it's the size of an entire city. The new center will cover an estimated 6.2 million square feet, with 646,000 square feet devoted to the data center alone. In total, the complex will be about the size of the Pentagon, though it will be spread out over a comparatively ...

When designing a new aircraft, engineers must be able to get a feel for how the jet might come together -- and, generally, the only way to do that is to actually build a mock-up and crawl inside. But, with the Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory or CHIL (which is pronounced exactly how you'd expect... with a heavy dose of shame), engineers can get some "hands-on" time with their creations ...

British scientists are developing an active camouflage system for tanks that uses electronic ink to project images of the surrounding terrain onto the armored vehicle's shell. According to The Telegraph, electronic sensors would be placed on the tank's exterior. These sensors scan the environment, and use the e-ink to project colors, lines and shapes onto the tank's hull -- turning the vehicle ...

Ridiculous and implausible science fiction movies number in the thousands, but one particularly absurd film has actually provoked public admonishment from NASA. According to The Australian, NASA members recently discussed Hollywood science fiction fare, particularly the inane nonsense offered by 'Armageddon,' 'The 6th Day' and the unprecedentedly terrible [Ed. note: AMAZING] '2012.' The ...

At Major League Baseball's annual winter meetings, general managers didn't just shop for free-agent players or discuss potential trades. According to The New York Times, they also browsed a trade show with a bevy of gadgets -- including the popular hand-sized radar gun and a smartphone app for concessions and souvenirs -- that could not only improve their teams, but also make a trip to the ...

Scientists have successfully demonstrated amazing advancements in prosthetics and other technologies for the disabled in recent years. Electrical impulse technology and mind control systems certainly provide hope for the future, but some analysts believe it could be decades before controllable prostheses and commercial, self-contained options become feasible. According to the BBC, however, ...

As part of a DARPA initiative, Boeing is developing a search-and-rescue aircraft that combines a helicopter's hovering capabilities with an airplane's long flight range. According to Aviation Week, Boeing will test a 20-percent scale model of the disc-rotor aircraft, called the CSAR DiscRotor, in a wind tunnel sometime next year. The aircraft uses rotor-mounted blades, much like a chopper, so ...

One would think that the first place the Pirate Party would go to avoid the authorities would be international waters, but the copyright-flouting movement is thinking of ditching the sea for the clouds. According to Forbes's Andy Greenberg, the Pirate Party has announced its intention to launch a server via weather balloon in order to escape any legislation threatening its operation on the Earth's ...