Tag: WEATHER

Every year at CES, we look forward to the strange offerings from Oregon Scientific, which always debuts some new, geeky gadget of questionable usefulness. This year, the thing that has us scratching our heads, and simultaneously reaching for our wallets, is the Build-Your-Own Weather Station Lab. There are two standard configurations: the basic package (aimed at gardeners and the mildly ...

For all the good that Google has done in helping us keep our e-mails and events organized, it's notoriously bad for hiding useful tools and features out of sight. We've got two simple tips today for opening up Google Calendar's potential. Google Calendar's '4 days' view has always seemed out of place, but makes much more sense when you realize it's customizable. You'll need to head to Settings to ...

The eyes of nearly every child in the United States instantaneously sparkle at the mere mention of two words: "snow day." Even those of us who grew up in the warmer parts of the country would sometimes be granted the glorious reprieve from school by icy roads, or -- if Heaven would have it -- respectable piles of the white stuff. All those young, wistful, smiling eyes may soon be permanently ...

AJ is a lime green, decal-bedecked 2011 Ford Fiesta. Like HAL from '2001,' he has his own man-made intelligence, and thus the gendered pronoun. He's been making his way around the country, sending messages to anyone who will listen. You see, AJ is a car that tweets. Ford engineers gave AJ (short for American Journey 2.0) the ability to connect to the Internet by outfitting him with a Dell ...

The newest trend in government is undoubtedly open data. The White House has Recovery.gov, with its detailed mapping of stimulus spending, New York City has an app store that shows everything from restaurant inspection results to public school ratings, and even Afghanistan has opened up its electoral data to app developers. Washington, DC is another data happy town that's been exposing detailed ...

Since we already have a color-coded system to tell us how afraid we should be, it only makes sense that someone would create a similarly colorful metric to tell us whether or not we should wear galoshes tomorrow, right? That's exactly what a cool new building called 'Tomorrow's Weather' does. The eight-story structure in Copenhagen, Denmark, designed by Swedish art duo Bigert & ...

In case you haven't blown your weekend yet by diving into the ADD-wonderland that is the Internet, we recommend you check out 'Effing Hail,' a free online flash game. The concept is simple enough: Move a cursor with the mouse, and click down to control the wind. A continuous stream of hail falls from the sky, and these lumps of ice will grow larger (and harder to control) as you balance them ...

If you've never been in a television studio before, there's a reason why television 'green screens' have that name -- they're actually green. Computers replace anything close to the color with a background image and, hey presto, the weather forecast is magically displayed behind your overly chipper local weather personality. What happens if you should accidentally wear the same color tie? Why, ...

Not sure if this is going to be helpful or a total flop, but a new device called Rain Wipe from Japan is being marketed to stores for display at their entrances. It essentially removes rainwater from wet umbrellas by absorbing the water with a cloth, and then uses pressure to push the water to a tray toward the bottom to keep things tidy. If you're keeping score at home, each tray only needs to ...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, will be awarding a $7.6 billion contract in December for a storm tracking system that significantly lowers the margin of error of current satellite systems, giving a five-day forecast the accuracy of a three-day forecast. The new system, dubbed GOES-R, will comprise two satellites and ground support and is scheduled to be launched in ...

In yet another example of how getting good at video games may one day help us save the universe, remote controlled drone planes will be used to fly into the eye of hurricanes this season, helping to monitor and predict storms before they hit land. It's part of an ongoing project funded by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The project is set to monitor the Earth's ...