Jamie Condliffe

This Is Samsung’s Crazy New 128GB RAM Chip

This may look like a regular RAM chip, but oh my it packs a punch. This is the latest chunk of RAM to roll off Samsung’s production line—and it squeezes a giddying 128GB into its svelte little frame. The chip, designed for big enterprise servers, uses Samsung’s “through silicon via” manufacturing technique. That allows the…

The Nation’s Thanksgiving Flights, Visualized

As many of you will have experienced in the last 24 hours, Thanksgiving is a busy time for the nation’s airlines. And that’s never more obvious than in this neat visualization of U.S. air traffic over the holiday. Put together by the guys at Upshot using data from Google Flights, it shows the dynamics of…

There’s a New Raspberry Pi That Only Costs $5

Raspberry Pi has been making small, affordable computers for a while now, but it’s just gone and made things insanely cheap. Its latest miniature computer, the Pi Zero, will cost just $5. The miniature board—it measures just 65mm x 30mm x 5mm—is intended to make it even easier to provide people all around the world…

Report: Amazon to Add Other Online Video Services to Prime Video

Amazon is planning to provide its Prime Instant Video members with access to other online, on-demand TV and movie services, alongside its usual original and licensed content, according to a new report. Bloomberg Business cites “people with knowledge of the plans” in reporting that “Prime customers will have the option of adding other online subscriptions…

This Neural Net Describes the City It Sees in Real-Time

Take one neural network that describes what it sees in an image. Provide it with a webcam feed from the MacBook it’s running on. Then, wander around a city and see what happens. Here are the results of exactly that experiment. That is, more or less, what Kyle McDonald did to create this video. Using…

Google’s faster-loading search result pages, part of a project known as AMP, are now scheduled to arrive in early 2016. But as well as cutting mobile data use and page-load times, Google will be making sure all its ads still get served up properly too.

2015 Is Set To Be the Warmest Year on Record

The World Meteorological Organization has announced that, according to the data it’s collected so far this year, 2015 looks let to have the highest global average surface temperature on record. In report published this morning, the Organization points out that it expects the temperature reach a symbolic high that is 1° Celsius above those recorded…

This Tiny Device Can Wirelessly Spoof Magnetic Stripe Readers

This humble-looking piece of circuitry, little larger than a quarter, can be used to wirelessly fool magnetic stripe readers into thinking you’ve swiped your card, by generating hefty magnetic fields that mimic the data held on it. Developed by Samy Kamkar, MagSpoof was developed as a way “to store all of your credit cards and…

A Portable Room-in-a-Box Lets You Move House in an Instant

If you regularly suffer from itchy feet, you might need a room-in-a-box like this. Designed to make it easy to move from city to city with all the basics you need to set up home, the Travelbox is an experiment in nomadic living. Designed by Stefan Juust, the concept was dreamt up to allow people…

FBI Links a Single Hacker to the Theft of 1.2 Billion Stolen Log-Ins 

The FBI has managed to link the theft of a frankly staggering 1.2 billion log-in credentials to a single hacker, after finding a Russian email address within reams of data obtained by security researchers. Reuters reports that documents made public by a federal court in Milwaukee reveal how the FBI has identified the email address…

Jeff Bezos’ Rocket Just Made a Beautifully Controlled Vertical Landing

SpaceX has been trying—and failing—to neatly land its rockets on a barge for months now. But Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company seems to have made a beautifully controlled landing on solid ground with its own New Shepard craft. In the video, Blue Origin—Bezos’s private space firm—shows its most recent launch of its New Shepard…

Earth Could Be Surrounded By Long Hairs of Dark Matter

Our planet may be surrounded by filaments of dark matter stretching away from its surface, according to a new study published by NASA researchers. In a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has used computer simulations to establish how dark matter—the mysterious stuff that is reckoned to…

Russian Fighter Jet Shot Down on Syrian Border

Russian authorities have announced that one of its Su-24 strike jets has “crashed on Syrian territory, having been hit from the ground” while flying at 20,000 feet. In a series of tweets, Russia’s defence ministry explained that “at all times, the SU-24 was exclusively over the territory of Syria … The SU-24 was at 6000…

This Lamp Is Powered By a Plant

Electricity doesn’t grow on trees—but it can, perhaps, be generated with their help. A new energy recovery system harnesses electrons from the microorganisms imparted into soil by growing plants, producing enough electricity to power a lamp. The technology, developed by researchers at the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC), uses a metallic grid to capture…

Here’s a Reminder Why You Shouldn’t Bother Doing Dumb Facebook Quizzes

When everyone around you is Facebook quizzing, sometime’s it can be hard to resist the lure joining in yourself. But next time, breathe deeply and move on—remembering the privacy implications we’re about to remind you of. You’ve probably seen your friends announcing their most-used words on Facebook, having happily granted a word cloud app access…

The U.S. Now Has a Space Hotline With China

Next time POTUS needs to talk space with China, it’ll be a straightforward process: it turns out Washington and Beijing now have an emergency “space hotline” to ensure conflicts don’t arise. The Financial Times reports that the new phone line—which sounds an awful lot like the Red Telephone used to communicate between Moscow and Washington…

Physicists Can Now Achieve Quantum Entanglement at Room Temperature

Quantum entanglement—the process though which particle’s states become inextricably linked, despite being nowhere near each other—is usually carried out at incredibly low temperatures. But not any more: now physicists can perform the act at room temperature, which could have a profound effect on quantum computing and security. A team from the University of Chicago have…

This Insane 2-Player Synth Makes the Music of the Future

What happens if you bolt together two keyboards, full color displays, a full suite of analog controllers and a granular synthesiser engine for two enthusiastic musicians? The Collidoscope is what—and it sound just futuristic as you’d expect. The guys that built it, researchers Fiore Martin & Ben Bengler, describe how it works: The Collidoscope samples…

This New Ocean Simulator Will Test Marine Engineering to Destruction 

Ever wondered how engineers check if their designs—from ships to wind turbines—will fair against an aggressive ocean? With something like this new facility at the University of Maine, which uses 32 fans and 16 paddles to simulate the most fierce of marine conditions. The new rig, which is being formally opened today at the school’s…

Why Is the UK’s Intelligence Agency Advertising Jobs With Graffiti? 

On the streets of UK cities, there’s an unexpected form of graffiti appearing. It’s not tags of spray paint, but instead job ads, scrawled onto sidewalks, prompting people to apply for a job at the nation’s intelligence headquarters, GCHQ. It’s part, we guess, of the UK’s pledged commitment to built a British ‘elite cyber offensive…