Jamie Condliffe

Moving the Most Powerful Space Telescope’s Mirror Is a Terrifying Job

Don’t drop it! In this picture you can see a team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Calibration, Integration and Alignment Facility moving the James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror. Slipping isn’t an option. The mirrors built for the telescope — which will be the most powerful space telescope ever built — are rather special. Over…

How It Felt to Work at Bell Labs in the 60s

Just 45 miles outside New York City in Murray Hill, New Jersey sits Bell Labs: the birth place of lasers, transistors, cellphones and many other modern technologies. In this video, Professor Brian Kernighan remembers what it was like to work there. Kernighan joined the labs in the late 60s, at a time when computer science…

The World’s Most Powerful Laser Has Been Fired in Japan

Take cover: scientists from Osaka University have begun using the world’s most powerful laser, that pumps out 2 quadrillion watts. That’s 2,000,000,000,000,000 watts. But don’t panic too much. While such a laser in continous use would demand more power than the world could feasibly supply to it, the device in fact only runs for one…

Scientists Can Turn Human Cells Into Working Lasers

How about this for a bright idea: A team of researchers from Harvard Medical School has developed three different ways to turn individual cells into functioning lasers that emit light when they’re excited. As New Scientist reports, the team have demonstrated that particles and droplets in skin can be exploited to emit light. In one…

Sydney Has Rolled Out the World’s First E Ink Traffic Signs

E Ink displays are an attractive way of displaying information that doesn’t change by the second: they don’t use much power, are easy to read in variable lighting, and happen to be relatively affordable. Now, they’re finding use not just in handheld devices, though—but on the streets of Sydney, Australia. The Australian Road and Maritime…

A Beautiful Visual Explainer Will Help You Understand Machine Learning

Ever wondered what machine learning was and still failed to understand it no matter how much you read? Then this neat visual introduction to the topic should do just the trick. Using a data set about homes, the site does an honestly amazing job of describing how it’s possible to teach computers to discern between…

eBay has announced that it’s shutting down it’s same-day delivery service, eBay Now. Not, perhaps, surprising given the competition and eBay’s lack of delivery expertise.

Watch This: Inside China’s Prolific Technology Manufacturing Region

The bulk of the world’s gadgets are built in the Pearl River Delta region of China. There, cheap labor, mountains of electronic components and high finance co-exist — if a little awkwardly — to provide a haven for engineers and entrepreneurs. This video takes a peek inside what that’s like. Created by Hackaday, The Factory…

Reddit’s head of community, Jessica Moreno, has left the company as it continues its meltdown. She’s the the fourth senior female member of staff to quit within the last month.

This Tiny Light-Emitting Device Flashes 90 Billion Times a Second

This may look like a piece of abstract art, but you’re actually looking at the cutting-edge of optical technology. Using a branch of physics known as plasmonics, this microscopic set-up can pulse light on-and-off a bewildering 90 billion times per second. The system is fairly straightforward, at least in theory. The square lump you can…

Chinese Police Shut Down a Huge Counterfeit iPhone Factory

A police raid in Beijing has shut down a large counterfeit iPhone factory that had produced over 41,000 handsets, reported to be worth $19 million. The factory was run by husband-and-wife team under the cover of a gadget maintenance shop. Their six assembly lines were set up in January of this year, employing “hundreds” of…

Mechanical Wrist Will Take Robotic Surgery to Places As-Yet Inoperable

Robotic surgery has become a relatively commonplace, with 1.7 million robotic procedures occurring between 2007 and 2013. This new tiny robotic wrist, however, will take the procedure into the head, face and neck. The Engineer reports that this flexible wrist is the latest advance in needlescopic surgery, which uses tiny robotic components—typically needle-sized, hence the…

The Nile From Space Is a Long, Meandering Line of Light and Life

As views go, astronauts aboard the International Space Station get a pretty good deal. Like this sensational sight of the Nile at night—a glowing line of light and life cutting through the expanse of Africa. The picture shows the Nile flowing from central Africa down the image towards the Mediterranean. You can see vibrancy and…

New Study Shows How Deeply Awful Those ‘Get the App’ Web Pages Are

Those web pages that stop you getting to the information you really want in favor of asking you to Download An App are deeply annoying. But now a study by Google shows just how counter-productive they actually are for the people that put them there in the first place. If any company was to test…

Federal Inspectors Request Criminal Investigation Over Clinton Emails

Federal officials have requested that the US Justice Department opens a full criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while she held the position of secretary of state. The officials believe that a full investigation is required to understand if she misused sensitive information while using her own home-brew email server…

This Glorious Mess Is Actually Munich From Space

A splattered canvas of reds and greens, this is actually a combination of three radar scans from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1A satellite as it passed over Bavaria in Southern Germany. The white sprawl on the right is Munich. The ESA explains what you can see: Along the northern part of this river, the white…

Watch a Computer Attempt to Sing 90s Power Ballads—With Feeling

Computers do many things well, but expressing emotion is not one of them. So what happens if you ask one to try and sing a heartfel version of a 90s power ballad? “What do machines sing of?” is an art project by Martin Backes that “endlessly sings number-one ballads from the 1990s.” There is little…

Meerkat now lets you live-stream video straight from a GoPro camera that’s connected to your iPhone.

Apple’s Cut the App Store Prices of 100 Popular Apps to $0.99

If you’re staring at your iPhone and feeling bored, how about a few new cheap apps? Fortunately Apple has launched a new promotion where it’s cut the price of 100 popular apps to 99 cents. Including Goat Simulator. The ‘100 Apps & Games’ has some pretty great titles on offer, too. For instance, all of…

Google Voice Gets Neural Network-Powered Transcription to Slash Errors

Google Voice has an incredibly useful function that provides you with a transcribed version of your voicemail—but if often gets things wrong. Now, Google is throwing neural networks at the problem to help improve its performance dramatically. The service now uses Google’s recurrent neural networks, similar to those used by Google’s voice search in Chrome…