Nanowires inside a rat can convert the power of breathing and heartbeats into electricity, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Technology Review reports these nano-generators could conceivably lead to nano-scale implants and sensors powered by the body. The same GIT team proved five years ago that zinc oxide nanowires could produce electricity…
Lest your Droid fall out of date, into disrepair, and end up on a Jawa Sandcrawler, MyDroidWorld is serving up a new Android 2.2 ROM, along with full instructions, for bringing your phone up to speed. Apparently it’s got everything except for Wi-Fi, so if you’re hankering for that Froyo, it’s well worth a look.…
The Creators Project assembled this incredible video profile of Curt Morgan, a snowboarder-cum-filmmaker whose team, Brain Farm, uses the world’s most advanced cameras to capture extreme sports as they’ve never been seen before. Think Planet Earth on forty Red Bulls. Among the tools in his arsenal: the Cineflex camera, which uses a system originally designed…
When you consider it, we’re not so nice with our furniture. We plop our heavy selves down on some pieces and put drinks on others…sometimes without coasters. We push them around, figuratively and literally. This smart furniture, however, pushes back. Brooklyn designer Adam Lassy added proximity sensors and motorized wheels to his Ikea furniture, allowing…
When we did our last round-up, the state of reading comics on the iPad was basically “good, not great.” A few shortcomings keep Comic Viewer from achieving that greatness, but goodies like in-app comic downloading make it a worthy contender. Comic Viewer is basically what you’ve come to expect from an iPad comic reader, with…
To stand out in the already-overpopulated field of alarm clock iPhone apps, you have to bring some really unique functionality to the table. Sleep Blaster does just that, with one extremely good alarm clock idea and one extremely bad one… The bad idea? Giving you the ability to yell at your alarm clock to shut…
A study in incongruity: ArcAttack, the Tesla-coil playing musical act adored by geeks everywhere, rocking out for Sharon Osbourne, Howie Mandel, and That British Guy Who Isn’t Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent. But something else is amiss… The musical Tesla coils around which the entire act is based? America’s Got Talent silenced them! For…
Before it occurred to anyone to just have Obi-Wan use The Force to smuggle C-3PO and R2-D2 past those nosy stormtroopers, the script called for a much more conventional means of subterfuge: a disguise! [Mike Verta—Thanks William!]
A lot of people consider Reeder to be the best iPhone RSS app, so there’s some serious anticipation for the native iPad version, which is currently being reviewed for App Store approval. These shots confirm one thing: it’ll be pretty. I’ve been waffling between NewsRack and NetNewsWire, but both have some pretty big issues (NewsRack’s…
I’m sure USC’s Speech Articulation group gained all manner of important phonological insight from these videos of an opera singer and a beatboxer doing their respective things in an MRI machine. Here’s the insight I gained: tongues are gross. Think animations-of-tongues-talking gross and multiply it by five. [USC—Thanks Dan!]
It’s a small victory, but BP reports that it successfully sawed through the ruptured oil pipe in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico today, the first critical step to their new containment dome strategy. Initial attempts to cut the pipe with a diamond-tipped blade failed, and the company had to settle for severing the…
O’Reilly makes some of the best tech books around, so we were super excited to hear about their new title Best Android Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders. Here are ten of those best Android apps for ten different activities. We scoured the Android Market to find the best apps that will make your phone…
It’s 1977 and you’ve got a potentially world-changing semiconductor on your hands—but how do you market the thing? By trashing toasters, telephones, cars, and especially TVs, which are so dumb they can’t even pay your taxes! (What?) That’s how National Semi envisioned the televisions of tomorrow: tax-paying, child-rearing futureboxes. Come to think of it, I’m…
We understand your pain. You love Giz but sometimes you can’t keep up with the daily flood of posts (sometimes we can’t either). So we made dedicated Facebook pages for our iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone 7 coverage. Our new Facebook pages make it easy for you to stay up to date with everything…
In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer. Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the…
DivX Inc, the company that owns the codec which made your early 2000s movie downloads look actually not too bad, is being acquired by Sonic Solutions, a content delivery company, for a reported $300 million. Sonic’s been working in circular media like CDs and DVDs for years—they own the popular Roxio brand—but is now looking…
The Zoom H2, an ice cream sandwich-shaped portable audio recorder, has long been a favorite for its sturdy build and studio-quality mics. Now there’s the H1, its smaller, popsicle-shaped brother; it still sounds great, and now it looks great, too. The H1 is Zoom’s smallest recorder to date, but nothing is sacrificed for its size;…
The Canon PowerShot SD4000, the company’s first compact with a back-lit CMOS sensor, achieves an elusive point-and-shoot camera feat: crisp, clean nighttime photography. And it’s not even that expensive. If you already own a DSLR, you probably don’t think twice about snapping shots in low-light conditions. But as most point-and-shoot camera owners can tell you,…
HP’s new ZR30w S-IPS LCD display has a color resolution of 30-bits per pixel, resulting in some 1.07 billion displayable colors. If you’re keeping count, that’s about 64 times as many as you can see on an average LCD. The ZR30w has a 2560 x 1600 resolution—over 4 million pixels in all—though it’s targeted towards…
F2.0, 1/8, ISO1600 F2.0, 1/13, ISO1600 F2.8, 1/15, ISO1600 F2.5, 1/13, ISO1600 F2.0, 1/10, ISO1600 F2.0, 1/5, ISO1600 F2.0, 1/60, ISO800 F2.0, 1, ISO800
