Lily Hay Newman

Attempts To Dodge Chinese Hacking May Backfire As Usual

With concern about Chinese hacking on the rise, Congress passed new restrictions on buying equipment from China last month as part of a funding bill. The measures ban some federal purchases of networked equipment “produced, manufactured or assembled” by any group with a strong connection to China. But members of the tech community, including the…

Administrator Bolden says “NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one.”

Algorithm Improves Airline Arrival Predictions, Erodes Favorite Work Excuse

When you’re flying anywhere you can pretty much turn the whole day into a black hole. The airport/in-flight wifi wasn’t working. We sat at the gate for an hour. We were in a holding pattern. It’s great. But sometimes, sometimes you actually want to get where you’re going. Hoping to improve arrival predictions, GE, Alaska…

What’s The Coolest Tech You’ve Ever Dreamed About?

Last night I dreamed that I was packing for a trip by googling my stuff and clicking on it to put it in my suitcase. For socks I could either select certain pairs or just enter the number of pairs I wanted and have them chosen at random. I really got into the logistics. Another…

Fire Printers Seem Like The Best Terrible Idea Ever

Inkjet printers are incredibly annoying, and if this one didn’t print with fire there would be no making over the inkjet’s image. But it does. It’s called the FireWriter. Built by Lucien Langton at ECAL, the University of Art and Design Lausanne, the FireWriter uses an Arduino Uno programmed with Wiring and Processing to integrate…

Print An Interactive Robot On The 3D Printer You Totally Have

Look, you probably don’t have a 3D printer. But if you do and you want to really scare the crap out of your friends you need a humanoid robot head like MAKI, the “emotive robot” that you build with 3D printed parts plus third party tech. Designed by HelloRobo, the idea is to provide a…

8,000 Sheets Of Rice Paper Can Organize Into Art

I know you’re all wondering how many sheets of rice paper is a lot. And I’m going to tell you. 8,000. When I think of a lot of rice paper I am thinking of 8,000 sheets of rice paper. Apparently, so is Chinese artist Zhu Jinshi, who used rice paper, 800 bamboo rods and cotton…

Sequence Your DNA In An Hour On This Tiny Chip

Diagnosing genetic disorders and devising personalized therapies just got a lot easier, or at least quicker. Panasonic and Belgian research lab IMEC have created a small chip that tests DNA in under an hour. The researchers believe that having such quick access to base pair sequences will not only help doctors detect disease-causing abnormalities, but…

Jason Yang: Game of Thrones Violin Cover

The season 3 premier is upon us, people. There were a lot of quality contenders for this soundtrack slot. Mashups, covers and original tracks abound. Jason Yang’s cover of the Game of Thrones theme by Ramin Djawadi is all-around solid, though, and also pretty epic. The track incorporates acoustic and electric violin, and was recorded…

Did You Ever Use Your Cellphone As A Walkie Talkie?

I never had a walkie talkie phone, but I sure saw a lot of Nextel commercials and Sprint still offers push-to-talk even though the original Nextel network is apparently getting the ax on June 30. In the early 2000s there was something really appealing about interrupting someone’s life with that little chirp. It’s kind of…

Boomboxes Are Expensive When They’re Big Enough To Need Wheels

The Mobile Blastmaster exists. That’s most of what you need to know. It’s the boombox of your dreams, or more probably, your nightmares. It’s a little red wagon on crack. This baby has pneumatic tires to easily traverse sand and snow. It plays from any Bluetooth-enabled device with a 30 foot range. It has a…

Okay, April Fool’s 2013 Is Happening

YouTube and GoogleMaps are getting the ball rolling today. According to the release above, YouTube is not actually a video viewing and sharing site, but an 8-year contest to find the best video anyone can make. And GoogleMaps now has a treasure map layer. Nice, we see what you did there. [CNET]

Robots Save Easter After Negligent Bunny Makes A Mess Of Everything

The Robotics and Perception Group in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich is nailing it. Funded in 2012, they are studying the development of autonomous robots by making seasonal videos. Which is all anyone really wants. In the video a Parrot AR.Drone (they’re everywhere today) locates jellybean eggs that the Easter bunny…

Wooden Lamps Show The Light Within

There’s something really meditative about these slotted lamps. They’re made out of wood from California cypress trees and the light inside is a constant current LED, but the sculptural elements come through more than the utility as a lamp. Designed by Paul Foeckler for Split Grain in LA, the lamps range from $750 to $1,950.…

Smell-O-Vision Might Actually Be Happening, But Who Even Knows Anymore

Doesn’t it seem like being able to smell a TV show would be undesirable a lot of the time? Alex Trebek’s cologne would be wafting around your grandma’s all through Easter dinner and then your house would smell like blood after the Game of Thrones premier. But you gotta give the people what they want,…

Do You Still Print Stuff Out?

Yesterday I was printing a form and I realized it was the first time I had printed anything in months. For awhile I was the one who still had a paper copy of my bus ticket, Fandango confirmation, even driving directions. But yesterday I realized that my printer was covered in dust and stocked with…

DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural World

We probably all vaguely assume that computers will overthrow us someday, which may be why it’s so unsettling to learn that computer code is evolving much like genetic code. By comparing bacterial genomes to Linux, researchers have found “survival of the fittest” acting in computer programming. Sergei Maslov of Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook…

What If The Sun Just Totally Disappeared?

This is actually a pretty great thought experiment. At first it might seem kind of pointless to talk about what would happen if the sun vanished, but it doesn’t actually result in the immediate destruction of everything. Which is weird. Vsauce walks through a pretty nuanced description of how earth’s natural systems would slowly fail,…

2009’s Fastest Supercomputer Goes Dark Today

The world’s fastest supercomputer isn’t the world’s fastest super computer anymore, so it’s getting turned off today. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, IBM’s Roadrunner is being replaced by a faster, cheaper and more energy efficient computer, Cielo. https://gizmodo.com/ibm-roadrunner-tops-cray-as-the-official-worlds-fastest-5090737 The $121 million Roadrunner supercomputer was the first to consistently compute a Petaflop, or a quadrillion mathematical…

64GB HTC One will be an AT&T exclusive. Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon will only have 32GB.