Bob Sorokanich

Chinese Satellite Spots Floating Object in Flight 370 Search

Chinese authorities said today that a satellite spotted a large object in the area of the Indian Ocean where the search continues for Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370. Malaysia’s defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein says China will send ships to investigate the object. The 74-foot by 43-foot object was seen in an image captured by a…

Now Available: Roland Synths, Samsung Galaxy S5 & Smartwatch Preorder

More goodies hit the market that you can now grab! Or at least, get in line to grab. Roland Aira We fell in love with Roland’s new line of production and performance tools when we got to see them in action. The TR-8 drum machine, TB-3 bassline composer, VT-3 vocoder, and System-1 synth all add…

Our Favorite Android, iOS, and Windows Phone Apps of the Week

Earth has made 7 rotations since we were here last week. Let’s celebrate with some great new apps! Multi-Platform Updates Timera Timera lets you combine historic and current photos in one image, right from your phone. With a location-based feature to help you find historic image locations and a community of users tagging new locations,…

Military Future-Lasers Could Help Detect Bombs and the Flu

DARPA is investigating handheld UV laser devices to help soldiers detect biological and chemical weapons from a safe distance. But when they master that technology, it won’t just be used on the battlefield; it could also help public health workers detect and track outbreaks of communicable diseases. Fighting flu with lasers? This really is the…

Smog is Forcing France to Rethink its Love of Diesel

Last week, the smog in Paris got so bad, city officials made public transit free and banned half the city’s cars from the road. The vehicle ban only lasted a day, with the reduced traffic and changing weather patterns alleviating the smog situation. But why did the smog get so bad in the first place?…

World’s Tiniest Plasma Transistor Can Make Supertough Electronics

The pink glow you see above is coming from the world’s smallest plasma transistor, an unfathomably miniscule device 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. It’s not just tiny, it’s tough, and theoretically able to withstand brutal environments. And it could massively change consumer electronics. Fabricated by Professor Massood Tabib-Azar and doctoral…

Badass Carmaker Local Motors Might Make Your Next Fridge

Crowdsourced carmaker Local Motors, makers of the 100 percent bonkers Rally Fighter you see above, just teamed up with GE Appliances, maker of… appliances. Clearly, your kitchen is about to get way more badass. The partnership, called Firstbuild, will pair GE’s deep R&D pockets and juggernaut status in the appliance world with Local Motors’ active…

German engineering firm EDAG’s concept Genesis gives a peek at the sweeping, sci-fi future of car design, where entire vehicle bodies are 3D printed in one piece rather than being assembled from thousands of components. Our gearhead friends at Jalopnik took a closer look during the Geneva Motor Show. [EDAG]

South Korean University Now Accepts Gamers as Student Athletes

Man, remember how your folks would harass you about getting ahead in life rather than molting in front of a video game for 42 hours on end? Throw this in your mama’s face: Chung-Ang University in South Korea now considers competitive gamers the same as traditional athletes. And it’s a top 10 (South Korean) school!…

Mod Puts Your Paper Notebook Doodles Into the Cloud

Sketching, jotting, or doodling in a paper notebook is one of life’s simple joys, but more often than not we end up just tucking those notebooks away and never looking at them again. Mod Notebooks wants to change that, with a setup that digitizes your dead tree designs. For $25, Mod will send you a…

NY Is Cracking Down on High Frequency Trading Tech That Runs the NYSE

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman vowed today to crack down on the technology that gives high frequency traders an unfair advantage in the market. And that’s a very good thing for regular humans with money in the marketplace. Attorney General Schneiderman specifies some of the services that trading venues offer high speed trading organizations.…

Toshiba’s New Breathalyzer Diagnoses Diseases, Not Drunks

Toshiba just took the wraps off a medical breathalyzer that the company says can diagnose diseases by analyzing the air a patient exhales. “Bad breath” just took on a whole new meaning. The company’s breath analyzer prototype blasts a patient’s exhaled breath with a quantum cascade laser. Gaseous compounds in the patient’s breath absorb energy…

NASA-Backed Study Says Humanity Is Pretty Much Screwed (Updated)

Hope you’ve enjoyed civilized life, folks. Because a new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says the world’s industrial societies are poised to collapse under the weight of their own unsustainable appetites for resources. There goes the weekend . . . and everything after it for the rest of our lives. Update: NASA…

What’s Your Proudest Online Accomplishment?

The internet is the place to pump your ideas out and hope they’ll resonate with someone somewhere. When digital strangers agree with your opinions, fawn over your pictures, or laugh at your jokes, it feels good, man. What was your biggest internet hit? The one I’ll always remember is a post I wrote on a…

This week in Tech Reads: internet drones, bee brain surgery, the continued search for Flight 370, and more. Jordan Golson explains how, despite all the tracking and navigation technology out there, it’s still possible to lose an airplane in 2014. [Wired] Brian Fung shows us how we know that Flight 370 kept flying for hours…

Navy Virtual Reality, NiceBooby.Net, Fake UberFacts, and More

Well this was a hell of a week. We blew the lid off of NBC’s collection of dirty-name URLs, debunked 24 hours’ worth of fake UberFacts, toured China’s largest ghost city, and more. Let’s take a look back, shall we? Amazon Prime Is Still the Best Deal in Tech Today, the fateful news came down…

Lego Robot With a Smartphone Brain Shatters Rubik’s Cube World Record

Cubestormer 3 is a robot with just one job—to solve a scrambled Rubik’s Cube as swiftly as possible. Today, at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK, it did the task in an astounding 3.253 seconds, faster than any human or robot in the world. Just look at that thing go. The third-generation robot was…

Shamrock Science Will Help You Get Lucky on St. Patrick’s Day

Finding a four-leaf clover is supposed to be all about good luck, but who says you can’t boost your odds? The super-nerds at Scientific American are here to tell you exactly how to find a four-leafer using science, rather than superstition. It’s still a game of probability, but knowing how much area you’ll need to…

Torrent Site Popcorn Time, Shut Down Yesterday, Is Alive Again

That was quick. After closing up shop yesterday among the usual copyright questions, and just a week after its first launch, Popcorn Time is back. TorrentFreak has the story of how the project, abandoned by its founders, will live on at the hands of YTS developers. In a conversation with TorrentFreak, YTS developer Jduncanator assures…

Malaysian Prime Minister: Missing Plane Was Deliberately Diverted

In a news conference on missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 today, Prime Minister Najib Razak declared that the plane was deliberately diverted from its prescribed route to Beijing, flying up to seven hours after takeoff, says The New York Times. Malaysian authorities have released a map plotting the plane’s last satellite signals somewhere along two…