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How to Jumpstart a Moon Colony From Your Bedroom

The next stage of human expansion will probably be into space, and the best place to start will be with a moon colony. Sure it’s not as cool as Mars, but it’s close by, which means easy rescue from Earth if things go wrong and a thriving tourism industry to support early colonization efforts. Maybe…

Proof Satellite Sucks: Dish and DirecTV Get FCC Approval to Downgrade HD Channels Until 2013

High-def channels consume bandwidth like Britney Spears at a Frappuccino trough (props, last night’s South Park). That’s a problem for twinkly satellite providers Dish Network and DirecTV, who just don’t have the capacity to blast every channel in HD—so the FCC just gave them the nod to downcovert broadcasters’ HD signals until 2013. Basically, it…

Balancing Your Books Gets Real With the Scales Bookshelf

We’ve shown you staircase bookshelves, elasticated ones, bookchair ones and now there’s this balancing design. There must be something about the form-meets-function nature of a bookshelf that means designers just can’t resist them. In this case, “form” gets an added twist with the addition of a pivot and some sliding weights. So you can have…

Japanese Graves with QR Codes Link to Memorial Websites

In Japan, QR codes are everywhere. Little boxes of data that can be turned into web links, they’re found on advertisements everywhere, allowing people to get more info by simply pointing their phone at it. Now, QR codes are being found in more unorthodox places: on graves. Yep, now if you’re interested in finding out…

What? how the hell do I approve my account?

The Video Surveillance Market Is About to Explode!

Video surveillance is the hot new thing. Tech market think tank ABI Research has just come out with a new study predicting that the global video surveillance market will “expand from revenue of about $13.5 billion in 2006 to a remarkable $46 billion in 2013.” In a press release only Philip K. Dick could love,…

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Back in Stock Soon, Honest! (P.S. I Love the Kindle Cake)

Whether the Kindle’s perpetual sold out status is the result of honest-to-God feverish demand for the little slab of e-book voodoo or a willfully sub-demand supply, that’s about to change. Jeff Bezos has a little love note on the front page of Amazon saying he’s sowwy they can’t keep up with our blistering desire to…

The Sheet Metal Retail Caves of Tokyo

In Tokyo, retail stores are turning into enormous metal caves. Here’s one, installed by artist Kimihiko Okada on the ground floor of the Diesel store in Aoyama. Okada took a giant sheet of metal just millimeters thin and molded it into stalactite shapes. It looks like what you’d imagine nature might become 100 years from…

Chuck’s Parents: Jack Bauer and Ninjas

It was a marriage of kitchen sink drama frustration and a healthy fear of Jack Bauer that ultimately resulted in the birth of NBC’s almost-SF (“He has a computer… in his brain!”) Chuck, according to the show’s creators at the 2008 Paley Convention. On a panel moderated by Lost’s Carlton Cuse, the show’s writers and…

Cellphone Delivers 666 Days of Standby, Eternal Damnation, a Camera

A phone that can stay on standby for months without needing to be recharged is a pretty cool idea, right? But where would such amazing abilities come from? One would think that if it was possible to do, many major manufacturers would offer that as a feature. But only from one random Chinese company? Well,…

Intel Sets Low Price for its Atom CPU

Intel has set a price for its low-cost N270 notebook CPU: a mere $44. Now that actually does seem pretty cheap to us, so perhaps Intel’s promise of much cheaper computers in the future will come true. At the same time Intel announced two 65nm Centrino CPUs, both aimed at the entry-level laptop market. The…

At Least Your Daddy Issues Don’t Involve The Hulk

With their upcoming series Skaar: Son of Hulk, Marvel Comics seem to have come up with one solution for two different problems: How to give long-term fans the illusion of character evolution without changing the original status quo too much, and how to build on the traditionally low-selling Hulk franchise in time for this summer’s…

Bout’ Time: Sprint’s Web-Capable Phones Getting Real Web Browsers

Instead of unreadably cramming the internets into half-assed mobile browsers, Sprint’s rolling out a full-fledged browser for “virtually all” of its phones that can do the web dance. They’re using Openwave’s OpenWeb, which supposedly will make for a more desktop-like and less crap-like internet experience, even on sites not optimized for mobile devices. It’ll hit…

Next Gen Optimus Maximus Details: Sub-$800, One-Screen and Raised Keys

Apparently, when Jesus called Art.Lebedev’s Optimus Tactus keyboard “Optimus Retardus” for its lack of physical keys, the design team listened. Or not. Either way, Lebedev’s latest plan is to indeed make a visual keyboard with just one full-color screen as opposed to many tiny ones. But it will overlay physical transparent keys (like on the…

Notes: Snowboarding Meetup Details (Now with Free Stuff)

Hey, more good news on the snowboarding reader meetup beta. The day: April 5th. The place: Alpine Meadows. The Time: 9AM, upstairs in the main lodge cafeteria or something Nokia is coming with a fleet of N95s we can use, and Vudu and JBL are donating a prizes to give away, as are a few…

This Lizard Drinks Through Its Foot, and Soon You Will Too

This mind-bendingly cute thorny devil lizard is one of the most sought-after creatures in the engineering world because it has a special talent: drinking through its foot. Using cracks in its scales, this little guy can wick water up through its foot into its body. Materials scientists hope that by studying how the lizard does…

Samsung Hauzen VC-RE70V Vacuum is Roomba’s Clever Cousin

As well as hanging out with attractive women on the bed, Samsung’s new Hauzen VC-RE70V robot vacuum has some clever tech inside. It actually uses a camera to generate a map of your room, so it knows where it has already cleaned. When it’s low on juice it hunts down its charging base for power,…

Hancock And Superhero Movie Will Bring The Pain

Two new movies will make make fun of superheroes this year, but neither one will actually have anything interesting to say about the eminently mockable genre, judging from the latest info. David Zucker’s Superhero Movie will stick to sight-gags about well-known characters and serve up dumb innuendo, judging from this new clip. Meanwhile, Hancock, starring…

Net Neutrality Shouldn’t Extend to Illegal Acts, Says FCC Comissioner

One of the FCC’s five commissioners, Jonathan Adelstein, said during a recent symposium on FCC Internet Video Policy that the FCC’s rules shouldn’t permit “illegal acts.” Sure, illegal downloading is a serious problem, especially if you’re a copyright-holding movie studio. But does that mean the FCC is actually against net neutrality, in general? Adelstein half…

Germany Titanic Doomsday Bunker Is Groovy, Surprisingly Not Full of Nazis

Here’s where the West German political elite was planning to spend nuclear winter, drinking Martinis and having toga parties after armageddon, waiting to see who emerged victorious from a worldwide thermonuclear war: a gigantic nuclear bunker with 17 kilometers of tunnels equipped with all kinds of commodities. Judging from the huge subterranean structure’s facilities, filled…