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This is how Ye Olde Google Charts would have mapped directions for Christopher Columbus, right before he took on his first trip to India defying the common knowledge of the time: The idea that Earth was flat and had edges with monsters, giant falls, and other terrible things at their end. Funny, because this is…
Panasonic’s latest fuel cell breakthrough is the world’s smallest designed for notebooks—270cc, about the same size as the existing lithium ones. They use highly concentrated methanol, similar to ones designed for the military as the fuel source, though 200cc of juice will give you 20 hours of power—or a whole one with an Alienware full…
Scientists at Korea’s S&P Energy Research Institute have worked out a way of manufacturing hydrogen that’s 20-30 times cheaper than current methods. Typical electrolysis methods in use take about 4 to 4.5 kWh of energy for each cubic meter of H2 gas but the new Korean method (apparently a chemical process) takes just 0.1 kWh,…
Earlier this month we peeked at official shots of the MSI Wind’s 3.5G-equipped refresh, the 10″ U120. Now news from Taiwan is that the U120 will hit the wild in November at $552 (converted) in both white and black, with an Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB memory and a 120GB hard drive loaded with Windows…
E-ink and e-paper are the display buzzwords of the moment, but generally the devices are mono colored… until now. And though KDDI showed a concept color e-paper display recently, it looks like the first device to market sporting a colored e-paper display will be an MP3 player from Freestyle Audio. Qualcomm have come up with…
At 16.1 million square feet, Dubai’s International Airport Terminal 3 has not only became the shiniest airport terminal ever, but it’s also the largest in the world, beating the 10.6 million of the previous record holder, the firebreathing Olympic terminal 3 at Beijing International Airport. Aesthetically, I still like Beijing’s terminal more than Dubai’s, but…
Our grim predictions of the imminent epic fail of perpetual consumer electronics big box second-run Circuit City are unfortunately panning out. The WSJ and AP report that their plan to avoid bankruptcy and death is amputation: Shuttering at least 150 stores (one-fifth of their 712 US locations) and cutting “thousands” of employees, which would let…
Intel’s solid state drives are real fast-$600 for 80GB kind of fast. It should come as no surprise, then, that they make a mighty quick RAID 0 setup, which does not provide data redundancy but does give twice the data throughput. Hot Hardware’s numbers were a blazing 396MB/s read and 130MB/s write times (the fastest…
Okay, these headphones from Greenhouse are pretty similar to the wierdo pig ones from a few months ago… but they’re worth it simply because I like the idea of having a mini model Angel and Devil pushed into your ears instead of boring old normal headphones. They’ve got a 5mW output, 20Hz to 20kHz response…
Apple and Microsoft have been having this bizarre pissing match for a few years now, but this new set of ads marks confirms what previous volleys seemed to imply: these companies have no intention of actually talking about their products. Microsoft’s feel-good “I’m Joe the Plumber and I’m a PC” campaign was about as substantive…
Details have been dribbling out about Motorola’s upcoming Android cellphone—we already knew it was going to be social-networky—but Businessweek has quizzed Moto and garnered a few more juicy facts. Firstly it’ll have a an “iPhone-like touchscreen,” which is no big surprise, and it’lll have a slide-out QWERTY like the G1. But, most interestingly, it’ll be…
It’s not easy being a tape nowadays. Your only friends are all in jail, everyone inexplicably likes old-farty vinyl more than you, and now people are even using you to build furniture. This is not how it was supposed to go. In your heyday, people rocked out to your not-so-dulcet tones, unwitting grunge parents produced…
LG’s upcoming KP500 smartphone is aimed at the entry-level end of the smartphone market, which kinda tallies with its cute-ish codename of Cookie. With quad-band GSM, GRPS/EDGE, a 3-inch touchscreen, accelerometer, Bluetooth, FM radio and 3MP camera, it doesn’t sound too low end—until you learn that it’ll only record video at QVGA resolution at 12…
Higher latency and much lower speed are keeping Wi-Fi out of a lot of business settings, even considering massive performance increases of new 802.11n over previous standards. Quantenna says it can remedy these problems with existing technology, and using techniques that are already part of the 802.11n standard. Though there is pretty much no way…
Zune Guy — arguably the greatest fanboy of our time — has decided to finally commit his acrimonious separation from his namesake to ink. So what does he do? He integrates the Zune logo into a tattoo of Dick Cheney as the Devil, where it serves as a makeshift inverted pentagram on the veep’s forehead.…
Spy-technology aficionados will know about Minox’s miniature camera and it’s genuine espionage heritage, and now the camera’s gone all modern with a digital face lift. A 5-megapixel sensor’s been plopped into the Digital SpyCam, which remains tiny at just 3 and 3/8 x 1 and 3/16 x 7/8-inches and weighing in at 2.1 ounces: small…
The UK Ministry of Defense has just declassified nineteen secret files detailing UFO encounters over the past decades, one of them involving a USAF Sabre fighter pilot who was ordered to fire at will against an unidentified flying object in British airspace. Unfortunately-or fortunately-lieutenant Milton Torres lost the contact after the UFO left the scene…
The wizards at Korea’s Yujin Robot have invented a coffee-serving robot. I wish I could tell you more about it, particularly why coffee; looks like it wouldn’t have any trouble just as easily serving beer, absinthe or cupcakes. Aving didn’t post any additional descriptions, just great photos, so I’m not even sure Cafero knows how…
Whoever said recorded music doesn’t have the same intensity as a live performance should meet Lead Sound, the Japanese company behind the Sympho Canvas virtual orchestra. Forty-six speakers are arrayed in a concert hall similar to the placement of instruments in a real orchestra and each speaker “plays” a discrete track. Four more fill in…
As the Android team intimated when T-Mobile’s G1 was launched, Exchange server support would have to come from third-party software developers. The first sign of this is ContactsSync, a free app distributed by net project-management software maker Wrike. To be clear, this isn’t full Exchange syncing, it’s just a way to dump Exchange contacts to…
