If you've ever wondered why the web is full of companies with strange domain names like Flickr or del.icio.us, wonder no more ? domains can be hard to come by. Here's our guide to getting the domain you want when someone else already has it.
The 24-inch ErgoSensor Monitor uses a built-in sensor to determine your distance from the screen and your neck angle while sitting. And, like a worried mother, will remind you to straighten your back, keep your distance from the display, and take breaks from sitting at the computer.
A controversial new study of honeybee deaths has deepened a bitter dispute over whether the developed world's most popular pesticides are causing an ecological catastrophe.
Within two years, we won't call newsstands like Next Issue's "a Netflix for magazines" because it's one price for a big catalog of content. We'll call it "a Netflix for magazines" because instead of mail delivery or bulky downloads, the primary delivery mechanism will be streaming high-definition, through-designed magazines over the web.
Director Joss Whedon has been saying he thinks his Bruce Banner/Hulk is going to be the thing Marvel Comics fans are most surprised by when the superhero team-up movie storms into theaters next month. In the latest promo spot to hit the web, little bits and pieces of what Whedon has been so psyched to show audiences are starting to come through.
Paleontologists have found hen-sized, hen-shaped dinosaur eggs sticking out of ancient sandstone in Spain's Pyrenees mountains.
Volkswagen wants to sell the latest Beetle to the half of the population turned off by dashboard-mounted flower holders.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was spotted by Twitter machine gun Robert Scoble at a charity event in San Francisco wearing a prototype of the Project Glass glasses.
On this week's edition of the Gadget Lab show, the gang takes a look at the latest Windows Phone, the Nokia Lumia 900 and chat about the Google Glass project.
Here's the first live episode of Game|Life, brought to you from the show floor at PAX East in Boston.
Five people have been charged with intentional injury in the case of a Chinese teenager's obsessive quest for an iPhone and iPad 2.
This year's Space Foundation Student Art Contest attracted 1,500 prekindergarten to high school students from the U.S., Pakistan and Turkey. From stargazing in sleeping bags to shuttle launches and science fiction landscapes, students made drawings, paintings and mixed media pieces depicting space. Here are some of our favorites from among the winners.
It's never been easier to make music, thanks to a wealth of apps available for smartphones and tablets that put bleeps and bloops together to create amazing tunes. The latest is Propellerhead's Figure.
Would-be sushi moguls take note: Suzumo has a line of sushi robots that might fulfill your 24-7 maki-making fantasies. The Japanese company is displaying its machines at the World Food and Beverage Great Expo 2012 in Tokyo this week.
Responsive design means building fluid websites that work everywhere. So why are you still using pixels in your media queries? There's a better way. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, make your site more like water.
Figuring out when the first day of the Jewish holiday Passover falls can be tricky. Thankfully, mathematician and Social Dimension blogger Samuel Arbesman has you covered with a clever equation.
UCSD physics professors create a robotic skateboard to teach kids the science of the sport.
No one has knocked more rockets out of the sky than Idan Yahya, a 22-year-old Israeli soldier -- and committed geek. "You have to make sure you're locked onto the right target. There's a lot of information and there is very little time," he says. "It definitely reminds me of and other online strategy games." Amir Mizroch reports from Israel.
These first-generation personal cloud services are convenient and wonderful. But in the long run we'll want them to do more. Jon Udell envisions some services he'd like to see for all of his "lifebits."
If you had a few billion dollars of extra cash, how would you spend it? Maybe buy a couple of mansions, a fancy car, or eat gold-sprinkled caviar every day? To many billionaires, that list sounds about right, but to a growing coterie of the super-rich, the placid luxuries of a pampered life leave something to be desired. They seek adventure, a bit of excitement that still maintains the sheen of exclusivity they cultivate so carefully.
With remarkable foresight, NASA and its contractors in 1966 mapped out the manned scientific exploration of Mars. Space historian and Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree describes their evolutionary plan for revealing the Red Planet's secrets.
Peter Hollens & Lindsey Stirling lay down 120 audio tracks in their truly epic cover of the Skyrim theme song, "The Dragonborn Comes."
News reports in Iceland have mentioned that the crater lake on Askja caldera has mysteriously become ice-free over the last month while lakes around it (that aren't on volcanoes) and at lower elevations are still ice-covered. Normally the crater lake isn't ice-free until June or July. This has lead to a lot of speculation about what exactly is going on at Askja, but thanks its remote location almost in the middle of Iceland, few people have been out there to see what is going on.
Last week I wrote about the three main theatre panel sessions at the Official Doctor Who convention in March. Today I'll be focusing on some of the smaller panels and talks that were given throughout the day. There were two presentations outside of those in main theatre along with a third fifteen minute talk and several other events happening throughout the day
I have very fond memories of Karel the Robot from my computer science days in high school. We used Karel, a little shape on the screen, to complete tasks, navigate around the screen, and learn to program. The syntax used to control Karel was fairly similar to Pascal, which we proceeded to learn next. Karel's beginner-friendly language eventually evolved to teach a couple of other types of programming languages, but hasn't been carried forward to allow kids to learn on today's hardware.
Too many children still grow up in armed conflict zones where their psychological well-being is severely affected. Luckily, non-governmental organizations such as War Child contribute to re-introduce a psychological, social and emotional balance for those children who lost it long ago.
theodp writes "On April Fools' Day, Google joked it was partnering with NASCAR on self-driving cars. Google Racing, the search giant joshed, had its roots in Project Caddy, which demonstrated the viability of self-driving golf carts. And in the future, Google added tongue-in-cheek, your kids will travel unattended in driverless-car car pools. Funny stuff, huh? Only thing is, GeekWire reports the USPTO disclosed Thursday that Google actually has a patent pending for driverless golf carts, as well as cars that can autonomously pick up kids from school and be switched into 'sport mode,' where 'the vehicle may navigate through turns at the maximum speed that is safe.' In addition to cars, trucks and golf carts, Google's patent application calls dibs on autonomous busses, boats, airplanes, helicopters, lawnmowers, recreational vehicles, amusement park vehicles, trams, trains, and trolleys. Google also describes how its invention will enable autonomous police cars to conduct high speed chases and give law enforcement vehicles 'a limited amount of control over nearby vehicles.' So, is the patent application legit, or did Google team up with the USPTO on a belated April Fools' goof?"
Karel Zak started a fork of Mutt back in January to integrate features the upstream authors deemed too radical, and today released the first status update. So far implemented is native notmuch support (inspired by Sup) which adds fast search, tagging, and virtual folders from notmuch queries. Unlike the current hackish solutions, all of these are available as native mutt commands and can be used in your muttrc. Additionally, patches from Debian and other distributions will be integrated. Source is over at Github, and a few screenshots are on their wiki.
New submitter SolKeshNaranek writes "After Anonymous hacked hundreds of Chinese government, company, and other general websites, China has acknowledged the attacks. Meanwhile, Anonymous China has not stopped its onslaught. 'The group has hacked and defaced hundreds of Chinese government, company, and other general websites over the last week. A few targets have had their administrator accounts, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses posted publicly. Last but not least, on many of the hacked sites, the group even posted tips for how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China. Surprisingly, the Chinese government has acknowledged the attacks. While Anonymous was not specifically mentioned, it's obvious what China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs was referring to during a briefing on Thursday, given the events during the last week.'"
LilaG writes with a paragraph from Chemical & Engineering news: "Chemists in China have precisely grown arrays of ultrathin flakes of bismuth selenide and bismuth telluride on a surface. The bismuth compounds belong to a recently discovered – and weird — class of materials called topological insulators, which conduct electrons only along their surfaces, not through their insides. Researchers think topological insulators promise a new realm of fast, energy-efficient electronic and spintronic devices. Making well-defined nanoparticle arrays such as the new study's flakes is a key step towards such devices."
An anonymous reader writes "The battle between angry fans and BioWare has been raging since the game's release over several issues, with the biggest being the disappointing ending. BioWare have stuck to their guns and stated that they won't make a new ending, but will release free DLC to add clarity to the existing ones."
silentbrad writes "As announced last month, Notch — creator of Minecraft — is working on a sandbox space game (no, not the Mars Effect April Fools joke, though it's similar). "The game [0x10c] is still extremely early in development, but like we did with Minecraft, we expect to release it early and let the players help me shape the game as it grows. The cost of the game is still undecided, but it's likely there will be a monthly fee for joining the Multiverse as we are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in. Single player won't have any recurring fees. ... The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish. Full specifications of the CPU will be released shortly, so the more programatically advanced of you can get a head start.""
badger.foo writes "Remember the glacially slow Hail Mary Cloud SSH bruteforcers? They're doing speedup tweaks and are preparing a comeback, some preliminary data reported by Peter Hansteen appear to indicate. The optimum rate of connections seems to be 1 per ten seconds, smack in the middle of the 'probably human' interval."
silentbrad writes with an excerpt from the Financial Post: "BCE Inc., Rogers Communications Inc., and Shaw Communications Inc. which together control two-thirds of the $8.3-billion broadcast distribution market, are lobbying against the so-called 'a la carte' model that would allow customers to pick and pay for individual networks, arguing the change would have disastrous consequences for programmers, such as Bell Media and Shaw Media. 'A regulation requiring that all programming services must be made available to consumers on a stand-alone basis would have far-reaching ramifications,' BCE, whose Bell owns 30 specialty networks, said in a submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. 'Undoubtedly, a market shake-out, causing many specialty services to exit, would ensue.' The three big players, led by BCE, have told the CRTC they support the status quo of 'tied selling,' or the practice of grouping weaker-performing networks in with a popular channels, versus a new approach to sell channels individually. ... In the race for subscription dollars, rates for TV services across providers have risen sharply over the last decade as the number of specialty channels, each commanding its own fee, has soared. Net costs to subscribers climbed another 2.6% in 2011, while average bills now hover around $60 a month."
sciencehabit writes with good news involving cancer research. From the article: "Chemotherapy drugs are like a shotgun. Even though doctors are just aiming for tumors, the compounds hit a variety of other places in the body, leading to side effects like bone marrow damage and hair loss. To improve their aim, researchers have tried to package these drugs inside tiny hollow nano-sized containers that can be directed toward tumors and bypass healthy tissues. But the size, shape, and makeup of these 'nanoparticles' can drastically affect where and when they are taken up. Now, scientists have surveyed the landscape of some 100 different nanoparticle formulations and shown that when a conventional chemotherapeutic drug is packaged inside the best of these nanoparticles, it proves considerably more effective at fighting prostate cancer (summary; article paywalled) in animals than the drug alone."
wiredmikey writes "A former CIA officer was indicted on Thursday for allegedly disclosing classified information to journalists. The restricted disclosure included the name of a covert officer and information related to the role a CIA employee played in classified operations. The indictment charges John Kiriakou with one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for allegedly illegally disclosing the identity of a covert officer and with three counts of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly illegally disclosing national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it. The count charging violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, as well as each count of violating the Espionage Act, carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, and making false statements carries a maximum prison term of five years. Each count carries a maximum fine of $250,000."
Inspired by work on work on non-traditional presentations in KDE's Karbon (part of Calligra), Aditya Bhatt set out to create a purely client-side tool for creating animated presentations in the browser. Based upon svg-edit and using Sozi, the initial results are pretty cool. His weblog post documents the process — the choice of SVG versus html5's canvas, Javascript instead of SMIL, etc. highlighting the challenges faced even today with different browsers offering wildly different levels of support for each web technology. The sourcecode for Awwation can be had over at Github.
Layzej writes "The Register reports on a paper published in Science in 1981 projecting global mean temperatures up to the year 2100. 'When the 1981 paper was written, temperatures in the northern hemispheres were declining, and global mean temperatures were below their 1940 levels. Despite those facts, the paper's authors confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions.' The prediction turns out to be remarkably accurate — even a bit optimistic. The article concludes that the 1981 paper is 'a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test.'"