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This is the greatest thing ever. Somebody in Chongqing, China decided to show their love for Apple products by dressing up in a homemade cyborg costume made of iMacs and other outdated Macs. Now he needs to go out and fight crime, with the awesome power of OS 2. More »
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This landscape may not look like that much - it's a solid B+ in middle school art, I'd say - but this might just be proof that its creator, a computer program named the Painting Fool, is a creative being. More »
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Sometimes, it already seems like the websites you visit know more about you than you know about yourself — but this is just the beginning. Every day you're helping to generate masses more data, which computers are getting better and better at crunching. How long will it be before the predictive power of these systems becomes so powerful, they're almost magical? More »
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In the 1970s, a remarkable thing was done; a computer was used to solve a math problem. This, in and of itself, was not remarkable. The difference engine could do it. But this problem was the first one that would probably remain unsolved if it weren't for computers. Find out about the Four-Color Theorem, and why it needed to be turned over to the machines, below. More »
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Thanks to the advent of smart phone technologies, many of us already carry the internet with us everywhere we go. But now, scientists have created the world's first wirelessly powered, computerized contact lens with an integrated LED display. That's right — the same access to information afforded us by the technology in our pockets could soon come to us via devices that rest directly on our corneas. More »
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A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America's Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots' every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones. More »
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Most Silicon Valley companies were opposed to the patent reform law that President Obama signed last week. Some argue that the America Invents Act favors large megacorps over smaller companies, and could dampen innovation in the tech sector. More »
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A new monkey Shakespeare simulator has risen, and has managed to get through a good ninety-nine percent of Shakespeare's works. Why has this new challenger done so well when others have failed? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5843952&view=rss&microfeed=true Over at FT.com, Tim O'Reilly has a must-read essay about the symbiosis between humans and computers. We're already propagating our knowledge and our culture at a much faster rate than in the past, he argues, and the next step is computers that can learn from "the activity of human teachers" but then notice things the humans wouldn't. He cites the example of Google's autonomous vehicle, which beats other self-driving cars because it can draw on all the experience of "millions of road miles put in by human drivers building the Google Street View database." More »
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Here are some sobering statistics to mull over on the day after Labor Day: according to InsideScience.org, U.S. manufacturers have cut nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs (about 33%) since 2001, "yet the value of manufactured goods rose 27 percent, and U.S. exports reached their highest level in 20 years." Will automated technology soon remove the need for factory workers entirely? More »
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Blowing up rockets in midflight is easy - as long as you've got a fast enough computer. More »
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Take a look at Champernowne's Constant. It's a ridiculously easy sequence to make, and yet it fooled programs designed to root out underlying order in seemingly random numbers. More »
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In the 1960s, IBM tapped Jim Henson and composer Raymond Scott to create "The Paperwork Explosion," a four-minute advertisement for the MT/ST word-processing machine. The commercial was jarring brew of jargon and flashing images seemingly custom-made for an office-drone dystopia. More »
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We all know how computer hackers flex their 1337 skills in movies: by flailing on a keyboard like it was a bongo and yelling whatever snippets of jargon pop into the actors' heads (i.e. "USB! Byte! Floppy! 56K!"). More »
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Proving the words of countless mothers across countless nations, new research shows that spending all day staring at computers and TVs actually is bad for kids, giving them heart problems later in life. More »
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Software developer JT Nimoy has an amazing collection of images from Tron Legacy on his site, where he explains all the math, physics, and old-school computer geekery that he put into making Flynn's digital world. More »
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Scientists have come up with a system that can scan zebras in photographs the way cashiers scan cans of peas at the grocery store. More »
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Not only is graphene cheap, easy-to-make, and compact, it also manages to cool itself down when it's part of a transistor. More »
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Engineers have used human blood to make a 'memristor,' a component that remembers its last use and adapts to it. More »
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When the world's financial giants begin creating vast artificial islands in the middle of the oceans to use as the hubs of stock-trading, it'll all be because of the speed of light. More »
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We assumed that in the future humans, or other biological entities, would receive mechanical or electronic 'upgrades'. It looks like it could be the other way around. Machines might be getting biological upgrades. More »
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Computers are always getting smaller and more powerful, but shrinking things down isn't just a matter of developing better electronics. A great number of practical things need to be considered when cramming technology into a small space. For example, the simple need to keep things cool. More powerful stuff pushed closer together without just the right way to cool down means melting or fires, neither of which people want. Engineers think they've come up with a solution to the heating problem, though: Armor made of silver and diamonds. More »
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You go to your favorite pizza place, pay with your credit card, then leave. Seems like all that's happened is you've picked up a steaming box of cheese and meat. But you've actually been robbed by a guy 3,000 miles away, who is snarfing up all the data from the pizza joint's credit card validation system. And because there are thousands of other little shops using the same exact validation system software, that guy isn't just robbing you. He's robbing 1,000 other people simultaneously, placing all their credit cards in a tidy little spreadsheet, and handing them off to the highest bidder. More »
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Computronium is defined by some as a substance which approaches the theoretical limit of computational power that we can achieve through engineering of the matter around us. It would mean that every atom of a piece of matter would be put to useful work doing computation. Such a system would reside at the ultimate limits of efficiency, and the smallest amount of energy possible would be wasted through the generation of heat. Computronium crops up in science fiction a lot, usually as something that advanced civilizations have created, occasionally causing conflicts due to intensive harvesting of matter from their galaxy to further their processing power. The idea is also also linked with advanced machine intelligence: A block of matter which does nothing other than compute could presumably would be incredibly sought after by any artificial intelligence looking to get the most compact and powerful brain for its money! More »
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In late December I attended Berlin's Chaos Communication Congress, an annual hacker conference where speakers reveal the latest in high-tech deviousness. Straight from CCC, here are ten ways hackers will subvert your computer, phone, bank card, and life in 2011. More »
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The Living Earth Simulator is quite possibly the most ambitious computer project ever undertaken. This all-encompassing simulation will collect all the data in the entire world, to predict everything from the next major disease outbreak to the next financial crisis. More »
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A Forbes Magazine article from 2000 called "Introducing the Computer of 2010" is as interesting for what it got right as for what it got wrong. Today's computer, said Forbes, would be Frisbee-sized and have a "virtual keyboard." More »
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Bringing us one step closer to giant robot overlords is CLARION, a program that performs the same way human subjects do in some impressive cognitive tests. It mimics not what we think, but how we think. More »
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In 1968's Silver Surfer 3, this advertisement for the Digi Comp I Electronic Computer Brain, hawked a psychic computer that used for telling the future and "studying space age miracles." Oh, 1960s copywriters, unencumbered the laws of reality. More »
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An anonymous hacker wearing a Guy Fawkes mask took over classroom projection screens at Washington State University on the fifth of November, to broadcast a prerecorded message adapted from V For Vendetta. More »
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Quantum computing uses visible light. Current fiber optic cables transmit infrared. Scientists have found a way to ‘translate' signals as small as a single photon from one to the other. More »
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Graphene was hailed as a miracle substance. Easy to make and cheap to acquire, it could help with anything from DNA sequencing to power production. Now, thanks to water and physics, it could soon be turned into a computer. More »
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At Carnegie-Mellon university, a massive computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, teaching itself English and educating itself in human affairs. We spoke to NELL's creators. More »
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When training a future robot overlord, you want it to learn to make complex decisions. No one likes an android whose only call is ‘shoot it.' Neural networks allow problem solving, prioritizing, and hopefully mercy. More »
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Can a piece of software help people who are suffering from political repression or struggling to survive after a natural disaster? Yes, and not always in the ways you'd expect. More »
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Apple thought they were so smart when they started making computers that came in different colors. Now, inspired by the noble gecko, scientists may have found a way to print electronics on leather. Count down to the iWhip. More »
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Earlier this week Google and Verizon pledged to uphold a set of network principles that could transform the internet into a husk of its former self. Let's look down the barrel of the Googlezon* future. More »
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Designers for Star Trek created flat, minimalist computers in order to save money. But as the franchise continued, the artists were forced to further explain the props' pretend functions, which eventually mirrored those of touch electronics today. More »
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School, Work and Play (World of Tomorrow) features this beautiful two-page spread. Apparently, thanks to computers, there's no crime in the future outside of the computerized variety. More »
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