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Google already most likely controls your email, your personal calendar and your web searches, but can the internet giant also create a conference that comes up with real solutions to the world's problems? Google just launched a new conference, Solve for X, which will bring together experts to discuss "radical technology ideas for solving global problems." The new video above mentions cancer and global climate change — because why start small? More »
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Should you look up Foxoak St, Cradley Heath, West Midlands B64, United Kingdom on Google Street View and move the camera toward the sky, you may notice something a bit off. I don't know what's more disconcerting: proof of alien battle cruisers or the fact that they've been cribbing human designs. More »
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If you use Google Earth to look up the Salfords Lads Club in Manchester, England, you'll find a famously coiffed squatter in this virtual world. Punch in "St Ignatius Walk, M5 3RX" on 3D Buildings mode and you'll see a pixelated incarnation of Morrissey, The Smiths' loud-mouthed pontificator, forever standing smugly. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5872406&view=rss&microfeed=true The congressional supercommittee failed to come up with a budget for the United States, so dramatic cuts will hit every sector — including government-funded science, which has already taken a budget hit two years in a row. Congress has said not to worry because when government money for endeavors like space exploration and environmental science are cut, private companies will step up to fund them. More »
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The Google Doodle at Google.com is some kind of Thanksgiving turkey thing — but if you go over to Google.co.uk right now, you're treated to a totally demented black-and-white animation in honor of the 60th anniversary of Stanislaw Lem's first publication. It's based on The Cyberiad illustrations by Daniel Mróz, and it really has to be seen to be believed. Go check it out now, while it's still up there! [Google.co.uk via Guardian and Matt Jones] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5862132&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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John Denver proclaimed it "almost heaven", but a group of geoscientists are implying it's a little more like the opposite.  Most of the rest of the world doesn't think of West Virginia as a hot spot, but it is. More »
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We already know that Google's Master Plan includes remaking the entire Babylon 5 series. Now intrepid nerd Michael Penta has screencapped this picture of a spaceship from Babylon 5, emblazoned with something that looks very like the Google Chrome logo. More »
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August 9 is the 65th anniversary of the day the US dropped "Fat Man" over Nagasaki. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Archive has created a Google Earth map that documents where survivors were in relation to the blast. More »
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These pictures of a whiteboard at Google headquarters were taken in 2005, and they reveal at last what the Big G's plans for total world domination really involve. More »
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Thanks to satellite data from NASA and Google, researchers discovered that North Korea has begun logging the Mount Paekdu Biosphere Reserve, a 326,000-acre United Nations forest preserve and habitat of the endangered Siberian tiger. More »
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If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement. It's a complicated legal document, but we've talked to some of its architects, detractors, and defenders - and break it all down for you. More »
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Google will likely be pulling the plug on Google.cn by the end of the month. According to the web search giant, China's stringent censorship and the hacking of Gmail accounts have driven Google to relinquish 35.6% of China's search market. More »
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No matter your thoughts on the Google Books settlement, it's hard to deny the coolness of Asaf Hanuka's two-mouthed Google monster from this month's issue of California Lawyer. Don't be evil? More like don't be dinner. More »
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Google recently unveiled a smart-phone app that can translate German text into English just by scanning it. And even though we're a long way from Hitchhiker-like Babelfish, the universal translator of Star Trek lore is closer than you think. More »
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Who opted out of the Google Books settlement thus far? Approximately 6,500 authors and other literary entities including such writers as Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Busiek, and, of course, Ursula Le Guin. More »
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According to no less an authority than the New York Times, internet attacks on Google last month may be the work of students with ties to the Chinese military. Not so, responds one of the schools accused. More »
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Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation is testifying at a hearing on the Google Books Settlement, arguing the company's ebook service will track what people read online. Worried about your book-reading privacy? EFF has also just released an e-book privacy guide. More »
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Now that Google has declared war on China, can it take on a diminutive 80-year-old science-fiction and fantasy author? Probably, but Ursula K. Le Guin is not going down without a fight. More »
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A burning house, a flooded road, and a man with a gun. The images captured by the Google Street View van's automatic camera are poignant and weird. According to one artist, they're also how future historians will study our world. More »
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Wondering how you too can warn people about the dangers of global warning? Google have created a way to make all of us into mini-Al Gores, by adding an Estimated Climate Change option to Google Earth. More »
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To celebrate the anniversary of the moon landing, Google has added the moon to the list of celestial bodies you can visit on Google Earth. The latest version features both Martian and lunar geography, including mission sites. [Google Earth] More »
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This creepy image was snapped by Google for its Street View map feature. It shows what seems to be a floating Victorian ghost in Cardiff, right near the Torchwood headquarters. More »
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On Friday, Google maps spawned another web myth. A mysterious grid of lines revealed by the company's new undersea terrain maps had the interwebs buzzing about the lost city of Atlantis. More »
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Google doesn't just help you find the nearest pizza place anymore - now it helps doctors find where flu epidemics are going to strike next. Working with a group of epidemiologists, the tech megacorp has revealed a new system for tracking disease outbreaks by checking what people are searching for. By tracking the rise in searches on phrases like "cold/flu remedy," Google said yesterday in a Nature article that it can predict with almost total accuracy where flu outbreaks are occurring, far more quickly than the American Centers for Disease Control can. More »
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We've already shown you that San Francisco has been overrun by Imperial Forces, but Google's Street View has revealed the shocking truth that it's not the only Californian city ripe for conquest by the Emperor - as anyone traveling down the virtual version of Hollywood Boulevard can see for themselves. We'll show the full shocking image that will have you realizing that LA is next... and that Darth Vader is a little short for a Sith Lord. More »
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So Google has a satellite in orbit, and now it wants to take over the oceans too? The New York Times' Ashlee Vance just reported that Google has taken out a patent to create "water based datacenters," which are essentially barges that house cargo container-sized server farms. Is the mega-company about to create a floating data island on the high seas? More »
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You may notice a new feature called "Suggest" when you use Google this week — the search engine will now suggest possible searches you might want to do. So, for example, if you type something like "Invasion of . . . " into the Google search bar, Google will helpfully suggest things like "invasion of privacy" or "invasion of Georgia." The search engine's anticipation of what you want may feel like a crude form of A.I., but it can't figure out truly important things, such as the fact that you were actually searching for "Invasion of the Booby Snatchers." Still, these kinds of search features are making it obvious that A.I. will probably emerge out of services like Google Search that aggregate data and make inferences based on it. More »
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Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. Mac Funamizu is a tech geek, designer, and futurist who has created quite a lot of buzz among design circles for his innovative gadgets from the future. The 38-year old Tokyo native has always loved Apple, Google, and Starbucks, but he always felt inconvenienced by the extra steps involved in using them. (Why mouth off a complex multi-conditional order of coffee when you could just customize your cup of joe online? Why doesn't Google Maps give you more than just a topographic image of what you're looking at?) At first, his ideas were just rough sketches in his Moleskine. But then he started posting his neat, provocative ideas online, and now developers are contacting him to try and make some of them a reality. More »
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Google and the internet are changing the way our brains work, no doubt about it. With the internet at our fingertips, why bother to remember trivial facts when Wikipedia is just a click or two away? In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr makes a convincing argument about the various ways our obsession with cyberspace is altering the way we think, then tries to tell us that's a bad thing. Here's why he's wrong. More »
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Gene-sequencing technology is taking off, but George Church at Harvard University is taking it to the next level: he wants to sequence the genomes of 100,000 people. Right now, about 12 human genomes have been sequenced and Church's ambitious plan is likely to cost cost around $1 billion to complete. Recently Google — who in February announced its Google Health software for storing electronic medical records — agreed to foot a major part of the bill. Google gives us free email, chat, search, a shopping client, and so on and all they've ever asked is that we let them look at all over our most private information. Seems like a fair trade, but does that extend to our DNA? More »
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If only today's announcement from Google and Virgin were true. Supposedly Google and Virgin Inc. are teaming up to create Virgle, a scheme to settle Mars by about 2015, possibly because Mars is the last place Google can keep its server farms the right temperature. In this video, Google founders Sergey and Larry ask you to send in your Youtube videos explaining why you should be one of the first Mars settlers. More »
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MIT's teaming up with Google to design the first satellite that can really, truly search the sky for planets similar to Earth in size and terrain, taking us a giant step closer to making contact with extraterrestrials. Google is funding the development of a six high-res, wide-field digital cameras with a 192-megapixel resolution for TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. That's enough resolution to gauge the brightness of two million stars. MIT scientists are currently hard at work with the design of TESS' observatory. More »
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Last night Google rolled out its latest mapping application, which allows you to browse the night sky and zoom in on nearby galaxies and stars. Called Google Sky, it's just about the most fun I've had with a mapping application since . . . well, Google Earth. But unlike Earth, Sky doesn't require you to download a bunch of software. You can browse the heavens as easily as you browse your neighborhood on Google Maps. And there are no annoying little pushpins — only helpful information boxes about what astronomical objects you're gawking at. You won't be able to look away. [Google Sky] More »
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In John Varley's upcoming scifi novel Rolling Thunder, everyone has a brain implant that lets them google information constantly. And many futurists are saying this technology will become a reality long before we colonize Mars. The question isn't whether we'll have google brain implants (or the futuristic search engine equivalent), but how we'll handle them. What exactly would be the plusses and minuses of being able to google information instantaneously in your head, without anybody knowing you're doing it? More »
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What happens when Google street view is no longer content with showing incredibly detailed pictures of the outside of your house? This hilarious science fiction video by the Vacationeers follows Google's omni-cam to its most invasive extreme... and of course they posted it on YouTube. More »
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