Make sure to say “I love you, honey” after hanging up on your wife today. You know why? Because if what happened to a man in China happens to you, you’ll be as dead as Colin Quinn’s career. The man was killed last week—I guess news trickles slowly out of China—when his cellphone exploded, breaking an artery in his neck. Ouch. → Read More
A Coast Guard camera pointed at the Hudson River completes the story of the miracle landing from start to finish. Within seconds of the splashdown, passengers are evacuating and a quick minute later, the first boat steams full speed towards the downed aircraft. There isn’t any sound but the 10 minute video chronicles the entire event. The must see video after the break. → Read More
WHO LIKES BICYCLES?! (Whoops, sorry, caps lock.) This little design-thing caught my eye, and I figured I’d share it with y’all, because, let’s face it, it’s Friday and most of you, myself included, would rather be constructing an army of snowmen or tap dancing on a Brazilian beach than [whatever it is you're currently doing]. → Read More
From Flickr
Now this is a feel-good story. All 135 people aboard US Airways flight 1549 are safe and sound after a soft water landing and escape into the frigid Hudson River on rafts.
I’m not a very good flier and I read this story by Steven Johnson about the relative safety of air travel. The money shot:
[MIT Professor Arnold] Barnett calculates that it’s more likely for a young child to be… → Read More
A couple of grad students in China have developed a method for testing someone’s blood alcohol level directly from a middle finger. The system consists of a small box mounted inside of a car, connected to the vehicle’s ignition. A would-be motorist sticks his or her swear finger into the box for twenty seconds and the system first checks the fingerprint to identify the driver and then checks… → Read More
Flickr’d Oh man, the Wall Street Journal sure is concerned about your Health and Well-being. It seems that laptop sales have, for the first time in recorded history, have overtaken desktop sales. That’s bad news because laptops encourage people to sit in all sorts of unhealthy positions and develop poor computer-using habits. (“Golly gee, why don’t I surf YouTube all night… → Read More
Someone decided to be clever and actually put technology to good use (as opposed to pouring endless amounts of money into developing bigger and bigger TVs), having developed a refrigerator of sorts that doesn’t require any electricity to operate. A team at Stanford, funded by a VC dude by the name of Adam Grosser, came up with a device that essentially works like a big hand warmer, but in… → Read More
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai have once again put Google Earth in an unfavorable light. The one (“baby-faced”) terrorist that police caught has said that the terrorists used Google Earth the help plan the attacks. (That they also used everyday cellphones, GPS and other technologies appears to be lost on the ban happy Indian officials.) In order to prevent future attacks, so the line of… → Read More
From the Department of Public Safety and General Preparedness comes this story of one man, a Cisco engineer, and his headline-making ordeal of having his possessions searched upon re-entry to the U.S. following an international flight. (It’s also the story of run-on sentences.) The man, Mohamed Shommo, told the Associated Press that border agents rifled through his digital camera’s… → Read More
Okay, we have here the greatest iPhone accessory ever invented. It’s the Silicon Touch iPhone case, and it makes using the iPhone a hell of a lot easier for the visually impaired. (Random fact: I’m legally blind in New York without my glasses.) It’d work with an iPhone App to make it so that people can feel what they’re typing, be it the SMS icon or actual, individual… → Read More
Last week’s attacks in India have reminded us all of the keen danger that terrorism poses. But one tool that was to be employed at airports to combat terrorism, those body scanners that sometimes reveal a person’s, well, person, came under criticism. Fighting terror (inasmuch as you can fight it) is great and all, but should people literally be exposed in the process? The Germans say… → Read More
We can jokingly say things like “buy a cellphone jammer to silence those annoying people on the bus” but that would be irresponsible. Quite irresponsible, it turns out, as criminals are now using such devices to impede law enforcement efforts. It happened last month in Canada. Two Mounties had pulled over a car, and as they approached to car their radios went out. It turns out that the two… → Read More
Americans had a saying in the 1840s: “54-40 or fight!” It referred to the Oregon Country-Canada border dispute we had with the British. Americans, feeling that their nation deserved to be a continental nation, were willing to go to war against the British, again, in order secure a few more swaths of land, and all the gold and glory that goes along with that. I have a similar saying: “70 by… → Read More
Flickr’d Oh, kids. If you’re going to play your shiny new Death Knight for 15 hours in a row, you’d better make sure to prepare yourself, mentally and physically, for the experience. A 15-year-old in the Netherlands didn’t, and he ended up in the hospital. → Read More
Did you hear the news? Craigslist is completely broken now, unless you use it for things like “finding apartments” or “selling stolen goods.” Why? The site has signed a deal with 40 state attorneys general to fight prostitution. From now on, anyone who wants to post an ad on the Erotic Services part of the site will be required to provide a telephone number and a valid credit card, which… → Read More
Just a heads up that there are a handful of potentially dangerous laptop batteries floating around out there. These ones are made by Sony but are found in certain models of HP, Toshiba, and Dell notebooks. The HP notebooks are the most at risk with about 32,000 affected batteries. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, “There have been 19 reports of the batteries overheating… → Read More
Honda is demoing a GPS-based warning system to help keep motorcycle riders safe from cars at the Car 2 Car Communication Consortium event in Germany today. The system built by Honda works with 8 other vehicle manufacturers that relay messages between motorcycles and cars with information like direction and position. Said information will be fed to riders through a HUD and in-helmet audio. Drivers… → Read More
Being that lie detectors are complete wastes of space, law enforcement needs, you know, something that actually works. That something could well be brain fingerprinting, which measures brainwave activity to determine if someone is telling the truth or not. VentureBeat puts it in easy-t-understand terms. Imagine you viciously murder someone with an axe. Then, when the police are questioning you… → Read More
Oh, Google. The company has just launched Mail Goggles, a feature that helps prevent you from making a drunken ass out of yourself when using Gmail. When turned on (it’s an optional feature), it asks you to confirm that you really want to send an e-mail. By default it’s only active late nights during the weekend, when people are most likely to send embarrassing drunk e-mails. When you… → Read More
While this little robot girl looks quite creepy—quite creepy—she actual has a noble purpose. She’s the handiwork of a group of Japanese engineers, and the big “wow” factor here is that the skin is made from flexible silicon. Combine that with her more than 50 motors and sensors and you have one reasonably realistic looking robot. Now, as to why I called it noble, it’s… → Read More
Reuters is reporting that text messaging may have had something to do with a recent train crash in California that killed 25 and injured 135. Cell phone records show that the train’s conductor received a text message at 4:21:03 PM, followed by the crash at 4:22:23 PM. The idea is that he got the text message, looked down to read it, and missed the trackside signal. The commuter train then… → Read More
I’m gonna hazard a guess here and say that if you’re *so* into watches that you need a specific safe for them, you’re probably in a different tax bracket than all of us here. That is, unless your name is John Biggs and you collect watches in order to fill some weird void in your soul. Fair enough. Be that as it may, perhaps you’re so drained from all the G1 coverage… → Read More
The National Snow and Ice Center, a division of Proctor & Gamble, has uploaded Google Earth-compatible KML files that make it plain as day to see polar ice cap melting over the past several years. If you don’t have Google Earth installed, there’s a Quicktime movie that gives you the gist of what’s going on. We’re all doomed, essentially. Or something. I don’t… → Read More
Honda in Japan announced they will equip their new Odyssey models (which go on sale in Japan next month) with a new multi-view camera system that displays images on the vehicles’ navigation system to enhance safety. The system consists of a total of four wide-angle CCD cameras that are installed in the front and rear of the cars and on the right and left door mirrors. Drivers will see… → Read More
The very fabric of our democracy came under attack last week when a hacker broke into Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. Federal investigators have since been involved, and are closing in on a possible culprit, a college student at the University of Tennessee. Investigators have tracked an IP address to student housing at The Commons in Knoxville, part of the… → Read More
New Yorkers now have something constructive to do with the cellphone’s photo and video cameras. As of yesterday, New York City’s 911 and 311 (that’s for dumb things like, there’s a lot of traffic on the BQE this morning, do something~!) phone numbers can accept photos and videos taken from cellphones. It used to be that being able to send in text message tips was considered… → Read More
Sorta like this, but not really because iRobot still doesn’t have the proper photos up yet IRobot has a couple of new Roombas for you pet owners. Two, to be exact. There’s the Pet Series Vacuum Cleaning Robot and the Professional Series Vacuum Cleaning Robot, both of which sound like a real hoot. The Pet Series has a few things that make cleaning up after your pets a little easier… → Read More
A rash of kidnappings in Mexico has compelled the well-off to buy a $4,000 GPS chip that’s implanted under the skin. The chip, called Verichip, is created by a company called Xega, is about the size of a grain of rice, and is used in conjunction with an off-site (well, off-body) unit that tracks the chip’s location. So, in a perfect world, if your loved one is kidnapped, at least… → Read More
As you know, the Transportation Safety Administration has decided to allow laptop-carrying airline passengers keep their laptops in specially approved bags at security checkpoints. It’s actually the most revolutionary decision in United States bureaucracy history. To that end, the TSA has finally posted details on its Web site how all this is going to work. That handy graphic shows the type… → Read More
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