Monday 22 April 2013

In New York, 3D printing finally gets its day in the sun

After years of being lumped in with other maker-oriented technologies, 3D printing finally has its own professional conference, the Inside 3D Printing event in New York. NEW YORK--Guitars. Skulls. Bracelets. Colorful heads. And so much more.

Advances in prosthetics aside, Boston amputees face challenges

At least 14 people lost a limb or part of one in the Boston Marathon blasts. But while prosthetics have progressed in recent years, patients still have much emotional, psychological, and physical reco

NASA to Webcast Lyrid meteor shower Monday night

A camera at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will broadcast live images of the space fireworks show. The Lyrid meteor shower is peaking right now, and NASA wants to make sure you don't miss this once-a-year space fireworks show.

Adapteva $99 parallel processing boards targeted for summer

(Phys.org) ?The semiconductor technology company Adapteva earlier this month featured its parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputingts at a major Linux event, and the board is targeted to ship

Coolest Earth Day ride: The Sora electric superbike

Recently certified by the Canadian government, this slick ride can do 0 to 60 mph in four seconds and cruise around for 185 miles.

Originally posted at <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-

Instacart (YC S12) adds Costco delivery to San Francisco, no membership needed

There are a few caveats, of course: While Instacart services three markets in the Bay Area, the Costco delivery service will service San Francisco only, to start. Also, the fee associated with delivery from its stores will be higher, clocking in at $9.99 for your collection of items, stiffer than the normal $3.99 rate.

Thermostat whiz Nest wants to reset your peak power use

The new Nest Energy Services are a set of tech-driven features intended to help you and utility companies reduce energy demand during peak periods -- without you losing control of your comfort. (Credit: Nest) After succeeding at the once inconceivable task of making thermostats sexy, Nest is now out to change peoples' relationships with their utility companies, and make the energy industry more efficient in the process.

Random Robot Roundup

I returned from a few days at the VEX Robotics World Championship to find our inbox full of news, so let's start things back up with a news roundup! (and, yes, pics of the VEX championship will be posted in a few days).

Scientists map all possible drug-like chemical compounds: Library of millions of small, carbon-based molecules chemists might synthesize

Drug developers may have a new tool to search for more effective medications and new materials. It's a computer algorithm that can model and catalog the entire set of lightweight, carbon-containing mo

Solar Electric Scooter takes a shine to green transport

Electric scooters are getting greener with the launch of a crowdfunding project for a scooter with a solar panel on the foot platform. (Credit: Solar Electric Scooters) Electric scooters are being positioned as eco-friendly alternatives to traveling everywhere in your car. What could make an electric scooter even more green?

A new kind of summer job: open source coding with Google Summer of Code

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source team



Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

A new kind of summer job: open source coding with Google Summer of Code



(cross-posted from the Official Google blog)



If you?re a university student with CS chops looking to earn real-world experience this summer, consider writing code for a cool open

Why eye doctors may soon prescribe Tetris

Researchers at McGill University say the video game distributes information between the eyes in a way that trains them to work together and could ultimately help treat lazy eye.

Percona XtraBackup 2.1.0 for MySQL beta now available

<img alt="Percona XtraBackup" src="http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Per

New Madagascar dinosaur species had tiny arms

Almost 10 years have passed since a new Madagascar dinosaur species was introduced to the world. Please welcome the Dahalokely tokana to the archeological history books. (Credit: Andrew Farke and Joseph Sertich) Don't cry for Tyrannosaurus rex and its teensy-weensy arms. It was in good company in the dinosaur kingdom with a recently discovered new species found in Madagascar.

NASA Successfully Launches Three Smartphone Satellites

NASA Successfully Launches Three Smartphone Satellites WASHINGTON -- Three smartphones destined to become low-cost satellites rode to space Sunday aboard the maiden flight of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. The trio of "PhoneSats" is operating in orbit, and may prove to be the lowest-cost satellites ever flown in space.

NASA's Johnson Space Center, White Sands Earn EPA 'Green' Honors

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recognized NASA's White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, N.M., and Johnson Space Center in Houston as Federal Green Challenge National Award winner

John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!! - (watch video)

Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there's much more to texting -- linguistically, culturally -- than it seems, and it's all good news. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less).

Soar through Google Earth with Leap Motion

Although only Leap Motion developers will be able to play with the Google Earth integration right now, the Leap launches next month. Google Earth has been around for years, but thanks to a new integration with Leap Motion, you can now soar through the digital representation of our planet like never before.

Yahoo Kills Upcoming, Archive Team Saves the Day

Bird photography with a Raspberry Pi and a DSLR

Tricky things, birds. Even when you've got yourself sorted out with boxes and feeders to entice them into your garden, it can be very difficult to get a decent photograph - they don't stay still for long, especially if they see you coming (and it is amazing at just how adept birds are at spotting the slightest movement - the sort of movement you might make to operate the zoom lens on your camera, for example), and many feeding birds will only visit the table for a few seconds at a time, even if you're well hidden.

Google announces $600 million expansion for North Carolina data center

Google announced Friday a $600 million expansion of its Lenoir data center, bringing the company's total investment in North Carolina to $1.2 billion. The announcement came little more than six years

Honor among (credit card) thieves?

A Michigan State University criminologist dug into the seamy underbelly of online credit card theft and uncovered a surprisingly sophisticated network of crooks that is unique in the cybercrime domain. The thieves, Thomas Holt found, run an online marketplace for stolen credit data similar to eBay or Amazon where reputations drive sales.

MySQL Applier for Hadoop

To support the growing emphasis on real-time operations, MySQL is releasing a new MySQL Applier for Hadoop to enable the replication of events from MySQL to Hadoop / Hive / HDFS (Hadoop Distributed F

Object.observe Shim, Behave, Snap.js

10 questions to ask (and answer) when hosting MongoDB on AWS

This is a guest post from Dharshan Rangegowda, founder of Scalegrid, creators of MongoDirector. This originally appeared on the MongoDirector blog. Are you hosting your production MongoDB instances on Amazon AWS? At MongoDirector.comwe manage hundreds of production MongoDB instances on AWS and have learnt a few things along the way.

Opera Mini update for Android

As we race towards a release of the new Opera for Android, we are also continuing to work hard on our existing products. Today we released Opera Mini 7.5.2 for Android. In addition to the security

How to recover table structure from InnoDB dictionary

To recover a dropped or corrupt table with Percona Data Recovery Tool for InnoDB you need two things: media with records(ib

Oxford Economics: A Success Case

The specific challenge of this project was to provide a long-overdue modern user experience for the company?s website which consisted of two major areas dealing with marketing and providing custome

Workflow Module

Looking forward to the release of the Orchard Workflow Module, which will probably be released around the same time as Orchard 1.7. The Workflow Module will probably replace the <a href="h

Windows AzureConf this Tuesday

ASP.NET, Visual Studio, ASP.NET 2.0, .NET

New in Symfony 2.3: Events in the Console Component



<a href="https://connect.sensiolab