Popular Science

Story from Gizmodo Australia

Apple's Macworld announcement that the entire iTunes catalogue is ditching the God-awful DRM that has kept it back is fantastic news for music lovers worldwide. After all, now you can purchase music that you can listen to on whatever device you want, however many times you want, all for the same price (until their new pricing structure kicks in, I guess). But what about the tunes you've already purchased, laced with hidden DRM and holding your music collection back?

Story from Gizmodo Australia

Engineers all over the world have focused their vast brainpower to overcome one major obstacle—space pooping. The Japanese think they have a solution with their fancy new wearable toilet.

Indeed, this is a far cry from the glorified Depends former NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak drove cross country in a couple of years back. These can detect when you relieve yourself, remove the waste with suction and clean you up after each use. They can even eliminate unpleasant sounds and odours.

Details are still fuzzy, but with very little fanfare it appears the world's first cell phone with a built-in projector has arrived. A company called Logic Wireless has just claimed to debut The Logic Bolt in partnership with T-Mobile. The phone has "razor-sharp" projections which can grow the screen size by 3000 percent and still retains a remarkably slim footprint, if the photos are any indication.

While it’s a safe bet that few Hamas members know the lyrics to “the Star Spangled Banner”, very little separates their activities from those witnessed by Francis Scott Key centuries ago. In what has become a hallmark of guerilla war, Hamas has used a mixture of low-tech weapons and simple tactics to stymie a technologically superior enemy.

I'm a non-geek, a non-Linux user and a non-male. I had never hacked anything in my life. And I had no plans -- or foreseeable need -- to do so.

Then, I discovered PureData. When an audio engineer friend mentioned the open-source programming language that uses rectangular boxes to build audio, video and graphics, I was intrigued.

After weeks of damaging midnight environmental rulings that have removed crucial endangered species protections, restrictions on mining the Grand Canyon, and allowed leasing of public lands for oil development, President Bush protected a whopping 195,000 square miles of the central Pacific’s tropical blue heart. With the stroke of a pen, he created the Mariana, Rose Atoll and Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monuments—and set aside an area the size of his home state of Texas, the largest swath of protected ocean on the planet.

Welcome to 2009. We have seen the future of gaming, and it looks a lot like its for your mother, grandfather and ADD-afflicted pals. Cheerfully, there's still hope for hardcore PC and console enthusiasts. It just doesn’t come in a shiny, shrink-wrapped retail box.

Jackpot: We pick winning gadgets from the year's biggest tech convention.  Courtesy Jeff Kubina; Lettering PopSci

Keep your browser pointed to popsci.com/ces2009 for up-to-the-minute coverage of the gadgets, tech trends and announcements you'll be talking about for the rest of the year.

Story from Lifehacker Australia

Conventional wisdom holds that in times of economic distress, it should be easier than ever to get discounted airfares. However, while there are some good deals to be had, the fundamental strategies for getting cheap flights remain the same as ever.

Story from Lifehacker Australia

When your toilet's got rings and lime scale stains and you've got no cleaning gear on hand, grab a can of Coke out of the fridge. According to wikiHow, you can pour Coke into a dirty toilet and the carbonic, citric, and phosphoric acids in it will break down stains, especially if you can leave it overnight to do the work. (Soda water will work too, without all the sugary residue.) Be warned though: this technique won't save you from the dreaded brushing of the bowl itself.

Why isn't PopSci up for the award? Well, we're not a blog, so we're more than happy to support those handy chaps over at Gizmodo Australia, namely editor Nick Broughall and his minions of technology journo underlings (that would be his dog... we're joking Nick!).

Gizmodo is up for the rather awesome award of Best Australian Blog, which, if we do say so ourselves, it totally deserves as it provides the already awesome PopSci.com.au with extra awesomeness thanks to its technology and gadget news we run on the site.

Darwin's visit to the Galapagos in 1835 missed finding a new species that has eluded generations of scientists until now – the "rosada" land iguana.

New to science, yes, but the iguana's lineage marks one of the oldest cases of divergence from other species on the Galapagos. Scientists were surprised to date the species' origin to more than five million years ago, before some of the islands had even formed.

Ah, New Year's. The time for spirited debauchery, reflection on the year gone by, and resolutions for the year to come. On New Year's Day, most people wake up determined (through the haze of their hang-overs) to do something different this year, whether it be losing weight, learning a new skill, or to quit biting their nails. That's admirable, but for the risk-takers and more impulsive among us, keeping a new year's resolution may be near impossible, and it's due to the dope—or lack, thereof.