Virgin Galactic's Enterprise Makes Maiden Manned Flight
Virgin Galactic's space plane made its first manned glide flight on 10/10/10, proving the spaceship's airworthiness and further paving the way
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29.10.10
The mystical power of numbers
A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, I turned 22. Big whoop, right? Many of us have or are destined to turn 22, so it’s hardly special. That is, except for the day that my birthday fell on. Y’see, I turned 22 on the 22nd of the 2nd… and yes, even though I failed maths and generally
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In-flight Wi-Fi for Aussies? About time!
If Hollywood is anything to go by, we in Australia are a bunch of lucky people. From nods in popular films and TV shows to our true-blue actors who seem to be headlining every other American-produced blockbuster, the rest of the world is certainly aware of our existence.
And yet, when it
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WIN 1 of 3 Pioneer NAC-3 Digital Speaker Systems.
For your chance to WIN 1 of 3 Pioneer NAC-3 Digital Speaker Systems for Ipods valued at $699 each. Email us at [email protected] with the subject line ‘The Buzz Oct Comp’ and in 25 words or less, tell us “How many songs do you have stored on
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Tunnel vision. Is the Mercedes Gullwing stunt real?
German car maker Mercedes-Benz has online car enthusiasts in a blather about whether or not a video of the new SLS Gullwing sports car looping the inside of a tunnel is real or fake. The climax of the three minute video (the tunnel stunt) by Mercedes-Benz is widely tipped to be the work of
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Seeing double … the twin screen TV for cars.
Luxury British brands Jaguar and Land Rover may have a solution to keeping couples happy on long journeys. Their latest models are available with a new wide-screen TV display that can show two images at once.
Thanks to some ingenious screen technology, the driver can view navigation instructions
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Cash for Clunkers … Where does the queue start?
Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a pre-election promise to introduce a Cash for Clunkers scheme in 2011 to help put newer, less-polluting cars on our roads. The focus was on reducing vehicle emissions by making owners of pre-1995 vehicles eligible for a $2,000 rebate on a new, fuel-efficient
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The importance of blogger anonymity
I was recently asked to offer my thoughts on the unmasking of the once-anonymous blogger known as Grog’s Gamut. My thoughts were requested on the general idea of whether I considered it to be okay for bloggers to have their identities revealed.
Let the records show that I do not think
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The death of the rebirth of 3-D movies
Last year, all of the major television distributors announced that they would be releasing some form of 3-D television in 2010. There was understandably a lot of excitement about the possibilities of what could be achieved with such technology as the entertained world was high on the visual
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Perfect Timing
Build an Atomic Clock
Time: 2 Hours
Difficulty: Hard
Buy or build a clock enclosure.
Follow the schematic to build the circuitry (download it from here), and attach the
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iPhone 4: the wait is over
For those out there that simply cannot wait to get their hands on the latest version of Apple’s iPhone and have been champing at the bit to get any indication of when it will be released, the good news is the end is nigh. According to a recent Apple press release published in full at
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Long-Awaited Barefoot Running Study Finds Sneakers Are Harmful
Shoes change the human foot strike and may lead to more running injuries...
All
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Warning signals: Mobile phones, radiation and the human brain
Per Segerbäck lives in a modest cottage in a nature reserve some 120km northeast of Stockholm. Wolves, moose and brown bears roam freely past his front door. He keeps limited human company, because human technology makes him physically ill. How ill? On a walk last summer, he ran into one of
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Quantum Hackers Use Lasers to Crack Commercial Quantum Encryption Without Leaving a Trace
Quantum cryptography is one of the most secure known means of transmitting data, due to the fact that even if a third party does intercept a quantum signal, that interference changes the encryption key, making the tampering apparent to parties at both ends. But a handful
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Video: Virgin's VSS enterprise makes its first crewed test flight
Virgin Galactic just released some nice video of its latest SpaceShipTwo (aka VSS Enterprise) test flight, the first with the spacecraft's two-pilot flight crew aboard.
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Synthetic cell-like microcapsules communicate like biological cells, cooperate like ants
Taking cues from slime molds, ants, and living biological cells, a team of University of Pittsburgh researchers has designed a system of artificial cells that can communicate with one another and cooperate to carry out tasks. The computer models they've devised could
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Video: Yale's Grab Lab Demonstrates an Unmanned Helicopter With a Grabbing Hand
Researchers at Yale's Grab Lab aren't about to let the nuances of rotary-wing flight restrict what unmanned aerial vehicles can do. A team there has developed a hand-like modular grasping and manipulation platform that can be fitted to the bellies of UAVs to provide them
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MIT's Self-Assembling Solar Cells Recycle Themselves Repeatedly, Just Like Plant Cells
Plants are extremely efficient converters of light into energy, more or less setting the bar for researchers creating photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. As such, researchers are constantly trying to mimic the tricks that millions of years of
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Video: Sony unveils paper-thin OLED screen that rolls up while still playing
We're putting things that used to be on paper on video devices, things usually associated with large video screens onto pocket-sized devices, and now Sony is putting video on a flexible
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Won’t somebody please think of the movie buffs?
It wasn’t so long ago that I was lamenting over the advancements in sci-fi ‘technology’ (or lack thereof) and the effect they have on inspiring
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Australians to reap the perks of a late iPhone 4 release
As a geeky tech junkie I often feel the pain of living in a comparatively small Australian market. Our population of just over 21 million people doesn’t really cut the mustard when compared to other developed nations that have anywhere from double to 10 times the population. What this usually
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Time travel: now much safer than it used to be
If, like me, you’ve spent altogether too much time being ‘educated’ by the (questionable) logic of science fiction shows, movies, books or even some form of heated discussion among geeky interested friends, you’ve doubtlessly had the
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The dubious importance of memory
Amid the plethora of qualities I am proud to call my own—the most important of which is humility—is my memory. Because life is all about applying a ‘once burned, twice shy’ mentality, in order to be able to rack up a tally of ‘I told you so’s’ that’s longer than anyone else
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Video: Apocalypse-Fearing Folk Can Seek Shelter in Futuristic US$10 Million Doomsday Bunker
A doomsday bunker envisioned by California company Vivos can offer you, your family, and 4,000 other people the chance to escape the end of the world in a network of 20 underground shelters. Surely even the sceptics can't resist the allure of scary music played over scenes of comfortable underground
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Although It's Been Said Many Times, Many Ways: The iPad is the Future
After a weekend using the iPad, I've realised I'm not interested in hedging my reaction to it with careful considerations of its lack of a USB port or webcam. It's not every day, or every year or maybe even every decade that we're able to see a piece of technology that takes a familiar human
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'Imaginary' hardware interface lets users wield their own fantasy peripherals to control a real device
Imagine a gesture-based mobile device with no screen, no keyboard, and no other peripheral inputs or outputs, a mobile device that's not really a device at all. Can you see it in your mind's eye? If so, you're probably picturing something akin to a new
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Liquid mirror breakthrough could make state-of-the-art optics cheap
A $136 million Earth-based telescope using brand new adaptive optics just trumped Hubble's deep space image clarity three-fold, but such high tech optics aren't just reserved for high-dollar observatories. A breakthrough in deformable liquid mirror technology
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Kinect: good with kids, bad with couches
Microsoft's Kinect, the controller-free, gesture-based gaming platform that finally saw an official unveiling at E3 this week continues to surprise us, but not always necessarily in good ways. For instance, we think it's awesome that the non-peripheral peripheral can
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LEDs Dethrone Compact Fluorescents as King of Eco-Friendly Lightbulbs
Never mind that twisty compact fluorescent. The new energy-efficient way to light your home is with LEDs. An upcoming crop of bulbs draw 12 watts or less, edging out a typical fluorescent, and they have a more conventional shape, contain no mercury, and last at least
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