Monthly Archives: June 2012

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This pleasant-looking plant may try to take your hand off if you’re not careful. The robot flower includes sensors that cause the petals to move in reaction to external stimuli. You can just make out the distance sensors as black … Continue reading →

Judge Lucy Koh on Friday granted Apple an injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone with the ruling coming on the heels of an identical decision to block sales of the South Korean company’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. A tweet and report … Continue reading →

Walter Tschinkel may not have solved the mystery of the fairy circles, but he can tell you that they’re alive. Tens of thousands of the formations — bare patches of soil, 2 to 12 meters in diameter — freckle grasslands … Continue reading →

Hey bro, next time you get drunk listen to your urinal. Michigan officials are deploying 400 talking urinal cakes to 200 restaurants and watering holes across the Great Lake State as part of a stepped up anti-drunk driving campaign for … Continue reading →

While the convenience of Apple’s Siri comes with searching by voice, a new test has found that Apple’s personal assistant is not yet a reliable enough search engine to entirely replace text input with Google. The closer look at Siri … Continue reading →

The Phoenix Frankenprogram to harvest the corpses of expired satellites and cobble together new ones seemed like one of DARPA’s more daft ideas, but this one has actually kicked off its first phase of development. The plan is to first … Continue reading →

Step from a sunlit hillside into the darkness of a cave, and you immediately have a problem: you can’t see. It’s best to stand still for a few minutes until your eyes adjust to the dimness, otherwise you might blunder … Continue reading →

The long-standing, heavily documented militarization of even small-town American police forces was always going to create problems when it met anonymous Internet threats. And so it has, again—this time in Evansville, Indiana, where officers acted on some Topix postings threatening … Continue reading →

TV makers are at a bit of an impasse: for the first time ever, demand for LCD TVs is down year-over-year. After years of increasing sales and declining prices, the market is finally beginning to become saturated, and the incremental … Continue reading →

Netflix is swaggering about and boasting about its upcoming programs. The service, which costs around $8 a month, is adding a decent range of new shows to its roster including the new self-made series of Arrested Development. Arrested Development series … Continue reading →

From Wired: What a difference a couple of years can make—the last time we took a look at a $99 Android tablet, we came away so scarred by the experience that we recommended you save your $99 and buy some … Continue reading →

There are a lot of cool things you can do with $1,000, but scientists at an Austin, Texas college have come across one that is often overlooked: for less than a grand, how’d you like to hijack a US government … Continue reading →

Scientists and engineers at Picatinny Arsenal are busy developing a device that will shoot lightning bolts down laser beams to destroy its target. Soldiers and science fiction fans, you’re welcome. “We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our … Continue reading →