"Engineering experts over at 911 Metallurgist, with some help from the designers at Neomammalian Studios, break down the innards of smartphones and how much the raw metals are worth." Continue reading →
"It’s the oldest trick in a crooked cabby’s playbook — and it’s about to become obsolete. Taxi Turvi keeps hacks honest by tracking their route with GPS technology, then checks it at the end of the journey to see if there was a shorter, cheaper way to go. The free app — the brainchild of a former NYC resident whose Southern accent made her a frequent victim of the trick — was launched two weeks ago. To use it, riders simply press 'start' at the beginning of their trip. Then, at the end of the ride, they hit 'stop' — and the app displays the route that was taken in a red line. The shortest route on the same map is overlaid in a blue line." Continue reading →
"More regulation madness. In New York City, Taxi prices are so out of line with what free market rates would be that corporations are now willing to pay over $1 million to own a taxi and collect the fares, which is what the ownership of a medallion allows. In a free market, even allowing for registration with the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, the cost would be the registration fee ($100?) and that would be it. Below is the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission report for February, which shows 4 corporate taxi medallions were sold for $1,000,000 and 2 sold for $1,100,000." Continue reading →
"If you own a mobile phone and spend sunup to sundown watching the traffic pass in Ghana’s capital, then Iddrisu Mohammed wants you to be his spy. With an iPad in his hands and two phones in his pants pockets, Mohammed crisscrosses Accra on foot, looking for people to become informants for Jamless, a recently launched traffic information service that hopes to restore a little sanity to the capital’s hectic commute. 'What Jamless will do is give you the traffic situation in any part of Accra that you are and give you alternate routes to use if the place is jammed,' said Mohammed, who is the company’s informant manager." Continue reading →
"'Is this for real?' Doug was referring to an article in the recent issue of Nature Communications on a novel way to mass-produce so-called superconductors on the super-cheap – using no more equipment than the average home CD/DVD burner. Hacked together by a group of research scientists at UCLA, the ingenious technique is a way of producing layers of microscopically nuanced lattices called graphene, an essential component of many superconductor designs. It holds the promise of rapidly dropping prices for what was until now a very expensive process." Continue reading →
"Death is Nature’s way of telling you it’s time to get off the Internet. But when you finally shuffle off this mortal coil, you leave something behind: all your email and other digital assets. That’s a huge problem not only for the deceased—once you’re on the wrong side of the Great Beyond, there’s no way to delete those incriminating messages—but also any relatives who might want to access your (former) life. And it’s a problem Google’s seeking to solve with the new Inactive Account Manager." Continue reading →
"So it looks like someone could hack a jetliner. With an Android smartphone. Awesome. At the Hack In The Box conference in Amsterdam, security consultant Hugo Teso demonstrated PlaneSploit, an app he developed that can take control of certain systems aboard an airplane and cause it to change direction or just crash itself into the ground. Hugo’s no terrorist, mind you. He developed the app to point out the glaring, frightening, insane security holes in most planes’ onboard flight systems. His demonstration was done in a simulated environment, but the methods and effects, he says, are exactly the same as what could happen with a real plane." Continue reading →
"What we perceive as a single color consists of multiple blended colors- just as green paint can be made from mixing yellow and blue paint. A spectrometer is a device that splits light into the various colors it is composed of, which we otherwise cannot distinguish with the naked eye. By viewing a substance through a spectrometer, one can distinguish the exact mixture of colors, which correspond to specific wavelengths of light. These can be compared to other spectra to help identify the sample." Continue reading →
"Researchers at Virginia Tech announced Thursday that their latest breakthrough in hydrogen extraction technology could lead to widespread adoption of the substance as a fuel due to its ease of availability in virtually all plant matter, a reservoir previously impossible to tap. The new process uses a cocktail of 13 enzymes to strip plant matter of xylose, a sugar that exists in plant cells. The resulting hydrogen is of an such a 'high purity' that researchers said they were able to approach 100 percent extraction, opening up a potential market for a much cheaper source of hydrogen than anything available today." Continue reading →
"It is surely now but a matter of time before we are reporting on the completion of the first 3D-printed house. Amsterdam-based DUS Architects is the latest company to show its hand, and has developed its own 3D printer, the 6-meter (20-foot) tall KamerMaker (literally, RoomMaker), with the intention of 3D printing a house before the end of the year. The intention is that the KamerMaker will print building components on site. The machine can print components, fabricated from polypropylene, up to 2.2 by 2.2 by 3.5 meters (7.2 by 7.2 by 11.5 feet) in size. It's hoped that in future the KamerMaker will be able to print objects from recycled plastic." Continue reading →