Thoughtware.TV

The Internet giant has applied its muscle to a phone application that can 'listen' to speech and provide translations in a computerized voice for English, Mandarin and Japanese.

Every place and object in the world has a secret past: who lived there, who passed by, who touched it. The secret lives of objects are filled with such details. If only you could make them talk. But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. All... More

Popular Science has partnered with Google to offer their entire 137-year archive online for free. You can also browse the archive online via Google. via Popular Science

A new Google Labs project merges two breakthroughs into one. Public Data Explorer brings together more than a dozen databases — health statistics, population numbers, employment figures — with a browser-based technology that lets researchers and presenters create charts that move. Google’s motion charts show trends in two ways not possible with motionless plots. First, the motion feature r... More

If you want to see the future debate over human enhancement, look no further than today’s sports. The modern athlete is a highly-enhanced creature. Whatever physiological edge you can get may provide the razor-thin margin for victory in contemporary sports. And with more ways of modifying the body come more restrictions, and innovations to get around the restrictions. Athletes may very well be... More

Phones have evolved to allow us to take everyday tools and gadgets and incorporate them into a little device in our pockets. Just as the first handsets replaced long distance radio receivers, smartphones are allowing us to replace a whole host of devices in and around the home. In this article we see some of the less obvious objects we can expect our smartphones to help improve and ultimately r... More

Get ready for Project Offset. This little-known development team, owned by Intel, is building a game engine that may make you believe that the richness of reality in the virtual world is not so far away.

Winter is typically flu season, and talk around the water cooler in 2009 has turned to the H1N1 virus, the so-called “swine flu.” Many wonder if it might be comparable to the 1918 influenza virus that caused the catastrophic and historic pandemic of 1918–1919. In 2005, in an act of random stupidity, the U.S. Department of health and human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influ... More

Senators John McCain and Byron Dorgan have introduced legislation in Congress to bring dietary supplements under FDA control. If the past is prologue, the results of such a move are likely to be an arbitrary and unscientific intervention against your right to do what you will with your body, with the pharmaceutical industry generally pulling the strings. If not outright banning substances that some... More

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch. As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the go... More

Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites recently rolled out SpaceShipTwo, a commercial passenger spaceship designed after the winning ship that captured the $10M Ansari X PRIZE for spaceflight in 2004. For those few of you who don't yet know, an X PRIZE is a $10 million+ award given to the first team to achieve a specific goal, set by the X PRIZE Foundation, which has the potential to benefit humanit... More

One of the ideas I champion is that DNA is a programming language for living things. By stringing DNA bases together in different ways, one gets different organisms. With one sequence, a bacterium is the result. With another, a butterfly. The same can be said about any subcomponent of life, all the way down to individual proteins. SEE ALSO h+ Magazine Current Issue DIY Bio: A Growing Movemen... More

On January 5, Michael Anissimov claimed that a number of predictions Ray Kurzweil wrote would happen by 2009 failed to check out. On his Accelerating Future blog, Michael posted: "Here are the failed predictions: 'Personal computers with high resolution interface embedded in clothing and jewelry, networked in Body LAN’s. The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR... More

Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the... More

A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, in Germany, led by the Spanish physicist Rubén Fernández-Busnadiego, has managed to obtain 3D images of the vesicles and filaments involved in communication between neurons. The method is based on a novel technique in electron microscopy, which cools cells so quickly that their biological structures can be frozen while fully act... More

Some amazing feats will be possible with HTML5. A pretty amazing piece of JavaScript dropped yesterday and it's going to take a little bit to digest it all. It's a GreaseMonkey script, written by 'Shaun Friedle', that automatically solves captchas provided by the site Megaupload. There's a demo online if you wish to give it a spin. The article claims a Javascript-based Neural Network is used. J... More

Tilera leads the "many-core" era, opening up new possibilities in networking, multimedia, wireless and cloud computing.

Don’t worry, it’s not at all dangerous. The nuclear battery in question is powered by nickel-63, a “mildly radioactive” isotope with a half-life of about 12 years, meaning that the battery could easily provide power for a decade or two or even as long as a century. Funded by DARPA and developed at Cornell, the battery generates enough power to emit a high-power RF communication pulse once e... More

Keith Stuart has a good article in today's Guardian Newspaper entitled 'How the 3D Engine is Changing the World'. Keith notes that John D Carmack, the programming legend behind the Doom and Quake games runs an aerospace company as a relaxing diversion from his role as technical director at games developer, id. Which goes to show that 3D engine design isn't rocket science – it's far more complicat... More

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device. Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact l... More

Electronics giant NEC has reportedly developed a wearable optical device that interprets foreign languages and projects a real-time translation directly onto the retina, enabling the wearer to communicate with other language speakers without an interpreter. The prototype device — called “Tele Scouter” — consists of a tiny retinal display and microphone mounted on an eyeglass frame. The m... More

Mistry is the creator of SixthSense, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera and tiny projector to display data and information onto surfaces, walls, and even your hand. Special fingertip sensors let users manipulate the data and use their hands to interact with it. During a presentation at the TEDIndia conference this week, the PhD student announced plans to release SixthSense under an ope... More

Letter by letter, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from his school's host computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock was trying to write "login," starting up a remote time-sharing system, but the system crashed after two letters, and lo! The Internet was born with the first data message sent between two networked computers.

3D TV, HTML5, video over Wi-Fi, superfast USB, and mobile "augmented reality" will emerge as breakthrough technologies in the next few years. Here's a preview of what they do and how they work.

The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection. But why stop there?