3D printing is stuck in a bit of a rut. There are companies trying to push the technology beyond the trinket market, but many of the existing printers are slow, jam often, and don’t always make perfect copies. One new printer introduced at the TED conference may have the answer.
The words that the world types into Google search are an ever-evolving global stream of consciousness, constantly fed by questions, idle thoughts, and random keywords.
For the most part, Americans seem to have greeted the revelations about government snooping from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with a shrug.
Responding to mounting questions, Hillary Clinton—the former US secretary of state and a presumptive presidential candidate—said this week that she “opted for convenience” by using a personal email account instead of her official one.
When the fourth generation of cellphone networks—usually referred to as 4G LTE—rolled out, all of the internet was supposed to be available immediately at our fingertips. Networks advertise services around the world that are “blazing fast,” “super fast,” and even “ultrafast.”
Google X, the research lab running Google’s experiment with self-driving cars, could start letting members of the public test out its cars as early as this year.
Apple is known for its attention to detail when it comes to product design. It has been winning awards for its beautifully crafted consumer electronics, made of high-end “space age” materials, for years. Apple has also been accused, however, of being an over-exuberant patent seeker that successfully patented a rectangle.
In one week, Pebble’s new Time smartwatch has become the most “funded” project in Kickstarter history, approaching $14 million in pre-orders. The watch project generated more than $9 million in pre-orders on its first day alone, and has slowly been making its way up the chart all week.
In 2011, Google launched a high-speed internet and television service in Kansas City, which it has since expanded to several other US metropolitan areas. Google Fiber is on par with the large internet service providers when it comes to price, except it is generally providing a much faster connection. That’s starting to force some of the larger providers’ hands—Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast are all in varying stages of trying to compete with Google’s high-speed offering. While Google does not yet (and may never) have the infrastructure scale of its larger competitors, it’s showing consumers what’s possible in broadband. It could well do the same for mobile phone services.
This post has been corrected.
Google announced earlier this week that it was going to ban adult content from Blogger, its blogging service. But now the company has changed its decision. In a short post on the Google Product web forum, the Blogger team said that it had decided to update its plans thanks to the response it had received from its blog users.
Trying on shoes is a hassle. After sifting through endless varieties to find a pair you like, they end up being a bit too tight or too loose, and the clerk invariably says it’s the only size they have; you leave disappointed. One startup is trying to change this—with a combination of 3D scanning and printing—by creating shoes and insoles that perfectly fit your feet, whatever size they may be.
When it comes to innovation, the rest of the world seems to be outpacing Europe, but patent applicants are coming to Europe in droves to make sure their inventions are protected there. Of the 247,000 patent applications sent to the European Patent Office (EPO) in 2014, 53% came from just three countries—US, China and Japan—with more than a quarter of the applications coming from the US alone. Among European nations, only Germany made it into the top five countries for patent applications.
They clean our floors, assemble parts in our factories, beat us at chess and feed us tomatoes. Robots are becoming ubiquitous, and economists from Boston and Columbia Universities say they will have a dire effect on the US economy.
The new Pebble Time smart watch was announced this morning and it’s being funded, like the first Pebble Watch, through Kickstarter. Its funding page, which has only been live a short time, has already shot past its $500,000 goal—it was at well over $3 million when we published this. The original watch is the second-best-funded project of all time on Kickstarter. If this project beats its initial goals by the same proportion—over 10,000%—as the original watch, it will make over $50 million. Watch the number tick up in real time on Pebble’s Kickstarter page.
Apple’s next release of its Mac OS X Yosemite operating system is going to be a little more inclusive.
There aren’t many album covers that are as immediately recognizable as Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. It’s a minimalistic cover—black and white and somewhere between a seismogram and a topographical map. It has adorned posters, t-shirts, tattoos, and parodies around the world since its release in 1979. It’s even been 3D-printed. But the artwork behind the album had a very humble beginning: It was actually inspired by the work of a PhD student at Cornell University in 1970, Scientific American’s Jen Christiansen discovered.
Even though it’s looking increasingly likely that humanity will find a way to wipe itself off the face of the Earth, there’s a chance that our creative output may live on. Servers, hard drives, flash drives, and disks will degrade (as will our libraries of paper books, of course), but a group of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have found a way to encode data onto DNA—the very same stuff that all living beings’ genetic information is stored on—that could survive for millennia.
You might expect to use virtual reality goggles for video games and entertainment, but what about for designing your next pair of shoes? A patent awarded to Nike on Feb. 3 shows the sneaker behemoth may be exploring that possibility.
In an ornate hall in the Philadelphia State House in 1787, a few dozen men drafted the US constitution. For four months, they debated and revised the document until they had something they could generally agree on. Today, they wouldn’t even have to leave their homes. A new site could let any diplomats-to-be work on drafting a new constitution in real time over the web.
Apple is reportedly moving beyond computers and mobile devices to take on the likes of Tesla Motors in the electric car market, the Wall Street Journal says (paywall). Apple reportedly has “hundreds of employees” working on a project codenamed “Titan,” a secret plan to build a minivan-shaped electric vehicle.
Android Wear may have been first out of the gate in the smart watch race, but only 720,000 Wear devices were shipped in 2014, a report from research firm Canalys said Feb. 11. That’s about 15% of all the 4.6 million smart wearables that Canalys calculates were shipped in 2014.
3D printing has been used to make fast food, jewelry, electric guitars, and tiny versions of ourselves. But one area where it shows particular promise is medicine. Quartz visited a lab where a research team has figured out how to use a 3D printer that sells for $2,500 to make replacement body parts out of living cells.
Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company will partner with First Solar to build a massive solar farm in California to power its buildings. Cook, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, said the farm will power its offices, including the under-construction Apple Campus 2 “spaceship” site, along with its 53 retail stores and datacenter in the state.
