Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Astro Boy’s Retrofuturistic World Has Hints of Real-Life Tech
When Astro Boy debuted as a Japanese manga comic almost 50 years ago, people had an out-of-this world notion of what the future would look like.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Robotic Surgeons Take Over at a Hospital Near You
Once considered oddities, multiarmed tools are becoming mainstays of hospital operating rooms.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Hollywood Reality Check: The Real Science of Brain Puppetry
A slate of new Hollywood science-fiction films share a common vision: In the future, we will become a race of puppet masters.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Why Apple’s New iPhone Doesn’t Matter Nearly as Much as its Old One
Apple introduced its latest iPhone, the 3GS yesterday.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
For Future of Mind Control, Robot-Monkey Trials Are Just a Start
The Force, it appears, may be with us sooner than expected. A study in the journal Nature this spring all but confirmed the latest evolution in the hard-charging, heady field of cybernetics: Monkeys can control machines with their brains. In the experiment, conducted by neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, a pair of macaque monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains were able to quickly learn how to operate a robot arm as though it were their own, successfully feeding themselves more than half the time.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
How the PS3 Helped Build the World’s Fastest Supercomputer
Gaming’s goodwill processor—the one inside the PlayStation 3—has proved once again that it’s around for more than just kicking butt in Grand Theft Auto. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have used microprocessors developed for the PS3 to power the fastest supercomputer on earth, the Roadrunner.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Gaming’s Guns of Tomorrow: Ready For War—or Inspiration?
Whether it’s a rifle erupting with high-speed plasma (a Halo favorite), another magnetic proximity mine blowing up whomever dares run over it (a GoldenEye staple) or some other as-yet-uninvented gun spewing more neon-colored energy, the virtual arsenals of video games have been thoroughly picked apart, overplayed and underestimated. The weapons selection in multiplayer-oriented shooters is [...]
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Digital Transition Looms, but Do Americans Have a Right to TV?
Next February, somewhere in America, someone out there is going to flip on his tube for some “Law & Order: SVU” and see nothing but fuzz. He’ll probably grapple with his rabbit ears and pound the side of his aging CRT, but no amount of cajoling will bring back Ice-T’s interrogation room or Richard Belzer’s last unfunny stand. That’s because on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009, the FCC will repossess the analog spectrum from the major television broadcasters and the networks will go all-digital.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It
Search is dead. Or at least that’s the opinion of one tuned-in venture capitalist I’ve been getting to know this year. We were recently discussing the drawn-out Microsoft-Yahoo-Google showdown and its larger implications when my fellow futurist issued his bold statement as a sort of summary dismissal of the whole multibillion-dollar battle. In his opinion, Silicon Valley’s Big Three are fighting over the scraps of the last decade of innovation while there’s a sea change taking place in the way people use the Internet–one that may leave the Web’s biggest players holding all the cards to a game nobody wants to buy into anymore.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Shooting for Realism: How Accurate Are Video-Game Weapons?
In real life, people rarely want to get into a firefight. But in many video games, particularly military-themed first-person shooters (FPS) like the just-released Rainbow Six Vegas 2, you can’t wait to step into the line of fire. After all, you’re an elite commando, and there’s no way not to fight–no button to press to call your nervous wreck of a wife or go hang out with the kids. It doesn’t matter how many bullets you take while gunning down whole platoons of terrorists and mercenaries, because this is red-blooded escapism at its geekiest. So shut up and start shooting, guys.
But unlike sci-fi FPS games such as Halo or Doom, military shooters have a tradition of so-called realism. Most of the in-game weapons are available now–or at least loosely based on designs that could eventually reach the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, as optimistic as game developers might be about a high-tech replacement for the M-16 assault rifle, there are no plasma rifles or rail guns in your arsenal. … So as this successful genre continues to deliver best-selling titles, will increasingly powerful PCs and game consoles allow military shooters to become more realistic than ever?
Friday, January 25, 2008
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the 700-MHz Auction but Were Afraid to Ask
When analog television broadcasting goes dark in the United States on Feb. 17, 2009, and the huge analog transmitters of more than 1,600 broadcast stations are turned off, what will happen to those radio frequencies formerly used for analog TV? Well, for UHF channels 60 to 69, the future will be decided starting this week, as the Federal Communications Commission begins to auction that reclaimed bandwidth, bringing at least $10 billion into the treasury from auction winners and possibly allowing a dramatic expansion of wireless spectrum for cellular voice and data communication.
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