There simply isn't a bigger question: wrapping up "Why are we here?", "Why is everything the way it is?" and "What if I don't believe a gigantic invisible skybeard did it?" -it's a Holy Grail of science. The theoreticians want to explain it, the experimenters want to detect it and - unlike 99% of all research - the public will actually care about the answer for a few minutes. We report on five ways scientists have have studied the beginning of everything and, in mockery of all you might think possible, made the question even cooler.1. There's a hole in...
We’ve once wondered if this whole field of mobile experience design got invented originally by frustrated Europeans as a work-around to the UI limitations of nokia smart phones. You see, back in the olden days (like 24 months ago), it was the mighty nokia that ruled the global smartphone market. Nokia n-series phones had by far the most features (wifi, 3g, storage) and the best cameras and video cameras etc. But still, hobbled as they were by 9 digit keypads and a notionally open, but still crufty, symbian OS, of that good stuff was sometimes hard to make the...
A couple weeks ago, I introduced to readers the idea that there is an irreversible progression of advertising messaging away from the 100-year tradition of mass reach and building awareness and toward an emphasis on achieving and maintaining consumer trust and passion. (Jack Myers' Five Emerging Principles for Redefining Advertising and Marketing Effectiveness) Advertising agency executives with responsibility for creative output are loathe to accept metrics around emotional connections, as Publicis Chairman Maurice Levy reinforced recently in comments at the Monaco Media Forum. But Levy and his colleagues will have no choice but to accept new measures of advertising effectiveness...
MSI is to offer new netbooks: the Wind U110, U115 and U120. The U120 is much the same as the original U100, but with 3G built-in. It's the other two that do clever things with the standard netbook loadout, though all remain stuck with a 600-line display. Here's a bullet list: • Options for 2GB of RAM. • The Z530, a more expensive version of Intel's Atom CPU, which uses 20% less power. • A new chipset that uses less power. • 6-cell battery as standard. • Hybrid flash/spinning storage, also said to use less power. The holy grail is...
Image: Michelin The Holy Grail of Eco-transportation Could this be the technology that revolutionizes transportation? Will the company that invented the air-pressure tire trump that achievement by making electric cars affordable and practical? Michelin's Active Wheel system is the holy grail of wheel technology: a wheel with an integrated drive motor that has succeeded to meet unsprung weight limitations. The Active Wheel frees automobile designers from the restrictions posed by the need for engine, transmission, drive shaft, different......
Last August, I saw the impact of Twitter's velocity first-hand with a fundraising experiment. I was able to raise $2,500 in 90 minutes at Gnomedex. I wondered whether or not those results would be replicable? Right before Thanksgiving, the TweetsGiving effort helped Epic Change raise over $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania. As Lucy Bernholz notes, this might be one more example of fundraising on Twitter is less marginal and moving to the middle.Lucy points to some implications for organizations to consider: Video, blogging, twitter, online payments, viral marketing, instant thank yous, etc as the minimal...
Is this tire really the "Holy Grail of Eco-Transportation," as Treehugger believes? Maybe. Time will tell if the electric engine inside the Active Wheel from Michelin will catch on and further drive down the cost of electric vehicles. For now, let's delve deep into this tire-motor combo, and you can decide for yourself if it has what it takes to kill the gas-guzzling combustion engine for good. The wheels, while still in development over at Michelin, already have a vehicle ready to receive them. Called the Heuliez Will, this tiny tot from Opel doesn't look like much, but it has...
Photography by Simon Jansen New Zealander Simon Jansen has all the bona fides of an alpha maker. A software engineer and classic car restorer, he's got a half-built R2-D2 and a custom minibike he made from scratch. He achieved geek fame with his ASCII animation of Star Wars scenes (asciimation.co.nz), which practically defined obsessive attention to detail. But a jet-powered beer cooler? This bloke operates on a whole 'nother level of absurdity. Jansen set out to make the holy grail of many a maker: the homemade jet engine. In his Auckland garage, he welded his own combustor, bolted it...
I am a strong believer in a person’s right to privacy. I don’t believe it is right for anyone to have to give up any part of that privacy. It doesn’t matter whether it is through trickery, subterfuge, social pressure or any other method you can think up. Our private lives are sometimes the only thing that is our very own. That idea though seems to be under attack in our modern technological world. This idea of personal privacy and interaction with an increasingly Internet based world is something that I think about - a lot. I also read many of...
The latest iPhone 2.2 operating system fixes many things, but something is still missing: Push notification services. Once again, Apple has missed the opportunity to enable push notification in a new update, which is specially bad after they failed to meet their self-imposed September deadline. That makes it almost two months late now. So what's the problem? Is the cause just a technical glitch or maybe there are other hidden, last-minute reasons behind it? Many developers and users were eagerly awaiting for the 2.2 update to finally enable push notification services, which disappeared from the 2.1 beta right before release....
Image by via CrunchBase Well, at least we know what the topic of conversation will be on many major sites today. Kara Swisher reported that Twitter and Facebook have had acquisition talks, but they have failed. The price is said to be $500 million in Facebook stock, with no cash changing hands. Personally, I was surprised at this price but given that Mark Zuckerberg seems to really like what they have done, it is not as surprising: At the Web 2.0 interview, Zuckerberg called Twitter an “elegant model” and that he was “really impressed by what they’ve done.” Obviously,...
Yup, the official Monty Python channel has launched with high-quality videos of their sketches straight from the vault. Now, you can impress your friends by quoting that hilarious scene from Holy Grail verbatim. Trust me - people love it when you do that. Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment » The Best Links: The Monty Python Channel...
