After strong winds and rain foiled his first attempts, on Sunday Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner completed a record-breaking (and sound barrier-shattering) 24-mile jump near Roswell, N.M.
Innovation
Meet X1, the Exoskeletal Robot Suit that Could Make Astronauts Super-Strong
When you read about robotics and human assistance devices, the inception-to-commercial-reality arrow usually points from military or space-based research back to civilian applications, say in the health industry. Infrared ear …
Lytro’s Light-Field Camera Gets Manual Settings
When Lytro released its namesake digital camera last spring, it wasn’t immediately clear what sort of person would want to buy it. On one hand, it was a genuine technological breakthrough: As the first consumer light-field …
Watch Live: Felix Baumgartner Freefalls from the Edge of Space
Keep it right here for live video of the Red Bull Stratos. Launching from Roswell, New Mexico, Felix Baumgartner will ascend to 120,000 feet in a stratospheric balloon then freefall back down to earth at top speeds estimated near …
Who Cares About Neil Young’s Ultra-High Quality Music Standard?
Neil Young claims he’s going to change the way we listen to digital music by pairing a new iPod-competitive Pono music player (I see “Ponyo” — how about you?) with an audiophile-caliber music download service. The claims are …
The Sad State of Japan’s Consumer Electronics Giants
The Washington Post‘s Chico Harlan has a sobering story on the dicey financial condition of big Japanese electronics companies such as Sony, Panasonic and Sharp. Once they were the gold standard in gadgets; now they’re struggling …
Take Kinect, Add Robotics, Strap to a Human and Presto — Automatic Building Mapper!
Mapping the insides of anything in real time is hard. Certainly harder than it looks in movies like The Dark Knight, where, near the end, a bat-suited Christian Bale dashes through a high-rise, taking out small squadrons of …
Voice Recognition’s Future: Hands-Free Siri Could Someday Be Possible
Controlling your phone by voice is great, but it’d be even better if you could do it without ever laying hands on the device.
Nuance Communications, the maker of Dragon dictation software, is working on it, according to a …
The Jetsons Turns 50: How the Future Looked in 1962
On Sunday, Sept. 23, 1962, Hanna-Barbera followed up its wildly successful prime-time cartoon The Flintstones with a new series about another family of a different era. TIME liked it. We said it was “silly and unpretentious, …
NASA Actually Working on Faster-than-Light Warp Drive
You know that scene in the film Contact where the “Machine” is spooling up, its three spinning rings kicking out crazy light and an electromagnetic field powerful enough to pitch nearby Navy battleships sideways, as Ellie (Jodie …
Ultrafast Chips that Run on Light: Nanoswitch Breakthrough Brings Us Closer
When you think about microprocessors and chipsets and circuit boards, if you’re like me, you think in metaphors: tiny green-and-silver cities comprising dozens of chips — some with billions of transistors — on copper …
Innovation in a Sea of Sameness
Ben Bajarin is a principal at Creative Strategies Inc., a technology industry analysis and market intelligence firm in Silicon Valley. He contributes to the “Big Picture” opinion column that appears every week on …