Raise your hand if you’ve ever been somewhere you wish you could disappear. You know, just blink right out of existence — push a button on a gadget or whip out an invisibility poncho, then vanish.
Alt Tech
The World’s Most Powerful Climate Change Supercomputer Powers Up
For all the political discord over climate change, one thing everyone can probably agree on is that when you’re throwing computational resources at modeling weather, the more the merrier.
Think of the new computer that just …
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 …
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 …
Netatmo Home Weather Station Kit Brings Out Your Inner Meteorologist
I took a meteorology class in undergrad as an elective because I’ve always been into the weather: tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos, ball lightning, supercells, squalls, you name it. Not enough to pursue it as a career, but let’s …
Penny for Your Rockets: Microthrusters Powered by Ion Beams Could Propel Satellites Through Space
Imagine rockets so small you could fit them through a piggybank slot. Imagine those rockets jetting microscopic beams of ions drawn from a reservoir of liquid plasma. Now imagine — or don’t, because they’re not imaginary — that …
Z Machine Produces Six Times the World’s Energy to Create White Dwarf Star
Calling Tony Stark! The Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico is the stuff of comic book legend.
The massive X-ray generator is capable of creating what astronomer Don Winget calls “star stuff,” …
If You Need a Reason to Get Excited About Technology Again, This Is It
Early Monday morning, the 33-year-old version of me watched live as NASA engineers cheered, hugged and patted each other on the back. The Curiosity rover had landed safely on Mars and I was awake at close to 2am on a …
The Future of Smart Health
If you follow my column here at Techland, you will know that I write quite a bit about smart devices. The road map of the technology industry is one where very powerful semiconductors and sensors are being embedded into many …
Curiosity Takes Center Stage as Crowds Cheer in Times Square
It was a bit surreal to stand in the middle of Times Square and hear a throng of revelers chant “NASA! NASA!” as if the space agency had just won a gold medal in the Olympics. They were cheering the successful landing of …
