Colossus: Creating a Giant
A short film made by Google to celebrate Colossus and those who built it, in particular Tommy Flowers. Colossus was the world's first electronic computer, used for code-breaking at Bletchley Park...
View ArticleSand Flea Jumping Robot
Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented...
View ArticleGoogle demos self-driving car with legally blind 'driver'
Google announced its self-driving car project in 2010 to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient. Having safely completed over 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, they wanted to...
View ArticleArthur C. Clarke on the Internet and personal computers
In1974 Arthur C. Clarke told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that every household in 2001 will have a computer and be connected all over the world. He predicted that all citizens would use...
View ArticleDARPA Legged Robot Mule
Today's dismounted warfighter can be saddled with more than 100 pounds of gear, resulting in physical strain, fatigue, and degraded performance. To help alleviate the impact of excess weight on...
View ArticleRegina Dugan: From mach-20 glider to humming bird drone
"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of...
View ArticleSherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?
As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication -- and asks us to...
View ArticlePython Metaprogramming for Mad Scientists and Evil Geniuses
This talk from the 2012 PyCon covers the power and metaprogramming features of Python that cater to mad scientists and evil geniuses. This will also be of interest to others who just want to use of...
View ArticleHow to Pull an All-Nighter
It's final exam season again, and for students across the country, the midnight oil is burning bright. Yet a question looms: It's the morning after an intense all-night cram session, and there's a...
View ArticleHow to Count Infinity
The notion of infinity is fundamentally beyond the human ability to comprehend, but that hasn't stopped mathematicians from trying. So just what is infinity, and why is there more than one of them?...
View ArticleIntroducing the Leap
Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can...
View Articleon{X} - automate your life
"Microsoft is today announcing the beta release of on{X} (pronounced ‘on-ex’), a website and Android app combo that provides users with extended control of their Android phones via remote programming....
View ArticleLEGO Turing Machine
This is a short documentary about the LEGO Turing Machine built by Jeroen van den Bos and Davy Landman at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam (Netherlands). They built it for CWI's...
View ArticleCuriosity's Seven Minutes of Terror
Team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover's final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.
View ArticleNASA robot Curiosity to land on Mars at 1:31am Mon, Aug. 6
NASA's nuclear-powered Curiosity will be the largest man-made object to ever touch down on another planet. The semi-autonomous robot will search for signs of life, past or present, while scaling a...
View ArticleTop 10 Things Consumers Want Most from the Smart Grid
The concept of a "smart" electrical power grid is one of the most promising ways societies might improve energy efficiency. Here's how Wikipedia describes the smart grid idea."A smart grid is an...
View ArticleThe rise of human-computer cooperation
Brute computing force alone can't solve the world's problems. Data mining innovator Shyam Sankar explains why solving big problems (like catching terrorists or identifying huge hidden trends) is not a...
View ArticleAndrew Blum: What is the Internet, really?
When a squirrel chewed through a cable and knocked him offline, journalist Andrew Blum started wondering what the Internet was really made of. So he set out to go see it -- the underwater cables,...
View ArticleClay Shirky on how the Internet will transform govenment
The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can't governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how...
View ArticleSmoothLife: a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life
SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers. This rule is SmoothLifeL...
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