Month: May 2014

Automotive Engineering

To make a car, Audi had to blow one up

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As reported on The Verge. By Aaron Souppouris The exploded car of Ingolstadt About an hour from Munich, Audi basically runs a city. Its headquarters are situated in Ingolstadt, a city of around 125,000 people. Audi employs over 35,000 here, an enormous complex housing corporate offices, research and development centers, production lines, and a large museum and visitors’ center. Today I’m standing in one of the many innocuous buildings, in front of the company’s new TT…

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Business Politics

HANA Visionary Vishal Sikka Resigns From SAP

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Ron Miller This afternoon, SAP announced in a statement that Vishal Sikka, Executive Board Member for Products and Innovation, has resigned for personal reasons. The resignation was effective immediately. At the same time, SAP named a couple of new executive board members, including Robert Enslin and Bernd Leukert. The news could indicate some disarray or possibly a power struggle at the software giant, especially coming so close to itsSAPPHIRENow Conference, which is scheduled…

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Culture Mobile

NYC inks deal to put train tickets on smartphones

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As reported on Engadget. BY ALEXIS SANTOS Part of New York City’s train system is set to get a 21st-century kick in the pants. Digital tickets that live on commuters’ smartphones will soon be introduced thanks to a deal inked between the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Board and Masabi, one of eleven companies that offered to build such a system for the city. The pact follows a — presumably successful — trial conducted between Masabi and the…

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Science

Scientists can trace your ancestors to within 30 miles using DNA

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As reported on Engadget. BY STEVE DENT You might know where your forebears lived a few generations prior, but how about the exact village they came from — 1,000 years ago? Thanks to DNA sequencing, it’s now possible to find that out in many cases according to researchers from the University of Sheffield in the UK. The aptly-named GPS or Geographic Population Structure tool was modeled using more than 100,000 DNA signatures called AIMs (ancestry-informative markers). Since those are often typical…

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Business Culture Random

High rollers: Las Vegas is poised to become the Disneyland of weed

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As reported on The Verge. By Lessley Anderson Cannabis entrepreneurs fight to stake their pot leaf in the world’s biggest tourist destination They won’t have neon signs, drive-thru windows, or 24-hour wedding chapels attached to them. But Las Vegas marijuana dispensaries will be massively profitable tourist attractions that could deepen the entire nation’s relationship with weed. At least that’s the hope of the 109 applicants who entered the heated competition for Vegas’ first medical marijuana dispensary…

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Application

Flipt Wants To Help You Make Smarter Home Investment — And Flipping — Decisions

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Frederic Lardinois  Tells You How Much Milk Your Wee Bairn Slurped All Day While the U.S. real estate market is still experiencing its ups and downs, the number of online real estate startups continues to increase quickly. The latest entrant in this business is Flipt, which aims to take some of the emotion out of real estate purchase decisions and replace it with a more data-driven approach. Flipt analyzes available residential properties in an area and then…

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SmartPhone Social Networking Tech

Ambient Proximity Is The Next Phase Of Location Sharing

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As reported on TechCrunch. by Josh Constine  accidentally Pulls Popular Shows Off The Service It’s not where your friends are, but how close they are that matters. After years of exact coordinate checkins, both Foursquare and Facebook are now focusing on ambient proximity — constantly and automatically sharing your approximate distance from close friends. Ambient proximity lets you know if a friend is near enough to meet up with, yet without the creepiness of seeing their every…

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Mobile SmartPhone

Paperfold is a foldable, transformable smartphone prototype

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As reported on Engadget. BY EMILY PRICE If Kyrocera’s folding smartphone Echo didn’t have enough screens for you, try this on for size. The Human Media Lab at Canada’s Queen’s University has created a fully functional smartphone that uses not two, but three different snap-together e-ink displays. The result is a gigantic device called PaperFold, that can do some pretty awesome stuff, especially with maps. You can display driving directions over all of the screens for easy planning, or fold the displays together…

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Entertainment Games

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare trailer features futuristic action, Kevin Spacey

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As reported on Engadget. BY JAMIE RIGG With Call of Duty being one of the most successful game franchises out there, you know there’s always going to be a next one. Well, the first trailer for that game has dropped, revealing its full title of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Kevin Spacey. The House of Cards actor appears to be cast in the role of a powerful, politically driven antihero (how original), but what we’re more interested in is the little hints…

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Space

NASA’s next spacesuit is this glowing hunchback chosen by online voters

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As reported on The Verge. By Adrianne Jeffries Last month, NASA asked people to vote for their favorite out of three possible designs for the outer shell of its Z-2 spacesuit. The winner has just been announced: 63 percent of voters felt very strongly about the aqua-blue enhanced “technology” design, which resembles the costumes in the classic sci-fi movie Tron. The designs weren’t that different, mostly varying in color scheme. All featured electroluminescent trim and geometric chest emblems. The…

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