Brian links

The Cryoscope shows the user exactly what to expect outside by haptically exhibiting exactly how cold or warm it is to be outside. The user simply touches an aluminum cube that has been heated or cooled to the appropriate temperature. The unit fetches weather data from the internet, and translates it to the cube physically, pumping heat in or out of the cube.

While smartphones are awesome little computers, one of the things that really makes them useful is their built-in sensors - many apps are made possible via a phone's accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS, microphone, camera, or some combination of the bunch. The thing is, though, all of those sensors are stuck in the smartphone. What if you want to use your phone to monitor another device? Well, that's where NODE comes in. The proposed gadget could be placed on or near a device, and would wirelessly relay data from multiple onboard sensors, via Bluetooth.

Seriously? You care enough about temporal accuracy buy an atomic clock but you don't know how to build one? We won't tell.Thankfully DIY Physics has a great tutorial on how to build your own with parts from eBay.

People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer's eyeballs in real time. According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected "to cost around the price of current smartphones," or $250 to $600.

In On The Brink we discuss the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud. Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. Concepts such as borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today's 'dumb society' are brought up and discussed.

Last week, physicist Brian Cox showed us why everything that could happen does happen in a riveting tour of the quantum universe. In this fascinating short excerpt from BBC's A Night With The Stars, Cox turns to the Pauli exclusion principle - a quantum mechanics theorem holding that no two identical particles may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously - to explain why everything is connected to everything else, an idea at once utterly mind-bending and utterly intuitive, found everywhere from the most ancient Buddhist scripts to the most cutting-edge research in biology and social science.

As I said in my recent review, I generally had a blast making my way through Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the PlayStation Vita. Despite some annoyances with the system's touch-screen and tilt-based controls, I had a good time working through the shooting and climbing sections and being rewarded with some well-acted witty banter in the cut scenes. But despite my overall enjoyment, there was still one point in the game where I was so frustrated I was ready to turn it off and never return. And while this frustration was probably at least as much my fault as the game's, I still think it would have been nice, and much less frustrating, if the game had offered just a little help getting me past that point.

Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty member will cost the universities $27.50/year for this right that the law gives them for free, along with a collection of other blanket licenses of varying legitimacy. In order to enforce these licenses, all faculty email will be subject to surveillance.

There's been a movement afoot to boycott Elsevier journals. It's started over in the mathematics community, led by Timothy Gowers, a serious mathematician indeed. The objections to Elsevier are the ones you'd think: high prices, unsplittable bundles of journal subscriptions for institutions, and their strong support for legislation like the Research Works Act.

We're making the TextYard college bookstore scrapers open source.  Any college student with rudimentary coding skills will now be able to take on their local bookstore.

do we want to submit a proposal?

Today, Dr. Kaku addresses this question: MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. What can this super camera enable us to see?

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in California and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology - have developed a "biological computer" made entirely from biomolecules that is capable of deciphering images encrypted on DNA chips.

For those of you who are addicted to merge new technologies to interface-archeology here is a new 'Tworsekey'.  A vintage looking tweeting device which takes input in the form of morse code and tweets the output. It features arduino and the ethernet shield.  The sketch can be downloaded from here.  Needless to say that the design is open sourced.

A debate that has gone on for millennia has flared up again in recent years Is the fact you are reading this story a decision you arrived at it by your own free choice, or was your interest programmed into the universe from the moment of the big bang? What makes free will such a fun topic is not only that it dives deep into physics, neuroscience, and philosophy, but also that we all feel we have a direct stake in the answers.

interesting - bet law enforcement uses it to reverse engineer energy high spots - possible labs or growing dens

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BetterNouveau is organizing a promising workshop about circuit milling with Roland iModela in Turin. Massimo is going to walk you around milling your own shield.

Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong are currently putting together a paper explaining why the presence of Dyson Spheres would actually deepen the mystery that is the Fermi Paradox. Armstrong recently gave a talk on the subject, titled "von Neumann probes, Dyson spheres, exploratory engineering and the Fermi paradox."