Being Pope may mean good things in the afterlife but here on Earth, it doesn't count for a lot on the Internet. On the day Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis, over 600 domain names were registered by cybersquatters. They must be evangelicals. Even mistaken names like Francis I were taken. So Popefrancis.org is not available to the Roman Pontiff, along with most of the...
read moreAs most of the entire world knows by now, Mother Nature gave us a bit of a surprise this week - a meteor exploded in the atmosphere and shattered windows and injured hundreds of people in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia.With just the concussive force of the meteorite explosion shattering things, you can imagine what would have happened if a meteorite hit a building - one meteorite did...
read moreThe rumor mill has it that Elsevier is in advanced talks to buy Science 2.0 fave Mendeley, a platform academics use to collate PDFS and share research and collaborate via a social network (and a terrific company all the way around, in my opinion). TechCrunch says that the sale might close by the end of February and could be in the region of $100 million. But they also say Mendeley has closed...
read moreResearchers at Imperial College have released a video game that was written in part by what they call an Artificial Intelligence (AI) "machine" named Angelina, which is a clever acronym for "A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named Angelina".Their latest effort, released last month, is called "A Puzzling Present" (download it here). Players have to help Santa collect gifts on 30 Christmas levels...
read moreElsevier has launched a new open access, online journal, Leukemia Research Reports. It will publish a range of peer-reviewed short form papers, including brief communications, case reports, letters to the editors, images and debate articles about basic and/or applied clinical research in leukemias, lymphomas, multiple myeloma and other hematologic malignancies. The editors of Leukemia...
read moreViviTouch is a kind of 'artificial muscle' that seeks to make video games feel more real. The technology behind it is electroactive polymers, developed by Bayer subsidiary Artificial Muscle of Sunnyvale, right up the road from me.It's basically a new sort of motor that converts electrical energy into movement, to go beyond the traditional haptic interface people expect by now. Motor?...
read more