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Think Gay Wilkinson’s anvil launching antics were crazy? 3 months ago, Bob Moravitz and his family and friends went beyond launching a small piece of metal – they launched cars. And a pickup. and a camper with a boat in tow. And two school buses. KARE 11’s Joe Fryer calls it “Crash for Clunkers”.
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I’m not a Twitter addict – although I do have an account – so I might be wrong on this one, but will a device that only sends and receives tweets be worth buying? That’s what Peek is counting on as is launches the TwitterPeek. Much like their one-trick ponies Peek & Peek Pronto, which…

Ah, software problems. We’ve all experienced them in varying degrees – sometimes it’s just a stupid online video that won’t load, and sometimes the operating system itself gives up. Now imagine a future where programs can still be compromised, or attacked, but will no longer crash or hang. A group of MIT researchers, led by…

Here’s another one of them MAVs that’ll soon be flying all over the place. A group of MIT students – Abe Bachrach, Anton de Winter, Ruije He, Garrett Hemann and Sam Prentice (I think I got +10 to my IQ after spelling their names) – developed an autonomous flight system that could sweep and analyze…

Scientists working for NASA have built a “variable gravity simulator” powerful enough to levitate drops of water up to 2 inches wide, and even young mice. The device is made of a “superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals.” I don’t know how the magnet can levitate…

Stanford computer science and electrical engineering professor Marc Levoy is a bit tired of the marketing gimmicks for digital cameras. He says that the “megapixel war” is over and the battle has now shifted from quantity to quality, as in what feature does camera X have that camera Y doesn’t. But Levoy doesn’t want to…

The man in the picture below is UC San Diego Computer Science Ph.D. student Stephen Checkoway. In his hands is a printout that proves that his team’s “return-oriented programming” exploit was successfully able to steal votes from a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine. Checkoway was probably like, “Yay! Our democracy is in danger!” Just…

I’m sure you’ve seen the plethora of ground combat robots that we’ve featured here at technabob, and I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned at least a couple of aerial drones. Now, with the conclusion of the frighteningly successful Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Autonomus Underwater Vehicles competition (AUVSI AUV), all our base are really belong…

Microsoft’s “top research and strategy officer” Craig Mundie demoed various flashy & functional future tech that the company believes will be an integral part of the future desktop computing experience. Mundie’s demo included “hologram-like videoconferencing, a virtual digital assistant, and multiple surface computers, along with voice-, touch- and gesture-recognition technology.” Where’s the visual & olfactory…

What was the last thing you bought at a vending machine? A can of soda? A magazine? A bike? A gold nugget? Live bait? Woman’s Day’s Brynn Mannino made a list of some of the weirdest vending machines we have today. The weird thing about the list is that Japan’s entry is so lame as…

Some say that the best motivation is the fear of humiliation. Want to graduate at the top of your batch? Tell everyone you know! Supposedly this will make you work extra hard, because you already gave your word, and failure will only give the people around you the license to point out how much of…

At least dogs get food when they get things right. This poor robot Einstein, made by computer scientists from the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, was given time to play with its 31 artificial facial muscles while “staring” at its reflection in the mirror. The robot was also equipped with…