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Google is inviting K-12 students all over the United States to participate in Doodle 4 Google, a contest to see who can create the best Google doodle – you know, the modified logos of Google that they use to celebrate holidays, honor important people or commemorate special events. The theme for the doodle requires…

If Photoshopping believable images is hard work, I wonder how much more complicated it is to fabricate video. We’ve all seen green (or blue) screens in behind-the-scenes features for movies, but if you think that they’re only used for fantasy or science fiction films, think again.

Stargate Studios posted a reel of their “Virtual…

Citizens of the United States of America, young and old, noob or hardcore, Xbox loyalist, Wii fanatic or PS3 fanboy, hear ye hear ye! Microsoft is looking for video game testers! The most likely location of the “Playtest facility” will be in Microsoft’s Seattle compound, but they’re encouraging everyone from the USA to sign…

It happened in Kansas, of all places: 32-year old Nick Harris was about to take his daughter to school when 6-year old Ashlyn Hough, a child of one of his neighbors, was accidentally run over by a Mercury sedan backing out of a driveway. Like a speeding… man, able to run as fast as…

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”.…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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!”…

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…