The Year in News: What Happened Next (Stories From November-December 2014)

Concluding our look back at the stories we covered during 2014 and what happened next, we turn to November. The Unicode Consortium, which develops standards to make sure characters appear consistently across different software and systems, unveiled proposals for changes to emoji, a system of characters for expressing emotions. It suggested the option to choose between […]

The Year in News: What Happened Next (Stories From September-October 2014)

Continuing our look at the stories we covered in 2014 and subsequent developments, we turn to September. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani argued that blocking Internet access to cut down political protest was harming the country’s scientific progress. He also lifted a ban on broadband providers offering fast speeds on fixed lines and cellphone networks, something seen as […]


The Year in News: What Happened Next (Stories From July-August 2014)

Continuing our look back at the stories we covered in 2014 and subsequent developments, we turn to July. The Department of Homeland Security brought in new rules saying all electronic devices, including cellphones, had to be powered up for security checks for flights into the US; those with dead batteries and no charger would not […]

The Year in News: What Happened Next (Stories From May-June 2014)

Continuing our look back at the stories we covered in 2014 and their subsequent developments, we turn to May. Despite finally bringing in a deadline to stop issuing security updates for the 13-year-old Windows XP, Microsoft issued a patch for Internet Explorer on the system, vowing it was a one-off. It has since stuck to […]

The Year in News: What Happened Next (Stories From March-April 2014)

As we continue our look back on the stories we covered in 2014 — and the subsequent developments — we reach March. A group of more than a million players joined forces to beat Pokemon Red/Blue through a project that translated chat room comments into commands on a game broadcast over Twitch. That inspired similar […]

This Creepy Hexapod Has Robotic Snakes for Legs [Video]

A rather creepy hexapod robot that has robotic snakes for legs. Each of these legs were built using the technology of a previous snake-like robot built by the Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab (Video at the bottom of this post.) Initial demonstrations of autonomous walking of “Snake Monster”, a hexapod robot built with modular actuators from […]

The Year in News: What Happened Next (Stories From January-February 2014)

It’s time once again to take a look back at some of the news stories we’ve covered here at GaS in 2014 as well as following up on later developments. In January, AT&T started offering companies the chance to make “sponsorship” payments that meant they picked up the tab when users streamed or downloaded their […]

World’s Fastest Internet Comes To… Minneapolis

Minneapolis is to get what’s being billed as the world’s fastest broadband connection, a whopping 10 gigabits per second. The service is available to around 30,000 homes and businesses in the city and is provided by US Internet. It already provides a gigabit service but has now flipped the switch to increase that ten-fold. Although […]

Google Completes Self-Driving Car Prototype

Google has published photos of its first “complete” prototype of a self-driving car. It hopes to test it on public roads next year. The first mock-up of the company’s vehicle was unveiled back in May but was missing several key features, most notably headlights. Since then Google has built a range of test vehicles, each […]

A Robotic Spider Dress That Attacks People When They Get Too Near Too Fast [Video]

This is super creepy. Aptly called the ‘Spider Dress’, this piece of wearable tech features animatronic mechanical limbs that respond to external stimuli while defending the personal space of the wearer. The dress provides an extension of the wearers intuition: It uses proximity sensors as well as a respiration sensor to both define and protect […]