Smartest Machine on Earth to Take on Jeopardy! Grand Champions

This week, an episode of NOVA covered Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed to interpret and understand natural human language, with all its ambiguity: wordplay, puns, double-meanings, intuitive differentiations and subtlety. Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is the result of the DeepQA Project, the goal of which is to create a computer system […]


The “Solar Wind” Bridge Design Harnesses Energy Two Ways

Francesco Colarossi, Giovanna Saracino and Luisa Saracino, a trio of Italian designers, have come up with an ingenious way to generate energy without consuming valuable real estate. Between the pillars of a long-expanse bridge, a multitude of turbines capture wind energy from the faster-moving high-altitude currents. In addition, the (currently theoretical) road is paved with a […]

Space Tech Anniversary: Luna 9 Lands on the Moon

February 3, 1966: The first spacecraft to land on any non-Earth planetary body, the Soviet Union’s unmanned Luna 9 reaches the Moon. Equipped with radio and television capability, heat control system, power sources and a radiation detector, the payload touched down in Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”). Immediately thereafter, the four-panel seal opened and Luna […]

Apple Awarded Patent for Time Machine. Product Launch Scheduled for 1985

by Derek Clark Contributing Writer, [GAS] Remember as a kid how you’d dream about all the cool stuff you’d one day enjoy in the future? Well, you probably don’t have a pink hoverboard or self-lacing sneakers just yet, but chances are, Apple has already patented it. Recently, Mashable.com reported that Apple was granted 563 patents […]

Android in orbit: Google phone headed for space

British researchers plan to send a cellphone into orbit to discover if it will still work. If it does, it could mean major changes to the way satellites are used. The project, run by the University of Surrey and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited will involve sending a satellite named STRaND-1 into orbit. The 30cm-long satellite […]