Category: Tech news

 Despite the promise of bountiful, cheap, and clean energy, nuclear energy didn’t completely overtake fossil fuels like everyone expected in the middle of the twentieth century. Among other things, fear of radiation leaks and waste products that have to be buried for hundreds of years turned the United States away from adopting it for more than a fraction of our energy usage. Read More

 From middle school girls’ sleepovers to more codified groups like the “Ladies’ Four O’Clock Club,” women have known for ages that there’s something special about the conversational dynamic that happens when a group of females get together. When women are with other women that they trust, they often can be completely honest and comfortable in a way that they… Read More

 One of the most recent applications from Westfield Labs is Dine On Time, an app that lets busy shoppers skip the line at restaurants in its food court and pay for their meal via mobile app. Since many of the diners in its San Francisco location are actually workers who have offices nearby, time is of the essence, and being able to place an order without having to wait in line is huge. Read More

 We’ve all been there. You’ve been out all day and suddenly that low battery alert pops up on your phone. If you’re lucky, the bar you’re at might have the right charger for your phone behind the counter. If you’re not, you’re walking or taking the bus instead of calling a car service. But with Y Combinator-backed Doblet, you might be able to get a charge… Read More

 Take Flappy Bird, make the bird fly vertically and avoid swinging things, and you have Swing Copters, the next mobile game from Dong Nguyen. Because let’s burn more of our time on this earth with mindless games. Read More

 As we move swiftly into an era of ubiquitous computing, Internets of Things, and mind-machine connections via wetware, it’s important to step back and take a look at where we’ve been. That’s why this How-To by Trammell Hudson is so cool. It shows how to boot a PDP-11 so you can play Adventure on a monochrome screen and reminds us that old computer were as finicky as Model… Read More

 Update 2: Here’s the latest from Azure, relating to its downtime:

Starting at 18 Aug 2014 17:49 UTC, a small subset of customers are experiencing connectivity issues to some Azure Services which may include Cloud Services, Virtual Machines, Websites, Automation, Service Bus, Backup, Site Recovery, HDInsight, Mobile Services, StorSimple and possible other Azure Services in multiple regions. Read More

 A new “anonymish” app called Looksee has launched, combining mobile photography with a Tinder-like matching element that lets anonymous users connect with each other over their shared photos. The idea is that when two users mutually like one another’s photos, their identities will then be revealed to each other, allowing them to make a personal connection and begin… Read More

 Microbiome is the ecosystem of bacteria that lives within us, which outnumber the number of human cells 10-to-1. Microbes in the microbiome perform functions such as digesting food and synthesizing vitamins and have also been linked to human mood and behavior. Read More

 40 million Americans take three or more vitamins a day, yet both the pill bottles and the way we buy them haven’t changed in decades. Well they’re about to, thanks to new Y Combinator startup Zen Health and its customized vitamin pack delivery service Zenamins. Punch in what you already take and answer a few questions and Zenamins will send you a personalized pill pack. Staying fit… Read More

 CGI has come a long way – from simulating Jar Jar Binks on the silver screen to replacing green screens with King’s Landing. Today, we should add this video to the progression. Producer and technical director Nobumichi Asai has used a projection technology called Omote to project makeup onto a live model’s face. Read More

 Over the course of the last year, Google’s AdWords advertising platform started launching a number of new products that allow advertisers to link ads and phone calls. Those include click-to-call ads, call metrics and calls as conversion in your AdWords stats, but today, it is taking this concept a bit further with the launch of Website Call Conversions. Read More

 Out this morning is a spec list for the forthcoming HP Stream laptop that will run Windows 8.1, and is expected to cost $199. It’s a device that Microsoft hopes will compete with Chromebooks, Google’s laptop offering that has consumed some PC market share, mostly among less expensive devices. Read More

 Ad tech company AppNexus just announced that it has raised an additional $60 million.
The company said that the round, which could eventually reach $100 million, valued AppNexus at $1.2 billion. The money came from an unnamed “large, Boston-based public equity and asset management firm.” Read More

 While communities built around GitHub and Stack Overflow have developers working together more than they ever have before, one group’s work is typically seen by too few, considering the impact it could have: researchers in academia, whose work at its most successful is typically discussed only at conferences or in journals. Read More