Geeking Out

Two university art professors are determined to bring a classic 19th-century device back into use.

Our warm-weather adventures continue as we saddle up on mountain bikes to go test some of the latest off-road cycling gear, including bikes, helmets, shoes and outerwear.

To sit back, cross one's arms, and declare the console war over would be ludicrous at this point.

It's a unusually cruel fate even in the twisted world of spider sex: When male dark fishing spiders copulate, they die -- death is the?unavoidable consequence of the mechanism by which males transfer sperm to females.

I hope you've always wanted a smartphone-controlled door lock because the tech world is here to shove them in your face. Or hand, rather.

Living the Wired Life is a series of profiles looking at people whose passion for their hobbies borders on obsession.

Companies are pulling more and more content off of outside social streams like Twitter and Facebook and onto websites they own and control.

curtwoodward writes "Driverless cars. Balloon-based wireless networks. Face-mounted computers. Gigabit broadband networks. In recent months, Google has been unveiling a series of transformative side projects that paint a picture of the search pioneer expanding far beyond an online advertising company. At the same time, Google has been trying to convince enterprise software buyers that it's finally, really, truly serious about competing with Microsoft for their business. Which version of Google's future should you believe?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DeviceGuru writes "Researchers at the Biorob lab at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), have announced a cat-like robot that is claimed to be the fastest quadruped robot under 30 kilograms. The Cheetah-cub Robot, which runs real-time Xenomai Linux on an x86-based RoBoard robot control board, mimics the biomechanics of a cat to increase the speed and stability of it quadroped legs, helping it achieve speeds of 1.42m/s. The goal of the still-early-stage project is to encourage research in biomechanics, with an aim toward building faster robots for search and rescue, or ground exploration. More info is available on EPFL's Cheetah page." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "A German computer scientist is taking a fresh look at the 46-year old Amdahl's law, which took a first look at limitations in parallel computing with respect to serial computing. The fresh look considers software development models as a way to overcome parallel computing limitations. 'DEEP keeps the code parts of a simulation that can only be parallelized up to a concurrency of p = L on a Cluster Computer equipped with fast general purpose processors. The highly parallelizable parts of the simulation are run on a massively parallel Booster-system with a concurrency of p = H, H >> L. The booster is equipped with many-core Xeon Phi processors and connected by a 3D-torus network of sub-microsecond latency based on EXTOLL technology. The DEEP system software allows to dynamically distribute the tasks to the most appropriate parts of the hardware in order to achieve highest computational efficiency.' Amdahl's law has been revisited many times, most notably by John Gustafson." Read more of this story at Slashdot.