According to a new Nielsen report, there is a big shift happening right before our eyes: Smartphones now account for 50% of all mobile phones in the United States.
Continue reading… “Fifty percent of mobile phone owners in the U.S. have smartphones”
Oscillating Gel Acts Like Artificial Skin, Giving Robots Potential Ability to ‘Feel’
Is this the face of feeling?
Sooner than later, robots may have the ability to “feel.” In a paper published online March 26 in Advanced Functional Materials, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated that a nonoscillating gel can be resuscitated in a fashion similar to a medical cardiopulmonary resuscitation…
Robo-readers: new helpers for teachers in the U.S.
Robo-readers are computers programmed to scan student essays and spit out a grade.
High school students in the U.S. are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots.
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The 9 to 5 is dead – redesigning work for the modern economy
No-hour work week.
The 9 to 5 workday is outdated. Happy workers are more healthy and more creative, so it’s time to start giving our workers the leeway to be happy (because otherwise they work all the time). The secret: Treat them like people.
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An app that prints your twitter feeds on toilet paper
Print your tweets on toilet paper.
People love customized toilet paper. There is a new app (with a name that might offend) lets you print toilet paper with your favorite Twitter feeds on ’em. Who needs bathroom magazines? (Pics)
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A changing accent shows how language parallels politics
Dialect regions as defined by the Atlas of North American English.
Lately, there has been a lot of discussion over whether the American public is becoming more and more politically polarized and what this all means for the future of our democracy. You may have wrung your own hands over the issue. But even if you have, chances are you’re not losing sleep over the fact that Americans are very clearly becoming more polarized linguistically.
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The Denver Zoo’s truck powered by poop
Denver Zoo’s poop-powered tuk-tuk.
One thing a zoo has plenty of is poop. And the Denver Zoo is no exception. They decided the best way to deal with it was to convert a little three-wheeled truck to use zoo poop as fuel. (Video)
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Physicists add 11 colors to the rainbow by tearing apart atoms
New colors found utilizing lasers and ion cascades.
True, the pink is a lie. But a UC Santa Barbara research team has honestly just generated eleven new hues using lasers and ion cascades.
The team created the new colors by aiming a pair of lasers—one high-frequency, the other low-frequency—at a slab of semiconductor material, a gallium arsenide nanostructure. The high-frequency beam separates an electron from its host atom, generating what’s known as an exciton (a bonded pair consisting of a negatively-charged electron and a positively-charged host). The powerful, low frequency wave then accelerates the freed electron, which goes crashing into the electron-less atom in front of it. Since the electron has extra energy from the acceleration when it recombines with the host atom in front of it, that energy is radiated as light. Previously unseen frequencies of light…
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Blind man takes a trip in one Of Google’s self-driving cars
Google’s self-driving cars have absolutely nothing to do with Google’s core business, and Google has never even tried to explain how they’re going to make money.
But so what? They’re really cool. They push technology forward. And as this video shows, they could make people’s lives better in real, tangible ways…
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Watching tearjerkers actually makes people happier: Study
Watching a tragedy movie caused people to think about their own close relationships, which in turn boosted their life happiness.
People enjoy watching tragedy movies like “Titanic” because they deliver what may seem to be an unlikely benefit: tragedies actually make people happier in the short-term.
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Europeans are world’s heaviest drinkers
Europeans down the equivalent of 12.5 litres of pure alcohol a year or almost three glasses of wine a day.
People in Europe drink more alcohol than in any other part of the world. They down the equivalent of 12.5 liters of pure alcohol a year or almost three glasses of wine a day, according to report by the World Health Organization and the European Commission.
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Half of all households in the U.S. own at least one Apple product
More than 55 million homes have at least one Apple product.
According to CNBC’s All-America Economic survey, half of all U.S. households own at least one Apple product. That’s more than 55 million homes with at least one iPhone, iPad, iPod or Mac computer. And one-in-10 homes that aren’t currently in that group plan to join it in the next year.
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