Gotta have a hit of Twitter!
You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or whatever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever ‘gone to the bathroom’ in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?
A great way to torture young and old alike.
The Wrongulator is a gag calculator that gives incorrect answers to calculations. I’m fascinated by the idea — I wonder if they’ve just got a standard calculator controller in there, and then a secondary system that scrambles the results, or whether it’s a pseudorandom number generator, or what. You’d want it to produce plausible outcomes (5 x 5 = 30; not 5 x 5 = 324527) but who knows if the manufacturer paid attention to this…
Continue reading… “Wrongulator: a gag calculator that gives the wrong answers”
To keep robes and towels from checking out, a small but growing number of hotels are starting to use new radio frequency chips to keep track of their inventory.
The RFID technology — which stands for radio frequency identification and requires an installed chip that can be read by an electronic reader — has been used by various industries for several years to organize product storage and tally shipments…
Continue reading… “Hotels use RFID chips to keep linens from travelling to new destinations”
Could social media save you from a natural disaster?
Facebook and Twitter are helping to improve and speed up responses to natural disasters and health emergencies by involving members of the public, it has been claimed.
Social media allowed an ”unprecedented” two-way exchange of information between the public and those given the task of preparing for and responding to major events such as earthquakes, floods and infection pandemics, said researchers…
Do you want your baby name to be part of the popular crowd?
Oliver and Olivia are the most popular baby names in England and Wales for the second year running, it was revealed today.
Jack held on to second place in the boys’ name category after slipping from the top spot last year after a 14-year reign.
Sophie jumped three places up the rankings, making it the second most popular name for girls, according to figures published today by the Office for National Statistics on first names given to babies born in 2010…
Continue reading… “Oliver and Olivia most popular baby names in 2010”
Agave can be a fuel?
It fuels your party, your buzz and your hangover the next day, but believe it or not tequila may soon be fueling your car. That’s because the agave plant extract used to make liquor can also be used to make an ethanol like alcohol which can serve as vehicle fuel, won’t interfere with food crops, and can even be grown in the desert…
Someday, our cars may hit the bottle more often than we do, but at least it won’t be hitting our wallets very hard.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
70% of the VC firms have disappeared over the past 10 years.
Continue reading… “The collapsing of the VC industry over the past 10 years”
Another iPhone medical breakthrough!
Diabetics have a problem dealing with sugar because they don’t produce enough insulin (Type 1) or any insulin that is produced gets no reaction from the person’s cells (Type 2). Treatment is mainly through management of blood sugar levels which if done properly can stop many of the complications.
It’s the monitoring of those blood sugar levels that researchers are working towards making as simple and fast as possible, and the latest idea involves the use of a sensor tattoo and an iPhone 4…
Continue reading… “iPhone 4 and a sensor tattoo creates diabetic blood monitor”
What are you streaming and how?
The TV Everywhere movement got another win Wednesday, as Fox announced that it will limit next-day streaming access to some of its programs to cable, satellite and Hulu Plus customers. This news, which comes a week after CNN and HLN’s TV Everywhere push, is just the latest example of the complicated relationship between television networks and the burgeoning streaming services game.
TV Everywhere, which Netflix’s Reed Hastings has referred to as his company’s “biggest competitor,” is gaining favor with content producers, like broadcast and cable networks…
Continue reading… “The looming content battle between TV Everywhere & online streaming”
Feisty little buggers.
The rodents of the future will eat poison pellets like candy, according to new research conducted on mice found in a German bakery. The baker called in an exterminator to rid his business of the pests and discovered, to his horror, that the little buggers weren’t even fazed by bromadiolone, which is a very concentrated and deadly version of the common rat poison warfarin…
Continue reading… “Eek! Mice are evolving an immunity to poison!”
Populations in the north have evolved to cope with dull, cloudy skies and short periods of daylight.
Good news for people who are from the north: you are likely to have a bigger brain than your southern counterparts. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean you are more intelligent than people from the south – just that you have evolved to cope with the longer winters and greyer skies in northern climates.
Close to a quarter of all global mobile bandwidth is consumed by people watching YouTube videos, according to a new report from network management vendor Allot Communications. The Google-owned video site’s global bandwidth share was 22 percent in the first half of 2011, compared with just 17 percent in the first half of 2010. YouTube now accounts for 52 percent of all global mobile video streaming, according to Allot.
Continue reading… “YouTube videos account for 22% of all global mobile bandwidth consumed”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.
