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Google Glass Users Can Steal Your Passcode With a Glance
Amazon now lets Londoners pick up packages from Tube station lockers
If work commitments mean you're constantly trudging to the Post Office to collect a missed Prime delivery, Amazon's hoping to make things easier for you, if you're a Londoner that is. As of Monday, the company will open click-and-collect lockers in...
More cuts to EU roaming rates starting July 1
Smartphone users in the European Union have reason to celebrate as the European Commission's goal to abolish roaming fees have come one step closer to reality. Starting July 1, the highest possible charge for making calls drops 21% from 0.24/min to 0.19/min, while receiving calls will drop from 0.07/min to 0.05/min. Texting will also drop from 0.08/message to 0.06/message, while the most significant decrease will be regarding mobile data usage, where we'll see a whopping 55% decrease from 0.45/MB to 0.20/MB. All prices are without VAT, but are maximum retail charges, meaning carriers can go lower if they choose to do so. Last year, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes announced her campaign to end roaming charges in the EU by 2014, including a plan to move a complete telecoms package for all of the EU by Easter this year. This latest legislation is one step in that direction, gradually allowing telecoms to compensate for the loss in revenue from roaming charges. Another important issue which the EC hopes to address is net neutrality. By not allowing ISP's to restrict speed or services such as torrents to users, the Commission hopes to enforce all providers to allow the same quality of service to all member states of the European Union. Source |...
MYBELL ups the decibels and adds flash to bikes
Facebook downtime was a half million dollar glitch
A Verbal Tour of the British Isles By Regional Accent
Siobhan Thompson of Anglophenia gives a wonderful verbal tour of the British Isles, performing 17 of the regional accents found in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Supreme Court unanimously rules that software patents can't cover abstract ideas
From now on companies will have to be a little more specific when filing software patents. The United States Supreme Court today ruled in favor of CLS Bank, a company that was accused by Alice Corporation of violating several of its patents relating...
LAPD embraces the clean and silent electric motorcycle
If we were ever asked to ride an electric motorcycle, our first instinct would be to make NYEEEEAWWWW noises to compensate for the vehicle's silent engine. That's precisely why we're not employed by the Los Angeles police department, which has just...
Oculus Stretch Run: New Games, Talent, Challenges
Oculus invited Tom's Hardware to try some new Rift game prototypes during E3, highlighted the company's recent influx of high-profile talent, and generally discussed the state of its progress, post Facebook acquisition. I also tried to get a better unders
Yo: The million-dollar app that does a single stupid thing
There's a new app, maybe you've heard of it, yo. No, seriously, that's the name of the app, Yo. As in, "Yo dawg." Yo does one thing, and one thing only: it sends a contact a notification of "Yo." No message attached to that, no images, no context, just "Yo from RENERITCHIE". It took eight hours to code, and yet somehow it's sweeping the globe in monosyllabic fashion, and even more inexplicably has raised a million dollars in funding to do… what? Hell if we know.
Video Games: The Movie finds publisher, release date
Following a controversial, yet undeniably successful crowdfunding campaign, Video Games: The Movie has been picked up for theatrical distribution in North America on July 18.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Variance Films will distribute the...
YouTube won't block music videos from Indie labels, but it won't pay them either
There's been some brouhaha about YouTube blocking a huge swathe of music videos before launching its paid Spotify rival. The truth, however, is a little more nuanced. Labels who haven't signed up to the website's new terms, the majority of which are...
Amazon unveils the Fire Phone with eye-tracking tech
Building upon its wide expertise in the tablet space, Amazon has unveiled its first smartphone today. So yes, all those rumors were true after all. It's called the Amazon Fire Phone and its main selling points are bound to be Amazon's reach in terms of content services, as well as the unique 3D UI dubbed Dynamic Perspective. Amazon Fire Phone This much talked about feature changes what's depicted on the screen depending on where you are in relation to the phone. It accomplishes this by tracking your eyes with four specialized cameras that are located in the front corners of the handset. You can see it in action in this, rather quiet, video. Dynamic Perspective ties in nicely with tilt gestures that allow you to initiate actions by simply moving the phone. For example, you can tilt the device to scroll inside the browser, something eerily reminiscent of Samsung's Smart Scroll feature. And the same thing works inside ebooks, and even games. As previously leaked, the Fire Phone boasts a 4.7-inch IPS 720p touchscreen with 590 nits of brightness, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset with a 2.2 GHz quad-core CPU and Adreno 330 GPU, and 2GB of RAM. It has support for 4G LTE. The handset's frame is made from rubber, and a sheet of Gorilla Glass 3 is present both on its front and on its back. The buttons are made of anodized aluminum. The rear camera is a 13MP f/2.0 unit with a five-element lens, and it comes with optical image stabilization as well as a dedicated hardware button. Amazon is throwing in free unlimited photo storage in its Cloud Drive. The Fire Phone has two stereo speakers on the front with virtual surround sound. The earbuds that come in the box have a tangle-free cable and they snap to each other thanks to built-in magnets. The Amazon Fire Phone runs Fire OS 3.5, which seems to be the same OS used on the Kindle Fire line of tablets. It's based on Android but lacks any of the Google's services. Obviously Amazon has made a big deal about its content services too. Movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, and newspapers - all are available right from the retail giant itself. Furthermore, a new exclusive feature called Firefly uses the phone's camera or microphone to recognize the things around you and then find them in its database. So you can point the camera at a book, it's recognized and you're then immediately offered the option to purchase it from Amazon. This also works for identifying TV shows and songs, and it has its own dedicated button on the side of the Fire phone. Another exclusive feature is Mayday, which gets you 24/.7 remote support for any task you would like to accomplish on the phone. Amazon's first smartphone is exclusive to AT&T in the US. You can already pre-order it from Amazon, and it will be shipping on July 25. The pricing is far from revolutionary. The commitment free price is $649. With a contract, the base 32GB Fire Phone would cost you $199 along with a new two-year contract with AT&T. Or you can choose the carrier's Next plans and pay $27 per month for the device. A 64GB option is available for $299. So no, the Amazon phone isn't free (not even on contract), but you do get a year's worth of Amazon Prime with every phone (introductory...
The Fire phone is Amazon's ultimate hardware weapon
Amazon's first phone is finally here. But what makes it such a curious little device isn't all that (lackluster) 3D, head-tracking stuff; it's Firefly, the company's new visual search engine. Amazon may have been born unto the internet as a modest...
How Belgium built their golden generation
YouTube confirms music service, will block holdout labels' videos within 'days'
The cat's (partly) out of the bag. After a string of rumors, YouTube has confirmed to the Financial Times that it's launching a paid music service this summer. It's not saying exactly how the service will work, but Reuters sources claim that it will...
Football in space! When it’s played in the American...
Football in space! When it’s played in the American modules by the international crew, is it soccer?
'The Machine' Calculates 640TBs Of Data In A Billionth Of A Second
Bionic Pancreas Handles Ice Cream Sundaes, French Fries
A new bionic pancreas for people with type 1 diabetes is showing promise in early field tests. So far, it's deftly handled ice cream binges and kids at camp, Bloomberg reports.
"The performance of our system in both adults and adolescents exceeded our expectations under very challenging real-world conditions," the device's lead engineer, Ed Damiano of Boston University, said in a statement.
Like a natural pancreas, Damiano's device automatically monitors wearers' insulin levels. When needed, it administers doses of insulin and glucagon, two hormones that healthy pancreases make to regulate people's blood sugar levels. In other words, the bionic pancreas does automatically what type 1 diabetes patients have to do manually, far more frequently than any person could—every five minutes, 24 hours a day. The device is about the size of a cellphone and people wear it on the outside of their bodies.
People with type 1 diabetes don't make insulin like typical people do. (Those who have advanced type 2 diabetes—the far more common type, that usually arises from poor diet—may also not make enough insulin. This artificial pancreas, however, is designed only for type 1 diabetes.) If type 1 diabetes patients don't keep measuring and managing their blood-sugar levels with insulin injections, they can have serious complications. But it's hard for people, especially kids, to check their blood sugar as often as they're supposed to. It's also impossible for them to do so while they're sleeping, leading to hours-long stretches when patients' blood-sugar levels are out of whack.
Several research groups have looked into making bionic pancreases to automate the check-and-inject process. Last year, Popular Science reported on a similar, but simpler, auto-monitoring device that got U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Challenges to making a really effective, convenient device include figuring out when to best inject glucagon, or whether to use it at all. Now, the standard is for type 1 diabetes patients to give themselves insulin injections only, but some scientists think glucagon could help bionic pancreases work more effectively. It's also an ongoing challenge to figure out how a bionic pancreas should deal with the many normal things that people want to do that dramatically affect their blood sugar levels—everything from eating carbohydrate-heavy meals to serious exercise, such as long-distance running.
Damiano and his team found their device controlled blood sugar levels better than conventional monitoring in 52 adults and adolescents, Bloomberg reports. Among the testers were young adults under the age of 20 at a summer camp for kids with diabetes. The testers each used the device for five days, some putting it through its paces. "Some kids were having ice cream sundaes and French fries and forbidden foods, just to see if the device could handle it," one 76-year-old tester tattled to told Bloomberg. ". . . the bionic pancreas handled it."
Damiano and his colleagues want to do larger trials, which they will need to get FDA approval for the device. The researchers will publish their current results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Tokyo Toy Show 2014: Robot pets, maglev toys and more!
It's our first year touring Japan's premier toy show, and we'd be happy to do it again. Among traditional wooden blocks, tricycles, action figures and card games (so many card games!) there's a number of toys with a high level of technology -- like...
Printeer is the 3D printer your kids can use
There's no denying that 3D printers are cool. However, they're not exactly easy to use for kids -- not unless Junior has a knack for modelling software, anyway. If Mission Street Manufacturing's Printeer hits its crowdfunding goal, though, children...
Tesla's Model X SUV enters production in early 2015, clever doors intact
Worried that Tesla's all-electric SUV, the Model X, might face yet another delay? Don't be. Tesla is telling pre-order customers that their vehicles will roll off the line in early 2015, complete with the space-saving "falcon wing" doors from the...
Domino's hackers fail to release customer data following Twitter suspension
Even hackers need to earn a (thin) crust
Autonomous camera drone lets you shoot your own action scenes
If you want to record a bike ride or some other adventure by yourself, you typically have to wear an action camera. Going that route is fine for a first-person view, but what if you want some more dramatic shots? That's where Hexoplus' crowdfunded...
Grumpy Cat's upcoming Christmas special could be the death of cinema
Scene: a theater full of people, laughing at images of butts with farting noises played as a soundtrack. It's satire from the world of Idiocracy, but we may not be that far off -- Lifetime has decided to make an actual motion picture out of a...