The first bionic hand that can feel will soon be here
We all love our consumer technology, but scientific breakthroughs like this are just extraordinary. Later this year, we'll see the first bionic hand that will give an amputee the ability to feel their hand again.
This will be quite the moment for artificial limbs with sensory perception, where the first man to get the new touch-sensitive bionic hand will be a man in his 20s living in Rome, who lost the lower part of his arm in an accident. The wiring of this bionic hand will be connected to his nervous system, where they hope he'll be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receive touch signals from the bionic hand's skin sensors.
This is coming from Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where he's also added that the hand will be attached directly to the patient's nervous system through electrodes clipped onto two of the arm's main nerves - the median and ulnar nerves.
Continue reading: The first bionic hand that can feel will soon be here (full post)
Congress to discuss asteroids as a threat to Earth, won't involve Bruce Willis
After multiple space agencies have been tracking the asteroid that fled just past Earth waving hello and goodbye, Russia was attacked by space rocks late last week. The meteroid broke up in our atmosphere, but still crashed into Earth injuring over 1200 people and causing millions of dollars of damage.
Because of this, the Science, Space, and Technology Committee in Washington are planning to hold a hearing soon "to examine ways to better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth."
NASA have said that the rock that smashed into the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, which is around 950 miles east of Moscow, was around 15 meters in diameter, and it was moving at an astonishing 18 kilometres per second. It lasted around 30 seconds in our atmosphere before it broke apart, and wasn't detected by any Earth-based telescopes. NASA scientists have said that it is virtually impossible for telescopes to see a meteorite that size in the daytime sky.
Bungie's new game, Destiny, gets revealed - is an always-on, persistent-world adventure
From the makers of Halo, we have a new game unveiled by Bungie - Destiny. Destiny is an always-on, persistent-world adventure game which the developers have signed up with Activision on a 10-year publishing deal.
The video above shows off a few quick glimpses at the otherwise bland first-person shooter bits (which I'm sure it's not a full-fledged FPS just yet), but it also unveils some of the more social integration Destiny will have, where you can create and customize your identities and gear to venture across an alternate universe to our own.
The big difference between Bungie's last massive game, Halo, and Destiny, is that it's not a lone soldier who saves the world - but a community of Guardians. Destiny will be more of a multi-player game than a singleplayer game, but this doesn't mean that those looking for a single-player game will miss out. Single player gamers can finish the quests off as a Guardian, but in order to "realize the vision of the game", Destiny will require an always-on Internet connection on all platforms regardless of play style.
Crysis 3 beta has been downloaded over 3 million times
Crysis 3 gets released in just over 48 hours, and is looking to do some good business as usual. First up, we have some download numbers on the beta, which was downloaded over 3 million times.
Most beta players will end up buying the full game, so we should expect at least 2-3 million sales just there. Crysis 2 sold 3 million units, so we should expect more sales this time around. Pre-order numbers are looking great too, where according to EA's end of January financial report, pre-orders for the third Crysis game are sitting at 40% higher than its predecessor.
Crysis 3 gets released on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on February 19 in the US, and two days later in Australia and Europe. Japan will have to wait until March 7 to get their nanosuit soldier gaming on.
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Kim Dotcom announces that Mega now accepts Bitcoin, will expand into email, chat, voice, video and mobile soon
Mega man himself Kim Dotcom has announced that Mega now has Bitcoin support, and has also unleashed some future nuggets that Mega will support in the near future. Dotcom reiterated his company's position to privacy, while also saying that his cloud storage is uniquely positioned in New Zealand to keep users' data more safe.
Dotcom also stated that Mega will eventually expand itself into email, chat, voice, video and mobile services "in the coming years". For details on Bitcoin-enabled Mega goodness, you can check out bitvoucher.co, where there's no less than six different ways to buy mega services with Bitcoin. Three monthly options are given, as well as three yearly options - all options cannot be refunded or exchanged. The options include:
Now we'll tackle the extra services that Mega will introduce over the next few years, first up we have chat, voice and video services. Dotcom isn't happy with the current services from Google, Microsoft and Apple, which are Gmail, Skype and iCloud, respectively. Dotcom states that these services don't offer enough privacy because they're based in the US, where the US government can demand access to users' data under specific circumstances.
Facebook continues to collect data on users who have logged out of the social network
Last week we reported that Google were dishing out users' data to developers when they download apps from the Play store, but now it's being reported that Facebook takes data from users even when they're logged out of the social network.
Facebook have confirmed this, but have insisted that the information collected is only for security purposes or to aggregate statistics. Facebook's data collection is from the cookies on your computer when you visit the social network, with the cookies shifting the information over to Facebook from any site that you visit that contains a link to Facebook - such as the "like button".
With this information in-hand, Facebook can map out your web usage. Director of Engineering for Facebook, Arturo Bejar, has said that the data is used to combat spam and phishing attacks by detecting suspicious logins. Not only that, but cookies can use the data to keep users from having to complete extra authentication steps each time they log-in. Because, you know, everyone logs out of Facebook when they're finished with it.
Top 5 things to expect with Sony's possible announcement of the PlayStation 4 this week
Are you getting excited? I'm a huge fan of PCs, but next-gen consoles are always exciting and they should push the bar of games up much higher since games are developed on consoles and ported on PCs.
What should we expect from the next-gen console from Sony? Sony are holding an event this week where they've said we'll "see the future" - most people, myself included, are expecting an announcement of the PlayStation 4. If this is true, here's some things you should expect from the PS4.
5.) Price. This is one of the most important parts of the PS4. The original PlayStation 3 launched for $600, where we saw 60GB included. The PS4 should hopefully hit the $300-$400 price, and include 500GB of storage. We should hopefully see a decently fast HDD inside, or some form of flash storage - maybe 64-128GB of SSD to help the OS feel snappy.
Google reportedly planning to open retail stores by year's end
It looks as though we may soon be able to go to our local Google store to check out the company's latest technology offerings. While it will likely be structured a bit like the Microsoft stores in that they feature other companies' hardware, the stores will allow Google the chance to offer hands-on experiences of their own devices, such as the Nexus 4.
The report comes from 9to5Google who cites "an extremely reliable source." They say that Google is planning to have the first of its retail stores open by year's end in major metropolitan areas. These stores will be a bit different than the current Chrome store-within-a-store that Google currently has in Best Buys.
The idea for Google retail stores is said to have come out of plans to take Project Glass to the public. Google felt it would be hard to sell a device that will retail for $500-$1000 without offering a try-before-you-buy opportunity. The retail stores will also give Google a chance to demonstrate other products, such as Chromebooks and driverless cars.
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Posterous officially shutting down as of April 30, lets users download data until then
Posterous, a popular blogging platform that was acquired by Twitter last year, has announced that it will be shutting down as of April 30. The site says that they are shutting down in order to focus on Twitter and there will be no more viewing or editing content past the shutdown date.
Because of this, Posterous is offering users the ability to download their data. WordPress and Squarespace are alternatives and both feature importers for Posterous data. A "backup" option is also provided and it will provide you with a zip file containing your data. You can request a backup by heading to the Posterous site.
"We'd like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter."
You can now download a free and legal copy of the source code for Photoshop version 1.0
For the interested software developer, or for those who want to experience a bit of nostalgia, Adobe has released a free and legal copy of the source code of Photoshop version 1.0. The code has been released in conjunction with the Computer History Museum who has detailed the software on their website.
The source code consists of about 128,000 lines and is mostly undocumented. Version 1.0 of the software was created by one sole engineer, Thomas Knoll. Version 2 had just two engineers. Around 75 percent of the code is written in Pascal and about 15 percent is in 68000 assembler language.
The code is free for non-commercial use and can be downloaded from the Computer History Museum. Nearly everything is included, save for the MacApp applications library that was licensed from Apple.