Future Technologies

This illustration shows a deep azure planet that astronomers found orbiting a star 63 light years away. STORY HIGHLIGHTS It is the first time astronomers have determined the color of an exoplanet The planet is 63 light years away Temperatures reach as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit It possibly rains glass sideways in 4,500-mph winds Astronomers have found a deep azure blue planet orbiting a star 63 light years away -- the first time they've been able to determine the actual color of a planet outside our solar system, NASA and the European Space Agency said Thursday. The planet, known as HD 189733b, is a gas giant with a daytime temperature of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit where it possibly rains liquid glass sideways amid 4,500 mph winds, NASA says. The blue color comes not from the reflection of an ocean, as on Earth, "but rather a hazy, blow-torched atmosphere containing high clouds laced with silicate particles," NASA says. "Silicates conde...

    'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. We've evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. In...

For Take a Tour:  Scroll Mouse on Below 3D image, you can even navigate camera by click and dragging right or left: It's a guided tour -- from about 150 million miles away. A stunning panoramic image from the Curiosity rover offers an incredibly detailed look at the dusty, lonely landscape of the red planet. And thanks to NASA's computer science geniuses, you can take a guided tour of the rocky landscape from your couch.  Here's how to get the most of it.  First click in the Photosynth player and drag the image left or right for a 360-degree look at your desolate surroundings (remember to keep your eyes open for  the Martian rat ). Then click the double rectangle in the bottom center of the image to take the panoramic image full-screen for the full mind-blowing experience. Now click the links at the right side of the screen for some highlights of the spots Curiosity has already investigated, as well as the sites yet ...

The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem.  There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity—jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month’s income.  Solving these problems isn’t simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we’re unveiling our latest  moonshot  from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carr...

STORY HIGHLIGHTS Raspberry Pi works when plugged into an HDTV or digital monitor Pi can display videos, browse the Internet and more Pi does not have internal storage The hottest computer on the market isn't a $1,000-plus decked-out gaming machine. It's actually a bare bones circuit board the size of a credit card. And it costs just $25. Meet the Raspberry Pi. What's it good for? For starters, you hook the Pi to an HDTV or digital monitor using HDMI. It can display high-definition videos, browse the Internet, play games or work on spreadsheets. Sound great! Is it for you, though? Well, it depends. First, let's look at a bit of history. The low-cost Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of Eben Upton. In 2006, he was teaching computer science at the University of Cambridge. He found that computers were too expensive and too hard for ordinary users to program. So, he set out to make a low-cost programming computer. His charitable foundation is working...

This is interesting. You can log into your Facebook account using three passwords – one is the main password that you created and the other passwords can be constructed by toggling the case of characters that form your original password. For example, if your Facebook password is  operati@nGeronimo! , you can convert the uppercase characters to lowercase (and vice-versa) and the toggled password string – OPERATI@NgERONIMO!  – will also get you into Facebook. There’s another variation as well. If the first character of your Facebook password is in small case, just change that character to upper case – like  Operati@nGeronimo ! -  and Facebook will gladly let you in. You may try these variations with your own password on the Facebook login screen available at facebook.com/login.php . Multiple Facebook Logins You don’t just have multiple passwords on Facebook, you can log into Facebook using multiple usernames as well. The default username is the em...

Hitting a target at 1,000 yards is a skill only possessed by a few elite snipers. But all that is about to change, thanks to a high-tech bullet guidance system created by Texas gun manufacturer TrackingPoint. For better or worse, almost anyone with $20,000 to burn can soon have the skills of a special forces assassin. At the heart of TrackingPoint’s sophisticated firearms, dubbed the XactSystem, is the company’s “networked tracking scope,” which sports a color heads up display, and instantly monitors a wide variety of factors, including wind speed and direction, target distance, gravity, the rotation of the earth, and more, to calculate when and how to accurately fire the ammunition. TrackingPoint’s so-called smart rifles, which range from $22,500 to $27,500, even pack built-in Wi-Fi, which allows shooters to transmit live video of their shots to an iPad, then upload them to YouTube or social networks. “They like to post videos; they like to be in constant communication w...

Microsoft today  updated  Bing Maps with its largest shipment of Bird’s Eye imagery yet, nearly 270 terabytes of data. The company also expanded the number of Venue Maps to more than 4,700 in 59 countries and added a new “Report a problem” feature. So far, Microsoft has published a total of 1,452,958 sq km, or half a petabyte of data, in Bird’s Eye scenes from around the world. The Bing Maps coverage for this release is shown in yellow (it’s mainly for the US, some Europe, plus a little Canada and Australia): Venue Maps meanwhile let you navigate your way around malls, airports, amusement parks, casinos, shopping districts, convention centers, museums, stadiums, universities, hotels, and so on, using your Windows phone, tablet, and PC. It’s Microsoft’s answer to Google’s  indoor floor plans . Here’s an example: Microsoft also explained that while using Bing Maps within a zoom level of 1,000 feet, purple (stores) and green (restaurants) polygons will ...

STORY HIGHLIGHTS Apple's new operating system for mobile devices includes app for cars It is designed to make sure drivers are not distracted Look for it in 2014 in up to a dozen car brands The new operating system will come to cars where it can controlled by voice Apple's new operating system for its popular mobile devices goes well beyond iPhone and iPad. It will be showing up in new cars. It's called iOS 7 and will be available to download this fall. The new operating system features a number of design changes to the devices' interface. It also adds a new application that will let an iPhone5 display a few essential functions through a car's multimedia system. It's called "iOS in the Car." It "seamlessly integrates your iOS device — and the iOS experience — with your in-dash system. If your vehicle is equipped with iOS in the Car, you can connect your iPhone 5 and interact with it using the car's b...

It turns out Koobface is washed up – not raging. Last week, McAfee  released a threat report  showing samples of Koobface, the Facebook spreading worm, spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. But on Friday, the anti-virus giant that's now part of Intel did a complete reversal. In a  cryptically-worded blog post  , researcher Craig Schmugar notes that sample counts can be "influenced by repacking of the same underlying code . . . and other forms of server or client polymorphisms." Schmugar confesses that "these factors led to our Koobface statisitcs being off by a large margin." Facebook issued no public statement. But the company's PR agency contacted all the publications that ran with McAfee's initial, alarming, survey results. Cyberattacks are real and pose tangible risk to consumers and businesses. And public awareness is not what it should be. McAfee is not alone when it comes to competitive vendor...

 UPDATE: McAfee on Friday, June 6, said it  made a mistake . Koobface has actually been quiet of the past three months. Koobface, the fast-spreading Internet worm cybergangs use to hijack Facebook accounts on a massive scale, is on the move once again. McAfee this morning released a  threat report showing samples of Koobface spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. "The resurrection of Koobface reminds us that social networks continue to present a substantial opportunity for intercepting personal information," says Vincent Weafer, senior vice president, McAfee Labs. Meanwhile, the bad guys also are turning up the spam spigot, as activity of the equally infamous spam-spreading botnet Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, also surged in the first quarter. After remaining more or less stable in 2012, spam levels reached the highest volume McAfee has seen in the past two years. The rising trends are very probably related. The logon...

SAN FRANCISCO —Think Apple's critics struck a raw nerve with the company? "Can't innovate anymore, my ass." That's from Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president for worldwide marketing, speaking on stage at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Schiller was essentially talking about Apple's new tubular-designed Mac Pro, the kind of powerful computer used by developers who make up much of the WWDC audience. But he might as well have been addressing Apple's most vocal detractors, those who say that Samsung is now the company that Apple used to be, and that Tim Cook isn't Steve Jobs. These are the fickle what-have-you-done-for-me-lately types who wonder whether the company that forever altered the tech landscape with the Mac, iPod and iTunes, iPhone and iPad has somehow lost its mojo. As if pumping out game-changing hardware is some sort of divine obligation. There were no true game-changers introduced at WWDC, though thi...