Technology advances to make your life easier: alarms, skin, fashion…Congress doesn’t advance, to make NSA’s life easier. And other Geek news.
Despite the uproar over disclosures that the U.S. government has been spying on the communications of the population at large, legislation to curb that activity narrowly failed in the House on Wednesday. Although the PRISM program has not produced any serious counter-terrorism success stories, lawmakers may be guarding against potential political repercussions of opposing it.
Find out who voted which way. Lost by 12 votes!
Sleep as Android is an accelerometer-based sleep cycle tracker app that includes a nice assortment of helpful sleep aids, including lullaby mode, sleep noise recording, lucid dreaming detection audio and a Captcha test to see if you are actually awake. Perhaps even more intriguing is that based on your sleep cycles, it knows just the right time to wake you up.
The Google Chromecast may be the least expensive way to access online services on your HDTV if you can’t do so already, even if more functional, pricier options are available.
“MechWarrior Online” is a game that lets players control powerful war machines (“Mechs”) and fight each other for dominance on the battlefield. The game is still in beta testing and plans to launch in mid-September but boasts more than 1.1 million registered pilots.
A customized war machine called “Sarah’s Jenner” was created in memorial of a young player after she lost her battle to cancer. It is now available in the game for $10. And all proceeds from its sale go to the Canadian Cancer Society.
This week, two major conferences on wearable technology are taking place in the U.S. — Wear Tech Con in San Francisco and Wearable Tech Expo in New York City. CNN spoke to keynote speakers from both events to imagine how a day in the life of a wearable technology user might look in the year 2015.
Responds to touch— so robots can pick up delicate things, you can shop right from your kitchen wallpaper, and maybe even let the e-skin feel things for you when you’re nerves aren’t working…
The site will offer suggested pins by tracking user data, but it says it will stop tracking users’ online activity if they choose to turn on the browser-based privacy measure.
Reporting in the latest edition of the journal Science, Susumu Tonegawa and colleagues describe how they were able to get mice to believe they had been shocked in one place, when it had really happened in another.
Tesla is building a nationwide network of Supercharger stations in the U.S. to help give its growing fleet of consumer vehicles the juice they need to conquer the nation’s highways, and now we have an inside look at how they’re approaching partners to help them expand.
The Kite Patch Indiegogo campaign is basically a concept patch which interferes with the mosquito’s ability to detect CO2, which is expelled every time we exhale. This would effectively keep mosquitoes from acquiring targets when they come close enough to enter the cloud of inhibitors given off by the patch.
