If you’re feeling down lately, you should try spending more face-to-face time with your friends and less Facebook time with them. Pacific Standard directs our attention to a new study conducted by two psychologists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria that finds spending time on Facebook can depress our mood even if we have no particular reason to feel sad. The reason for this, the researchers say, is that social media such as Facebook and Twitter can make us feel as though we’re wasting time much more than general Internet browsing.
The United States Navy is set to deploy its electromagnetic railgun on one of its joint high-speed vessels (JHSV) in 2016. According to the Navy, the weapon uses “an electromagnetic force – known as the Lorenz Force – to rapidly accelerate and launch a projectile between two conductive rails.” The railgun will be able to fire projectiles at a much higher velocity than current weaponry, obviously allowing them to travel much greater distances. More →
The medical world has been revolutionized by technology again and again, yet even the smallest advancement is still able to surprise and delight us. National Geographic has drawn our attention to one app that provides the blind with an aural alternative to vision. EyeMusic SSD (sensory substitution device), an app for iOS devices, captures shapes in the environment and translates them into what the developers call a “Soundscape” through musical notes. More →
Researchers from the National University of Singapore have found a way to quickly detect GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid,) also known as a “date rape drug” alongside Rohypnol (roofies), Time reveals. Once mixed with a beverage that contains GHB, the newly discovered liquid changes into a fluorescent orange color in less than 30 seconds. More →
Firefighters are our heroes… until we figure out how to replace them with robots, at least. Discovery News points us to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s newest robot robot called SAFFiR (short for “Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot”) that can walk right into deadly fires that are two intense for human firefighters to handle. More →
It turns out we’re more like bats that we ever imagined, for just as we can call dibs on the last slice of pizza, bats can call dibs on the bugs they’re about to eat. MDConnects reports that biologists at the University of Maryland have discovered that male brown bats can use a special sound known as a “frequency-modulated bout” (FMB) that lets nearby bats know that they’ve put in a claim on a particular piece of food and thus letting them know to stay away. Apparently this ultrasonic call is produced exclusively by flying male brown bats while foraging as the scientists found female brown bats did not emit any such sounds. More →
Nowadays, we spend nearly 6 hours each day staring at a display, whether it’s a desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet. After looking at screens all day, your eyes may start to feel a bit off, which means you may be suffering from a condition called Computer Vision Syndrome, or CVS. Symptoms of CVS include headaches, dry eyes, blurred vision and potentially long-term nearsightedness. More →
The photo you see above is one minuscule portion of a staggeringly massive infrared panoramic photo captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope that manages to squeeze the entire Milky Way galaxy into a single photograph. That single photograph, mind you, is a 6GB file. More →
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates isn’t going to sugarcoat things: The increasing power of automation technology is going to put a lot of people out of work. Business Insider reports that Gates gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, DC this week and said that both governments and businesses need to start preparing for a future where lots of people will be put out of work by software and robots. More →
What will Google’s robots have in common with Google+? Apparently they’ll be everywhere and you won’t be able to escape them. Bloomberg reports that Google chairman Eric Schmidt said this week that his company is experimenting with using robots to automate a lot of the more mundane tasks we do every day. In this way, says Schmidt, “robots will become omnipresent in our lives in a good way” because they’ll “replace a lot of the repetitive behavior in our lives.” More →
As we gear up for an era where space travel becomes more common thanks to the efforts of companies like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, territory that was unchartered just a few decades ago could soon become commonplace. Even those of us with no interest in traveling to space have come to rely on The Final Frontier more so than ever before, thanks to an increasing number of services that rely on satellites orbiting the Earth. Cell phones and in-dash navigation systems rely on GPS satellites, Dish and DirecTV obviously use satellite feeds, and satellite communications systems offered by the likes of Inmarsat and Iridium continue to proliferate across various industries. Just how crowded is it getting up there above the Earth’s atmosphere?
The answer: Pretty crowded. More →
Believe it or not, one tiny fruit could change consumer technology forever — and no, fanboys, we’re not talking about Apple. It turns out that the pomegranate, which is quite trendy right now for everything from flavoring drinks to scenting shampoos and candles, is also the inspiration for new lithium-ion battery technology that may feature dramatically improved battery performance and longevity. More →
