Welcome to Doonesbury. Soap-bubble screen created by scientists uses ultrasonic sound to control transparency. Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images TV broken?
Good news: You might soon be able to just fire up your incredible transparent soap-bubble screen, available in 2-D, 3-D, and holographic formats. An international team of researchers at the University of Tokyo has created a display that projects images onto screen made out of sturdy soap film. Using ultrasonic sound waves played through speakers at different frequencies, the scientists were able to create what’s called a bidirectional reflectance distribution function—a way to control the level of transparency of the micro membrane. The result is a screen that lead researcher Dr. You can’t buy it at the store anytime soon; this bubbly screen mixture is made up of mostly dish soap, but it features special colloids, allowing items to pass through the screen without it popping.
Orbitz defends practice of showing Mac users pricier hotels. Mac users who search for hotels on the Orbitz online booking service are initially directed to more expensive hotels than PC users, Orbitz acknowledged last week.
Orbitz defended the practice, saying the travel search engine is simply showing users what it thinks they prefer. Orbitz Chief Executive Barney Harford said data collected by Orbitz shows that Mac users were 40% more likely than PC users to book four- or five-star hotels. "That is just one of many factors that determine which hotels to recommend a given customer as part of our effort to show customers the most relevant hotels possible," Harford said in an email.
Harford's comments came in response to a Wall Street Journal report that Orbitz produces different hotel search lists based on the type of computer used to log in. Orbitz — among other travel websites — collects and studies millions of bits of information about people who book travel through the website. Delta expanding Wi-Fi service.
How Smart Should Our Maps Be? - Technology. Maps can be beautiful, interesting, and, of course, useful, but there are a lot of questions we address to maps - and these days, Google Maps specifically - that maybe a map isn't the best tool for answering.
Think of it this way. In the days before online trip planners and GPS, if you wanted to know how to get from point A to point B, you would look at a map and trace out a route. But these days few people would use a map that way (I still do just because I enjoy the process but I think I'm in the minority). Instead, they would plug in their request and an algorithm would spit out a route for them. The route would appear on the map, but the map is no longer the tool for finding that answer. Map: Extradition of fugitives to the U.S. Technology - Alexis Madrigal - Finally, You Can Have a QR Code on Your Headstone. Technology - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Future of the Map Isn't a Map at All—It's Information.
The FAA Changed Rules for Google's Project Glass Stunt. It was an awesome stunt that only the FAA could allow.
It was an amazing stunt. With the help of skydivers in wingsuits, bikers, mountain climbers, 25 cameras and even a zeppelin blimp, Google managed to deliver a "package" from 4,000 feet above San Francisco to the Moscone stage here on Earth during Google I/O 2012. Dream City. When you think of Indianapolis, what springs to mind?
Besides the annual Indianapolis 500 race. Take a minute to sum up the essence, the unique identity, of the Midwest’s second-largest city. It’s hard to do — not because Indianapolis doesn’t have a unique identity, but because if you don’t live in or around it, you probably have no idea what it is. There are lots of cities like this.
For every clearly defined Detroit, New Orleans or Las Vegas, there’s a more amorphous Columbus, Ohio; Louisville, Ky.; or Providence, R.I. Google's digital glasses move out of lab and closer to reality. Technology - Rebecca J. Rosen - 59% of Young People Say the Internet Is Shaping Who They Are. An opinion survey commissioned by The Atlantic finds telling differences among America's generations.
JodyDigger/Flickr One thing that we often overlook as we try to understand how the Internet is remaking our world is just how recently it appeared in our lives. We have adopted new technologies with such remarkable speed and enthusiasm that they seem like they have been here much longer than they actually have. A few points of reference: When the country elected Barack Obama just four years ago, Twitter was a fledgling startup. Coffee Nerves New York. JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out. Health - Brian Fung - Chart: What Killed Us, Then and Now. Via The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff comes this incredible chart from the New England Journal of Medicine comparing the reasons we die now to the way Americans went to their graves a century ago: The chart ranks the top ten causes of death for each year.
In addition to the remarkable decline in mortality overall, it's also noticeable how heart disease and cancer have surged to become two of America's top killers. In 1900, cancer and heart disease accounted for 18 percent of all deaths. Today, that figure's jumped to 63 percent. In addition to being responsible for a greater share of deaths overall, the absolute number of people being killed by these chronic conditions has also grown, from 201 people out of every 100,000 in 1900 to nearly 380 per 100,000 today. Video - Stunning Photos of Lions in Kenya, Snapped via a Remote-Control Car.
Video - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Engineering the Perfect McDonalds Burger, and a Marketing Win. Shocking Christian school textbooks. Is President Obama’s New Ad Subliminally Calling Mitt Romney A Robot? The 2012 campaign is shaping up to be one of the nastiest in modern history, with a record number of negative ads being run, with a record number of ad dollars.
The Obama campaign has released a new, “positive” ad that highlights President Obama‘s January 29, 2009 signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, but is the ad’s title a subtle dig at Mitt Romney‘s humanity, or artificial simulation thereof? The ad looks positive enough, opening with shots of Barack Obama with his late mother, and with his daughters, and a voiceover reminding voters that he’s “The son of a single mom. Proud father of two daughters.” The ad then cuts to footage of women at various workplaces, as the narrator says “President Obama knows that women being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men isn’t just unfair, it hurts families.”
The family being hurt is pictured doing dishes together in what looks like a very well-equipped kitchen. Technology - Evan Selinger - What Happens When We Turn the World's Most Famous Robot Test on Ourselves? For years the Turing Test has been used to compare humans with computers.
A Concise History of the Origins of Cinema. Society and visual media. How Street Artist Vhils Creates a Mural - Alex Hoyt - Entertainment. The renowned Portuguese artist shares a first draft The son of a dissident in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, the Lisbon-born street artist Alexandre Farto, a.k.a. Vhils, first rose to prominence when one of his portraits appeared next to a work by Banksy at the 2008 Cans Festival in London. Now, at 24, he’s the youngest artist represented by Banksy’s agent, Steve Lazarides, whose gallery website says Vhils is “taking Vandalism as art to its logico ad absurdum conclusion.”
Avenue of the arts boston.