Joshua covers a wide array of gadgetry for TechHive. He is also the editor in chief for Macgasm.net. More by Joshua Schnell
Amanda Ghassaei
TechHive intern and beard maven Albert Filice has been playing around with a 3D printer and managed to make a 3D-printed necktie. As impressive as this is, it looks like he may have some competition.
Artist Amanda Ghassaei managed to take a digital copy of a song and laser etch it into a slab of maple, thereby creating a wooden record. By etching Radiohead's "Idioteque", and the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" into the wood using Python, a PDF, and a lot of math, Ghassaei may have unintentionally created sustainable music.
Kevin is a small-time tech hound, amateur photographer, and a general know-at-least-something of all things geeky hailing from New York. More by Kevin Lee
A team of researchers led by PhD student Dustin Adams at the University of California, Santa Cruz have created camera app that might help the blind take photos. No, we’re not just talking about “bad photographers,” but those who are actually visually impaired.
The camera app brings several features that make it easier for the visually impaired to take photos. For example, it replaces the somewhat hard-to-locate shutter button with a swiping motion on the screen, making it easier to snap a photograph.
Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils. More by Brad Chacos
Forget Dave Bowman. Real-life space commander Chris Hadfield has harnessed the power of social media during his stint as the commander of the International Space Station to help make being an astronaut cool again, regularly dropping knowledge bombs and breathtaking in-orbit photos on his YouTube and Twitter feeds.
Between Hadfield and frequent updates from the Mars-hopping Curiosity rover, space has never felt so close. But even good things have to end; today, Commander Hadfield is scheduled to return to Earth after his stellar five-month stint in the sky.
How did Hadfield decide to wrap up his tremendous run? Not with a bang, but with a melancholy strumming. Last night, Hadfield shared his final opus with his 821,000-plus Twitter followers: An out-of-this-world cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
Elizabeth Fish is a freelance writer who happens to run a hyperlocal news website in Lincoln, UK. She also covers all things geeky for TechHive. More by Elizabeth Fish
"We're doomed."
If you're a regular GeekTech reader you might remember YouTube user ParadiseDecay’s Minecraft recreation of the Death Star trench run from Star Wars: A New Hope. It looks like this Star Wars and Minecraft fan won’t be putting down his mining tools yet, as he’s replicated yet another classic scene.
ParadiseDecay’s latest video is a recreation of the opening scenes the original Star Wars film from 1977. This new video begins with the iconic opening crawl of text, but the Minecraft influence quickly becomes apparent.
Cassandra Khaw is an entry-level audiophile, a street dancer, a person who writes about video games for a living, and someone who spends too much time on Twitter. More by Cassandra Khaw
Screenshot: DigInfo.TV
We constantly make jokes about how self-aware machines might one day rise up to destroy mankind. At this rate, who knows? It might happen. Hasegawa Group's Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN) is an artificial brain that can think like a human's. And this upgraded version also knows how to abuse the Internet to learn new things.
Announced in August 2011, Hasegawa Group's Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN) is what its makers call "an unsupervised online-learning method capable of incremental learning and does not require a predefined network structure." Technical jargon aside, this essentially means SOINN can learn new things little by little over time without any human intervention.
Corey Tamas is a communications consultant, a father, and professional musician in Ottawa, Ontario. More by Corey Tamas
Though chip transistors have traditionally been made with silicon, a team from USC has developed carbon nanotubes that could replace silicon and allow for faster transistors.
Chongwu Zhou, a professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, leads a team at USC that clocked the carbon nanotubes at 25GHz, a dramatic speed advantage over the second-fastest nanotube transistor (a design from French Institut d’Électronique de Microélectronique et de Nanotechnologie, which peaks at 15GHz).
Cassandra Khaw is an entry-level audiophile, a street dancer, a person who writes about video games for a living, and someone who spends too much time on Twitter. More by Cassandra Khaw
Mad physicist/Flickr
It's safe to say that everyone has, at the very least, seen a Lego block. It's hard to miss them. They're everywhere. Especially on the Internet. If you want to retain some sense of satisfaction in regards to that house you built back when you were five, though, you might want to not read any further. However, if you're interested in seeing the incredible things people have been working on, look no further than our weekly overview of the best creations from the Lego universe.
Amanda Ghassaei
"We're doomed."
Screenshot: DigInfo.TV
Mad physicist/Flickr