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.
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
The University of Pennsylvania’s RHex bot leaps across chasms or over obstacles by performing multiple jumps in order to gain momentum before it makes its big leap. And since it can scurry around, it can get a running start if need be, too. Its C-shaped legs can rotate 360 degrees to help the 20-inch machine spring into action.
Corey Tamas is a communications consultant, a father, and professional musician in Ottawa, Ontario. More by Corey Tamas
Putting together Ikea furniture is a cruel test of mettle that most of us must brave sooner or later, but science has (finally) done something worthwhile by creating an Ikea-furniture-assembling robot.
The Distributed Robotics Laboratory at MIT calls it the “IkeaBot.” As the name suggests, it’s a robot that slaps together your Ikea furniture, allowing you the luxury of watching while sipping coffee and being grateful.
"We're doomed."
Screenshot: DigInfo.TV
Mad physicist/Flickr
