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
Harvard University
If you think real flying insects are annoying, you aren’t going to like the new robotic equivalent, either. Engineers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University made the world’s tiniest robot that’s only the size of a penny.
Aside from its sheer tininess, the robot—aptly named RoboBee—can take off vertically, hover, and fly around using its delicate, bee-like wings. Inspired by the biology of a fly, the two wings flap 120 times per second, making them almost invisible when in motion. They move so quickly thanks to “piezoelectric actuators”—strips of ceramic that expand and contract in a reaction to electricity.
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
If you’ve spent long hours perfecting your Minecraft world, you’ll want something to show for it—even if it’s only to justify to others why you spend so much time playing the game. Luckily for you, you can make 3D prints of your designs thanks to a free service called Printcraft.
Printcraft is basically a Minecraft server that converts your creations into 3D-printable STL files. Project developer Paul Harter teamed up with 3D printing service i.materialise, so you can print little Minecraft figures without buying your own 3D printer. (If you do have a 3D printer of your own, you can download the STL file and print it out yourself.)
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
It’s finally here. A new 3D printing outfit in New York called BotObjects say that it's come up with the first full-color desktop 3D printer. Unlike other consumer-grade 3D printers, the ProDesk3D does not print in just one or two different colored plastic mediums; instead, it prints using the whole gamut of the rainbow by mixing five base colors together.
The ProDesk3D works just like other 3D printers we seen in that it still heats up ABS or PLA (Polylactic Acid) plastic filament, which it then extrudes in layers onto a build area to create an object. The major difference is that the ProDesk3D literally infuses the plastic filament with color by melting five different colors of PLA into the plastic ribbons before the plastic reaches the extruder head.
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
Though it's unlikely that film critics will ever demand an Academy Award for IBM's A Boy And His Atom, this doesn't change the fact that the short flick is still a bloody good movie—for something that occurs on a microscopic level, anyway.
The proud holder of the Guinness World Record for World's Smallest Stop-Motion Film, A Boy And His Atom was created with the help of an IBM-invented scanning tunneling microscope. According to IBM Research's Christopher Lutz, the microscope is the first device that enables scientists to "visualize the world all the way down to single atoms."
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
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteA false-color image of a giant hurricane-like storm on Saturn.
It seems like Saturn's atmosphere has brewed up a literal version of the phrase “a perfect storm,” judging from these images from a NASA spacecraft.
NASA’s Cassini probe took images of an enormous “hurricane” sweeping across the planet's north pole. Using false-color images, scientists were able to deduce that the eye of the hurricane alone is around 1,250 miles wide. To put that in perspective, that’s 20 times larger than a typical hurricane here on Earth.
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
SpaceShipTwo was first carried aloft to an altitude of about 47,000 feet (14,000 meters) by the mothership WhiteKnightTwo. Once it reached its cruising altitude of sorts, WhiteKnightTwo released the craft so it could test-fire its rocket engine. It ultimately reached a maximum supersonic speed of Mach 1.2, or roughly 913 miles per hour (1,500 kilometers per hour), which is well past the speed of sound (768 miles per hour or 1,236 kilometers per hour).
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
Well, this is it, guys. Here’s where humans really do start become obsolete. We’re now building robots that can not only play sports, but can learn how to play better using an artificial brain that works like a human's.
Researchers from the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology built a robot that can hit baseballs. The artificial brain is built around a Nvida GPU and it contains around 100,000 neurons, each programmed to focus solely on playing baseball.
Harvard University
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute