Planetary Resources this week unveiled a full-scale prototype of its Arkyd-100 — a space telescope and technology demonstrator that will be used on the company's first deep space missions. Backed by high-profile investors like James Cameron, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt, the asteroid mining...
"We’re raising the bar on spacecraft design." Chris Lewicki, Planetary Resources
Aaron Swartz's family funeral was held this week in Chicago, but on Saturday, New York hosted a public memorial. Organizers reported an attendance of just under 900, filling Cooper Union's Great Hall to standing-room capacity, with many more...
Japanese carrier KDDI’s CEO Takashi Tanaka says the company is "considering" selling smartphones with Mozilla’s Firefox OS, reports CNet Japan. The comment was made following yesterday’s HTML5 Study Group in Tokyo, at which Tanaka was an unexpected guest. The CEO declined to give details on the time frame that KDDI is considering.
Who would have thought that within a year, we'd have multiple, competing asteroid mining startups? Deep Space Industries, which will hold its official launch on Tuesday at Santa Monica's Museum of Flying, is the latest of several ambitious private companies to announce plans for the final frontier: in its case, to prospect near-Earth asteroids with an eye towards using materials in them to build a permanent presence in space. In 2015, it says it will begin sending unmanned "FireFly" spacecraft to explore asteroids that fly near Earth, followed by heavier "DragonFly" craft that will bring back samples from likely candidates between 2016 and 2020.
'FireFly' prospecting craft by 2015, zero gravity 3D printers in the future
If these initial steps pan out, DSI has far more ambitious plans. Among them is a "Microgravity Foundry," a 3D...
Between zero-gravity 3D printers and FireFly-class craft, it's a nerd's fondest dream
After a weekend that saw 15,000 BlackBerry 10 app submissions, RIM writes that 19,000 apps were submitted over the weekend. The run has prompted the company to extend the application deadline for its $10,000 developer incentive to February 18th, 2013. RIM has spent more than a year aggressively trying to get a critical mass of apps, and it's been bullish on its prospects; VP of Developer...
A zerg rush of app development
Ever since Apple bailed on the Macworld conference in 2009, organizers have had to come up with inventive ways to maintain interest in the annual expo. This year, that involved recruiting actors Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad, both of whom star in the forthcoming Steve Jobs biopic jOBS. On January 31st, Kutcher and Gad will take to the main stage at Macworld — again co-branded as "iWorld" this...
For the first time, scientists have discovered quadruple-helix DNA in the human body. Until now the general consensus has been that only double-helix strands of DNA were found in nature, with those of the four-strand variety relegated to research labs and test tubes. But Shankar Balasubramanian, a chemistry professor at Cambridge University, has found that they naturally occur in cancer cells. Even more important than the discovery itself, though is the potential quadruple-helix DNA could offer in battling the horrific disease.
It's important to note that scientists are still in the very...
Remember that time in the middle of class, when you were just sitting there minding your own business — and then everybody started breaking out into song? And I'm not talking about Grease 2, here; I'm talking about full-on Generation M culture warrior anthems.
Fellas. Yeah. Fellas. Yeah. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge.
RIM has renamed its yearly main event from BlackBerry World to BlackBerry Live, in a spirited announcement on the company's business blog. Unfortunately, its choice of May 14-16th overlaps with Google's I/O event, which dazzled last year with crazy stunts and several major product announcements. (Both RIM and Google changed the dates of their conferences for 2013, but Google went public with its decision early last month.) The company says its...
Thorsten Heins better be planning to parachute from a blimp
Polaroid and Technicolor are known as trailblazers that grew into iconic American brands. However, both companies have gone through so much trauma over the last decade — bankruptcy, new ownership, and general identity crisis — that their modern incarnations bear little resemblance to the...
A group of 23 women have signed on to a class-action lawsuit in the hopes of putting a dent in the practice of "revenge porn" — a rather despicable type of online pornography that consists of user-submitted pictures, usually of an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend and usually without the subject's...
Moog's iconic analog synthesizers tend to run on the expensive side, but the recently announced Sub Phatty synth offers a lower price point along with what Moog calls a new sound for its lineup. The Sub Phatty includes 31 knobs and 25 keys,...
As part of its effort to raise more funds from web giants like Google, which are accused of using loopholes to avoid paying taxes in the country, France is considering a new measure that would tax the collection of personal data from users. France has been working on...
Amazon may be lagging behind Netflix when it comes to delivering original programming to users, but the company just scooped up a fairly recognizable brand in Zombieland. A TV series set in the same zombie-filled universe as the feature film starring Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson was...
Kim Suozzi, a terminally-ill neuroscience student with brain cancer, died at the age of 23 on January 17th. Her one wish before she died was to have her body cryonically preserved, but she lacked the many thousands of dollars required to finance such a service. In an effort to raise the funds, Suozzi turned to Reddit in August of last year, imploring readers of the site to donate to her cause. That post led to a...
Just two years ago, Andy Greenberg had an hours-long interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The author and Forbes reporter listened as Assange claimed to have a massive trove of documents, the release of which, he promised, could “take...
Since Motorola Mobility was acquired by Google in mid-2012, many have been waiting for a real Google-influenced cellphone to take advantage of that partnership. That phone still hasn't arrived, but there is still a Google Phone... of sorts. The Motogo!, released last year in Brazil and now coming...
A new polymer developed at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Hong Kong Polytechnic University could be used to enable cheap cotton to...
AT&T recently made FaceTime calling available to all eligible customers on tiered data plans, but advocacy group Free Press remains unimpressed with the move. Immediately after AT&T announced it...
The New York Times details a campaign from a Michael Jackson fan group that sought to bury an unfavorable book on Amazon with promotion of anonymous one-star reviews. While fake reviews are thought...
Temple Run 2 has amassed over 20 million downloads in its first four days on the iOS App Store, with six million of those coming on day one alone. And though it's initially a free download, the...
Whether you like it or not, oversize smartphones are all the rage these days, with companies such as Samsung and Huawei leading the charge. But they may not be the only manufacturers interested in...
The "new" MySpace unquestionably places a bigger emphasis on music than any previous iteration we've seen. Visit the freshly-revamped site and...
Cuba seems to have started accepting internet traffic through an underwater cable, not just the slow and limited satellites it's relied on for years. Traffic monitoring company Renesys said yesterday that it had detected a new connection between Spanish ISP Telefonica and the state-owned Cuban telecommunications company, with lower latencies than would be possible through the aging satellite...
The 8-inch Galaxy Note tablet we saw last week will be officially unveiled at Mobile World Congress, according to Korea's iNews24. The site reports that Samsung mobile head JK Shin says the 8-inch tablet will be coming at the show, which is held in late February, though he didn't reveal any other...
