• Entertainment & Gaming

    The Dangers of Flip-Flops

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 6.24.2008 9 Comments

    For non-metrosexual men, they’re one of three pairs of shoes on the closet floor. Between the dusty brown loafers and Adidas cross-trainers lies a pair of flip-flops. In Providence they’re worn four months a year, in Florida everyday after work and in California—from birth. Flops are an extension of man’s feet, but could the pleasure of air running through ones toes be outweighed by long term complications?

  • Science

    Video: The XOS Exoskeleton in Action

    By John Mahoney Posted on 4.9.2008 20 Comments

    Iron Man's fictional tech may soon become real. Inside a mountain lab, researchers have already built motorized suits that give ordinary people superhuman strength. // By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T and C // found at http://corp.brightcove.com/legal/terms_publisher.cfm. var config = new Array(); /* * feel free to edit these configurations * to modify the player experience */ config["videoId"] = null; //the default video loaded into the player config["videoRef"] = null; //the default video loaded into the player by ref id specified in console config["lineupId"] = null; //the default lineup loaded into the player config["playerTag"] = null; //player tag used for identifying this page in brightcove reporting config["autoStart"] = false; //tells the player to start playing video on load config["preloadBackColor"] = "#FFFFFF"; //background color while loading the player /* * set the player's size using the parameters below * to make this player dynamically resizable, set the width and height as a percentage */ config["width"] = 486; config["height"] = 412; /* do not edit these config items */ config["playerId"] = 1494874797; createExperience(config, 8); We've told you all about the Raytheon Sarcos XOS exoskeleton, the smart suit of armor that endows its wearer with super-human strength. Now see it in action, and meet the minds behind both Iron Men—real, and imaginary.

  • Gadgets

    Get In Touch With PopSci.com and Win

    By John Mahoney Posted on 4.11.2008 7 Comments

    Now that we've settled into our new site, we want to hear what you, our users, think about PopSci.com. We'll use your responses to continue to make our site the best it can be. And to sweeten the deal, survey responders will be eligible to win a shiny new iPod Touch.

  • Entertainment & Gaming

    Gaming on the iPhone

    By Gregory Mone Posted on 4.7.2008 0 Comments

    A few enterprising gamers have managed to port the popular shooter game Quake 3 onto the iPhone and iPod Touch. A YouTube video recently put into circulation shows how they've taken advantage of the devices' built-in accelerometers and touch-screen capability. Basically, you move around by tilting the iPhone or iPod, and tap the screen to blast bad guys. They've set it up so that multi-player games are possible, too.

  • Entertainment & Gaming

    The Future of the Couch Potato

    By Gregory Mone Posted on 4.4.2008 2 Comments

    The convergence Consulting Group has just released a report stating that Web-based TV viewing is on the rise. By 2010, the group predicts that 23 percent of the content produced by broadcast and cable TV will be viewed online—up from about 9 percent today. At the same time, since advertisers haven't moved too many of their dollars over to the new medium yet, you have to expect that the big networks won't let a full transition happen too quickly—the money has to be there first. In other words, old-fashioned commercial-heavy programs aren't going away just yet.

  • Cars

    Traffic Jams on Open Highways

    By Matt Ransford Posted on 4.1.2008 11 Comments

    The only thing more frustrating than creeping your way toward the site of a bottleneck on the highway only to discover the accident is on the other side of the median are the times when you make it through and discover, as far as you can tell, nothing was holding up the traffic. Japanese researchers have now demonstrated that the "nothing" may in fact be the traffic crossing a threshold of density of cars on the road. Too many cars means that small slow downs by a few drivers equals up to big backups miles away.

  • Entertainment & Gaming

    The Leap Year Demystified

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 2.29.2008 3 Comments

    Happy Leap Year Day! Today is February 29th, the hanger-on day we get at the end of February every four years. Everybody knows it eventually comes around and most of us learned the thirty days hath September rhyme in school. But we could probably use a refresher on why exactly it shows up. Let's take a look.

  • Entertainment & Gaming

    Grandma and Open-Sourcing

    By Abby Seiff Posted on 2.8.2008 4 Comments

    There's an interesting essay on CNET about the trend of more and more people migrating to Linux, and why they've basically got the wrong idea. The piece is a response to an article on Linux.com, in which the author describes how he "cobbled together a computer" for his Mom out of cast-offs, then switched her over from Windows to Ubuntu Linux.

  • Gadgets

    Sharper Pictures From Your Next Cameraphone

    By Sean Captain Posted on 2.3.2008 0 Comments

    Kodak has invented a new image sensor that the company claims will radically improve photos from camera phones—eliminating the grainy-looking pixel noise that is currently taken for granted. The technology is a little funky, but heres our best understanding of it…

  • Entertainment & Gaming

    Wii Broke It

    By popsci Posted on 11.18.2006 85 Comments

    Wiitopsy_ss_15It is with a heavy heart that we bring you this special weekend report. When PopSci's Wii arrived last week, it didn't spend too much time in the box. Ripped open without any hesitation, our little Wii gave us a long Friday's worth of furious Wii Sports and Excite Truck action at PopSci HQ.



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