Webmail Service Using Live Snails

Is your Internet as of late moving at a snail’s pace? It may be more fact than fiction! A project set to demo at Siggraph 2008 later this summer has fitted snails with equipment to allow them to send e-mails on behalf of visitors to a website.

Instead of instantaneous communication, sent messages will travel at [...]

Is Too Much Information Really a Bad Thing?

An article on the Guardian website asks whether collecting too much information on innocent people makes it harder to catch the guilty.
At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your

calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It’s better to crunch [...]

Moo Cow Pseudo Facial Recognition

Please don’t read into the sudden infatuation with bovine technology. It’s just that it sound so preposterous that it deserves to be passed on to the masses. I do suppose that as technology becomes more and more fundamental in our daily routines, these types of applications are inevitable. Nonetheless,
Australian scientists have launched technology that uses [...]

The War on Terror Rides the Bus

Authorities can now put the brakes on terrorists who hijack New York buses.
Like something out of the movie “Speed,” a new GPS device enables authorities to remotely control a bus – slowing it down to 5 mph and preventing it from restarting once it has stopped. The device has been installed on thousands of local [...]

Where’s the Beef?

The same Global Positioning System (GPS) technology used to track vehicles is now being used to track cows.

But Agricultural Research Service (ARS) animal scientist Dean M. Anderson has taken tracking several steps further with a Walkman-like headset that enables him to “whisper” wireless commands to cows to control their movements across a landscape—and even [...]