Russ McBee

Today, BMW announced a pilot program in which 500 purely electric MINI's will be sold in California, New York, and New Jersey over the coming months. This ''field trial'' of the MINI E will allow 500 customers to lease the car for one year; during the trial period, MINI has agreed to pick up the cost of recharging the car. The numbers are ...

This is just unbelievably cool: The world's most advanced, commercially available, bionic hand has won the UK's top engineering prize. The i-LIMB, a prosthetic device with five individually powered digits, beat three other finalists to win this year's MacRobert award. The technology has been fitted to more than 200 people, including US ...

Three very cool stories caught my eye today. 1) Researchers have managed to decipher and play back a recording made nearly two decades before Edison's phonograph. The phonautogram was made in France in 1860 and represents the earliest known recording of any sound. Although the recording (and others like it) have been known for a long time, only ...

Jack Lail posted about JungleDisk the other day; it sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I like it. The idea is pretty simple, at least in the abstract: using Amazon's S3 online storage service, JungleDisk maps an online storage location to a drive letter on your PC. This provides a highly reliable, highly stable online ...

Holy crap: IBM (NYSE: IBM) disclosed Monday that it has teamed up with Taiwanese vendor MediaTek to develop computer chipsets that the companies say will allow consumers to wirelessly zap high-definition content to televisions and other devices at push-button speeds. [...] Devices utilizing the technology would be capable of receiving a ...

I've been toying with the idea of buying a laptop. I don't need one for any specific or imminent purpose, but I think it might come in handy. My criteria are pretty simple: I want performance, portability, and quality for the least cost. I'd likely use it for Web surfing, email, blogging, maybe some light photo editing (but nothing heavy), and ...

Microsoft's Photosynth technology is mind-blowing. Imagine a satellite map of the United States; then imagine the ability to drill into a region, a city, a street, a building, and a blade of grass on the lawn. Imagine starting with a full frontal view of Notre Dame Cathedral and then drilling into details of the exterior, down to a tooth on a ...

Some Swedish scientists with way too much time on their hands have invented talking paper: Researchers from Mid Sweden University have constructed an interactive paper billboard that emits recorded sound in response to a user's touch. The prototype display uses conductive inks, which are sensitive to pressure, and printed speakers. The team ...

I usually feel a mixture of awe and creepy dread whenever I read about Google's various technologies; those people are way too smart not to be aliens from Planet Genius. Today is no exception. Google's image search now supports basic face recognition: The hidden feature was discovered by Google Blogoscoped, and there is currently no ...

Get ready to ditch the keyboard and mouse: That is the coolest thing I have ever seen.