Category: Technology

People-Power Lights 2012 Olympic Walkway

Gina Clifford

When I first met Laurence Kemball-Cook he was showing me how he’d hacked a cheap AM-FM radio in his hotel room the night before. He rewired it to run off of kinetic energy instead of the batteries it was designed for. He also shared photos of LED bike lights he’d hacked together that provided superior lighting at a fraction of the cost of commercial bike lights. It was obvious that Laurence had a thing for lights. Really, though, his sustainable clean energy power generation invention is what makes his story interesting.

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Marissa Mayer: Yahoo’s New Pregnant CEO

Marziah Karch

Marissa Mayer is a big deal. She’s Google employee 20, the first woman engineer, and the highest ranking woman there. Well, she was. As of yesterday, she’s a Xoogler. Mayer quit Google in order to become Yahoo’s new CEO. As if that weren’t enough, the same day she made the announcement, she tweeted that she and her husband were expecting a baby boy in October. That’s right, Yahoo hired her with a visible baby bump.

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The New McAllen Public Library: Brilliant!

Patricia Vollmer

The McAllen, Texas public library moved from a smaller downtown location to a renovated 124,000 square foot former Walmart building last December. This was touching to me on many levels, so it’s worth sharing with other readers if you hadn’t heard about it. The story was making the rounds on the Internet because the architecture firm that designed the new location, Meyer, Scherer and Rockcastle, Ltd., had just won an International Interior Design Association Library Interior Design award. Learning more about this story was so fun for me. The town of McAllen had a 5 1/2 year journey from choosing the site to financing the work to cutting the ribbon this past December.

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Kytephone App Makes Android Phones Kid-Safe

Nicole Wakelin

Keeping kids safe is a priority for parents, especially when it comes to sharing information online. Everyone is worried about some creepy stalker setting up a meeting, or getting their information and whisking them away from a playground or a schoolyard. Many parents opt to keep them away from things like smartphones for fear of their making dangerous connections. The problem is that there are times most of us would like our kids to have a ready means of contacting us in a pinch. Kytephone aims to provide a way for parents to give their children phones and keep them safe.

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Can You Hear the Higgs?

Helen Barker

Have you ever wondered what one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time sounds like? Wonder no longer! After the announcement of the Higgs boson discoveries last week, researcher Domenico Vicinanza immediately went to work sonifiying the data. Now that the general populous can finally hear what the Higgs boson evidence sounds like, hopefully all of us can understand the data leading to this momentous discovery. Could the mysteries of the universe be holding a waltz beat? How about a jazz rhythm? R&B? Pop? Country? Turns out the score has a distinctly latin flair, similar to a habanera beat.

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Welcome Back Reading Rainbow, We Missed You!

Dakster Sullivan

When I was in school, Reading Rainbow was one of my favorite TV shows. The signature theme song would get stuck in my head for most of the day after watching whichever episode my teacher put on for us. Levar Burton felt like a friend I had met in the library and I looked forward to the books he would use in each episode. The thing I really liked about Levar was how excited and eager he was to read each book. I feel like his enthusiasm to read rubbed of on me a little bit.

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What Finding the Higgs Boson Means

Helen Barker

There has been a rise in speculation from the international physics community about the contents of a press conference that has been called by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to be held at 9am Geneva time (3am EST) on July 4, 2012. Physicists expect that the announcement will be positive proof of the Higgs boson particle and a successful mission for the team. The anticipation reached a frenzied state yesterday when scientists from the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois announced that they had found significant supporting evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson.

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Travel Week: Universal Studios Cinematic Spectacular — 100 Years of Movie Memories

Dakster Sullivan

Recently, I was given the opportunity to check out Universal Orlando’s latest nighttime show. I’ve never seen an evening show at the park before, so I was looking forward to the experience. My past experience with nighttime shows at Disney, prepared me to fight the crowd and wait for over an hour for a good seat. To my surprise, that wasn’t necessary at all. Unlike the shows at other Orlando theme parks, there are multiple locations along the water front that you can view the show and still have a front row experience.

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Kickstarter: Hone Means No More Searching For Keys

Nicole Wakelin

There’s nothing quite as frustrating as getting ready to leave the house in the morning and not being able to find your keys. This is usually more likely to happen on a day when you’re already running late or you overslept and can’t see straight or your kids are missing a shoe, or a glove or their school bags. It’s one of those moments of parenting hell that we’ve all endured. Lucky for all of us, the days of searching the house for our keys are soon to disappear thanks to the folks behind Hone.

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Keep Your Data Backed Up and Safe With CrashPlan+

Jenny Bristol1

For years I’ve kept my data backed up on an external hard drive. This has its advantages. The data is always there for me to access, and I can physically move the hard drive, in case of emergency or random paranoia.

But what if my house burns down? Granted, my ioSafe external hard drive is fireproof and waterproof, but fires can sometimes ravage for a long time and surpass the fire rating on those things. And a combination of onsite and offsite storage is always recommended.

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