Darren Quick

Facial recognition might be all the rage in giving computer systems the ability to ascertain the identity of individuals - what with most people having different facial features and all. But a team from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, has taken a different approach to identify users of touch-based tabletop computers like Microsoft's Surface. Instead of focusing on the face, the team has looked in the opposite direction to develop a system known as Bootstrapper which distinguishes between users based on their footwear. Read More

Consumer-level 3D printing technology has moved ahead in leaps and bounds in recent years with the release of devices such as the Thing-o-Matic, the Replicator and Cubify 3D printers. Proponents of the technology envision a not-too-distant future where users will be able to download designs and print everything from car parts to ... well, a new and improved 3D printer. The folks at The Pirate Bay are obviously on board with this idea. The file-sharing site better known for allowing users to share multimedia, games and software via BitTorrent has now added a new "Physibles" category. The new category will contain digital files for objects that can be physically created using a 3D printer. Read More

Lock up your satellites and batten down your power-lines because a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) is headed our way. According to the National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), it is the strongest Solar Radiation Storm since May, 2005. According to NASA, the CME is moving at almost 1,400 miles per second (2,253 km/s) and will reach the Earth's magnetosphere as early as 9 a.m. US EST on Tuesday, January 24 - give or take seven hours. Read More

In February last year, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and transport company Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) announced plans to investigate the effectiveness of a system intended to reduce the frictional resistance between a vessel’s bottom and the seawater using a layer of air bubbles. Now MHI has coupled the Mitsubishi Air Lubrication System (MALS) with a high-efficiency ship hull in the conceptual design for a container ship that the company claims would offer a reduction in CO2 emissions of 35 percent compared to conventional container carrier designs. Read More

Volkswagen has unveiled the latest addition to its "New Small Family" series of ultra-compact city vehicles based on the first Volkswagen up! concept car that debuted at the 2007 Frankfurt Motor Show. Since then we've seen numerous up! concept cars such as the up! Lite, the E-up! and the Space up!, and even before the production launch of the three-door up!, which hit showrooms last December, Volkswagen had already hinted a five-door model was in the works. Now the company has revealed that this new addition will be available in Germany from May, and the rest of Europe by mid-year. Read More

On its company blog, Sony has announced a spring (or autumn if you’re south of the equator) refresh for of its VAIO line of laptops. While the Z series, S series and E series will all receive CPU upgrades along with various other component updates, the C series changes are limited to updates of the cosmetic variety. Read More

Husqvarna has decided to go back to the 70s with its Concept Baja. The retro-styled bike had its first debut at the 2012 Progressive International Motorcycle Show in New York last Friday as part of the exhibition's 12-city tour across the U.S. Taking its name from the famous desert race that's been run each year for more than four decades, the Concept Baja radiates a 70s vintage vibe with a design that echoes the company's off-road models from that era, but with a modern touch most immediately evident by an LED-array headlight built into the front number plate and an LED instrument display built into the crossbar. Read More

We recently looked at one of the potential contenders in the US$10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE, which as the name suggests, was inspired by the medical tricorder of Star Trek fame. Now scientists have developed a new way of creating Terahertz (THz) or T-rays, which they say could help make handheld devices with tricorder-like capabilities a reality. Read More

One of the biggest criticisms leveled at biofuels that are derived from crops such as wheat, corn and sugar cane, is that they result in valuable land being taken away from food production. For this reason there are various research efforts underway to turn seaweed into a viable renewable source of biomass. Now a team from Bio Architecture Lab (BAL) claims to have developed a breakthrough technology that makes seaweed a cost-effective source of biomass by engineering a microbe that can extract all the major sugars in seaweed and convert them into renewable fuels and chemicals. Read More