Swiss Army Solid State Drive

Swiss Army Solid State Drive of the Day: Victorinox, maker of Swiss Army knives, is showing off a fancy new knife attachment at CES: a 1-terabyte solid state drive.

The terabyte SSD comes in a plastic cover, and includes an airport-safe replacement sleeve you can put it in when you don’t want to carry a knife. It works with both USB 3.0 and e-SATA, and features 256-bit security.

The only hangup is the asking price, which is currently set at $3,000. Granted, 1TB SSDs just went mainstream last year, and a 2.5″ version will run you about $1,000 all on its own, but $3k is still pretty steep.

The Swiss Army drive is due out in August.

[slashgear]

Stephen Hawking and The Equation for Time Travel

[Via]

Neil deGrasse Tyson on America’s Science Decline

Neil deGrasse Tyson on America’s Science Decline:

In the following video, Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about how the amount of peer reviewed science research being done in America has gone down since 2000, and gone up in other places of the world.

[Via Videosift]

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BlueStacks brings App Player, 400,000 Android apps to Windows 8 (video)

Back in October, BlueStacks unveiled an alpha version of its App Player, bringing a slew of Android apps to Windows PCs, tablets and desktops. Today, the company expanded its reach with a new, Windows 8-compatible version of its software, integrating more than 400,000 Android apps into Microsoft's latest OS. The latest App Player, which will support both standard desktop and Metro UI modes, effectively allows Windows 8 users to run "most every app" from the Android catalog, without having to conduct any porting magic. BlueStacks demonstrated its new virtualization tool on a Windows 8 Ultrabook at CES today, and plans to bring the App Player to a brand new device this March, when Taiwanese manufacturer InHon releases its first Ultrabook, with the software pre-loaded. Head past the break for the full PR, along with a demo video.

Continue reading BlueStacks brings App Player, 400,000 Android apps to Windows 8 (video)

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Exclusive: 2012 BMW ActiveHybrid 3 nav system uses altitude to optimize hybrid efficiency

Somewhat lost in the fanfare of BMW introducing a hybrid version of its best-selling 3 Series at the Detroit Auto Show was a brief mention of its new navigation technology. The 2012 ActiveHybrid 3 will be the first hybrid to use its nav system to help predict the best time to use and recharge its battery. This will go well beyond currently available navigation technology that plots economical travel routes based on traffic and speed limits, also incorporating altitude, final destination and other real-time data to wring the most out of those electrons.

For example, suppose there's a big hill on your route. Since the 3 Series hybrid "knows" you will be descending, and thus afforded a good opportunity for recharging, it can drain more of the battery on the way up. BMW says it is still working on the system, but it will be included as a standard feature on the ActiveHybrid 3, and will eventually spread to the ActiveHybrid 5 and other hybrid models. While we don't have much in the way of details, the opportunity here seems pretty vast, effectively allowing the car to hypermile for you.

The Hobbit in 12 Minutes of the Day

The Hobbit in 12 Minutes of the Day: Long before Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, or even the animated Rankin-Bass film, there was another official movie version of The Hobbit.

In 1966, film producer William Snyder’s rights to the story were about to expire and revert to the Tolkien estate. He assigned animator Gene Deitch to create a super-low budget version of the story that would fit on one 35 mmfilm reel, which held about 12 minutes.

Deitch has released his Hobbit, along with the story of the one-month ordeal it took to create it, on his blog. He writes:

Snyder played his ace: to fulfill just the letter of the contract – to deliver a “full-color film” of The Hobbit by June 30th. All he had to do was to order me to destroy my own screenplay – all my previous year’s work, and hoke up a super-condensed scenario on the order of a movie preview, (but still tell the entire basic story from beginning to end), and all within 12 minutes running time – one 35mm reel of film. Cheap. I had to get the artwork done, record voice and music, shoot it, edit it, and get it to a New York projection room on or before June 30th, 1966! I should have told him to shove it, but I was basically his slave at the time. It suddenly became an insane challenge.

Deitch met that insane challenge, and the results are far less terrible than the one-month deadline would suggest.

[cartoonbrew]

-philosophyofdrawing

Dark Knight Soundtrack Theory of the Day

Dark Knight Soundtrack Theory of the Day: YouTuber Jerome Villarin has a fascinating theory about Hans Zimmer’s inspiration for the Dark Knight movie score, and a video to back it up.

Specifically, he noticed that “Why So Serious?” from Zimmer’s score sounds an awful lot like part of Francis Lai’s score for the 1983 musical Edith et Marcel.

It sounds crazy, until you hear the two compositions back to back, and then played on top of one another.

Oh, and until you remember that the music of Edith Piaf, the subject of Edith et Marcel, featured prominently in another of Zimmer’s collaborations with Chris Nolan …

I N C E P T I O N.

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Genetically Modified Giant Ants of the Day

Genetically Modified Giant Ants of the Day: Researchers at Canada’s McGill University have figured out how to create giant-headed “supersoldier” ants in a lab by treating regular ants with a dose of hormone.

The hormone unlocks a gene that appears to be a throwback to the ants’ ancestors, who may have used their enlarged heads and mandibles to protect the nest and crack seeds.

“What we are showing for the first time is there is this ancestral potential sitting there, and when poked by the environment it can really unleash this potential that can power evolution,” said the study’s senior researcher, Ehab Abouheif.

It can apparently also power nightmares and flashbacks to the movie Them!, but the McGill team forgot to mention that in their study.

[huffpo]