Best Buy Missing 20 Laptops, Police on Lookout For Tom Cruise Wannabes [Crime]

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A three-foot hole in the roof, footprints on a pipe leading up the side of the building, no alarm ringing, no one on any security footage and missing 20 laptops. Mission Impossible follow up or Best Buy burglary?

The incident is being dubbed the Mission Impossible burglary because the thieves apparently never touched the floor of the New Jersey Best Buy store—they would've set off an alarm if they did. Instead shimmied up a gas pipe, cut a hole in the ceiling of the place, and "dropped 16 feet to 10-foot-tall racks" to snatch the laptops from there. The crew cleverly avoided being caught on any security footage and left the store as quietly as they entered it.

Officers believe that about two to three people were needed to pull off the entire stunt, but I think they just need to ask a certain scientologist about his whereabouts for this particular evening. [NJ]


Corsair’s Force Series SSDs Are the Fastest in Its Class With 280MB/s Reads [Ssd]

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These Force Series SSDs from Corsair have up to 280MB/s reads and 260MB/s writes, which are supposedly "class-leading". Even if it's not the fastest solid state drives on the market period, it's the fastest Corsair's ever made.

The drives will be available in 100 and 200GB sizes in about two weeks, and will support SATA II 3.0Gb/s. No prices for these yet, but our guess is you're going to have to pay a little more for the higher performance. In comparison, Corsair's other 128GB drives run around $400-500, depending on where you shop. [Corsair]


The FDA Warns POM: Stop Saying Pomegranate Juice Cures Cancer | Discoblog

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pomtruthThe Web site for POM pomegranate juice makes some pretty extreme claims, strongly implying that the juice can prevent or help treat diseases like cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and even erectile dysfunction. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has said such claims are misleading and are not allowed on food products, according to a report in The New York Times. If POM wants to make such claims, the FDA stated, it will have to be regulated as a drug.

In a crackdown on companies with misleading labels, the FDA shot off warning letters asking 17 companies to clean up their act.

POM is not the only company to be chastised by the FDA for misleading labeling. Other offenders included several products whose labels trumpet the fact that they contain no transfats, even though they contain high levels of saturated fat, writes The New York Times:

The products included Gorton’s Fish Fillets, Spectrum Organic All Vegetable Shortening and two products from Dreyer’s, the Dibs bite-size ice cream snacks and the vanilla-fudge Drumsticks. According to Dreyer’s, the Dibs contain 17 grams of saturated fat per serving. Federal guidelines recommend that a person not consume more than 20 grams in a day.

The FDA also wagged its finger at some baby foods made by Gerber and Beech-Nut, saying those foods made several unwarranted health claims, because dietary levels for the nutrients cited on their labels haven’t been established for babies.

Related Content:
Discoblog:Fast Food Joints Lie About Calories (Denny’s, We’re Looking at You)
Discoblog: Food Fraud: High Schoolers Use DNA Tests to Expose Fake Caviar
Discoblog: Fiber-Filled, Antioxidant-Packed Ice Cream—Brilliant? Sacrilegious? Nasty?
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?

Image: POM Juice


Explore Google Search Suggestions Word-By-Word [Google]

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You can learn a lot about the psyches of internet users through Google's search suggestions, as we've seen. But What Do You Suggest? lets you explore these suggestions in a much more in-depth way.

The site allows you to start with any word you want, opening up visual trees showing what words people usually type next. The lines connecting the words show how common each word combo is, allowing you to follow the popularity to the most common search phrases or going to some of the weirder ones. And at the end, of course, you get the results those people searching for these things end up with.

It's a fascinating little time-suck, if you're interested in just how people use Google and how everyone is just a little bit crazy. [What Do You Suggest? via Infosthetics via Brian Stelter]


Plan B For Outer Space

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NASA Chief Bolden Seeks 'Plan B' for the Space Agency, Wall Street Journal

"NASA chief Charles Bolden has asked senior managers to draw up an alternate plan for the space agency after members of Congress indicated they wanted to reject a White House proposal to hire private companies to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit and beyond. In an internal National Aeronautics and Space Administration memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bolden ordered officials to map out "what a potential compromise might look like" to satisfy critics on Capitol Hill. By calling for an alternative plan, Mr. Bolden threatened to undercut White House efforts to get its proposed NASA budget through Congress."

Johnson Space Center Prepares 'Plan B' at Bolden's Request, Space News

"Bolden, however, said March 4 that he did not request NASA human spaceflight officials to come up with an alternative to Obama's plan. "The President's Budget for NASA is my budget. I strongly support the priorities and the direction for NASA that he has put forward," Bolden said in a written statement. "I'm open to hearing ideas from any member of the NASA team, but I did not ask anybody for an alternative to the President's plan and budget. We have to be forward thinking and aggressive in our pursuit of new technologies to take us beyond low-Earth orbit, and the President's plan does this. After years of underinvestment in new technology and unrealistic budgeting, we finally have an ambitious plan for NASA that sets the agency on a reinvigorated path of space exploration."

Keith's note: According to Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee staffer Jeff Bingham, posting as "51D Mascot" at nasaspaceflight.com regarding Sen. Hutchison's recent proposal:

"Absolutely right, but the point here is timing. At this stage you have "camps" at the extreme edges of "PoR" or bust and "Bold New Idea" with many of the influential folks and key players taking those positions--now. But when it becomes clear, as I believe it will, that neither of those are going to be sustainable, then a mddle ground will be sought. But it has to be articulated as an option, and THAT is the true purpose of this bill. Thus, an attempt to line up all those players prior to introduction would have been counterproductive. The hope is that having a reasonably cohesive, credible alternative "on the table" can provide an eventual rallying point for a path forward, or at the very least a focal point for the serious discussion of what that path should entail."

Bingham also notes here that "The Ares 1 references are, first, "suggestive" as options to be reviewed as part of HLV development. The notion is that an evolvable shuttle-derived HLV could begin with a core that might be an in-line configuration of 4-segment SSRBs, coupled to an ET-sized core segment (strengthened and with a boat-tail at the bottom holding SSMEs, and a payload attachment/inter-stage carrying an accelerated Orion with LAS attached) which would become the "government-operated" LEO/ISS support capability, with a target IOC of 2013."

Silicon Nanophotonics to Make Your Gadgets Run Faster and Consume Less [Electronics]

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IBM is replacing copper wiring with an avalanche of photons and electrons. They are now transmitting data streams between circuits at the nanophotonic level. Speed: 40Gbps. Power supply: Just 1.5 volts. This video explain how it works.

The system is so fast and consumes so little because of electron avalanches: The receptor—called nanophotonic avalanche photodetector—catches the photon, which starts an electron chain reaction thanks to the properties of Germanium. What does this mean: Faster, smaller, and more power efficient devices. And the possibility of saying "nanophotonics" any time we want.

Nanophotonics!

[Twitter]


Portable Generator

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I am installing a temporary portable generator and I was told that article 702.6 in the NEC says the the transfer equipment shall be suitable for its intended use and design and he said no ATS can not be used with a portable generator. That only has to do with parallel operation correct? I am not

Ballmer Explains the Cloud, In 5 Easy Steps [Microsoft]

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In his first time speaking at University of Washington—the giant Microsoft-endowed school in the company's backyard—Steve Ballmer explained "the cloud."

First, there was a goofy video showing how stoned most UW students are, conducted by a gal with shockingly platinum hair and bronze skin. Then Ballmer says it's something he's betting his company on, and that every company is betting their companies on, and that it's a $3.3 trillion industry. That's pretty serious. Here are his five key principles:

1. "The Cloud Creates Opportunities and Responsibilities" (In fairness, Ballmer admits it sounds like "some blah blah blah business term.") What he means is that creators don't have to come from big-ass tech companies to market cool software now. He says "Apple's done a very nice job" with the App Store, giving opportunities to developers, and that Microsoft is keen on providing those types of opportunities. How do developers who have worked on open-source or freeware apps finally get some money for their creations? (Does this mean Windows Phone 7 will follow a similar developer strategy? Who knows...)

He also says that the cloud is supposed to give more control to users, not just developers. Control over privacy and anonymity, that is. Ballmer doesn't mention too many examples, but cites Facebook—obliquely—as an example of the challenges of cloud-related privacy.

2. "The Cloud Learns and Helps You Learn, Decide and Take Action" Machine learning is key to cloud strategy. Ballmer says that when you look out at 83 million websites and try to find something simple but hard to search for, like "What do we as a society spend on healthcare?" you can easily get nothing. "It's only eight numbers," Ballmer says, but they're hard to find in one simple little chart. The cloud needs the intelligence to know what people are looking for, and know how to go and find that information on its own, or collaboratively with users.

Here, to drive the point, Ballmer invited a guy from the Bing team to demo Bing Maps' explore feature. It's live, so you can check it out for yourself. Drill down into the University of Washington, if you want a good representation of what they're doing.

3. "Cloud Enhances Social and Professional Interactions" This Ballmer admits is kind of an obvious notion, as we're already immersed in it, but he says that the innovations here will improve to a point where "virtual interaction through the cloud is as good as being here today." He doesn't mean "as good" in the sense of "as useful." He means that one day, an entire auditorium of activity would be able to be captured on 3D video and streamed live anywhere, like Harry Potter diving into a Pensieve. (That'd be my Potter fanboy analogy, not Ballmer's.) He also means, of course, that realtime data collaboration tools will get better and better. He didn't mention that they'd have anything to compete directly with Google Wave, but if they do, hopefully they'll focus on ease of use.

As a near-term social example, he brought a demo of Xbox Live TV, something already launched in England with the Sky Player. Imagine Mystery Science Theater 3000 done with Xbox avatars, under a screen playing a live show. In the Sky example, of course, sports are key. I am thinking there are very few live TV events anymore, but maybe a Lost episode or some (non-Olympic) sporting event would be a good example.

4. The Cloud Wants Smarter Devices This pillar of the Ballmer argument is the one that probably makes the most sense to Giz readers and people who have kept up with Windows Phone 7 (and Pink) news. As a student sitting near me just pointed out, the "smarter devices" angle is antithetical to what Google and others seem to preach, but Microsoft obviously cares about processing at the consumer end, and they believe that as long as processing is cheaper than bandwidth it makes sense.

Not surprisingly, his demo is Windows Phone 7, so I'll spare you any crappy photo and just link you to our comprehensive coverage.

5. "The Cloud Drives Servers Advances That Drive the Cloud" We tend to ignore the hardware demands of the cloud, but obviously, Microsoft's server business is a key part of Ballmer's reason for promoting the cloud. He speaks of service issues—systems able to deploy software instantaneously worldwide, without a hassle. "If a machine breaks, that shouldn't be your problem. There shouldn't be people babysitting all these machines." A call for QA, perhaps, and aimed as much internally as it is externally.

An example of the fruits of this is a UW project called Azure Ocean, which is constantly aggregating the world's oceanographic data, expanding constantly with sensor data every day, noting that it must have been a "very exciting period in the last few weeks" with the earthquake in Chile. No doubt no one will dispute the need for research tools of this scope now.

Ballmer also says that part of this server business is people having their own clouds. Governments and companies want to buy their own systems. Sometimes this is obvious, like for military or strategic purposes, but sometimes it's just a matter of preference, and Ballmer wants people to be able to buy "refrigerator"-sized water-cooled systems with net connections, if that's their preference.

Ballmer concludes with the sentiment that "the Cloud fuels Microsoft and Microsoft fuels the cloud." Take that as you wish.

My own quick take on this is that the cloud is as nebulous as you think, but at least these are areas worth thinking about more. The cloud isn't anything new, but it's taking shape, and clearly in the hands of only a few companies. Google is the biggest, and arguably Microsoft is #2. In other words, we need to listen to Ballmer, cuz he'll be driving it, at least for now.


Bioluminescent Lamp Glows With the Power of Genetically-Altered Hamster Cells [Horror]

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Who needs a lamp to be classy when it can be fucking horrifying? That's what the "Half Life" lamp is, because it glows thanks to living hamster cells that have been enriched with firefly genes. Holy shit.

The lamp, created by Joris Laarman, was created without harming any hamsters, apparently. Instead, it was created using a culture of tissue kept alive since 1957. Oh, that's much less creepy, thanks so much, Joris!

Want to see this horrifying specimen in person? It'll be on display at the Friedman Benda Gallery in NYC starting tomorrow. [Metropolis via Inhabitat]


Works by Depero on Display in D.C.

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Fortunato Depero 50

February 19 – March 12, 2010
*Vernissage, February 26, 2010
*Closing Event, March 12, 2010
Italian Cultural Institute, Washington DC
Curated by Maurizio Scudiero

Check out this review of the opening by Susana

Review in the Washington Post

The exhibition represents the techniques employed by Depero for his graphic work and advertisements. It is an ensemble of Depero’s graphic design works spanning over the course of 35 years.

Curated by art critic Maurizio Scudiero, responsible for the Archivio Depero in Rovereto, and by the Studio 53 Arte (a futurism dedicated gallery), the exhibition illustrates 41 works and 10 vintage prints.

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I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords | The Loom

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Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true.

The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one.

It’s important to bear in mind that you can carry this galaxy of microbes around and enjoy perfect health. These microbes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, behave like well-mannered passengers. They do not barge into the kitchen, take a cleaver to the cooks, and then eat all the food. Aboard the SS Homo sapiens, the crew includes a huge staff of security guards armed with lethal chemical sprays and other deadly weapons, ready to kill any dangerous stowaway (also known as the immune system). For some reason, the immune system does not unleash its deadly fury on the microbes–even when the microbes are fairly close relatives to truly dangerous pathogens.

In fact, our microbial passengers may actually help out the cruise liner’s crew. They can close up the ecological space in our bodies, so that invading pathogens can’t get a solid foothold. Some species in our guts can break down our food in ways that we can’t, and synthesize certain vitamins and other compounds beyond our biochemistry. The genes that the microbes carry–millions of them–expand our biochemical powers enormously.

To understand the human microbiome better, scientists have been cataloging the microbes in and on people’s bodies, and they’ve been sequencing their DNA. (Listen to my recent podcast with biologist Rob Knight for more.) Yesterday, Nature published a head-spinningly huge study on the microbiome from a team of European and Chinese researchers. Lurking in the stool of 124 volunteers, the scientists found, were 3.3 million microbial genes. The scientists identified a core of bacteria species carried in most people’s guts, as well as other species that varied from person to person.

As Ed Yong rightly points out, this study is most impressive as a titanic database. It is not the Theory of Everything for the human microbiome. That will take a lot longer to build, because the microbial ecosystem inside of us is so complex. Individual species don’t just sit in isolation, surviving in their own special way. Microbes cooperate with one another to get the food they need and produce the conditions in which they can thrive. In Microcosm, for example, I write about research suggesting that E. coli–a minor member of the gut ecosystem–may keep oxygen levels low enough for other species to invade and dominate. And it’s not as if there is some Platonic ideal of a microbiome that we all carry around with us from birth to death. The diversity of microbes I carry is different from the one you carry, and they both change over our lifetimes. Every time we take a dose of antibiotics, for example, the balance can change dramatically. And as the diversity of microbes changes, so do its ecological functions.

Which brings me, at last, to the possibility that the human microbiome can become our puppetmaster.

First some background. A lot of parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. (I get into more detail about this in my book Parasite Rex and in this segment of the show Radio Lab.)

Very often, the parasites cause hosts to do things that help the parasites, instead of themselves. For example, a protozoan called Toxoplasma needs to get from rats to cats, and to help the process along, it makes rats lose their fear of cats. Parasites can also change the diet of their host as well as the way in which their hosts digest their food. Parasitic wasps living inside caterpillars, for example, cause catepillars to convert the plants they eat into compounds that supply quick energy (good for wasp larvae growing quickly) instead of storing them as fat for their own metamorphosis.

I was reminded of this sinister manipulation by a paper that was published in Science today by Rob Knight and his colleagues. They built on previous research that revealed that mice genetically engineered to be obese have different kinds of microbial diversity in their guts than normal mice. Scientists have found that if they transfer microbes from an obese mouse to a regular mouse that has had all its own germs stripped out, the recipient mouse will develop extra fat. In the case of these obese mice, it appears that the microbes become less efficient at helping the animals digest food, triggering a series of changes that leads the mice to be fat.

Knight and his colleagues discovered a different–and more disturbing–way that microbes can make mice fat. They started out by engineering mice so that they didn’t produce a protein normally found on the surface of gut cells, called TLR5. TLR5 can recognize bacteria, and some studies suggest that the cells can then pass along signals to the immune system, possibly sending a stand-down command so that the immune system doesn’t start trying to kill the microbes (and end up killing gut cells too).

Born without TLR5, mice got 20% fatter than normal. Not only that, but the mice had lots of other familiar symptoms that go along with being overweight, such as high levels of triglyceride, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Without TLR5 exerting its soothing influence, the mice suffered from chronic inflammation, probably thanks to the low-level war they were waging on their microbes. And things got worse for the mutant mice when they had to eat a high-fat diet. They gained more weight on a high-fat diet than regular mice, suffered even more inflammation, and even ended up diabetic.

The obesity of these TLR5-deficient mice was not the result of inefficiency, as in previous studies. Instead, the mice wanted to eat more–about 10 percent more than regular mice. Knight and his colleagues restricted the diet of the mutant to what the regular mice ate. A lot of their symptoms went away. So the change in their behavior was critical to their weight change.

The scientists also discovered that the make-up of the microbial diversity changed significantly in the mutant mice. Were the microbes giving the mice their symptoms? To find out, Knight and his colleagues knocked out the microbes with antibiotics. The mice ate less, put on less fat, and showed less diabetes-like symptoms.

To isolate the effects of the microbes even more, the scientists transferred them from mutant mice into the bodies of ordinary mice that had first had all their own germs stripped out. Remember–these mice have a normal set of TLR5 receptors. The scientists found that the microbes made the recipient mice hungry–and also made them obese, insulin resistant, and so on.

So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on.

When I first learned of this work, I asked Knight–with a mix of dread and delight–whether the microbes were manipulating their hosts, driving them to change their diet for the benefit of the microbes. He said he thinks the answer is yes.

This discovery doesn’t just have the potential to change the way we think about why we eat what we eat. (Am I really hungry? Or are my microbes making me hungry?) It also provides a new target in the fight against obesity, diabetes, and related disorders. What may be called for is some ecological engineering.

[Update: Links to papers fixed.]


First Shots and Specs of Microsoft’s Secret Project Pink Phone [Exclusive]

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These are the first photos of Microsoft's Project Pink phones, snatched from deep within the bowels of the Microsoft/Verizon industrio-complex —not the Turtle, but the larger, Sidekick-like Pure. This doesn't look like Windows Phone 7, so what is it?

The shots come just hours after a leaked advertising campaign for the Turtle outed Verizon as a carrier for the Pink Turtle, without so much as a mention of the Pure.

Our tipster confirms the Pure is also headed to Verizon, but doesn't have a release date. (Though it's hard to imagine the release date would fall too far out of line with the Turtle, which is expected to hit stores at the end of April.) Anyway, this thing: It's strange! The paneled interface, with fixed squares for everything from music (with Zune typography) and email to RSS feeds and what looks like a unified social networking hub. As hinted earlier, the aesthetic is similar Windows Phone 7, but the software is distinctly not Windows Phone 7. This looks like Windows Phone 7: Feature Phone edition.
Our source got a few seconds to use the Pure, and said it was intuitive, "better than Android," and decorated with Windows Phone 7-style animations throughout. That said, the app situation still doesn't add up. There's apparently an download screen for new apps, but it's not populated with anything yet. This could mean two things: Either the Pink phones will tap into the Windows Phone 7 marketplace somehow, which would be great (but also doesn't make sense), or they'll have apps like the Zune has apps—which is to say, only sort of, and only from selected partners.

The more we see, the more the Pure and Turtle look like they're stacking up to be Zune-ified followups to the Sidekick. It's an interesting move, but who does Microsoft think they're going to sell this thing to? Tweens?

Update: Firmware Leak

We've got our hands on leaked Pink firmware, and we've dumped all the icons and photos we could extract. Sadly, there's not way to run this right now, but we can see a lot of what's shown above, like the homescreen application icons, in full resolution. There are also traces of Zune, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Windows Live. There are some shots (discovered by someone else who's got the firmware) that show a lockscreen dialer, but these are likely placeholders of some sort. Also tucked away in the firmware are default wallpapers for both phones, in their rumored resolutions. Finally, we've got a shot from the Turtle's unremarkable camera, which appears to have flash.

(Filenames included in the gallery, because they're pretty descriptive.)

Here's what we can glean from the dump so far:

• The carrier is definitely Verizon, though there are references in the firmware to AT&T and T-Mobile in the US (which are probably placeholders, since the rest of the evidence points to CDMA radios as standard for these phones.) There are also references to a wide range of foreign carriers in the UK, mainland Europe and Asia, but again, most of these carriers don't support what looks like the initial version of the handset's CDMA hardware, as far as I can tell.

• The OS is based on Windows CE, like the Zune and Windows Phone 7. This doesn't mean a ton to users, but the guy who passed us the firmware sums up what that means under the hood:

Everything is programed in .NET a lot like 7 is. It does not say it inside the files where I have seen, but It is coded in XAMl and is in the structure that CE 7 is supposed to be structured, it is my belief that it will be based off CE 7, and it will have a lot of tie in to Windows Live as well.

• Turtle and Pure codenames are used in the firmware, but that doesn't mean that those'll be the shipping names for the product. There are also codenames for the "Pride" and "Lion" handsets, which appear to just be the international versions of the Turtle and Pure, respectively.

• The Turtle's screen is 320x240, while the Pure's is 480x320—the same as the iPhone.

• There are reference to something called "The Loop," which sounds like some kind of central social networking hub.

We're powering through the firmware dump now, so we'll post more as we get it. [Special thanks to our tipsters, and Conflipper]


YouTube Gets Automatic Captioning For All Videos [YouTube]

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Today, YouTube is rolling out automatic captioning for all videos uploaded to the service, using Google's speech recognition service. You can see a demo in the video above.

Automatic captioning with Google speech recognition was launched in November. This only had a few selected education partners to test out automatic captioning, until now.

There are many reasons for captions on every video: ESL viewers, people in other countries, searchability, not wanting to disturb others, loud locations and automatic translations to other countries.

The captioning won't be perfect, since Google's speech recognition isn't perfect, but it is really, really cool, and is sort of one step toward the goal of speech to speech recognition in real time that Google is aiming for. By testing pre-recorded videos, they can help refine the tech on something that isn't as vital or time sensitive, in order for it to be used in something that is—phone conversations.

Also cool, if your video gets captioned weirdly by Google's system, you can download the captions in plain text and correct the captions yourself. This is much easier than captioning from scratch.

If you want to have YouTube go and caption something you uploaded a few years ago—because they caption newly uploaded videos first—you can manually request that as well.

Update: In response to some of the comments, yeah, it may use the same system as Google Voice's transcription (not sure yet), but having more people come in and upload their correct versions of captions helps Google learn and improve their system faster, which helps all their speech-to-text services.

Update 2: I don't usually get emotional at press conferences, but watching the students from the California School For the Deaf talk about how the auto-captioning will improve their lives is kinda making me tear up. Right now, I think this is cooler than anything I've seen rolled out in the last few years.

Update 3: I asked if this was the same algorithm currently being used in Google Voice, and they yes, more or less, if you're talking about the base technology. Goog411 and Voice Search all have the same core algorithms, but each of these four have various conditions and issues that the algorithm needs tweaking to. So, you can probably expect a similar level of performance to Google Voice, or maybe even worse, if the videos have people who don't speak clearly, or multiple voices, or a noisy background.


There’s More Ingenuity In This Wooden Marble Machine Than the Sum of My Entire Existence [Science]

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Equipped with a marble, some wood and the principles of potential energy, kinetic energy and gravity, one man built a remarkable machine that warps your very sense of what's physically possible. Prepare yourself, then hit the clip at 2:30.

While this video eventually ends, the device can keep going, sending the marble in a loop from the top to the bottom to the top (to the bottom...) without stop, as long as a single weight is repositioned to reset various components.

And, if for some reason, you're one of those guys thinking to himself, "Meh, I could do that." Please, please do. [Reddit via CrunchGear]