engine

Painting lines on a floor for team sports is so old school. Why not use programmable LED lights under a glass surface?

That's what Germany's ASB Systembau is doing with its ASB GlassFloor. With a frame of aluminum supporting a glass floor, it can be set to display lines for sports like basketball, handball, volleyball, or whatever else you want to play.

Ceramic dots on the glass re-create the feel of a wooden surface, while special etchings diffuse the LED light and prevent glare from bothering athletes.

That means you can also have all manner of ads, scoreboards, and graphics on the floor. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Wireless audio at CES 2013 has been almost entirely dominated by the idea of streaming music directly from your smartphone, usually via Bluetooth.

Teenage Engineering's newly announced OD-11 is taking a different approach, which it calls the Cloud Speaker. The cubelike speaker actually borrows its design from Swedish audio engineer Stig Carlsson, whose original OD-11 in 1974 featured the same angled tweeter and woofer that directs sound out the the top of the speaker, rather than a more traditional front-facing design. The idea is to throw the sound into a room, without a defined sweet spot that standard … Read more

Today's Google Doodle honors the birth of a computer visionary who believed such machines could be more than just number crunchers.

Born December 10, 1815, Ada Lovelace is perhaps best known for her contributions toward Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Designed but never actually built until 1991, the Analytical Engine is in many ways one of the ancestors of today's computer systems.

A mathematician and writer, Lovelace took on the task of first translating and then expanding upon an article describing the Analytical Engine. Her notes contains what some people think of as early computer progams or algorithms, … Read more

Continuing CEO Marissa Mayer's march toward all things mobile, Yahoo has acquired tiny mobile video-chat startup OnTheAir.

Yahoo snapped up the San Francisco-based startup today, the five-employee company announced on its Web site. Yahoo confirmed the acquisition, its second since Mayer took over as chief executive this past July.

"When we first met with the team at Yahoo, it was clear that everybody there is committed to making mobile products the backbone for the world's daily habits," the company wrote.

The mobile market is growing rapidly, and Mayer has said the space is integral to Yahoo'… Read more

NASA is already experimenting with 3D-printing components for rockets to Mars, but the fun doesn't have to stop at liftoff.

Researchers at Washington State University and NASA are suggesting that rocks on the moon or Mars could be used to print useful objects like tools or replacement parts.… Read more

Foursquare is edging even deeper into Yelp territory. Today the check-in social network announced that it is launching a 10-point rating system for local businesses with its iOS app update.

Sound familiar? That's because it's basically Yelp's business model. However, Foursquare said that what it's introducing is "a lot different from the other types of ratings you see today."

"Instead of other sites where every place gets 3.5 stars, we come up with our scores using the same Foursquare magic that powers Explore," the company wrote in a blog post today. &… Read more

To those of us who are human, a lack of empathy from others can be quite startling.

A lover says to us: "Oh, your mother's death made you sad? Why didn't you say?" We look at them and think: "You should never have studied engineering. Or math. Or business."

Now presumably uncaring scientists have delved into the roots of this issue and emerged, tousle-haired, with a fascinating conclusion: Empathy represses analytic thought.

This explains so much -- especially Google.

As Science Daily feels it out, research led by an unfeeling brain at Case Western … Read more

A mysterious rash of outages struck the Internet today, crippling major services for hours at a time. It isn't clear whether they're related.

Among those hit:

Google Apps Engine. Google said that at about 7:30 a.m., an unnamed component of App Engine "began experiencing slow performance and dropped connections." Users began seeing slow response times and had trouble connecting to services. At the moment, most App Engine users and services are being affected. "Google engineering teams are investigating a number of options for restoring service as quickly as possible, and we will provide … Read more

Facebook officially opened the doors to its London office today -- making it the social network's first international engineering center.

The social network was courted by the British government, which has been working to make the U.K. a place the tech industry can call home.

According to Reuters, the company's vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, said that London is "rapidly emerging as a global technology hub" and a place that can both provide engineers as well as be a good place for engineers to relocate.

Facebook announced the opening of its U.K. engineering … Read more