time travel

This ambitious game tries to give you a console or PC-like RPG experience on your Android device. In some ways, it succeeds. However, unlike the story, the gameplay in Time Travel Heroes needs more work to be completely fun on most gadgets. If you don't mind repetitive battle sequences, you might enjoy this game.

You need to register with the game in order to play. Luckily, you don't have to hand over your e-mail address to get to the action. Once you're inside the game, it has a very busy environment for you to click and touch. … Read more

I've seen some bizarre Street View images on Google Maps, but this time the satellite feature has leaked government secrets about Air Force One's flight arrangements: time travel.

Well either that, or Air Force One commercial airplanes can fly faster than the speed of light. This image from the unofficial Google Maps blog shows the official USAF aircraft emerging out of a crack in time. If I had to guess, I'd say around 99 percent of us don't have access to this technology.

Not sure what's going on in East Lake-Orient Park, Fla., that … Read more

It takes a lot to excite three seasoned gaming writers independently at a single show, and it looks like Bioshock Infinite has pulled the trifecta. Big, bold, and highly hyped, Irrational and 2K Games' prequel to the Bioshock universe is undoubtedly one of the most exciting games at all of E3 2011. Here's why.

Scott: I'm rarely excited about E3 games. I hate genre repetition. I don't like the endless flow of shooters and racers and fighters, the summer-movie-cliche money-shot explosions, the tacky dialogue.

However, once in a long while, a game comes along that has a big imagination. So big that it seems to challenge the perceiver, and bend the mind. Consider my mind bent, because BioShock Infinite seems to get ever more bizarre, epic, and richly detailed every time I see it.

The E3 closed-door demo of the game is hard to describe. We couldn't play the game--we only watched a 20-minute controlled playthrough--but what we saw had the scope, drama, and surprise to rival most of Hollywood's output. Early 20th century floating isolationist city in an alternate steampunk universe. Psychic powers, mechanical robot birds, gangs of political deviants, roller-coaster rail systems--yes, check. There are also endless clever and creepy historical details akin to what filled the original BioShock, such as a decaying gift shop filled with presidential forefather marionettes, dangling their decaying limbs from the ceiling.… Read more

On today's show, Donald Bell gives us his in-person BlackBerry PlayBook review, why Twitter is like your freeloading, couch-surfing bum of a brother, and how the FBI's command and control server could end up taking Elvis off life support. What, you didn't know Elvis was still alive? The things you learn on BOL. Plus: the white iPhone is coming! No, really! And your comments on throttling, for good or for ill. --Molly

Stephen Hawking says he's an optimist. Perhaps theoretical physicists have an idiosyncratic definition of the word.

For in an interview with BigThink, Hawking suggested that unless the human race begins to inhabit outer space, it will disappear.

His tinge of optimism is painted in quite muted colors. "If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space," he told BigThink.

But those two centuries might well be fraught with far more crises than ever before, he said.

Hawking is worried about the way humans are eating up … Read more

If there is one thing that would, perhaps, cement your relationship with the man or woman of your dreams, it is surely the offer of a one-week trip to Neptune.

Thankfully, this obvious truth coincides with Stephen Hawking's latest advice on how you might be able to achieve such a trip. As part of his documentary series on the Discovery Channel, Hawking has already warned us about aliens not being all that pleasant and promised that time travel will, one day, be as feasible as getting a Prius to go 60 mph uphill.

Now, however, he has offered some … Read more

There's something very comforting when a scientist as well regarded as Stephen Hawking admits to keeping quiet for fear of "being labeled a crank."

Thankfully, he seems to have conquered his fears in a new documentary series for the Discovery Channel, in which he has already considered how man might truly conquer space. Or, indeed, how spacemen might come down to our meager Earth and dismember us as so much fast food.

Hawking has already warned in his documentary that we should be very wary about making contact with beings from out there. "If aliens ever … Read more

Every couple of times a season, it seems, we're due for another well-crafted downloadable indie gaming sensation on either Xbox Live Arcade, PSN or Nintendo's WiiWare. Last year saw quite a few memorable download-only games, many of them inventive and weird enough to simply be unbankable as a disc-based release. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is just such a game, available now on Xbox Live Arcade for the MS Points equivalent of $10.

Long discussed at indie gaming events such as GDC, the Odd Gentlemen-developed game has been published by 2K Games, makers of normally far more … Read more

Like many of you, I'm a geek, and it extends well beyond my interest in technology. I still read an occasional science fiction novel and look forward to the release of superhero and James Bond movies.

Lately, I've been wondering how close we are to achieving some of the scientific "miracles" that had previously belonged solely to the realm of science fiction. Advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and other fields are certainly making lots of exciting things possible in the laboratory, but that's just the beginning.

What I'm interested in is early academic, defense, medical, or even hobbyist applications. Remember, that's where computing and communications started, and look where we are now.

Here are six off the top of my head. And yes, some of them are out there, but my goal was to leapfrog all the usual stuff, like virtual reality, robotics, and the like, which I've written about previously. Some of it may surprise you.… Read more