In his final instalment of Donald Bell’s Maker Update for 2020, he celebrates some of the most creative and clever pandemic and social isolation projects of 2020. Projects include Simone Geirtz’s Proud Parent Machine, Bornach’s incredible Astable Exhalation sculpture, Shane Wighton’s robot barber, and Colin Furze’
Karl D. Stephanro mercatornet.com Faithful Muslims are required to pray five times a day, facing toward Mecca. In our smartphone era, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with an app that reminds the Muslim user that it’s time to pray, and conveniently uses
Spencer M. Ross University of Massachusetts Lowell Sommer Kapitan Auckland University of Technology Collectors for the Paralympic Games carried donation buckets ahead of the recent Santa parade in Auckland, asking for gold coin donations. Onlookers shrugged them off: “Sorry, no cash on me!” To the rescue, a charity volunteer waved
While Australia and New Zealand slavishly follow the EU’s obsessive focus on “renewables” despite the mathematically incontrovertible fact that they just cannot feasibly replace fossil fuels, some in the US are recalling America’s “can do” spirit – and making next-generation nuclear happen. Five minutes’ scribbling on the back of
righttolife.org.uk An Argentinian pro-abortion activist has created a modification for the famous 1990s video game, Doom, in which the player completes the game by shooting an unborn baby with a shotgun. Once the player has killed the unborn baby the game displays the message “You defeated fetito [English
Last week, the Australian government tabled world-first laws to force tech giants like Google and Facebook to start paying for news content scraped from media outlets and to meet minimum standards, including giving notice of changes to their algorithms. The government says that its mandatory news media bargaining code was
Australia is set to pass world-first laws to force tech giants to pay for the content they’ve so far been scraping for free from media companies, as well as sharing their data-collection methods. Is this the last gasp of a dying legacy media – or the first push-back against the
Commercial fusion generation has been “just around the corner” for almost as long as I can remember. As far back as the late 70s, fusion was a mere 20 years away…and there it’s stayed, always just out of reach. No matter how many “breakthroughs” are announced. So, you’
Cybathlon 2020 was a recent cyborg Olympics in which people with physical disabilities competed using exoskeletons, bionic limbs, and other technology. In one race, competitors with quadriplegia wore scalp sensors that detected their brain waves and allowed them to steer vehicles on the screen. From IEEE Spectrum: Pilots controlled the
This series is designed to help people to understand modern technology, and become more confident in using computing devices. It is not designed to educate experts. The author is involved in tutoring older students at SeniorNet, a New Zealand wide organisation. SeniorNet hopes that students will feel more confident in
It sounds like something from a ’50s b-grade science-fiction movie: The Claw from Outer Space! But, in fact, a very real giant claw in orbit around the Earth is being proposed by the European Space Agency. Why not? It’s 2020, after all. Unlike some rampaging alien monster of Hollywood,
It goes without saying that Twitter is a sewer of deranged leftist hate. Something about the site seems to foster the vilest bullying and insanely vicious witch-hunting, mostly, it seems from the very people who at the same time loudly trumpet their own virtue and “inclusiveness”. Like the inquisitors of
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This series is designed to help people to understand modern technology, and become more confident in using computing devices. It is not designed to educate experts. The author is involved in tutoring older students at SeniorNet, a New Zealand wide organisation. SeniorNet hopes that students will feel more confident in
