Members of the media, please contact: Trent Perrotto NASA Commercial Policy NASA Headquarters 202-358-0321 Josh Byerly COTS Program Johnson Space Center 281-483-5111 George Diller Launch Operations Kennedy Space Center 321-867-2468 Continue reading →
A former Manhattan store owner confessed Thursday morning to strangling 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 — the boy whose disappearance sparked the now-famous face on the milk carton. If you can’t remember the last time you saw someone’s face on a milk carton, or never even heard of the concept, there’s a reason: Technology and social media have drastically changed how we search for abducted persons. Police are still investigating the Patz case and have yet to confirm whether the Manhattan man’s alleged confession will lead to anything new. But its resurgence has brought attention to the methods now being used to find those who go missing, as well as the future of these alert systems. Amber Alerts, named after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, kidnapped and ... Continue reading →
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NYC Police hold press conference on Etan Patz case LIVE VIDEO — New York City Police hold a press conference to discuss the case of Etan Patz who disappeared 33 years ago. Continue reading →
The thing (well, one of the things) we love about robots is that they can be designed to do things that humans can't. It's not just that they can do human-y things better—it's that they can take a piece of our selves (like fingers) and improve on them to enable totally new capabilities. Osaka University's Omni-Finger is just such a robot, giving artificial fingers an entirely new dimension. While the prototype in this vid just has one Omni-Finger, the final concept will include three of them (as in the illustration below). This will enable robots to arbitrarily alter the orientation of objects that they've grasped without having to set the object down, manipulate it, and re-grasp it, making grasping tasks as a whole easier and ... Continue reading →
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Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones may be the hottest athlete on Twitter right now. Her witty, self-effacing humor has charmed media and fans alike. Oh, and the attractive, single 29-year-old is also a virgin. She discussed why she doesn’t want to have sex until marriage with HBO’s Real Sports earlier this week. The interview — in which she called her extended abstinence “harder than training for the Olympics” — has further fueled Jones’ social media superstardom. Since May 20, her number of Twitter followers has jumped by about 20,000 — a nearly 40% increase. But the @lolojones profile has long been a source of humor and unusually blithe insight into a world class athlete’s personal life. Over the past several days, for example, Jones has tweeted ... Continue reading →
Note: This video is slightly NSFW-ish. Through 873 stock images, this video takes the “life flashed before my eyes” expression seriously. The creative video is an ad for Getty, made by the agency BBDO, which starts life at when two people fall in love, and ends with a boat party. Somewhere in between, the average human life apparently includes laying a golden egg, winning at bingo and getting struck by lightning. Topics to follow Follow Advertising 2,401 followers Follow Viral video 977 followers Follow Photography 882 followers Follow Follow Follow Continue reading →
In an experimental move, The New Yorker is planning to release a short sequel to Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, through 140-character installments on Twitter. “Black Box” takes a A Visit from the Goon Squad character and paints her as a female spy in the 2030s. As she goes undercover among suspected terrorists, she keeps a mental log of events — all in dispatches of 140 characters or less. The format naturally lends itself to serialization on Twitter — and indeed, Egan said that she came up the idea of tweeting the story before writing it. That’s surprising given that Egan has never been active on Twitter even as a reader, she told fiction editor Deborah Treisman in an ... Continue reading →
Less than two months after announcing its plans to acquire photo app company Instagram for $1 billion, Facebook has released an iOS app that looks and functions almost identically to Instagram’s. Facebook Camera, which is now available in the App Store for free, sincerely improves upon the photo capabilities offered by Facebook’s primary app for iPhone and iPod touch devices. Like Instagram, your friends’ latest photos are displayed in a single scrolling feed. You can also now simultaneously upload multiple photos to Facebook; Facebook’s main app only allows you to upload photos one at a time. And like Instagram, the app allows you to crop, rotate and apply filters to your photos. Interestingly, none of the app’s 15 filters were developed by the Instagram team, ... Continue reading →
