Oops, the cat’s out of the bag

ON Wednesday we told you of a story we couldn’t publish thanks to an unprecedented gag order. But that order has blown up in the government’s face.



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See-through mice are now a scary reality

IF your regular furred mouse gives you the heebie jeebies, then these see-through mice will be down right terrifying.



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Seven internet things we want Orlando Bloom to punch

FOLLOWING his fistacuffs with Justin Bieber, here’s what else we want Handy Landy to take a swing at next.



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More wild weather on its way

VICTORIA shivered through a blustery night — but, be warned, the wild weather is not over just yet, you may even get some snow.



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ET deals: Today only! $400 for Toshiba L50D quad-core laptop with 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD

For one day only, Toshiba is offering a bonus $50 coupon on one of their already low priced laptops. Thanks to that, you can now pick up a quad-core beauty loaded with big specs for just $400, a sweet savings of 33%. The Toshiba L50D-BST2NX1 features a new A4-6210 quad-core processor, which has plenty of power for typical office and web browsing needs, plus integrated AMD Radeon R3 graphics for casual gaming. Perhaps the most notable specs here is the generous 8GB RAM and 1TB hard drive, providing a volume of memory for multitasking and storage that you almost never see at this price point.



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PlayStation Now public beta launches today on PS4

Today, Sony plans to roll out the PlayStation Now public beta for PS4 owners. Over 100 PS3 games will be made available for rental in the US and Canada, but more platforms, regions, and titles are on their way. After months of waiting, now we finally get to see if Sony can deliver on the promise of game streaming from the cloud. Will it be everything we hoped for?



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New indoor positioning system lets you do Batman-like echolocation on your phone

Echolocation has worked helped bats navigate for millions of years, and now Berkeley researchers think your laptop could do it too.



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Massive, undetectable security flaw found in USB: It’s time to get your PS/2 keyboard out of the cupboard

Security researchers have found a fundamental flaw that affects almost every USB device. This flaw is so serious that, now that it has been revealed, you probably shouldn't plug a USB device into your computer ever again. There are no known effective defenses against this variety of USB attack. The USB IF itself notes that your only defense against this new attack vector is to only use USB devices that you 100% trust -- but even then, as we'll outline below, this won't always protect you.



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Bleep: BitTorrent’s new p2p chat client avoids the cloud so you can speak freely

The world's most successful data transfer protocol could underlie the next generation chat client: Bleep will provide totally secure, totally peer-to-peer chatting from BitTorrent.



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43Tbps over a single fiber: World’s fastest network would let you download a movie in 0.2 milliseconds

A research group at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), which was the first to break the one-terabit barrier in 2009, has today managed to squeeze 43 terabits per second over a single optical fiber with just one laser transmitter. In a more user-friendly unit, 43Tbps is equivalent to a transfer rate of around 5.4 terabytes per second -- or 5,375 gigabytes to be exact.



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Toyota speeds up cancer services

OH what a feeling! Efficiency lessons learned on the Toyota factory floor are now being put to use in a most unexpected place: a hospital’s cancer ward.



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Ford and GM in hot water over piracy claims

TWO of the world’s biggest car makers are being sued for aiding music piracy. But does this lawsuit have a leg to stand on?



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Has the weather gone totally mad?

BOILING one minute, freezing the next. What the heck is going on with our insane winter weather? We explain all.



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Kim Kardashian makes crazy money from app

KIM Kardashian has dabbled in many industries, and now the reality star, fashion designer and professional poser is taking on the game world - and winning.



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We’re a major ‘app economy’

AUSTRALIA is a leading ‘app economy’ with a new report finding more app workers are employed here, per capita than the US and UK.



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Biggest mobile myths busted

STILL think a mobile phone can blow a petrol station sky high or be able to cook an egg? It’s time we put these urban myths to bed.



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8 hottest Instagram accounts

IF you’re sick of seeing cat pictures and your friends lunch on Instagram, why not break it up with some pictures from these smokin’ hot accounts?



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Snapchat valued at $10 billion

IT’S the app that makes no money and famously lets you send self-destructing pictures of your squidgy bits. And it’s now worth $10 billion.



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Self-driving forklift Ray brings automatic parking to the luxury market

Dusseldorf Airport in Germany is trying out a new robot parking system that uses self-driving forklifts to increase parking efficiency by up to 60%.



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Regeneration therapy from Biplastiq can rejuvenate tissue with light

A new company known as Biplastiq plans to offer a radical new medical treatment. The technology uses genetically-transformed mitochondria that can be activated with light to provide additional energy where cells need it most.



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ET deals: $385 17-inch quad-core laptop, $100 3TB drive, $60 mechanical keyboard

We've been hard at work hunting down the best deals anywhere in tech and gadgets, and today our haul is highlighted by a $385 17-inch AMD laptop from HP, which is one of the cheapest quad-core laptops this size on the market right now. A couple of our other favorites include a 51% savings on a huge 3TB USB 3.0 Seagate hard drive, and an amazingly slick 55-inch Sony Bravia 4K 3D smart TV bundled with a mount for $1849.



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New display tech corrects for bad eyesight, makes reading glasses a thing of the past

A new technology from UC Berkeley could make your glasses obsolete by correcting images on a screen so they appear clear to your busted eyes.



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The secret world of power generation, and the arrival of Earth-spanning super grids

A long, long time ago -- well, the middle of the 1800s to be exact -- electricity was an intriguing but mostly useless thing. Some factories and residences toyed with early electric lights and motors powered by on-site generators, but most of the world used piped steam and natural gas to heat their homes and drive their machines for decades after electrification began. That would all change, however, with Nikola Tesla's invention of three-phase high-voltage power distribution at the end of the 1800s and the creation of the world's first synchronized national electricity grid in Great Britain in 1938.



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Microsoft announces Sharks Cove mini PC, a powerful, expensive rival to Raspberry Pi

Though it takes Microsoft a while to jump in on an emerging trend, the company does tend to throw its hat into the ring eventually. Despite releasing satisfactory hardware, the company was late to both the modern-day smartphone and tablet scene, hindering its success. This time around -- likely thanks to the success of the Raspberry Pi -- Microsoft is targeting the mini PC market with the announcement of Sharks Cove.



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This robot needs just a few seconds to learn to walk again after you break its legs

Some foolhardy roboticists in France, who clearly haven't read enough sci-fi books, have created a robot that can recover from a broken leg. More accurately, if the robot is immobilized by a broken leg, it only takes a few seconds for it to learn how to walk again, using a new gait that minimizes the impact of the broken leg. If robots are to become truly useful, they'll have to be able to autonomously recover from damaged circuits and broken limbs.



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EA revolutionizes gaming with Netflix-style subscription service – but only on Xbox One

EA, in one fell swoop, has changed the entire landscape of gaming and made it much more feasible to buy an Xbox One instead of a PS4. Starting today, beta testers will be able to subscribe to EA Access ($5 per month or $30 annually), giving them unlimited access to some of EA's biggest games Considering these top-tier games usually cost $70 each, gaining access to all (or most) of EA's games for just $30 per year is an incredibly good deal -- so good that, if you're into EA games, the Xbox One actually starts to make a lot more sense than the PS4. This is crazy, crazy stuff from EA -- really, what is the company thinking?



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Piracy set to become tougher

INTERNET service providers could be ordered by Australian courts to block access to websites which allow users to illegally download material.



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‘Date rape is bad, stranger rape is worse’

OUTSPOKEN atheist Richard Dawkins has sparked a Twitter meltdown after saying some types of rape and pedophilia are worse than others.



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The price you really pay for free wi-fi

WOULD you be so keen on public wi-fi hotspots knowing your movements could be tracked and your personal information exposed?



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‘OMG I think I’m being kidnapped’

A TEENAGE girl walking her dog in the forest at night texted her boyfriend an ominous message before being found murdered.



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Apple updates MacBook Pro, but where’s the Retina MacBook Air?

At long last, Apple has finally gotten around to updating its line of Retina MacBook Pros. Hardware bumps and price dips are certainly welcome, but how long are we going to have to wait around for Apple to release iMacs and MacBook Airs with Retina displays?



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ET deals: Lenovo Z50 Core i7 15.6-inch laptop for $649

This model of the Lenovo Z50 packs a Core i7-4510U CPU, a power sipping processor that still delivers some serious performance. It also sports a 15.6-inch 1920x1080 high-def anti-glare display, making it a great choice for watching movies or even playing games. There's no discrete graphics for playing more intensive titles, but the Core i7 and integrated Intel HD 4400 graphics has plenty of power to handle HD movies and moderate gaming.



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2014 Mitsubishi Outlander review: Proof that good tech doesn’t always make for a good car

This compact SUV has adaptive cruise control, torque vectoring and three rows of seats. It still feels like a last-generation car but the pricing is competitive and the tech is OK. This isn't a bad car, but there are better compact SUVs on the market right now.



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Sewing an invisibility cloak with a needle made of light

Needles made of lasers are being used at the University of Cambridge to assemble nanoparticles into larger segments that could one day be used to make an honest-to-goodness cloaking device.



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Mars rover Opportunity breaks longest off-Earth driving record, finally beating the speed freak Russians

NASA's Opportunity rover, Curiosity's diminutive forebear that has been trundling across Mars for over 10 years, has finally broken the world record for the longest distance driven on another planet. Since landing on the Red Planet in January 2004, Opportunity has now driven a grand total of 25 miles (40 kilometers), breaking the previous off-Earth distance record of 24.2 miles, which was held by the Russian lunar rover Lunokhod 2.



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Mysterious fast radio bursts from outer space: Astronomers baffled, suggest they could be alien in origin

Since 2001, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia has been picking up mysterious, unidentified bursts of energy that astronomers have since dubbed 'fast radio bursts.' At first, because no other telescope in the world had ever seen these bursts, it was assumed that these FRBs were probably just glitches in the telescope's electronics -- but now, 13 years later, a telescope on the other side of the planet in Puerto Rico has detected an FRB. No one knows what's causing these FRBs, but it's almost certainly something very exotic, like an intelligent alien civilization.



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The car that keeps you awake

CAR makers are looking for hi-tech ways to make their vehicles safer, including a seatbelt with built-in sensors that stops you from dozing off at the wheel.



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Intel releases rare details of its custom CPUs for Oracle – and there’s a lot more to come

Intel has finally shared some details on how it's customizing chips for companies like Oracle. It turns out that these current parts go through extra validation steps and can adjust their core counts, frequencies on the fly.



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The Cloud: What you need to know

ALMOST all of us have one but we don’t have a clue how it works or how to get into it. This is everything you never understood about ‘the cloud’.



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Why the fist-bump could save humanity

EVERYONE knows that the fist bump has always been the superior form of greeting, but now science actually has evidence to prove it.



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Google Street View catches entire police chase

GOOGLE’S Street View has just about every street in the world caught on camera, but what about an entire police chase?



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Upgrade phone or no 4G for you

AUSTRALIA’S two biggest telcos will ask customers to upgrade their smartphones and tablets or miss out on speedy new 4G connections.



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Is this cat going to be the next big thing?

WHY is everyone talking about MeowChat? Find out everything you need to know about the next big app that’s going gangbusters around the world.



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Teen’s phone catches fire under pillow

A TEENAGER’S phone has caught on fire underneath her pillow while she was asleep, melting the phone and burning her bed.



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What’s the science behind a superstar?

BRAZILIAN superstar Neymar dribbled, jinked and danced his way around opponents at the World Cup. He played on another level and, according to scientists, he actually is.



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New game consoles and 4K could reverse significant strides in power efficiency

A new report suggests American's are burning a lot less power than three years ago -- but can the trend hold up?



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What happens if you get hit by the main beam of a particle accelerator like the LHC?

I don't know about you, but ever since I started covering the Large Hadron Collider and other large-scale particle accelerators for ExtremeTech, I've always morbidly wondered: What would happen if a scientist was accidentally hit by the main particle beam? Would the scientist explode in the style of beam weapons in Star Trek? Would the beam bore a hole clean through the scientist's chest? Or maybe the beam would do nothing at all and pass through the scientist harmlessly? Well, fortunately (unfortunately?) we don't have to guess, as this exact scenario actually happened to Anatoli Bugorski, a Russian scientist, way back in 1978.



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Scientists are about to use supernova cosmic rays to peer inside the most dangerous room in the world: Fukushima

Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be using one of the universe's most energetic fundamental particles to image the destruction inside Fukushima's reactor core.



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Nvidia quadruples display resolution by stacking two cheap LCD panels on top of each other

Nvidia researchers have used a fantastically straightforward approach to quadruple the effective resolution and double the refresh rate of cheap, off-the-shelf LCD panels: Stacking them on top of each other. This technique, which Nvidia calls cascaded displays, could be key to developing cheap, ultra-high-resolution screens that are needed for consumer-oriented head-mounted displays like the Oculus Rift. Nvidia has already built a prototype cascaded display device -- using a 3D printer no less -- that closely resembles the Oculus Rift, and the results are surprisingly good.



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Stanford creates ‘Holy Grail’ lithium battery, could triple smartphone and EV battery life

They've done it again: The battery barons of Stanford, led by Yi Cui, have created what those in the industry call the 'Holy Grail' of lithium-ion battery design. In specific, they've finally worked out how to create a rugged lithium electrode that can increase the capacity of a lithium-ion battery by three to four times -- as in, this lithium electrode, on its own, could increase the battery life of your smartphone by three times, or significantly reduce the size and cost of an electric car's battery pack.



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Apple goes green with solar-powered data centres video

Technology company Apple has installed 55,000 solar panels tracking the course of the sun from a 400,000 square metre field across the road from its data centre in Maiden, North Carolina, as part of its efforts to cut the environmental footprint of its cloud. Suzanne Goldenberg meets Lisa Jackson, the former head of the US Environmental Protection Agency and now Apple's front woman on green initiatives, to see how the company is cleaning up its act Continue reading...



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‘World’s cheapest phone’ fails test

AN Australian online retailer claims its new smartphone is the cheapest 4G handset in the world. But shopping around suggests that claim is untrue.



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Do we really only use 10 per cent of our brain?

IS there a heap of extra brain power ready to unlock in all of us or is it one big myth? Scientists put their grey matter to use to find out.



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This is a new level of human laziness

YOU must be kidding. The couch potato fans of this popular sporting team are so slack, they’ve employed robots to cheer on their behalf at games.



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Is this the end of the free download?

THE days of downloading your favourite TV show for free are numbered. Here’s how the piracy crackdown could cost you.



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7 ways technology is making you stupid

PEOPLE assume that smartphones and laptops are evidence of progress. But these tech advancements also come with some unintended consequences.



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The new smart shoe to help you walk

THIS smart shoe was originally designed to help blind people navigate. Now an Indian company wants you to wear them and help you get from place to place.



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River mysteriously turns blood-red

IN A story straight out of Exodus, a Chinese river has a mysterious plague-like transformation, turning into a crimson red colour.



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PS4 Destiny graphics look superior to Xbox One version, but barely

A few days ago, the Destiny beta finally made its way to the Xbox One and Xbox 360. It launched on the PS4 and PS3 earlier in the month, but now we can get a good look at the beta running on both of the current generation consoles. It's no surprise that the last-gen versions are noticeably uglier, but how does the 900p Xbox One version stack up to the beta running at 1080p on the PS4?



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US Congress ‘vandalised’ Wikipedia

US Congress computers have been blamed for disruptive edits to Wikipedia including one calling ex-defence chief Donald Rumsfeld an ‘alien lizard’.



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A implant that trains your brain to stop tinnitus

Is that ringing ears bad enough that you would implant a simulator in your neck just to be free of it? For thousands of Americans, the answer seems to be yes. A series of clinical trials for an implant made by company called Microtransponder has demonstrated that their new nerve cuff electrode device is up to the job. The question that remains is how does it work, exactly?



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Where are all the clean, infinite-range nuclear-powered cars, ships, and planes?

This morning I found myself pondering a particularly interesting question: Where are all the nuclear-powered cars, ships, and planes? Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuel power, it generates more power than fossil power (i.e. it goes faster) while weighing significantly less, and you can go years without ever having to refuel a nuclear vehicle. Imagine if you could buy a nuclear-powered Tesla Model S or Ford Escape, and never had to refuel it for the entirety of its operational life. So, where are all the nuclear vehicles? Were they kiboshed by the ecologists? Is it yet another conspiracy hatched by Big Oil to maintain their juicy fossil fuel profits?



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Japan will face the robotic jobocalypse head-on, by mastering robots before they master us

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has announced that he wants to triple the size of the Japanese robotics industry. Is this how you prepare for an uncertain future?



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Pedophile danger lurks in apps

QUEENSLAND children as young as seven are using a messaging service that police warn is dangerous as it exposes them to possible contact with sex predators.



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Apple to release 4.7 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 to mitigate fading iPad sales, convert Android owners

Apple is gearing up for the launch of the iPhone 6 in September, and has reportedly placed a massive order of between 70 and 80 million units -- far more than any previous iPhone launch. As we've previously reported, the iPhone 6 will step up to a much larger 4.7-inch screen with a sapphire front panel -- but curiously, there's now a very solid rumor that there will also be an iPhone 6 with a 5.5-inch screen. At first blush, a 5.5-inch iPhone 6 sounds utterly crazy, but it makes a little more sense following Apple's earnings call on Tuesday: Last quarter, Apple's tablet sales dropped a massive 19% sequentially and 9% year-over-year. Perhaps fading iPad sales are the reason Apple is finally looking at large-screen phones?



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Australia’s massive recycling failure

AUSSIES have a pretty good reputation for recycling, but there’s one item we seem unable to part with — and the problem just keeps on growing.



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What those car terms really mean

WHEN buying a car, manufacturers expect us to know what all the technology in their car does, but a lot of us don’t. So what does it all actually mean?



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Chubby penis sized app row settled

MUSIC icon Chubby Checker has reportedly settled a trademark infringement lawsuit over a naughty penis measurement app named after him.



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Astronaut tweets photo of Gaza explosions from space

AN amazing picture taken from the International Space Station shows the scale of the Gaza conflict with explosions and rockets seen by astronauts.



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Drone finds pensioner missing for days

AFTER a three-day search for an 82-year-old man involving hundreds of volunteers it took just one drone 20 minutes to find the missing person.



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NASA: Earth was nearly destroyed two years ago

PHEW, that was a close call. NASA has revealed we were a week away from being smashed by a devastating solar flare in 2012. Could it happen again?



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Selfie time as bombs fly overhead

MOST would think huddling in a bomb shelter would be a terrifying experience — not for these Israelis who have started posting ‘bomb shelter selfies’.



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Sony hurriedly patches 3D Blu-ray playback into the PS4 after Microsoft promises support

Eight long months after the launch of the Xbox One and PS4, both Microsoft and Sony have finally announced support for playback of 3D Blu-rays. I'm certainly not going to turn my nose up at the addition of new features, but it does make me wonder what took so long for these updates to surface. The PS3 has had 3D Blu-ray support since 2010, and it works perfectly fine on that aging hardware. So, what's the hold-up on the current generation?



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ET deals: HP Envy 15t and 17t touchscreen laptops at $800

Both the ENVY 15t and ENVY 17t pack the new Core i7-4710HQ quad-core processor, delivering top-notch performance that will be up to just about any task you put it to. They also share a standard 1TB hard drive, giving you plenty of space to store all your media and files. Despite the 17t being bigger, you'll find the same array of ports on both laptops, which includes three USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, ethernet, a DVD-RW, and a multi-card reader. Even before we get to any differences, both of these laptops have a lot to offer.



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The liquid hard drive that could store a terabyte of data in a tablespoon of fluid

New research on nanoparticles shows that they could be used to encode information when suspended in a liquid. This could one day allow us to store vast amounts of data in a very small volume of "digital colloid."



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The smartshoe: A much more sensible approach to wearable computing than Glass or a smartwatch

You know how wearable computers have always sounded cool, but in practice strapping a big computer to your face always seemed a little bit impractical? Well, here's a slightly more sensible alternative that you can wear without fear of reprisal or feeling self-conscious: The smartshoe. Developed by Ducere Technologies, and available for just $100-150, the Lechal smartshoe is surprisingly comparable to Google Glass -- though, of course, it's not quite as good as capturing point-of-view videos of your loved ones or extreme sports.



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US military’s ‘air optical fiber’ increases the power of laser weapons, networks, science

Researchers in the US, funded by the US military and the National Science Foundation, have managed to turn air into an "optical fiber." This breakthrough allows the scientists to turn thin air into an optical waveguide, allowing for much better transmission of lasers through free space -- much in the same way that glass and plastic waveguides allow for efficient transmission of laser light over long stretches of optical fiber. As you might have guessed from the US military's involvement, this could be big news for laser weapons -- but there are repercussions for laser-based communications and scientific research as well.



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The solar storm of 2012 that almost sent us back to a post-apocalyptic Stone Age

While you didn't see it, feel it, or even read about it in the newspapers, Earth was almost knocked back to the Stone Age on July 23, 2012. It wasn't some crazed dictator with his finger on the thermonuclear button or a giant asteroid that came close to wiping out civilization as we know it, though -- no, what nearly ended us was a massive solar storm. 'If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,' says Daniel Baker, who led the research into the massive solar storm.



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The Ford Falcon takes flight

THIS is it. The final Falcon. The last local Ford hits the road on December 1 and this is how it will look as an XR8 hero car



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Eight facts you didn’t know about space

DID you know we are actually all made of stars? Or the crazy costs of a space suit? Some of these facts are out of this world.



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Never ending lightning storm defies belief

TALK about wild weather! This lightning storm in South America has been appearing in the same place almost every night for thousands of years.



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Science just made the mango more amazing

STONE ME! Scientists have fixed the one thing we hate about mangoes by growing a seedless variety of the fruit.



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Son finds dad’s ghost car on Xbox

EVERY now and then a ghost story comes along that touches the hearts of the sternest of cynics. This is one of them.



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‘Apocalyptic’ bug plague strikes city

PICTURES that will make your skin crawl have emerged from a city that’s been blanketed by a plague of insects. Word of caution: keep your mouth shut.



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How to get access to the OS X Yosemite beta for free

Early last month, we got our very first peek at OS X Yosemite at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Just eight weeks later, Apple is now preparing to roll out public access to the latest beta of OS X 10.10. Are you interested in trying out Apple's latest and greatest operating system for yourself? Well, you're in luck because it's incredibly easy to sign up for the beta, and it won't cost you a dime.



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The polariton laser: With 250x lower power consumption, could this be the answer to on-chip optical interconnects?

Engineers at the University of Michigan and Intel have succeeded in creating the first practical, room-temperature polariton laser. The polariton laser is of extreme interest because it requires just 0.004% of the current required by normal lasers, making it a prime candidate for use with on-chip optical interconnects. It is also believed that the polariton laser is the first new practical method of producing coherent laser light since the laser diode debuted more than 50 years ago in 1962.



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Falcon 9 performs another perfect soft landing – SpaceX now confident it can land back at the launch pad (video)

Following the tenth launch of a Falcon 9 rocket last week, SpaceX is reporting that the rocket's first stage carried out a perfect soft landing back here on Earth. This is the second time that SpaceX has successfully soft-landed a Falcon 9 rocket launch, and now Musk's commercial space exploration company is confident enough that it can take the next, most important step: soft landing the Falcon 9 on a solid surface, so that it can be reused in future launches, instantly cutting down the cost of a space launch by tens of millions of dollars. If all goes to plan, SpaceX will attempt a soft landing on a solid surface in October, and then again in December.



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Amazon Fire Phone review roundup: A gimmicky mess, unless you’re looking for a Buy Now button in the shape of a smartphone

This morning, ahead of its July 24 release date, the internet was flooded with Amazon Fire Phone reviews -- and, rather unfortunately, they almost universally pan the smartphone for being gimmicky, ugly, sluggish, and low on battery life. A fair number of reviews go as far as calling the Fire Phone more of a prototype, and that you'd be better off waiting for the sequel. As expected, too, the fact that dozens of key apps are missing from the Amazon App Store makes the Fire Phone much less useful than an iPhone or Android smartphone.



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Microsoft will unify Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox into ‘one converged operating system’

Microsoft's Satya Nadella has confirmed that the next version of Windows, probably Windows 9, will unify the Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox operating systems into 'one single converged operating system.' Microsoft had previously made some moves towards unification with Universal Windows Apps that run across all three platforms, but this new version of Windows will go a lot further: 'This means [we'll have] one operating system that covers all screen sizes.'



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Death of the ‘dumbphone’ nears

STILL need a reason to upgrade your old phone? Telstra plans to kill off its 2G network in 2016, forcing some old mobile phones into retirement.



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Truth about Meerkats has been revealed

THEY might look cute but don’t be deceived by their fury, little faces. A new study shows the true nature of meerkats.



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Strangers turn up for wedding photo and it’s hilarious

A BRIDE-TO-BE accidentally invites a stranger to her wedding photo shoot. He turns up with all his mates — and the results are hilarious. Then Twitter got hold of the photo.



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Nude teacher learns his lesson

A TEACHER who took nude pics of himself learns a lesson after his email account is hacked. Guess what arrives in 287 students and staff inboxes.



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Why the iPhone 6 could kill the iPad

WHEN it came out, everyone joked that the iPad was just a big iPhone. But what’s going to happen to the iPad when Apple releases an actual big iPhone?



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If you could ask Hillary one question

WHEN former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton opened herself up to a live Q&A session, she expected the hard questions. And the downright bizarre.



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New biotech wheat gives fungi the finger without adding new genes

Wheat is hard to modify in the lab, but a team of Chinese researchers have successfully changed its DNA to make it resistant to fungal infection. They did it without using outside genes, too.



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UK supermarket will be the first to disconnect from the grid, use electricity generated entirely by its own rotten food

A grocery store in the UK will become the world's first to be powered entirely by its own food waste. At the end of the day, any leftover food -- after the good stuff has been given to charity -- will be transported to a nearby anaerobic digester, where it will be turned into electricity and sent back to the store via a privately owned one-mile-long power line. When the anaerobic digester is turned on, the grocery store will sever all connections to the national power grid and rely purely on the electricity generated by bacteria feasting on rotten food. Cool.



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MIT creates graphite ‘solar sponge’ that converts sunlight into steam with 85% efficiency

MIT is reporting that it has created a new, cheap material -- using a microwave, no less -- that converts sunlight into steam with an amazing 85% efficiency. This could have major repercussions in the realms of desalination and sterilization, and perhaps for concentrated solar thermal power generation as well.



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How to use a VPN to boost your Netflix performance – even if you’re not a Verizon customer

Can using a VPN improve your streaming video performance, even if you aren't on Verizon? We investigate.



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Dronies to become the new selfies

DRONIES, or videos using remote-controlled aircraft, are set to become more common on social media and the New Zealand ski slopes this season.



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Nvidia launches new Tegra K1 Shield Tablet and separate gamepad, priced rather optimistically at $360

Nvidia's new Shield is dropping today and the updated tablet packs a number of high-end features. Will gamers bite, considering the increased price tag but better use cases?



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Move aside, Segway: Honda’s Uni-Cub could make walking a thing of the past

Behold, the future of personal mobility devices: The Honda Uni-Cub. The Uni-Cub, which is self-balancing and has zero turning radius, is essentially a sit-on Segway without any handlebars. Most importantly, the Uni-Cub is much smaller and easier to maneuver than the Segway, allowing for Uni-Cub users to ride alongside or even within a pack of pedestrians. The main usage scenario for the Uni-Cub is moving around internal spaces, such as offices and museums: Not only is it easier and faster than walking, but compared to other personal mobility devices it also leaves your hands free to operate a smartphone or some other implement of your choosing.



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Can you finally forget your password?

TECHNOLOGY has evolved to make our eyes, fingers, voice patterns and even heartbeats the key, but are we really ready to ditch the password?



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How these gamers became millionaires

PLAYING computer games is no longer a hobby, it’s a professional sport that comes with a prize pool worth more than $10 million.



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The hi-tech super stadiums of the NFL

GIANT televisions, state-of-the-art sound systems and swimming pools. Just some of the insane features of Gridiron’s multi-billion dollar venues that make them the most impressive in sport.



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Not the smartest idea by far

DANIELLE Sexton stole a distinctive leopard-print dress from a shop. But it was what she did next that really landed her in hot water.



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Mobile-free lanes for footpaths

IMAGINE a footpath that has “No cellphones” marked, with the other part labelled “Cellphones — walk at your own risk”. Would it work here?



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‘No cellphone” pavements marked

IMAGINE a street pavement that has “No cellphones” marked, with the other part labelled “Cellphones — walk at your own risk”. Would it work here?



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The creepy things Google knows about you

GOOGLE knows pretty much everything about you, and it’s both extremely creepy and a little bit awesome. How does it know all this and what does it do with it?



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ET deals: $320 off Lenovo Y40 Core i7 laptop with R9 M275 graphics

The Y40 packs a powerhouse combination of a Core i7-4510U processor and 2GB AMD Radeon R9 M275 GPU, which provide plenty of power to keep your frame rates up with current games. This laptop also sports a 1080p anti-glare display, and all those extra pixels serve not just to give you a crisp picture, but also a handy advantage over any 720p laptop gamers out there who have to work with less real estate.



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Handheld device allows anyone to instantly test drinks for date rape drugs

Date rape drugs are shockingly commonplace in nightclubs, college campuses, and private parties across the world. To help solve this problem, a small team from Toronto, Ontario is crowdfunding the pd.id -- the "personal drink ID." With a device the size of a thumb drive, anyone can test to see if a drink has been tampered with.



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