If you wanted to see in the dark, you could do worse than follow the example of moths, which have of course made something of a specialty of it. That, at least, is what NASA researchers did when designing a powerful new camera that will capture the faintest features in the galaxy. This biomimetic “bolometer […]
Samsung’s never shied away from going big. Big phones, big TVs, big watches. In fact, that was one of the defining characteristics for the first few generations of the Gear line, the first few of which were really more wrist-worn tablet than smartwatch. Things thankfully mellowed out a bit last year with the introduction of […]
Welcome to the 2016 TechCrunch Holiday Gift Guide! We’ll be rolling out a bunch of guides leading up to Christmas, hopefully making your holiday shopping a little easier. Looking for gifts for others on your list? Check out our full 2016 Gift Guide Hub. Have a furry friend and want to spoil them with tech […]
When the Freedom of the Press Foundation published an open letter to Canon, encouraging the company to implement encryption features into its cameras, it missed the point. Yes, encryption per se is a great idea, but when dodging bullets in war zones, gravity friction-lock batons in tin-pot dictatorships or nasty cutlery if you’re filming gangs, it isn’t going […]
During the supreme madness of the Pokémon GO season this summer, it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talk about how the insanely popular game was boosting activity levels and making people walk miles more than they did before. That effect appears to have been significantly overstated, according to research published in the British Medical Journal. […]
Serious motion capture setups often involve dozens of optical markers, inertial sensors or both, making them a pain to set up and tear down, and producing a ton of data. This Disney Research project produces high-quality results from just a handful of sensors by making some smart assumptions about how the body works. The researchers […]
AMD’s big graphics software update this year is called Crimson ReLive, and comes in both Pro and standard formats. The annual huge improvement dump adds a lot of oomph under the hood for Radeon graphics hardware, including performance increases of over 8 percent in terms of specific title gaming performance on the same generation of hardware Radeon […]
Everyone knows the holiday season means three things: family, friends and interconnected low-energy Bluetooth devices connected using a simple mesh network. Estimote, a beacon company, has given us the last thing by creating a small mesh network of wireless beacons that they proceed to hang on a Christmas tree. The new beacons run Bluetooth Low […]
Hardware kits, internet-connected toys and robots that teach kids to code are now commonplace. But Osmo, an early entrant in IoT toys, is pulling ahead of the pack with funding and partnerships with top names in the field. Specifically, Osmo has raised $24 million in new venture funding from Mattel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Collab+Sesame, […]
Droughts, climate change and deforestation are putting forests at risk worldwide, so studying these ecosystems closely is more important than ever — but it’s a hell of a lot of work to climb every tree in the Sierra Nevada. Drones and advanced imaging, however, present an increasingly practical alternative to that, as this UC Berkeley […]