Flip the brass power switch and the Marshall Acton III springs to life like an old friend ready for a late night jam. This is the smallest of the Marshall home speakers and weighs in at over 6 pounds and 10 x 7 x 6 inches. The black version with woven front grille and modest script branding looks like the guitar amps of yesteryear. At $199.99 (was $299.99), it’s definitely a fair price for what you get.
A computer mouse on your desk looks innocent, right? Researchers Isaac Tunney, John Bass and Alexis Lussier Desbiens at the University of California, Irvine, found out a secret about high-performance mice: they can hear you. Not just the clicks and scrolls, but your own voice, picked up by the tiny vibrations of your desk. This is called Mic-E-Mouse and turns a regular peripheral into an unexpected eavesdropper in an age where everyday devices can also be spies.
Photo credit: Igor Bogdanov
Leaked photographs of what appears to be the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 have surfaced, and prototype units have a similar design with some noticeable differences from the Pocket 3.
Aviation has always been about scale, from the barnstormers who flew biplanes in the 1920s to the Cold War giants that redefined heavy lifting. Radia, a Colorado-based startup, has entered the fray with the WindRunner, a cargo plane that takes scale to new heights. This monster, 109 meters from nose to tail (longer than a football field) will carry loads no other aircraft can. Radia engineers started drawing it out in 2016 with a simple question: how do you move enormous wind turbine blades to remote locations without breaking up highways or rivers? The answer is in their hangar-sized drawings, a four-engine jet designed for one big job, with a few extras along the way.
A drone hovers above a truck speeding down a rural road at 110 km/h, and it begins to descend with precision and then lands smoothly on its bed. This is the latest achievement from the Createk Engineering Lab at Université de Sherbrooke in Canada. Their Project DART has solved a long-standing problem for drone technology: landing on a moving target in real-world scenarios.
Duke Nukem 3D was released in 1996 and still holds up today. Now a fan project called Voxel Duke Nukem 3D is bringing back those memories. Modder Dan Peterson has spent years converting the 2D graphics into voxel based 3D models. These models are exact to the originals, replacing 2D images with 3D models that rotate as you move.
Fifty years after astronauts bounced around the lunar surface in a stripped-down electric cart, General Motors is back with a rover that’s more like a reliable pickup truck than a one-time toy. The Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV, is developed by a team led by Lunar Outpost, with General Motors handling the battery pack, frame and smarts for standing upright on uneven ground. This vehicle is for NASA’s Artemis missions which will deliver humans to the South Pole starting around 2030.
Photo credit: Chase The Summit
Apple is continually improving its smartwatch lineup and the Series 11 is the latest example. This one is brand new and has all the features that made the Series 10 a daily must have. Amazon has already dropped the base aluminum model to $389 from $399, so now is the time to pick one up before the Black Friday craze kicks in.
A couple in the US were so smitten with their Labrador-Golden Retriever mix named Bailey they wanted to give him more than a pat on the head. They turned to Rolls-Royce, the British maker of ultra-luxury cars, to create a one-off Spectre, called Specture Bailey, that’s as much a tribute to their dog as it is a work of art.
