Trulia.com Crime Map

Trulia.com, the real estate web-site, has unveiled a new web site that shows a great interactive crime map for most US cities, including San Francisco. This is not the first online crime map out there, but this one has by far the best interface. It looks really good, is well designed, and it is very fast and responsive. You can zoom in from National level all the way to street level and get all kinds of detailed information about every single crime reported. You can also see trends by hour or day.

[Trulia.com/crime via gizmodo]

Battlefield 3 Trailer

Check out the amazing full lenght trailer for the upcoming first person shooter Battlefield 3. This is actual gameplay footage, the realism is impressive! You've got destructible environment, immersive sound effects, photo-realistic lighting and rendering. You hear all kinds of sounds, people talking, dogs barking, you see sun rays through the smoke and partial lighting on people, see the reflections of your surroundings on your scope, flags floating in the wind, tracer bullets and sparks flying, debris blown up in the air everywhere.

Endeavour's Last Flight

The Space Shuttle Endeavour launched for the last time this morning at 8:56am EDT, carrying 6 astronauts and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), as well as the new STORRM navigation and docking system to the International Space Station. This is the second-to-last flight of the Space Shuttle fleet, the last flight will be Atlantis' STS-135 mission, scheduled for July 12, 2011.

Ah, crap! We're running out of Neodymium, too...

We already knew that we were running out of oil, and in recent years experts have started to worry that we are running out of Uranium to power the world's Nuclear power plants. But now, new reports show that we are also running out of Neodymium and Dysprosium, two rare metals used in the manufacturing of the powerful permanent magnets found in electric car engines and wind turbines.

HTC Thunderbolt gets 26 Mbits/second!

Yep, 26 Mbits/s. That's the amazing download speed I was able to get on my friend's HTC Thunderbolt running on Verizon's 4G LTE network. We were at Rosamunde in San Francisco's Mission district, with four out of four bars of signal strength. The upload speed was 5 Mbits/s.

The RoboEarth Project and The Rise Of The Machines

The field of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence seems to have been making significant progress these last couple of years. A few months ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer was able to beat the two best human players at Jeopardy. It is capable of understanding questions formulated in normal English language on a variety of fields like science, history or popular culture, and come up with an answer in less than a second.

The Skylon Spaceplane

British Aerospace company Reaction Engines Ltd is working on a design for a Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) Spaceplane called Skylon that will take off and land horizontally from a runway, just like a normal plane. This concept has been studied several times already in the past, with projects such as the U.S.'s National Aerospace Plane (see my previous post) or the British HOTOL, but all encountered technological problems that they could not solve.