Comet Full Of Frozen Water Surprises Scientific Community

Identify your present location. Then, as if your eye view were a satellite’s, imagine your present location as seen from outer space. Pan far, far, away from the Earth until you reach the edge of the solar system. Focus on Pluto. Then zoom out a little and note the Kuiper Belt where floats a startling comet called Hartley 2. Say hello to Hartley 2.

Solar Cookup200 Sun Roaster Burns Barbecue Chicken Without Remorse (Video)

You can also call it a glittering bowl of death. Not that it can incinerate innocent people who happen to be passing by your yard, but it does spell ‘well done’ on unsuspecting meat sacrificed for the good of all. The Cookup200 is quite a popular brand in France and has since expanded overseas.

Rise Of The Apes! Monkeys Go On Benign Virtual Rampage

Don’t worry, it was done all in the name of science. Science! What you’re about to read is a minor breakthrough in prosthetic technology and brain implants. Both involved test monkeys and proved very successful.

In a rare alliance of two prestigious universities from France and America, monkeys were able to control virtual limbs by thinking out their actions, thanks to brain plants. This is as good as hard science fiction gets, only this time it’s real.

Google+ traffic drops 60 percent?

Chitika Insights

Graph of G+ traffic (page views) in September

Even after Google+ dropped its invite-only system and opened itself to a curious public, its traffic fell by more than 60 percent after an initial surge of 1,200 percent.

Military drones flying despite worries about computer virus

Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images file

A Predator unmanned drone sits on the tarmac at Kandahar military airport in Afghanistan in 2010.

The computer systems that control the U.S. military's Predator and Reaper drones have been beset by a persistent computer virus, according to reports surfacing Friday.

Mourning Steve Jobs, Samsung & Google delay new Android

Looks like the iPhone 4S may be the last big product announcement for at least a week, as the tech world mourns the passing of Steve Jobs. Samsung and Google, which were due to make a splash at an industry-wide wireless technology event next week, has decided to delay the official release of its new product(s).

Meet Siri, your personal iPhone assistant

Want to to know what the weather is like in Seattle or Austin without checking the Web or even your pre-set weather maps on your phone? How about having your text messages read to you? Siri will do that for you and a whole lot more. Apple unveiled the personal assistant as part of its iPhone 4S announcement Tuesday.

Siri is the company Apple bought last year for an estimated $200 million, and developed the artificial intelligence behind the program. Apple exec Scott Forstall showed off Siri with various questions and impressive answers, such as:

Forstall: "What time is it in Paris?"

Siri: "The time in Paris, France is 8:16 p.m." and shows a live clock.

Forstall: "Wake me up tomorrow at 6 a.m."

Siri: "OK, I set it for 6 a.m."

Then Forstall asked Siri to find him a "great Greek restaurant in Palo Alto."

Siri: "I've found five Greek restaurants, and I’ve sorted them by rating."

In addition, Siri can also set up meetings for you, take dictation and search the Web, including instant Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha searches.

"For decades technologists have teased us with this dream that we can talk to our technology," Forstall said. Now you can ...  although many of us have spent years talking to our technology — without it talking back.

Siri will come with built-in with support for English, French, and German. It will be beta at the start, Forstall said, with more languages and services added "over time."

And over time, Siri will be taken quite seriously if it isn't already.

"Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ artificial intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event," Siri cofounder Norman Winarsky said in a recent interview with 9to5mac. "Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use."

10 gadgets to make your pet Internet famous

Nerd Approved

It's common knowledge that the Internet is fueled by two things — pornography and cat videos. Needless to say, if a pet video goes viral it can be extremely lucrative. Maybe it's time you and your pet got a piece of the action. The following gadgets make it easy to get your cat or dog to do something cute and stupid on camera.

Spooky Ice Planet Laboratory

If you think that you have the imagination of Geiger and can come up with something as creepy as aliens and other xenomorphs, then you might want to invest $19.99 in the Spooky Ice Planet Laboratory. This is one unique way of creating creepy crystalized creatures, and it also allows you to study the properties of crystals in this science kit itself. While anyone from as young as 10 is able to use this, I’m quite sure the older ones out there would also be able to have their fair share of fun with it as well.

Who says that you need to wait until Halloween to have your fun with creepy, spooky, and scary stuff? This crystal growing kit will allow those with a penchant for science to check out crystal properties while creating their own version of monsters. There is also a workbench tray that will hold all of the crystal making tools, not to mention molded wells for planting trees and situating sentinel bugs, a skeleton, and the Ice Lord himself.

A full-color Instruction Booklet is thrown into the mix to help you get started right out of the box, and even better news is this – there is no need for a fridge to get this going.

Scosche Outs iPhone Radiation Detector

Before the action starts, the official status of this fancy new gadget is it’s out of stock. Don’t worry, since Scosche are hard at work on new models for their bestselling portable radiation detector. It’s originally called the RDTX-Pro but a new HRDTX is coming next year. The whole scoop after the jump!