Another year, another demonstration of what's going to doom our species. If last year brought us iPhones and Anna Nicole Smith's boobs, this year in search brings us Britney Spears and World Wrestling beating Obama. That's what Yahoo! Search says, which statistically would probably be in line with Google's zeitgeist. Their top 10 searches are: • Britney Spears • World Wrestling Entertainment • Barack Obama • Miley Cyrus • RuneScape • Jessica Alba • Naruto • Lindsay Lohan • Angelina Jolie • American Idol That you hear, dearly beloved, is the sound of the Fourth Trumpet. God saves us all. [BBC News] ...

Emotiv's "mind-reading" controller is a press darling, mainly because it's really cool. Apparently, though, Emotiv won't have the headset ready to go for the planned December release, because it doesn't, strictly speaking, well, work. Based on electroencephalography technology (or EEG to the interested layman), a properly functioning Epoc isn't out of the realm of possibility. But after a series of failed press appearances, starting just after the announcement and culminating in an glitchy gaming failure which I witnessed firsthand at the Intel Developer Forum, the product just doesn't look like it's ready. BigDownload spoke to a PR rep for the company, who said that the product is being he ...

Remember how Sony told us we'd be able to lounge around all Thanksgiving weekend, watching YouTubes on our TVs in full screen? LIES! Turns out today's the real day for 2.53. [Sony—Thanks, Stephen] ...

Compared to the ZzzPhone—a modern marvel of engineering and/or MSPaint—the i6-Goal is sort of boring: it's got no QWERTY, 3G, two-week battery, male enhancement powers, etc. It does, however, appear to be real. Announced by TechFaith Wireless and QIGI, two Chinese companies that very much seem to exist, the i6-Goal is a reassuringly modest accomplishment. The touchscreen phone is a relatively normal quad-band GSM phone, featuring a 2MP camera, GPS and an SD slot. The hardware actually looks quite similar to that of the HTC Touch, which perhaps not coincidentally can hackishly run Android. Notably, the handset will be the first released in both Windows Mobile or Android flavors, s ...

Like Wanted come to life, the Pentagon's now funding $22 million into researching bullets that could change course mid-flight to hit their targets. DARPA, the Defense Department's R&D office, is handing out $12.3 million to Lockheed Martin and $9.5 million to Teledyne Scientific & Imaging to design .50-caliber sniper rifles with guided ammo. DARPA had previously thrown money into laser-guided bullets, but the stuff Lockheed Martin's working on—called Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance (Exacto)—would be able to travel accurately regardless of the surrounding environment. Though public details are (obviously) scarce, the rifle may include “fin-stabilized projectiles, spin-stabilized ...

It's been a long time coming, but after dabbling with touch on the midrange 5800, Nokia has finally brought a touchscreen to its brand new flagship S60 smartphone, the N97. But it's not quite a full dive into touch—there's still a horizontal QWERTY keyboard hidden below the 3.5" 640x360 resistive touchscreen and accesable via a smooth 30° flip mechanism. The N97 will run an even further touch-enhanced Symbian OS, S60 v5, which features the 5800's quick contacts bar and adds an assortment of customizable desktop widgets that can pipe in your Facebook info, RSS feeds and the like, much like those found on Nokia's internet tablet OS. The widgets will be open to third party developers and ...

With energy conservation and easy eco-friendliness on just about everybody's agenda these days, one of the most popular concepts is the “Smart Home,” a living environment that knows just how much power you actually need to be comfortable and gives you not a drop more. Nokia's hopping on that wagon with its new Nokia Home Control Center, a Linux-based platform that will control your house's resources via your mobile phone. According to Nokia, the NHCC will allow third-party developers to create services that are added onto the accessibility platform. That way, you'll rarely come across an incident where some new smart home tech you bought doesn't actually work with your main controller. ...

Financial apocalypse be damned! The Shanghai Tower, set to reach a whopping 632 meters by the time it's completed, broke ground over the weekend. With its zenith a full 140 meters higher than the Mori Building (currently the world's highest observatory), it'll grab the honors of the tallest building in China. The Shanghai Tower is organized as nine cylindrical buildings stacked one on top of the other with a double-skinned layer on the outside. The outside layer is triangular shaped and swivels as it reaches upwards. Designed by San Francisco-firm Gensler, the tower plans on accommodating offices, a luxury hotel, nine sky-gardens and various retail and cultural venues, as well as a new Sha ...

Financial apocalypse be damned! The Shanghai Tower, set to reach a whopping 632 meters by the time it's completed, broke ground over the weekend. With its zenith a full 140 meters higher than the Mori Building (currently the world's highest observatory), it'll grab the honors of the tallest building in China. The Shanghai Tower is organized as nine cylindrical buildings stacked one on top of the other with a double-skinned layer on the outside. The outside layer is triangular shaped and swivels as it reaches upwards. Designed by San Francisco-firm Gensler, the tower plans on accommodating offices, a luxury hotel, nine sky-gardens and various retail and cultural venues, as well as a new Sha ...

During my visit to Hong Kong, Brian showed me to a local design store called G.O.D. (Goods Of Desire), which kind of reminded me of a China kitsch-themed Urban Outfitters. When I get a chance to go back there, I'm definitely saving up some money for these laser mice, a Microsoft Arc and G.O.D. mashup. Man, could you even tell computer mice were in the picture? Fooled me at first glance! There's two G.O.D.-designed ARC mice for sale, one with a traditional Chinese tea pottery scheme and the other with an old-timey “mouse” drawing and character. Cute! Both use 2.4GHz wireless technology with a range of about 30 feet. Like the regular ARC, these can fold to half their size. No price was l ...

1. View Source It’s right there for free all over the web. Make a habit of it, and pretty soon you’ll train yourself to see the second web - the world of Meta-tags and Javascript libraries and CSS style and comments - some of them quite fun! I’ve known several sites that were easier to read from the source code than they were in the web browser proper. 2. Switch Window Managers Mainly this is for the Linux/BSD crowd. Try a lightweight like Blackbox or Window Maker, if it comes with your distro. Edit a style. By changing your desktop every now and then, it just keeps your mind loose and limber. 3. Try a New Distro From the same reasoning as above. Live CDs are gre ...

A Japanese company, Sosu, has recently revealed healthy cigarettes, a rechargeable battery-powered device that emits flavored steam, complete with glowing LED lights. Unfortunately these cigarettes won’t actually help with those nicotine—you know, the addictive part—cravings. The Mismo cigarette comes from Sosu's 'Nicolestyle' (or "Nicotine-less Style") line of products. Nicotine-free and tar-free, the cigarettes ensure you get your essential nutrients such as CoQ10 and Vitamin C. Flavors come in mint and grapefruit, which lay in cartridges that cost about $10 each and last for 300 inhales. For about $126, you can at least look swanky and cultured (coughpretentiouscough) as you hang ou ...

A Japanese company, Sosu, has recently revealed "healthy cigarettes," a rechargeable battery-powered device that emits flavored steam, complete with glowing LED lights. Unfortunately these cigarettes won’t actually help with those nicotine—you know, the addictive part—cravings. The Mismo cigarette comes from Sosu's 'Nicolestyle' (or "Nicotine-less Style") line of products. Nicotine-free and tar-free, the cigarettes ensure you get your essential nutrients such as CoQ10 and Vitamin C. Flavors come in mint and grapefruit, which lay in cartridges that cost about $10 each and last for 300 inhales. For about $126, you can at least look swanky and cultured (coughpretentiouscough) as you hang ...

The Gizmodo Gallery, which starts this week in NYC, is going to have voodoo. See, Blendtec, the guys responsible for those catchy videos of gadgets being destroyed aren't just giving us one to give away as a door prize, but they're setting us up with a demo model we can use to pulp our own gadgets with. We'll have lab coats and goggles, but also whipped cream and berries. And I think we'll sacrifice a gadget or two come this Saturday to the gods of user interface design or battery life because clearly, asking companies to improve such things have by and large gone unanswered. We may do even more than a few if you've got some particularly interesting and hated ones you want to puree, but no p ...

Good OS, who provided the $200 Wal-mart PCs with gOS, will release a cloud-based version of the OS, the pragmatically named Cloud. Cloud runs a hybrid browser/linux kernel, offering quick startups and minimal lag. According to Electronista, Cloud launches within a few seconds, provides access to the internet, runs client apps (like Skype), as well as a variety of web apps, including a dock full of them from Google. In addition, Cloud is compatible with flash video and mp3s, giving users options for multimedia use within the OS. But Cloud is not meant to be a standalone solution. Instead, it will be packaged in netbooks alongside Windows XP, complete with a dock icon that will switch you over ...

For those of us who don't remember life before the NES, Boing Boing uncovered a collection of vintage instruction manuals, ads, hang tags and more, which give us a glimpse of gadgets from the past. Included in these clippings are lessons on how to build fallout shelters in case of emergencies, and my personal favorite, headphones, now available with a "new coiled cord!" Check out a gallery of our favorite retro gizmos below, or head over to the Product Manual Archive to check out the ongoing collection! [Product Manual Archive via BoingBoing] ...

Okonomiyaki's a Japanese omlette/pancake dish that's made of a mish-mash of anything you like. I love them. Kotaku's Ashcraft loves them. This Japanese robot can make them. This makes it the best robot ever. It's called the Motoman SDA10, and it's an industrial robot made for working alongside humans, not replacing them. They're supposed to be super dextrous to the point of being able to put together a digital camera from tiny, tiny parts. Okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is delicious, and probably a better test of how awesome a robot is. In fact, I vote that they ditch Turing and use this instead. [Pink Tentacle via Born Rich via Dvice] ...

Sure, most of us have enjoyed a cold one while watching TV. But there's nothing worse than running off to the fridge during Sex and the City reruns the game. Now that hassle is over. Because the Micro Matic v-POD is both your TV and your beer dispenser. Constructed of stainless steel and loaded with six faucets that can dispense anything from beer to beer, the v-POD already sounds like a must-buy for its $3,050 asking price. But the v-POD also features a 10-inch LCD with stereo speakers that can play back MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4 and MP3 files off of your flash storage of choice. Sure, we wish that display were a bit bigger. But when you're curled up in the fetal position crying about your failing ...

From the maker of handy iPhone landscape typing program TouchType, SMS Touch is an iPhone app that allows users to send unlimited text messages without paying for an SMS plan. It's a clever idea. Avoid that $15 unlimited texting plan from AT&T by using your free email to send SMS messages. With SMS Touch, you can write an email (complete with the landscape-style keyboard and spellcheck functionality) and send it as an SMS to anyone in your phonebook. When they respond to your text message, instead of coming back to your phone as a chargeable SMS, the message actually arrives in your email. In other words, you can send SMS messages while all the while communicating in email. Priced at $5, pa ...

Kudos to LaCie for making their flash drives more portable—although, the coin-shape may prove problematic. It won't be long before your sensitive data ends up in the hands of some Starbucks employee. It is definitely thicker than a traditional coin, but the metal exterior of the USB 2.0 drive enhances the illusion, making it easy to lose in a pocket full of change. Still, at $20 for the 4GB version and $30 for the 8GB version, at least you are getting a decent amount of storage for the price. [LaCie via Crunchgear] ...