Nokia has applied for a patent which amounts to tattoo which would accommodate customizable buzzing for your phone.

Here is how it would work:

The patent application describes “a material attachable to skin, the material capable of detecting a magnetic field and transferring a perceivable stimulus to the skin, wherein the perceivable stimulus relates to the magnetic field.” The material would react to magnetic signals emitted by a nearby electronic device, such as a smartphone. It would offer some sort of micro vibration, and could be set to certain vibrating patterns. The idea is to provide you with a more direct way to notice when you’re receiving some sort of incoming device alert, whether it be a phone call, email, or text message.

Congratulations I Didn’t Feel The Vibration Through My Pants Excuse Practitioners and welcome to Screwsville.

In reality though, this is something that could be used for far more than smart phones. Imagine how many “alerts” we get everyday. Our phone, our car, our appliances and anything else you can think of. What if we had a way to prioritize some to directly interact with our body.

It’s a pretty cool idea at least.

[Information Week] via @Lockridge_Lisa

Dissecting the Stephen Moffat Doctor Who press conference today.

How many episodes?

We will get six this year including a blockbuster Christmas special (MUCH more on that in a bit) and then eight more to round out this season in 2013.

When are Amy and Rory off the TARDIS for good?

Episode five. Which means we have five episodes for them to reconnect with the Doctor whom they’ve just realized is still alive. I sincerely hope that this season comes with a bit of reinvestment for the Ponds. The possible pregnancy / Amy’s going crazy angle last season felt tacked on. In fact, Amy’s storyline has felt a bit stalled since the end of her first season. She got on the TARDIS to put off getting married to Rory, she then rediscovered her love for him, bada bing bang boom we’re dun-zo.

If it’s simply, “Hey! The Doctor is back!” I’ll be a little bummed.

Will one of them die?

Moffat says not everyone will survive the fifth episode. But… c’mon, you wouldn’t send Amy off a widow, would you? Or kill off a beloved companion? Stuck in an alternate time stream is bad enough.

Anywho… their final nemesis will be the Weeping Angels.

Who is the new companion?

Jenna-Louise Coleman. Her biggest credits to date came from the ITV soap opera Emmerdale. Let’s go to a clip…

She also played one half of the silent double date put together for Steve Rogers by his pal Bucky at the World’s Fair in Captain America.

We will soon see her in the upcoming Titanic miniseries penned by the folks behind Downton Abbey.

Why is she the new companion?

Moffat says she won him over in an audition with Matt Smith where the motor-mouthed rambler played catch up with JLC’s energy.

Also, as The Internet has already noticed. She’s pretty. Reading between the lines of Moffat’s answers, they seem to be positioning her as an Amy Pond-level spitfire with Rose Tyler looks.

Raise you hand if you think that’s a bad idea? I thought not.

She does look tiny. Next to the stretchy Smith she might look even smaller.

How does she meet the Doctor?

No firm details beyond that she’s not a “conventional” character. So I guess we can rule out the Doctor arriving in modern day London and solving a crisis surrounding a smoking hot chick in her early 20s before inviting her on his space ship to enjoy platonic adventures?

What we do know is that it will take place during the Christmas special. This creates the highest stakes incarnation of that particular episode since David Tennant had his “Hello, World” turn in The Christmas Invasion, which began season two.

Once Rory and Amy are gone, have we seen the last of River Song?

Quoth Moffat: “No, not necessarily.”

It can’t all be good news, sweetie.

A South African man claims he has been to heaven four times and has drawn a map.

Self-styled prophet Mthembu says there are 11 heavens, so nuts to you if you had seven in the office pool. He made his first journey to one of them in 1998, took a little breather until 2004 when he returned. He also made a long weekend of heavenly vacays in 2006 and 2008.

He described those first several minutes in heaven.

“An angel, whom I later realised was Gabriel, who was in his early 20s, appeared at my house and led me by the hand to the Mandeni River where he baptised me and he returned to heaven,” Mthembu told the newspaper.

He said the same angel arrived in 1998 and this time took him along to heaven. Mthembu said he had seen God, Jesus and angels during his journeys.

Mthembuuuuuu do you know what that’s worth? Who knew heaven was a place on Earth?

[News24]

Elon Musk got his close-up beauty shot last night on CBS’ venerable newsmagazine 60 Minutes. His company SpaceX was the subject. Here was our favorite impression.

The biggest geeks about SpaceX work at SpaceX.

Every employee interviewed shared the same Big Sky optimism. They are doing what they are doing because this is a pivotal moment in the history of space and… well… they’d like to go to space and this is the best way to do it.

Which is why we root for them.

The organization really has a dot com start-up vibe to it. Not a shock considering Musk’s background but it is awesome to see in action.

The money quote from Garrett Reiseman, an engineer and astronaut who spent time on the International Space Station now working with SpaceX as a consultant.

“If you had a chance to go back in time and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA. If you had a chance to be there at that moment when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn’t you want to do that?”

Watch the full segment above.

A season comes to a close with the cast a little lighter, many bullets fired and a few lessons learned.

This might not be a democracy but it is the final Dissection of the year so you might as well click through a read it.

Read the rest of this entry »

We finally have a date.

SpaceX announced they will send the first commercial spacecaft to spacestation into orbit on April 30th. If successful, the unmanned Dragon capsule will dock with the International Space Station representing a major step for space exploration in the Post Dreams era.

Here is how the mission will go down.

As the Dragon capsule approaches the station, astronauts onboard the outpost will grab onto it using the space station’s robotic arm. The capsule will then be attached to the Earth-facing side of the station’s Harmony node. This process is similar to how the unmanned Japanese cargo freighters are manually docked to the space station.

So, who is down for a April 30th meet up?

[Fox News]

First, for a moment, let’s assume the rumors are true and Sophia Myles will return to the Doctor Who franchise as a companion in the post-Amy Pond era.

Many keen eyes will remember Myles as Madame de Pompadour in the superlative season two episode The Girl in the Fireplace, written by current Who boss Steven Moffat. To date, this is my favorite stand alone episodes for a couple of reasons.

• The Doctor got to solve an awesome problem. Self-contained time travel whilst interacting with a real world historical figures whilst trying to decipher an escalating problem whilst not getting killed by murderous robots. Compelling plot, check.

• The Doctor sacrifices himself. If all you do is travel time and space getting in the middle of all sorts of issues, you’re going to have one or two times when the Doctor resigns himself to death. This happens.

But most important to us now.

• The Doctor falls in love. For someone as care free and empathetic as Tennant’s Doctor is this relationship set a crucial touchstone in the character. Of course this dude falls in love with random awesome chicks! Madam de Pompadour is portrayed as the most badass lady to ever live. Of course they fall in love with each other!

There is real, crackling chemistry in these scenes. Unsurprisingly, the actors began a two-year relationship afterward.

So assuming Sophia is back, we have three ways to look at it.

The actress is playing a companion completely unconnected to her former role. Unlikely considering DW’s gleeful habit of splashing around in it’s own history.

The Madam de Pompadour we’ve met returns to the Doctor’s side for adventures. Possible, but I would suspect less likely than my third hypothesis.

Sophia returns as a new character that is somehow connected to the Pompadour we met. Think along the lines of some genetic linage of insanely awesome women. Almost as if she’s a gender double for the Doctor himself. Pompadour is portrayed as The Doctor’s equal in Fireplace, why wouldn’t this new character?

Remember the scene in Fireplace when the Doctor is reading her memories only to realize that she is using the connection to read his? That’s pretty much all you need to retcon a new race of super ladies that happen to look a smoking hot as Sophia.

No matter what, I am pumped. Something I haven’t said about DW in a while.

During the great changing of the guard between Moffat and his predecessor Russell T. Davies if I were to have made a list of Moffat characters that I would like to see revisited in more depth both The Angels and Pompadour would occupy the top. Certainly far ahead of some characters who’ve gotten nothing but screen time in the intervening two seasons. Sweetie.

Besides, a sex super nova character coupled with the current, asexual incarnation of the Doctor? Geronimo.

I think he might have some sort of vitamin deficiency. Second fox related post of the month for those keeping track.

[Animal Oddities]

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

What a malarky sentence. It’s never safe. Ever. Stop thinking that people. There will always be something in there to kill you.

Take this brand new sea snake discovered off the coast of Australia. It’s venomous and coated in spikes, just in case that first part wasn’t enough.

Though some other sea snakes have spiky scales on their bellies, “no other [known] sea snake has this curious feature,” study leader Kanishka Ukuwela, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide, said by email.

Normally snakes have smooth scales, but each of the newly named Hydrophis donaldi’s scales has a spiny projection, he said.

Scientists cruising shallow seagrass beds in the Gulf of Carpentaria (map) recently captured nine of the rough-scaled reptiles.

Seriously, the ocean is a soup of terror. I will never feel at ease until James Cameron personally murders all of these horrifying little goblins and any others we haven’t accidentally run across.

From here on out, I live my life by the SALTY LANGUAGE PLEASE DON’T CLICK UNLESS YOU WANT TO HEAR CURSE WORDS code of Chris Cooper in Adaptation.

[National Geographic]

There has been a lot to criticize about this season. A lot.

But one thing that’s been beyond reproach for The Walking Dead. They know how to reach a destination, no matter how convoluted the path there might be. Sunday’s episode marked one key thematic shift in the series which to this point had been sorely lacking, events had real consequences and changed the dynamics of the characters.

Finger cuffed by death, let’s talk about the most satisfying episode of The Walking Dead… Read the rest of this entry »

Who’s excited for reams and reams of new stories that are likely gloomy, brutal and horrifying only for them to be whitewashed into super child-friendly parables and then re-darkened into adult action-adventure yarns?

Well today is your lucky day!

Over 500 new fairy tales have been discovered in Germany.

Many of the stories in Von Schonwerth’s collection are found nowhere else. The tales include stories for adults as well as children. There are stories about magical animals, princesses, evil witches, farmers and more. In one of the stories a young woman escapes a witch by turning herself into a pond. The witch then drinks the pond and swallows the woman along with it. The woman then escapes by cutting herself out of the witch with a knife.

Pond changing? Witch knifing?

Get Tim Burton on the phone. I’m seeing Abigail Breslin as the young woman. Johnny Depp as a helpful frog who lives in the pond. And for the witch… who would be a good fit?

[Writers Write]

Yup, that’s it. Inside that piece of machinery will be James Cameron as he conquers the freaking ocean. For those unaware, in the next week or so, Cameron will descend for three and a half hours until he settles at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the lowest known point in the ocean.

The mission hasn’t come without a price.

He said the deaths early last month of his two crew members, Mike deGruy and Andrew Wight — both celebrated filmmakers who specialized in carrying viewers into the sea’s depths — initially prompted him to want to scrap the expedition. The two were preparing to film a sea trial of the Deepsea Challenger when their helicopter went down shortly after takeoff from an airstrip south of Sydney, Australia.

“It was a horrible day,” Mr. Cameron recalled. “We felt sick at heart. It caused us to question risk and the meaning of life. I personally did not want to continue at that point, but the team rallied.”

While incredibly sad that part of his crew lost their lives during the process, it’s awesome that Cameron will honor their memory by completing the task they worked so hard on.

[New York Times]

After a man left a grocery store, a fox stalked him and would not leave the man alone until he gave the fox some of his food. This was a fully grown man, by the way, weighing in at over 200 lbs.

“Despite making attempts to escape, the fox persisted and carried out a sustained attack on the food he had just bought from Tesco.

Eventually, Mr Baker claims, he resorted to offering the animal his loaf of garlic bread and the fox scampered off.”

Everybody knows foxes love garlic bread. However, wildlife experts do not think you should give in and give food to foxes, but should try and frighten them away. Perhaps with a weapon of some kind?

“The best thing to use is a water pistol.”

Ah. OK.

[The Telegraph]

An episode of long deliberations and a shocking conclusion.

We debate the shocking end of this week’s Walking Dead AFTER THE JUMP… Read the rest of this entry »

In one corner we have serial entrepreneur, self-admitted wife swapper and daredevil explorer Richard Branson. In the other, the man who leap frogged his own film as the high grossing in box office history, James Cameron.

Their shared mission, to make it to Challenger Deep. The lowest point in the Mariana Trench. Deeper into the ocean than Mount Everest is tall.

Only once has a manned vessel briefly touched the sea bed. But the 1960 exploration only lasted 15 minutes before beginning the ascent back to the surface.

Now, two of the world’s most visible men are ready to return to the bottom of the ocean.

And it looks like Cameron is going to win. Which is freaking awesome.

Not like, kind of cool. Amazing. To use a cliche, it’s so awesome if we saw it in a movie, we’d think it was too cliche. That’s how awesome this is.

What’s more, he’s going to go it alone. In a one man submersible. Since the 1960 mission kicked up such a silt storm it brought visibility down to zero, if successful, he will become the first person to see the Challenger Deep.

Allow me to rephrase that, the director of Terminator 2 will likely become the only person in the entire history of humanity to see this. Hundreds of people have seen our Earth from space. Challenger Deep? The guy who directed Aquaman on Entourage.

I cannot put into words how happy this makes me. It’s the triumph of creativity and will. The world is better for James Cameron being in it.

He plans to spend six hours on the floor, collecting samples before coming back to the surface. Also, he is equipping several 3D cameras for the adventure the footage for which he hopes to burn on national television while he laughs in our faces turn into a feature film.

Awesome.

[CNN]

Is this final proof of the dire Mayan 2012 prophecy? Most likely not.

But it is a totally sweet light beam shooting out of the top of the Mayan city of Chichen Itza. It was taken by a tourist who was trying to capture a lightning strike in the distance. Two picture were fine, the third, is what you see in the video.

Experts say it’s clearly an artifact in the picture. Which is probably right. And boring.

[Yahoo!]