Gearfuse Technology, Science, Culture & More

Fancy spiders? Check out this creative piece of Flash animation. You can pull a spider around by its legs or just toss it about, making it your helpless victim for any torture you see fit. Still, no one wants to touch a real spider of that size anywhere but here, where the sky is the limit (actually it’s 255 pixels.) ...

NEWS FLASH: CRUNCHGEAR BLOGGER NICHOLAS DELEON IS “SQUEAMISH WHEN IT COMES TO EXCESSIVE VIOLENCE.” THE REPORT COMES ON THE HEELS OF THE RELEASE OF SILENT HILL: HOMECOMING, A SURVIVAL HORROR VIDEO GAME. SAID VIOLENCE INCLUDES: ?the OFLC [the Australian ratings board] cited several high impact scenes in the game, mostly focusing on drilling into and severing body parts. One scene ...

Thanks to Nissan’s Biomimetic Robot Car (BR23C), crash test dummies could find themselves out of a job. Having been compared to R2-D2 (but bearing no resemblance whatsoever), the BR23C will not maintain your car like a mechanic would, rather, it will play the part of backseat driver. The robot is the “poster-bot” for Nissan’s new crash prevention technology. Drawing upon ...

Feeling nostalgic today? Take a trip back to 2001, when the economy was…well, pretty shitty. Dot-coms were folding left and right, TRL was huge and Google was gaining dominance. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, our pals Larry and Sergey have launched a search page that uses the oldest available index the company has, which is from 2001. The old ...

The Phoenix Lander is still hard at work discovering various hints of life on Mars. NASA had originally believed there was ice on Mars, but weren’t able to prove it at the time. Then, NASA found water.� Now, Philip Christensen, the principal investigator for the Mars Odyssey THEMIS camera system and a professor from Arizona State University says melting snow ...

So yeah, while I’m addicted to Facebook, I don’t have an iPhone. But alas, I hear many good things about the just-released Facebook 2.0 application for the iPhone. From the above screenshot, it looks just like the web-based version. But why speculate? I turned to Boggle master/blogger Andrea Rosen to find out: VV: You just downloaded the app. First impressions? ...

The team here at Gearfuse is celebrating Rosh Hashanah so we’ll resume normal posting on Wednesday. Take care and a big “Happy New Year” to our fellow jews out there!

We don’t get the chance to see many snakebots. There’s the Japanese M-Tran, a shape shifting robot, but that hardly counts as a snakebot. Anna Konda, however, is very much a snakebot. Despite looking and acting very similarly to a penis, Anna is really a firefighter. Anna has 20 joints, each with 33 degrees of freedom, giving it an extensive ...

Have a Windows PC and a Netflix account? Perfect. Grab your credit card and get ready to hand over $30 to RealNetworks. Yes, that Real. The one with the obsolete streaming audio format. Yes! That’s the one! You see, Real just released RealDVD. It’s a legal application that allows you to rip DVDs to up to five computers without ramifications. ...

Computing isn’t always about raw power and trying to build the best gaming rig out there. Sometimes the simple bare necessities will suffice.� Lenovo�s first netbook, the IdeaPad S10-42312CU, comes with all the bare necessities you’ll ever need to surf the web. Featuring a 10.2-inch 1024�600 widescreen display, an Intel Atom N270 single core processor running at 1.6GHz, GMA 950 ...