Cutting Edge

Microsoft plans to acquire Canesta, which makes technology that enables human gestures to power devices, the companies said today.

The Microsoft purchase, about which no financial details were disclosed, indicates that "there is little question that within the next decade, we will see natural user interfaces become common for input across all devices," Canesta President and CEO Jim Spare said in a statement. "With Microsoft's breadth of scope from enterprise to consumer products, market presence, and commitment to NUI (natural user interfaces), we are confident that our technology will see wide adoption across many applications that … Read more

The six-member, all-veteran crew of the shuttle Discovery flew to Florida today to await their blastoff Monday on a space station resupply mission that will be the orbiter's 39th and final mission.

Arriving at the Florida spaceport after staggered flights from Houston aboard T-38 jets, commander Steven Lindsey, pilot Eric Boe, Nicole Stott, Michael Barratt, and spacewalkers Timothy Kopra and Alvin Drew touched down this afternoon.

"Weather permitting, if all goes well, we'll have a nice November 1 on-time launch," Lindsey told reporters at the Shuttle Landing Facility. "We're looking forward to it."… Read more

Who says the NASA Spirit doesn't live on?

Those who mourned the Mars rover's failure to communicate with its earthbound operators will be heartened to know data from the plucky explorer continues to produce important findings--even as the rover itself remains stuck in a sand trap and out of contact. In fact, NASA says that trap has turned out to be a jackpot, announcing today that Spirit has detected evidence of water under the ground's surface.

Layers of soil with different compositions in the area where the rover became stuck more than a year ago led the … Read more

One-ninth of the American ICBM strike force went offline on Saturday, according to a report on the Web site of the U.S. magazine The Atlantic, as a series of control errors multiplied beyond the ability of engineers to compensate.

The squadron of 50 missiles affected is stationed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, said the report. The weapons are controlled by five launch control center computers (LCCs), which periodically interrogate the on-board guidance systems of the weapons to confirm their status. According to the report, one LCC began to ping the missiles out of sequence, causing … Read more

To the Japanese, wrapping a gift well can be as meaningful as the gift itself, elevating the simple act of wrapping to an art that is in itself a visual gift. So, not surprisingly, Japanese scientists are delving into a way to make paper even more artful by making it smell like the image it displays.

Specifically, Kenichi Okada and his team from Tokyo's Keio University are developed a technology that hopes to recreate the aromas of objects you've just printed. While scratch-and-sniff technology isn't new or even novel, Okada's team is tackling the more trying … Read more

I know that, for some, bees are something of an irritant. The same, however, can be said of computers.

While bees sometimes pester us with their proximity and noise, computers pester us by making us believe in the proximity of something we're missing, somewhere out there.

However, new research suggests something both powerful and profound about these two pesterers: bees are allegedly far smarter than computers. For, the Guardian informs me, bees are swiftly able to solve the "traveling salesman problem."

My mother's solution to this was to never open the door or, if she did, … Read more

Get a whiff of this, space geeks. A pair of artists has created a batch of scratch-and-sniff prints that smell like the moon.

And just how does the moon smell? Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke haven't been there themselves, so they went with reports from Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, who said it has a strong smell resembling gunpowder.

The limited-edition silkscreen prints, which sell for $55 unframed, started out as "Moon, Scratch & Sniff," a commissioned project for Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, which held an event on olfactory art last month.

Now anyone with an interest … Read more

The first live Twitter messages from space were less than a year ago, but already astronauts have moved on to geolocation: Douglas C. Wheelock, commander of the Expedition 25 mission, earned the "NASA Explorer" badge on Foursquare for checking into the International Space Station on Friday morning.

Foursquare business development rep Eric Friedman said on the company blog that Wheelock was "the first human to ever use a location-based service from space," leaving open the possibility that aliens somewhere else in the universe may have developed their own social-networking services and consequently, as far as we … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--It's hard to imagine anything in a museum featuring hundreds of original Disney concept sketches and art pieces, including dozens of Mickey Mouse, being as impressive as the art itself.

But try visiting the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio here and not coming away with the strong impression that the way the facility was designed, with its wide variety of beautiful digital displays, imaginative use of video screens, innovative touch-screens, audio clips of Walt himself nearly everywhere you go, and much more, is nearly as compelling an experience as the opportunity to see first-hand the origins … Read more