Full Frame

Work hard, play hard at GDC (audio slideshow)

As the video game industry searches for the next big thing in gaming, designers around the world are honing their skills and playing with new ideas and theories in game design. Most of the time, digital artists and designers are locked behind their screens and spread around the world, but the Game Developers Conference provides a forum for the worldwide community to come together and share ideas on the future of gaming.

They come from Europe, China, South America, and across the United States, and GDC gives them an opportunity each year to meet the industry's biggest players face … Read more

Building a bridge that's ready for the big one

During the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge nearly collapsed. Just one or two seconds more of shaking along the San Andreas fault zone, says Caltrans' Bart Ney, and the whole bridge would have come down.

Today, the seismic innovations being incorporated into the construction of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge are far more advanced. The construction is a race against the clock, and engineers say the new bridge, once built, will be secure enough to survive a "massive level earthquake--the largest you would … Read more

So stupendous living in this YouTube

Thanks to users around the world watching hundreds of millions of videos each week, YouTube has taken self-produced video to another level. Sure, we still watch and rewatch silly cat videos, ranting diatribes, and painful accidents, but as the Google site grows, it is becoming an important distribution platform for more serious forms of films, news and music entrepreneurs.

Behind the scenes, the 300 employees at the San Bruno, Calif.-based company are seeking new ways to energize and monetize the medium. Engineers and product managers are integrating new elements into the YouTube platform every day, finding ways to build … Read more

Capturing atomic images via ultrafast X-ray pulses

Particle acceleration has been the focus of research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center since the early 1960s, but a relatively new project at the U.S. Department of Energy facility at Stanford University called the Linac Coherent Light Source ( LCLS) is giving scientists a unique opportunity to capture images of single molecules. With the use of microwaves, electrons are accelerated along a two-mile path where they are oscillated back and forth, generating radiation and ultrafast X-ray flashes that capture images of molecular events with a "shutter speed" of less than 100 femtoseconds. Creating these molecular movies of … Read more

NASA, Air Force, national lab partner to improve mpg (audio slideshow)

Just a 12 percent increase in fuel efficiency for America's trucking industry could translate into a savings of $10 billion, or 3.4 billion gallons of diesel fuel--as well as prevent 36 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere annually. The small things do add up, and that is the philosophy behind the multi-agency cooperation taking place at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., where the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has teamed with Navistar and the U.S. Air Force to develop and test devices for reducing the aerodynamic drag of semis. Some … Read more

Japanese astronaut tweets images from space

A Japanese astronaut aboard the International Space Station since December has been shooting some incredible images and sending them back to Earth.

Soichi Noguchi, a member of the Soyuz TMA-17 crew and Expedition 22, has sent more than 28 images of the world's major cities and tallest mountains taken from on board the International Space Station more than 200 miles into space. The images have been posted via Twitpic to his Twitter page.

The images below show San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and a brilliant shot of the Amazon River as it runs through Brazil. See the full gallery … Read more

Google helps envision the future of the Bay Bridge

This week, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) announced a partnership with Google to bring the planned Bay Bridge to Google Earth. The bridge, under construction since 2002 and slated to be completed in 2013, will be mapped in Google Earth, with the currently-under-construction and completed portions visible in varying opacities.

We rode along with Google Earth co-founder Michael Jones to take a look at the live site construction in the San Francisco Bay. Take a look into the future in Google Earth, here (zipped file).

You can get more details on the new Google Earth feature in our story, &… Read more

Wozniak on the importance of piquing kids' interests

Apple founder and tech pioneer Steve Wozniak participated Monday in a San Francisco-based lecture series, The Discovery Forum, which serves to increase awareness about the importance of childhood creativity, and raises support for the Bay Area Discovery Museum's educational exhibitions and programs.

Wozniak, in conversation with TV anchor Dana King, discussed some of the projects he played around with as a child such as wiring circuits and building ham radios. He said he never thought his interest in electronics would lead to a career--his interest was the result of personal curiosity. (He also went off topic for awhile on his Prius problems.) … Read more

Photonics exhibition trips the lasers fantastic

SAN FRANCISCO--SPIE, an international society founded in 1955 to advance light-based research, gathered this week in San Francisco for SPIE Photonics West, a huge industry exhibition showcasing some of the newest developments in optics and photonic technology.

Companies exhibiting at the show, which ran from January 23-28, unveiled the lasers, fiber optics, lenses, medical optics, nano interfaces, and optoelectronics that are powering the next generation of consumer gadgets.