Entertainment

Let's say you're a cat touring Paris, and you swing by the Place Vendome. What does it look like? Well, a lot like what humans see, it turns out, only much greener. That's because cats are dichromats and don't see the color red.

I viewed the Place Vendome from a feline perspective while scrolling around All Eyes on Paris, an interactive 3D digital simulation that shows the City of Light through the eyes of common critters.

Now on display at the Futur en Seine international digital festival in Paris, the project aims to teach about animal vision by letting you see a bit of the world as a cat, dog, bee, hawk, or rat would. And let me just say that rats don't have Paris anywhere near as gorgeous as they do when Pixar takes them there. … Read more

Even if you've seen a plethora of images and videos showing the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 from every possible angle, the following high-quality 3D renders, with 360-degree pan and zoom, give you a fuller impression of each console.

Using modeling programs like Blender and Maya, designers JC Volumic and Sylvain Bernard created very accurate 3D renders of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The interactive experience, hosted on Sketchfab, lets you check out just about every conceivable angle of the two highly anticipated gaming devices. Most modern smartphones should be able to view these renders, too.… Read more

Who wears short-shorts...with gadget-charging capabilities? Attendees to the U.K.'s Isle of Wight music fest, that's who.

At the outdoor festival in Glastonbury, England, this weekend, mobile carrier Vodafone will try on its new Power Shorts, which harvest movement to boost the battery life of mobile devices. Need more power out there in the open field? Start dancing!

The shorts -- created with help from scientists at the University of Southampton -- incorporate a Power Pocket that contains foam-like ferroelectret materials with pockets of permanently charged surfaces. When the material gets squashed or deformed through movement, kinetic energy gets produced. Vodafone says a full day's walking and dancing will charge a smartphone for more than four hours (not much, but way more than campers can expect from those hawthorn-tree outlets). … Read more

At first glance, it might not look as tricky as piloting a quadcopter just by thinking at it, but a project by artist Lisa Park has surprising depth. Eunoia -- Greek for "beautiful thinking" -- is all about the hidden power of the mind.

The performance itself consists of Park meditating, surrounded by flat 60-centimetre-diameter dishes of water mounted on speakers. As she meditates, she channels her thoughts into making the water ripple and leap, remaining completely still in the center.

On her head, she wears a Neurosky EEG headset -- the same device used in the Necomimi emotion-displaying cat ears. … Read more

When the iPhone arrived six years ago, it was the hot commodity. It didn't take long for Apple's sleek, powerful smartphone to dominate the mobile phone market -- and one of its greatest draws was a rapidly growing software marketplace, curated and quality controlled, bringing extraordinarily useful features to what was essentially a pocket-size computer.

However, competitors weren't far behind. Some have continued on, others have failed, but by far the biggest is Internet giant Google's mobile operating system, Android. In fact, the number of Android devices activated outnumbers iOS devices by a mile -- 750 million Android to 600 million iOS.

Nevertheless, as we and many of you well know, the iTunes app marketplace seems vastly superior in quality of content, in spite of Apple's barriers to entry, such as a registration fee for app sellers, and the fact that Google Play is rapidly catching up in terms of quantity and downloads. Apple has pipped 50 billion downloads across over 900,000 apps, while Google Play is currently counting down to that number across 750,000 apps. But there's an even greater discrepancy in app revenue. A massive 76 percent of the entire revenue generated by apps goes to iOS -- leaving the other 24 percent of the pie to all other operating systems.… Read more

In the fictional "Game of Thrones" world of Westeros, only one thing seems more inevitable than the show's unending wanton violence and each of the story's heroes meeting an untimely death: winter is coming.

Fans of the HBO show based on George R.R. Martin's novels will know that the problem for the various Westorosi clans is that exactly when winter will arrive and how long it will last is anyone's guess. Summer in the fantasy world may last for years, but when winter sets in -- and there's no apparent way to predict when that will happen -- it can last for generations.

Now, at last, science is stepping in to aid fans and Ravens alike by positing an explanation for why all efforts to adopt an effective system of fictional meteorological forecasting seem so hopeless. A group of graduate students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University have published a research paper (PDF) suggesting that the most likely cause of the unpredictable weather in Westeros is that the world is orbiting not one, but two stars.… Read more

Yahoo continues to clean house as CEO Marissa Mayer charges on to revamp the struggling company. It announced Wednesday that it's resetting all Yahoo IDs that have been inactive for at least a year, leaving them up for grabs.

But there will be a process, of course. Users will be able to request the IDs they want starting in mid-July, but won't find out which one they got until mid-August.

"If you're like me, you want a Yahoo ID that's short, sweet, and memorable like albert@yahoo.com instead of albert9330399@yahoo.com," Jay … Read more

You've probably not been the same since you saw the latest Apple ad.

It's helped you understand your indispensable place in the world, your iPhone's indispensable place in your life, and Apple's indispensable place in American business.

For those who didn't quite get it, the folks at Funny or Die thought they'd rewrite the voiceover to make things a touch clearer.

"We spent a lot of time developing things so that you don't have to watch concerts you paid for," explains the very level voice of Apple reason. … Read more

Internet, we love you, but why must you dangle before us things we cannot have?

Brian K. Anderson, the YouTube user who brought us the Lego Breaking Bad video game parody, has done it again -- this time with one of our favorite TV shows of all time, "Arrested Development."

In BluthFighter -- a mashup with Street Fighter -- we get to see GOB Bluth square off against Tobias Fünke in full blue-man regalia and never-nude short-shorts, tagging out for Tony Wonder and Carl Weathers, with such awesome moves as the Segway Slam. Who we'd really love to see is Lucille, possibly dealing out Martini Haymakers. … Read more