awards

We all know that any single tweet has a much better than average chance of containing total nonsense, and that any individual Twitter user's Oscar predictions aren't worth their weight in ones and zeroes.

But if you aggregate tens of thousands of users' guesses, you end up with what could be called The Wisdom of the Twitterverse, and in this case, the crowd has spoken: "The King's Speech" will win Best Picture in a runaway.

Since the announcement of the Academy Award nominations last month, a service called Tweetbeat has been collecting each and every … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--A host of hot new Android phones from Samsung, LG Electronics, HTC, Sony Ericsson made their debut at Mobile World Congress 2011 here this week, but it was the relatively venerable iPhone 4 from Apple that was named the show's best mobile device.

The iPhone 4 is months old and early on suffered notable reception problems. Its maker didn't even come to the show. But the influence of Apple, reaching all the way from Silicon Valley to this cosmopolitain event, was clear.

The iPhone 4 was lauded by judges for its "great screen, sharp design, fantastic … Read more

CNET Tech Car of the Year for 2010

2011 Nissan Leaf

Earlier this month we invited you to vote for the 2010 Tech Car of the Year from our five nominees. This year proved an upset, though, as our staff judges came down on the side of the 2011 Nissan Leaf, these votes overruling the general support for the Lincoln MKZ Hybrid and the Audi A8. The MKZ Hybrid is an excellent car, although its very close relative, the Ford Fusion Hybrid, won last year's award. Audi came out this year with a phenomenal flagship sedan in the new … Read more

Strawberry fields will forever be changed by robots that can automatically identify and pick ripe berries, according to Japanese researchers.

Developed by the minds at an organization aptly abbreviated IAM-BRAIN (that's the Institute of Agricultural Machinery's Bio-oriented Technology Research Advancement Institution), the machines can harvest more than 60 percent of a strawberry crop.

Even though each machine takes nine seconds to pick a strawberry, they can cut harvesting time from 500 hours to 300 hours for a 1,000-square-meter field (about a quarter-acre), BRAIN's Shigehiko Hayashi explains in the video below.

The robots can also pick strawberries at night. There's more video of the machine at work here, on BRAIN's Japanese page.

The berry bot has a stereo camera system that images the strawberries in 3D. Image-processing algorithms gauge their ripeness, and if a berry is at least 80 percent red, the machine neatly snips it at the stem and deposits it in a bin.

Japanese farmers are field-testing experimental versions of the robots and testing is expected to be complete by the end of the year. … Read more

Have you ever seen photos in which the bottom half of the frame shows the sea while the top portion displays the sky? Well, if you have an underwater camera, you could do that fairly easily by submerging the shooter midway underwater and shooting. Or, you could wait for Han In Kyung's Underabove, a concept dual-lens snapper that does the same thing.

Han's idea is to float the device. The submerged end would have a camera that snaps photos under the sea, while the top half of the shooter would capture the scene above water. It's not stated, but we're guessing the rig will combine the two shots into one. … Read more

As a way of saying thank you, Microsoft has launched a new awards program for standout users of its forums and technical sites.

The new program, dubbed the "Community Contributor Award," aims to distinguish users who have put extra effort into the company's online communities at MSDN, TechNet, and Microsoft Answers--three sites that are frequented by some 4 million active users.

According to the program's frequently asked questions section, the award can be given to just about anyone, including to those who have created new content for these sites, all the way to moderators who … Read more

Projects designed to help communities improve access to clean water, cook with clean-burning fuel, fortify salt to maintain nutrients, and use mobile phones as learning devices have been honored with awards for technology benefiting humanity.

The annual Tech Awards, sponsored by The Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif., were given to the winners in a ceremony tonight.

Two of the winners were projects that dealt with the problem many local communities around the world have in getting enough clean, fresh water. The Peer Water Exchange, a project of Blue Planet Network, is a global clearinghouse where communities can share water … Read more

So simple, yet so brilliant. Designer Samuel Adeloju's clever little idea of a life-saving ring that can be "shot" out to someone in danger of drowning beyond the reach of a simple toss has won him 10,000 pounds ($15,890) in the James Dyson Award against 14 finalists. The international design award aims at inspiring young people to design something that solves a problem.

Given that Adeloju hails from surf-happy Australia, one can guess at the inspiration floating his boat. The Longreach Buoyancy Deployment System works on the idea of a bazooka-like device that can fire … Read more

The next time you get injured, go ahead and swear.

Researchers who found that cursing actually relieves pain were among the winners of Ig Nobel prizes today. Also honored were projects on whale snot and certain things fruit bats do while copulating.

Sponsored by the science humor magazine "Annals of Improbable Research," the annual awards were presented tonight in a ceremony at Harvard University to projects that "cannot and should not be reproduced."

The Ig Nobel peace prize was awarded to research from Keele University in the U.K. that confirmed that swearing can lessen pain. … Read more