bee

I get asked this question a lot: "Does anyone still make great-sounding affordable CD players?" Sure, most of the major brands do, but only NAD currently offers a large slate of players starting with the $300 C 516BEE, and it's a honey.

Before we go any further I want to first clarify why I'm reviewing a CD player in 2013. Despite the naysayers the CD isn't "dead," far from it. Music lovers are still buying hundreds of millions of CDs every year. Download sales just barely surpassed sales of physical music (CDs, LPs, … Read more

Imagine waking up, reaching for the tablet on your nightstand, and turning on your coffee maker from bed. You catch a few more winks before it alerts you that your hot java's ready. If Qualcomm's concept Wi-Fi coffee maker ever goes into production, your mornings may never be quite the same.

The coffee maker, however, is just one of many odd and unusual gadgets on display at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.… Read more

LAS VEGAS -- BeeWi's collection of smartphone-controlled toys comes with an arsenal. The Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology company showcased three toys at CES 2013 here, including the Tank Bee, a tank that shoots infrared bullets.

You can group two tanks together and let them fight it out or pit a tank against the electronic target that's included. The target also shoots back, creating a battle that plays out in front of you as well as on your smartphone app.

After the app connects to the toy, a dashboard lets you control the toy and shows you how much &… Read more

Bazinga! Scientist Sheldon Cooper, a character on the TV show "The Big Bang Theory," already has two Ph.Ds and an IQ of 187. But now he also has a bee dedicated to him.

A new species of the Brazilian orchid bee -- dubbed Euglossa bazinga -- has been named after Dr. Cooper's catchphrase "Bazinga."

On CBS' TV series (disclosure: CBS is CNET's parent company), Cooper, played by actor Jim Parsons, uses the word after he pulls a trick on someone. Brazilian biologist Andre Nemesio from the Universidade Federal de Uberlandia recently discovered a new bee species that he thinks fits the "bazinga" bill. Because the new species so closely resembles the Euglossa ignita, a more common Western Brazilian orchid bee, it wasn't recognized as a separate species -- therefore it "tricked" scientists for years. … Read more

Sometimes real science sounds more like science fiction. Just the phrase "bionic bees" sounds like something out of an old paperback.

But that's the goal of a new project from two U.K. universities, the University of Sheffield and the University of Sussex. Engineers from the schools are planning to scan the brains of bees and upload the data into flying robots with the hope that the machines will fly and act like the real thing.

The goal of the project is to create the first robots able to act on instinct. Researchers hope to implant a honey bee's sense of smell and sight into the flying machines, allowing the robots to act as autonomously as an insect rather than relying on preprogrammed instructions.… Read more

Army-funded researchers at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory are popping out Harvard Monolithic Bees ("Mobees") from multi-layered, laser-cut blocks about the size of a quarter.

Inspired by pop-up books, the manufacturing process could allow for rapid production of dozens of flying robots and other electromechanical devices. The research is being published in the March edition of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

In the RoboBees project, Pratheev Sreetharan and colleagues want to build bee-size robots that can fly and act autonomously as a colony. Until recently, it used a painstaking manual assembly method.

The prototype sheets consist of 18 layers of carbon fiber, titanium, brass, ceramic, adhesive sheets, and the plastic film Kapton. As seen in the vid below, the bee snaps together as it pops out of the laminate. … Read more

You wouldn't normally consider keeping a beehive on the second floor of your loft apartment in the middle of the concrete jungle, but Philips' urban beehive concept just might change your mind.

The urban beehive consists of an outside flower pot with a bee entryway above it. A glass container full of honeycomb frames sits on the inside to tempt the little buzzers into making a home.

A pull on the bottom of the hive is a smoke actuator that lets you calm the bees down before you pop off the cover or collect honey. Bees are incredible creatures, but you don't want to piss them off.

The beehive sports a sleek look that will fit right in with your modern sense of style. Philips touts the benefits of pollination, a fresh honey supply, and the educational interest of having a hive at your fingertips.… Read more

All too often we encounter music players that are either lacking basic features or crammed with features that aren't particularly useful. MusicBee is one of those rare programs that covers all the basics and includes some pretty cool extras. If you're in the market for a new way to manage your music collection, you should take a look at it.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, with a list of tracks dominating the center of the screen and a list of directories down the left side, just like many other music players. If you have songs … Read more

A recent scientific study suggests that bees are significantly disturbed when mobile phones are used in close proximity to the furry critters. The study may shed light on why the bee population is in decline globally.

As bees can communicate through sound, the experiment at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology observed any changes to the noises the insects made when active mobile phones were placed in their hive. The results were quite worrying.

Read more of "Cell phones causing decline in bee numbers?" at Crave UK.