Here’s a story that has everything: baby pandas, human adults dressed like grownup pandas–okay, it only has two things, but they’re both pretty great, right? The humans in the above image are biologists with China’s Hetaoping Research and Conservation Center. They’re dressed like grownup pandas to help introduce the facility-born baby panda back into the wild.
The scientists will start by placing the four-month-old panda into a guarded area with hidden cameras, eventually moving him into the wild forest. The precautions follow a similar event that led to the death of another male cub a year after introducing him into the wild. The scientists pin the death on other wild pandas.This latest attempt is the first time scientist have done this since that attempt.
Scientists have tried similar tactics with endangered species. In California, puppets were used to help raise condor hatchlings. More adorableness after the jump.
You unfortunately still have a bit of a wait in store for your off-the-self Windows Phone 7 device, but those lucky enough to have a developer device are now starting to receive an update that includes the much anticipated copy and paste functionality, and we’re now seeing the first videos of it in action. That expectedly functions much as we’ve heard before, and it appears to work reasonably well in the (admittedly brief) video. Head on past the break to check it out for yourself.
Looking for a low priced gift for the tech enthusiast in your life who has everything? Well, if said person owns an iPhone or iPad, consider one of these ultra cheap accessories. Steve Jobs would likely consider the Pogo Stylus Sketch a crime against nature. For those who use their devices to create art and handwritten notes, it may just be a godsend.
This $15 accessory features a soft tip that gives the user the writing freedom of a stylus (you remember those, right?). The Pogo Stylus is also a terrific option in these winter months, when gloves make it impossible to use the device’s touchscreen.
The Pogo also works with the Zune HD, Android handsets, and most other touchscreen devices. You can pick one up at the Ten One Design page.
LG will replace conventional magnesium in its mobile phones to a more environmentally friendly magnesium alloy, effectively reducing CO2 emissions by 4kg per handset.
This article was written on August 12, 2008 by CyberNet.
Yesterday was a day of outages for MobileMe and Gmail. Apple’s MobileMe, which had a rocky introduction to begin with, saw a four and a half hour mail outage yesterday. MacRumors mentioned this outage yesterday but also took a look at MobileMe’s overall uptime which is about 96%. That’s not an impressive number when you put it into perspective. Over the last two weeks since Apple deemed MobileMe reliable, the service was down for 13.5 hours, or 6.75 hours per week. When you think of it that way, that’s too much downtime for a service that is responsible for doing so much. People usually expect uptime of about 99% or greater.
Gmail too had an outage yesterday. We don’t know the exact length of it, other than Google said it was a couple of hours in the afternoon. It’s not like Google to write a blog post about an outage, but in this situation they did. They said, “we feel your pain, and we’re sorry.” They went on to explain what happened, apparently there was an outage in their contacts system that prevented Gmail to load properly. On the blog post, they said, “We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts.” They went on to say, “We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.”
Maybe Google needs to start a blog just for outages? They’ve got so many different services that experience outages on occasion, and people like to know what’s going on. On their blog post about the outage yesterday they even said that they usually don’t write about problems like this on their blog, which they don’t. In this case they said they made an exception because so many people were impacted. It shouldn’t matter how many people were impacted because if you are someone that is experiencing an outage, you would like to know what’s going on. A blog just for those outages might be a good idea…
After a year of hearing about 3DTVs nonstop we finally got some of the main contenders in house to examine, although we’ll start by pointing out that this isn’t so much of a “3DTV” roundup, since a more apt description of these displays is 3D-capable HDTVs. That’s an important distinction to make, since nothing about the 2D performance of these TVs suffers because of their ability to do 3D, and in many cases they cost the exact same price as their comparable 2D-only models from last year. With that said Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Mitsubishi and LG’s finest have had their moment and on the next page we’ve done our best to compare them in a way that makes sense for the average HDTV buyer who might also want to take in a 3D event or movie from time to time. Right now, there’s barely enough 3D content to support more than a couple of hours viewing per week, much less support a full viewing conversion to all-glasses, all the time — but more about that later. Check out our full impressions after the break.
Crave contributor Katie Linendoll gets her hands on the Pick Punch, which looks like a regular hole punch but cuts custom guitar picks from all kinds of plastic.
Today is Wilson’s last day on the show before he ships out to China tomorrow. Don’t worry, he’ll be back with us at CES in January, but before he leaves we test his ability to predict the future of tech one last time. To nobody’s surprise, all of his predictions are related to Apple. We also ask Wilson to check the validity of this growing Chinese trend, give predictions on tomorrow’s Google Chrome OS event, run through the latest Facebook design, and more!
(Credit: http://www.chinahush.com)
It started with small trinkets, then moved on to blinking LEDs, and now Chinese kids are attaching condoms to their cell phones. The movement is a countrywide effort for young people to show their support for contraceptives, although a condom danging from your phone must look pretty funny to everyone else.
Also, the phone charms are generic with no markings to indicate manufacturer, type, or even an expiration date. While he’s there, hopefully Wilson can also promote our own adjunct method of birth control: The 404 Podcast!
Google is finally ready to unveil its big Chrome OS project with an event tomorrow, December 7, in San Francisco. The search engine giant provided no other details in the invite, but we’re thinking the Chrome Web Store may finally materialize tomorrow, giving users an easy way to search and download Web applications.
Additionally, Google plans to incentivize developers to use the store by offering a 5 percent “processing fee,” as opposed to the 30 percent cut that store operators typically receive from applications sales.
Big changes include more prominent photos at the top of the page and a new “Featured Friends tool that highlights your most important friends. Popular features like your “Wall” and “Personal Information” get moved to a new column under the main profile photo, and infinite scrolling means you can browse profile photos faster than ever.
If you’d like to leave a video voice mail for the show, record a YouTube video and send the link to the404(at)cnet(dot)com! You can also leave an audio-only voice mail at 1-866-404-CNET (2638), or just shoot us a note at the404(at)cnet.com. Have a safe flight to the motherland, Wilson!
As mentioned earlier, we’re gearing up for the holidays here at Gearlog by bringing you the top titles for each of the top consoles. On Friday it was the Xbox 360. Today, it’s the Nintendo Wii.
As always, Nintendo’s library tends to skew a bit younger than its Sony and Microsoft counterparts. The list is full of familiar all-ages heroes like Kirby, Donkey Kong, and even Mickey Mouse.
But don’t worry–we’ve got something for the grownups, too.
We had an opportunity earlier today to sit down with one of the powerhouses of the wireless industry in the US: Steve Largent, who heads up the CTIA. In that capacity, Largent oversees the industry group most directly responsible for lobbying carriers’ interests in Washington, which means he’s helping to steer the direction this business is going on a very broad, long-term, critical scale — and he also happens to run a trade show that we attend twice a year. We were joined by the CTIA’s VP of Regulatory Affairs, Christopher Guttman-McCabe, for a spirited conversation covering the gamut from net neutrality to spectrum allocation to the Droid R2-D2 Edition and pretty much everything in between. Check it out after the break, won’t you?
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