Hasta La Gadget!

If the crashing sound of lightning striking Saturn wasn’t enough to excite your inner-meteorologist, then perhaps footage of a raging extraterrestrial hurricane will win you over. After orbiting the ringed planet for nine years, NASA’s Cassini probe has managed to snag video of a super storm on the celestial body’s north pole. Cloaked by the darkness of winter, the hurricane’s eye became visible as Saturn’s northern hemisphere transitioned into spring. Unlike the tropical cyclones of Earth (see: Hurricane Katrina, Sandy and Irene), this furious typhoon has been spinning for several years and has winds that flow at speeds exceeding 300MPH. Further differentiating itself from our world’s whirlwinds, this alien cyclone is locked to its planet’s north pole and is fueled by small amounts of water vapor instead of an actual ocean. Completely in a category of its own, the hurricane’s eye measures about 1,250 miles wide and is surrounded by fluffy white clouds the size of Texas. To see this Saturnian fury in all its glory, check out the video after the break and feel free to leave your gratuitous hurricane names in the comments below.

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Source: NASA

As you may have heard, Facebook Home has finally made its way to a select number of devices from HTC and Samsung. While the initial rollout was a little shaky, we were able to grab the social network’s latest mobile triumph on every device that officially supports it. What you see above is the full spread of devices that are listed as candidates for the downloadable APK’s launch (the HTC First excepted, which we have unfortunately already shipped away): from left to right, you’ll see the Samsung Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S III, HTC One X+, One X and the One. For folks who already have access to it, the One isn’t officially supported yet, but it’s been announced and it should be coming soon.

We’ve already gone into painstaking detail of Facebook Home in our review of the HTC First, so we won’t dwell too much on the downloadable version. In short, as we expected, the interface seems quite a bit more quiet than our experience on the First simply because it doesn’t offer the same system-level integration; in other words, the devices shown in the above image are only able to display notifications related to Facebook services. You can still access your usual suite of alerts through the status bar at the top of the screen, but just make sure to go into Home settings to enable this functionality. Aside from the difference in notifications, the downloadable APK differs from the First’s pre-loaded version in that no Google search bar sits upon the top of Home’s app menu. Other than that, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any major variances in Cover Feed, chat heads or the app launcher. If you’re curious to see exactly what it looks like on a Samsung Galaxy S III, check out our gallery of screenshots below.

Note: To ensure that everything works the way it should on your phone, make sure the official Facebook and Messenger apps are installed and completely up-to-date.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Facebook

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This week, the Seattle Mariners showed off a new 3,840 x 1,080, surface-mount LED display at Safeco Field — one the team’s PR department touts as the “largest in Major League Baseball and among the largest in all of sports.” At 201.5 feet wide by 56.7 feet tall, its surface area of 11,425 square feet places it behind massive screens at Charlotte Motor Speedway (16,000 square feet) and Cowboys Stadium (11,520 square feet). That’s good enough, the team said, to rank as the third-largest sports-venue display in North America and surpasses Kauffman Stadium’s HD scoreboard as the largest in baseball. Roughly 1,200 individual panels make up the screen, offering a total of 4,147,200 pixels — more pixels than the 2.6-megapixel Cowboys Stadium display, the team pointed out.

To feed their new HD beast, the team revamped its video control room and upgraded to high-def cameras throughout the stadium. A 64-bit operating system called VisionSOFT allows the team to mix in multiple video sources, from in-house animations and HD video feeds to out-of-town footage from broadcast partners. All told, the HD upgrade required about 3,000 each feet of power, video coax and Cat5 cables. Along with showing ads, stats and replays, the team will take advantage of the HD resolution to display social media updates from fans during games via Twitter, Google+ and other sources.

You can check out more shots of the new screen in action after the break.

Filed under: Displays, HD

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Remember those old-school NASA mission patches that spacefarers would proudly wear upon their shoulders as they bounced around the great beyond? CASIS, the agency’s newly-minted non-profit wanted to commemorate its first experiment being put on the International Space Station, and so enlisted the talents of Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer behind the Obama “Hope” campaign and those Obey T-shirts. We’ve snagged one of the patches for our own homemade astronaut jacket, but if you aren’t here at Fort Mason, you can watch the design process in the video after the break.

Filed under: Misc, Transportation, Science

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Yep, the crazy looking guitar you see above from 3D Systems (being manhandled by our own Andy Bowen) was printed. Not created by machines or people, but pieced together by a 3D printer — at least the body, that is. The neck, strings, and various jacks / knobs are all fabricated via other methods, but the body is all printed. That includes the many America-centric icons seen throughout the body, from the Statute of Liberty to the Brooklyn Bridge — okay, okay, it’s rather New York-centric, but 3D Systems head Avi Reichental tells us that 3D Systems used iconic New York locations as a representation for the “Americana” the guitar is supposed to embody. He says — and we can’t help but agree, many of us being New Yorkers — that New York is an “emotional” symbol for the USA. Join us for a visual tour of the Americana, set to the backdrop of the San Francisco Bay, won’t you?

Filed under: Misc, Peripherals

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