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+13 +1
New Fabric Softener Tech Promises Clothes That Never Stain
Sofft wants to kickstart a new age of clothes washing.
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+16 +1
Silicon Valley will destroy your job: Amazon, Facebook and our sick new economy
An Amazon River legend says that its famous pink river dolphins sometimes become shapeshifters and assume human form to seduce unwary travelers and lure them to a magical city called Encante. The catch is that this city is underwater. Once you’ve been there you can never go back home.
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+20 +1
Coolest Crowdfunded Projects of the Week
Each week, we’ll showcase the hottest new products from Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
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+19 +1
LifeVac made to save lives, prevent choking
Arthur Lih would do anything for his daughter. So when he heard of an 8-year-old child her age, choking to death on a grape, he couldn't help but think what if the same thing happened to his daughter.
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+22 +1
'Foodini' machine lets you print edible burgers, pizza, chocolate
As further proof that you can now 3D-print anything, a company called Natural Machines has introduced a 3D printer for food.
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+10 +1
Corn Gears
Corn Gear is a gear-design exercise. The teeth of the gears are wound in a helix around a cylinder at a 13:5 angle. Two mirror-image corn gears can roll over each other at 0 degrees, like normal gears, but at 90 degrees as well. The corn gears can also roll over a flat gear bed.
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+18 +1
What to really expect from patent reform
When Justice Joseph Story said in 1841 that patent cases are closer than any other kind to “the metaphysics of law,” he could have been speaking for the frustrated jurist or patent clerk of any era. What happens when the differences in what two parties claim to have created are narrow or nuanced to the point of being indistinguishable?
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+24 +1
Why has human progress ground to a halt?
We live in a golden age of technological, medical, scientific and social progress. Look at our computers! Look at our phones! Twenty years ago, the internet was a creaky machine for geeks. Now we can’t imagine life without it. We are on the verge of medical breakthroughs that would have seemed like magic only half a century ago: cloned organs, stem-cell therapies to repair our very DNA. Even now, life expectancy in some rich countries is improving by five hours a day.
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+19 +1
The U.S. Government Has a Secret System for Stalling Patents
Entrepreneurs and established companies alike depend on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to legally protect their inventions. But the Patent Office has been using a secret system to withhold the approval of some applications. Newly released documents reveal that the office, tasked with evaluating and protecting the rights to intellectual property, has a covert system for delaying controversial or inconvenient patents. It’s a system that attorneys say, if abused...
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+15 +1
Our System Is So Broken, Almost No Patented Discoveries Ever Get Used
The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system creates a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.
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+20 +1
Twitter CEO: 'We suck at dealing with abuse'
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is taking personal responsibility for his platform's chronic problems with harassment and abuse, telling employees that he is embarrassed for the company's failures and would soon be taking stronger action to eliminate trolls. He said problems with trolls are driving away the company's users. "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," Costolo wrote in an internal memo obtained by The Verge
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+16 +1
Study Confirms That Revealing Secrets, Rather Than Hoarding Info, Is Good For Inventors
Sciamiko points us to an interesting study done by Stuart Graham, who was the first chief economist of the US Patent Office (we were initially excited about his hiring, though the only other time we reported on his work, it was to wonder why a paper hid his connection to the USPTO), looking at whether or not inventors choose to reveal the "secrets" of their invention prior to actually getting the patent. Graham and his co-author, Deepak Hegde, examined what happened...
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+16 +1
“Shopping cart” patent beaten by Newegg comes back to court, loses again
As patent reform moved into the political spotlight during the last Congress, one patent that kept coming up was the "online shopping cart." It seemed to resonate as a technology that clearly shouldn't have been patented. By the time it started being brought up in Congressional hearings, though, the shopping cart patent was dead. Its owner, Soverain Software, was beaten when computer retailer Newegg won an appellate ruling invalidating its patents and throwing out the...
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+14 +1
Patent troll claims to own Bluetooth, scores $15.7M verdict against Samsung
Gordon Bremer didn't invent Bluetooth 2.0. In fact, as he admitted on the stand last week in an East Texas federal court, he hadn't even read the specification for it until 2007—three years after it was on the market. Despite that, Bremer may be getting paid a hefty royalty by Samsung, after a jury ruled that the Korean electronics company infringed Bremer's patents. He stands to get 2.5 percent of the $15.7 million verdict won by his employer, Rembrandt IP, one of the oldest and most...
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+13 +1
EFF Outlines Plan to Fix the Broken Patent System
The U.S. patent system is in crisis, but there are clear steps Congress and the White House can take to mitigate the impact of vague patents, patent trolls, and a weak legal process to protect competition and creativity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains in a new report released today.
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+21 +1
Peer into the $770,000 fighter pilot smart helmet, with X-ray vision and Iron Man head-up display
It's arguably the most expensive and technically complex piece of headgear ever produced and before any Royal Australian Air Force pilot steps into the cockpit of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) jet, they will need to be fitted with a custom-made $770,000 flight helmet. With the Australian government committed to purchasing 72 of the controversial fighters at a cost of $12.4 billion, the bill for these smart helmets alone could exceed $55 million.
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+18 +1
New 5G technology can download 30 movies in a second
In ten years we might look back at how we used to have to wait for films to download, or web pages to load, and wonder how we ever coped. A team of researchers has developed a 5G data connection that is 65,000 times faster than current 4G technology. The astonishing speed reached one terabit (125 gigabytes) per second - the equivalent of downloading about 30 movies in a single second.
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+13 +1
At Kodak, Clinging to a Future Beyond Film
What happens when a tech company is left for dead but the people left behind refuse to give up? At Kodak, the answer is to mine its patents for gold.
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0 +1
Boeing patents 'Star Wars'-style force fields
A new patent granted to aircraft, defense and security company Boeing is taking its cues from science fiction. Just like the glowing energy shields seen protecting troops, machines and even spacecraft in Star Wars and Star Trek, the design -- named "Method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc" -- uses energy to deflect potential damage.
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+17 +1
With New Nonstick Coating, the Wait, and Waste, Is Over
LiquiGlide has found a way to make the interiors of some bottles permanently wet and slippery. That keeps substances like ketchup from sticking inside.
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