Polaroid proper is no more, but its brand-name and identity are still around in various reanimated forms-and today at IFA in Berlin, the company that owns those assets is releasing a new rendition of the old Polaroid’s classic instant camera. It’s called the Snap, and it’s a 10MP camera equipped with an instant printer that spits out 2-inch-by-three-inch color pictures …

Hot on the heels of Nikon with its D5, Canon has announced its new flagship DSLR. Say hello to the 1D X MarkII, whose overkill will surely be embraced by professional photographers everywhere. The new camera is the first update of Canon’s high-end shooter since the original 1D X was launched at the end of 2011 . And it certainly …

According to MIT, Americans swallow over 3,500 button-sized batteries every year. Say what? But instead of educating the public about not swallowing random crap, researchers at the school want people to swallow a new folding origami robot they’ve developed that’s designed to retrieve foreign objects, among other tasks. The tiny robot, which is a generous description, was actually co-developed by …

We’ve come a long way from Steamboat Willie. This week, Mickey Mouse takes the form of a faceless audio-visual orb that visualizes any music it hears. Designed by Polish design firm PanGenerator, Mickeyphon is a giant A/V unit shaped like Mickey’s noggin. When it hears music it swirls about its axis in the direction of the sound, and then maps …

Fisheries biologist John Shepherd once said that “counting fish is like counting trees-except you can’t see them and they move.” This can make animal behavior research extremely difficult. And while increasingly advanced electronic telemetry tags can tell us a lot, there’s just no substitute for seeing a behavior on video. Knowing how animals behave in the wild is critical for …

I wasn’t ready. Adriana Hamacher/University of Bristol Why would they give it lips?? Apparently, in order to make a robot as expressive as possible, researchers decided to give BERT2, a robot assistant a pouty pair of lips and wide eyes with… are those eyebrows? Researchers from the University College London and the University of Bristol, who dared to use BERT2 …

Over the past year, Nvidia’s Shield Tablet has become one of the top tablets for Android users. Today, the company recalled a subset of the devices, saying they’re prone to, uh, no easy way to say this, exploding into flames. There’s a very easy way to check if your Shield is involved in the recall, and Nvidia will send you …

Earlier this year, we reported on Tomotaka Takahashi , the famous engineer who sent the first talking robot into space, and his plans to make robots as popular a consumer electronic as smartphones. He’d been teasing a humanoid phone to debut this year, and here it is: a cutesy, talking, limbed phone that hitches rides in your front pocket. It’s …

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Mission controllers at NASA are currently working to return the Curiosity Mars rover to full activity after a computer glitch that caused the rover to enter into a precautionary stand-down over the weekend. It doesn’t appear to be serious, but NASA engineers are still trying to find the cause of Curiosity’s safe-mode entry. The rover ceased its regular …

Last night, in a fit of rage, I made my way to the Time Warner Cable website and added cable TV to my internet service. For the service and a cable card it will cost me an additional $52 a month. With my own DVR I will be recording three shows at a time with minimal fuss. I have no …