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Last year, NASA’s Ames Research Center announced plans to launch an Google Android-powered nano-satellite into space. A test unit has already been sent into suborbit, and a space launch is set for April 4. But a team of British researchers has quietly beat Ames to the punch.
from Wired Top Stories
Divvying up the check at the end of a meal can be the worst. GroupMe’s latest update to its iOS and Android apps will make it better with a new bill splitting feature. More » 
from Gizmodo
Quick. Name your favorite bar game. Darts? Trivia? Foosball? I’m guessing pool or snooker will win out in most cases. Bars have to make serious revenue on drinks and games to let the tables occupy so much space. And billiards players take their games seriously. Don’t mess with that person who has their coins waiting on the table. They may look harmless. But they are focused. And they end up running the table despite their innocent look. I think I found out how they practice.
If you are like me you have problems playing the bumpers. I never quite get the right point to ricochet the ball into a pocket. Three students from University of the Algarve in Portugal either have too much time on their hands or really do have a purpose in playing endless games of pool. They designed a device that tells you where to aim. The “PoolLiveAidâ€Â focuses on where the cue ball is then lays out where to aim, using a laser on the bed of the table. Basically they give you what you can get on a billiards video game. Obviously you wouldn’t take the contraption into your local. But for practicing purposes it could really get your game up to snuff. The students are still testing the device, so don’t anticipate it on the market anytime soon.
from Coolest Gadgets
China’s citizens do not report as much as $2.34 trillion of what they make every year, hiding “gray income” that represents nearly 20 percent of the country’s GDP, Chinese economics scholar Wang Xiaolu says, in a report from the news site Global Voices.
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from News
Philips and Cree predict bright, general-purpose LED bulbs under $10 will be an industry tipping point.
Lighting companies are within reach of a price point they think will make bright LED light bulbs a mass-market item: $10.
Faster printing could see the technology move from research labs to industry.
Nanoscribe, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has developed a tabletop 3-D microprinter that can create complicated microstructures 100 times faster than is possible today. “If something took one hour to make, it now takes less than one minute,†says Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe.
Even the best consumer 3-D printers require a whole lot of brains to create the simplest plastic tchotchke. Toymaker Maxwell Bogue doesn’t think creative expression in three dimensions should be so hard, so he created the 3Doodler: a plastic-melting pen that lets you draw objects in midair.
We’ve covered the pen before. But we still wanted to catch up with Bogue at the recent 2013 Kairos Global Summit on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to see just what this little gadget could do:
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from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now