3D-printed clothes, Donkey Kong rescue swap: This week in off-beat tech stories
This week we saw scientists say they've foundthe Higgs-Boson "God" particle, an overhyped SimCity launch that was marred from the start, and Google received a slap on the wrist to the tune of $7 million after it allegedly "snooped" on home Wi-Fi networks. And China, can you stop cyberattacking the U.S. please?
In another roundup of the top off-beat tech stories that made headlines over the past few days, we discuss 3D printed clothes, an iPhone prototype the size of an iPad, and the answer to life, the universe and everything.
3D-printed dress made possible with "articulated" fabric
Year after year, fashionistas find something new to flaunt on the runway. This year, it seems, 3D-printed clothes are increasing in prominence in this huge albeit hard-to-reach field. But at a private event in New York City, 3D-printed clothes rose to new level of prominence with a never-done-before design.
A unique 3D-printed dress, modeled by burlesque star Dita Von Teese, was no ordinary gown. Inspired by the Fibonacci sequence and designed entirely on the iPad, the world's first "articulated" dress was printed with 17 different sections and joined with more than 3,000 connectors. Described by one of its creators, Francis Bitonti: "This would have been incredibly expensive, if not impossible, to do by hand."
Early iPhone prototype was size of an iPad?
It's hard to think of the iPhone being anything other than a thin, desirable, high-resolution shiny rectangle, wanted by so many. But just two years prior, its prototype was a lot closer to the size of an iPad and it included relics of the mid-1990s computing revolution: serial and Ethernet ports.
ArsTechnica this week lifted the lid on the mash-up of different ports, cables and logic boards, which in its rough form came close to two inches in thickness. According to the publication, the early development prototype included an array of ports that were commonly found on computers than mobile devices for testing, and it included a basic version of OS X. One of the several prototypes that came out as part of the Apple versus Samsung trial showed that one prototype had diagonally edged corners rather than the rounded curves that we see today.
Lego machine automatically folds, throws paper airplanes
Teachers have a troublesome gig keeping their classrooms free from carnage, arguments and all-out disarray without the added headache of kids throwing paper airplanes around. A new contraption created entirely out of Lego not only folds paper to airplane-like proportions but fires them at high speed, automating the process in just a matter of seconds.
It includes touch sensors, motors, infrared receivers, and between 6,000-7,000 Lego bricks in total to make this self-contained paper airplane production line. Here's how it works:
Donkey Kong "hacker" dad switches gender roles for gaming daughter
One 3-year-old gamer can now play "Donkey Kong," her favorite game, with a twist: Pauline rescues Mario, rather than the other way around.
Her dad replaced the rescuing plumber with the hapless princess after she was "genuinely disappointed" that the player could not take on the role of the girl in the game. In a reversal of typical gender roles, he replaced the main game protagonist with the female heroine. He carefully replaced the frames used in the game with Pauline's face where Mario should have been, and even took to replacing the "M" with a "P" at the top of the game display.
After a friend of the family uploaded the picture on Reddit of her father's attempt to "hack" the game, he received positive recognition by the online community for his efforts.
Google Doodle holds answer to "life, universe and everything"
"Don't panic." Two words that hundreds of millions of Google users saw on Monday to mark the birthday of one of the world's most loved cult-fiction authors, Douglas Adams, the man who brought us the answer to "life, the universe and everything": the number 42.
More than a decade since Adams' death, Google honored his life's work with one of its own famous doodles on its search engine front page for what would have been his 61st birthday.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" started out as a radio program in the U.K. during the 1970s, which then became a written adaptation and spanned numerous forms. Adams extensively documented the adventures of dressing gown-donning Arthur Dent, who survived the destruction of Earth as he was once nice to a friendly alien, partially thanks to his trusting towel -- in which inter-galactic travelers are always reminded to keep one at hand.