Being a Mongolian nomad, it may not surprise you that Shagdarsuren Herelchuluun and family can build a ger (or more commonly known by the Russian “yurt”) in just over an hour. But thanks to the impressive time-lapse filming of Dan Grossman, you can watch the entire process in just over two minutes. Watching them put the home together, and the seeing the natural beauty of the surrnounding Lake Hovsgol area, makes me feel like a rube for paying rent.

How many of us have lain awake at night, wondering what a mouse embryo looks like during the early stages of its three week gestation? Well, you can find all your answers here thanks to an ongoing series from Cambridge University called “Under the Microscope.” The most recent video shows seven days of mouse embryo growth, taking it from something that resembles a newt to something that almost resembles a mouse. More than just being interesting, researcher Erica Watson explains that because mice us similar genes during fetal development, there’s a lot humans can learn from their rodent companions. Piqued your interest? See the video after the break.

When GoDaddy‘s public and unapologetic pro-SOPA stance initially came to light, the backlash was big enough that GoDaddy backed off its “support” to something a little more lukewarm and moved to “not supporting SOPA,” but dancing around the issue more than actually opposing SOPA. Now, GoDaddy has come full circle and claims to oppose SOPA in an about-face that has occurred at a pretty staggering speed: 1 week. The cause of this speed is doubtlessly because of the loud voices, particularly those of reddit, railing against the registrar nonstop, calling for a boycott, and advocating the transfer of domains. Their efforts seem to have worked, although the boycott itself may not be as responsible for the change as we all might like to think.

It looks like GoDaddy’s confident support of SOPA and fearlessness in the face of a boycott has already crumbled. Not even a day after all the press, GoDaddy has released a statement that they no longer support SOPA. The statement reads:

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

High-speed cameras are pretty awesome. So awesome, in fact, that Discovery has an entire series devoted to just shooting things with them. Some of the more impressive ones will capture around 40,000 frames per second, but a new camera developed by Andreas Velten and Ramesh Raskar at MIT blows that out of the water with an almost unbelievable 1 trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to capture footage of traveling photons.

From the moment Siri was introduced to the public with iPhone 4S, the comparisons to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey began. With a surprisingly powerful, albeit quirky, voiced-based interface, it’s quite understandable. Thankfully, the wonderful people at ThinkGeek have made the rhetorical reality with Iris 9000.

Next to the traditional iPhone dock is a spitting image recreation of HAL 9000, complete with pulsating red eye and 1950s IBM design aesthetic. The device also amplifies Siri’s voice, and provides a more robust microphone for picking up your voice from farther away. There’s even a mini remote to activate Siri from across the room, or even while sitting in your pod locked out of your spaceship.

Read on after the break for a video of Siri Hal Iris 9000 in action.

According to the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, the Russian space agency has determined what caused the crash of an automated Progress resupply ships en route to the International Space Station. If true, this could head off a scenario in which the ISS would have to be unmanned due to the limited 200 day rating on the Soyuz spaceships currently docked at the station.

The Russian article states that the committee assigned to investigating the crash has determined that a malfunction in the rocket’s third engine caused the crash. Specifically, a fault with the engine’s gas generator. This is fast work, especially considered that the committee was formed only four days ago. However, the article does not say if the problem has been resolved in future rocket launches.

Despite these recent problems, the Universe Today notes that Russian rockets have an otherwise sterling launch record. Since their introduction, the cargo-carrying Soyuz-U has 745 success and 21 failures, and the manned Soyuz-FG has had all of its 25 launches reach orbit successfully. With a lead on the source of the problem, all eyes will surely be on a commercial launch scheduled for October 8. If that and subsequent launches go well, then it could be smooth sailing for the ISS.

(via Universe Today, image via Wikipedia)

Google’s new social networking attempt Google+, which is currently in an invite-only trial period, is already having some privacy issues. You might say “it’s a social network, of course there are privacy issues” and you would be right, but you’d also be ignoring the fact that Google+ marketing tauts Google+ as not having those problems. Privacy issues do kind of come with the territory, but Google’s insistence that they don’t have to makes this all the more of a shot in the foot.

So what’s the breach? Well, as you probably know, Google+ organizes members and their connections to each other with “Circles.” This way you can post something to a specific Circle instead of the world at large. The issue seems to be that when you post something to a Circle, any receiving members can repost it with varying levels of privacy, up to and including “totally public.” Alright, so that’s a little disconcerting, but you should be able to turn reposting off, right? You can, but only after the post in question has been published — and you have to do it for each, individual post. Okay, okay, Google+ is only taking its first steps here and what new service doesn’t have issues that need to be patched up? The issue is, this crack happens to be running right down the keystone that’s holding the whole service together. Hopefully Google can respond swiftly and appropriately without jeopardizing the trust of its many potential users.

(via FT Tech Hub)

The popular online television streaming service Hulu has announced that it’s putting itself up for sale. Only a day after the service recieved an unsolicited purchase offer and Yahoo! expressed interest in acquiring it, Hulu decided that perhaps it ought to put itself on the market and see what happens. The bidding starts in two weeks.

Hulu is a hot commodity and is widely credited with changing the television industry by bringing more television to the web. While this makes it a valuable purchase for any number of the Internet powerhouses out there, all that revolutionizing has also put Hulu on bad terms with its current owners, Walt Disney Co., News Corp., Comcast Corp., who inherited a share through the acquisition of NBCUniversal, and Providence Equity, who are all looking for a chance to get out. As of now, there’s no telling who might potentially bid on the company, or how their bids might be affected by whether or not Hulu’s previous owners will still continue to provide content.

(via The Los Angeles Times)

People who are born blind can become quite adept at identifying objects by touch alone, but scientists wanted to know if how they would fare if their sight was suddenly restored and their eyes became their primary sensory input. Simply put, could someone who has seen with their hands learn to see with their eyes? Thanks to modern medical science, this question is no longer an issue of navel-gazing and was recently investigated in a study published in Nature Neuroscience.

The researchers worked with five children, ages 8 to 17, that had their sight restored as part of Project Prakash, an organization that provides free medical care to curably blind children in rural India. Within 48 hours of undergoing surgery, the children were presented with an object and allowed to feel it with their hands and then asked to identify a similar object amongst a set of objects. As expected, the children handled the task easily.

Then the test subjects were given a different object to feel, and were then asked  to identify that object from a group of objects by sight alone.