Kevin Lee

Earlier this month, we heard reports that Facebook was gearing up to add a new paid "highlight" feature to give your status updates some increased visibility on users' news feeds. Now it appears that the feature is ready for prime time.

The last time we heard about the pay-to-promote feature, it was in its testing phase, and the price for a Highlighted status ran between free and $2. Gorilla vs. Bear, a music blog, tweeted on Wednesday that these sponsored new feed bumps can cost as much as $100.

If you thought LG’s 84-inch 4K HDTV was too crazy to be real, you probably won’t believe in this insane 33-megapixel Super Hi-Vision-format camera.

NHK showed off the new camera at its recent NHK Open House 2012 event. The camera, according to NHK, can shoot 7580-by-4320-pixel resolution video at 120 frames per second (fps)--which breaks down to about four billion pixels per second.

The iCraft Team. [Credit: Mary Knox Merrill]Is there anything a robotic arm can’t do? They can juggle balls, manufacture microchips, and crush humanity.

Six electrical- and computer-engineering students from Northeastern University thought that robotics’ most useful creation should be used in more ways to assist mankind. And so they hacked together a robotic feeding arm that you can control with your just eyes.

[Credit: MIT BioInstrumentation Lab]Out of all the technologies from Star Trek that I wanted to become a reality, the one I wanted the most was the Hypospray. I mean, who wouldn’t prefer being injected with an aerosol spray instead of being archaically stabbed with a piece of metal, hoping that it hit a vein.

Needleless, air-based injections have been around in some form for quite a while now, but most of them require compressed air or air canisters to deliver medicine. But MIT researchers have developed a new kind of Lorentz-force actuator injection system that uses magnetic energy to deliver a shot.

We already know that musically inclined robots will take up the Beatles mantle in the future, and that they are skilled at reproducing the classic James Bond theme. But just to further show how obsolete human musicians are, Vladimir Demin (MrDeminva on YouTube) built a robotic guitar that can replace a group of guitarists.

Normally it takes a group of musicians to play this particular Russian tune. Demin’s actuated player guitar can reproduce the song by itself with such unrelenting tempo and perfect accuracy.

[Credit: Eloraam]If Minecraft was a game made with simplistic (some might say retro style) graphics to inspire creativity, we would say it has been incredibly successful. Now it seems that the whole thing has come full circle with this latest RedPower2 mod--by a programmer known as Eloraam--that lets you create an 8-bit computer.

Unlike a redstone-powered computer that used individual redstone torches to compute data, Eloraam’s mod has special recipes that let you create a CPU, monitor, ribbon cables, and floppy drive. This CPU is a single-block unit that packs enough power to emulate the MOS Technology 6502 chip, an 8-bit processor first produced in 1975 that was used in a number of computers and video game consoles throughout the 1980s.

[Credit: Leap Motion]The Kinect brought on a whole new kind of gesture controls, and the iPhone helped bring multitouch controls to the masses. Each is great at what they do, but there are drawbacks; with a touchscreen you have draw your finger across a relatively small surface, and most motion sensing technologies are still only accurate enough to detect your hand as a single entity.

Leap Motion, a startup out of San Francisco, wants to meld the two ideas together without any compromises. The company just announced its new 3D motion-control contraption, called The Leap, that it claims is accurate enough to detect touch-control gestures like pinch-to-zoom or capture your single-finger whipping action in a game of Fruit Ninja (take that, Kinect whole-hand sensing!).

Play-Doh control pad for playing Super Mario. [Credit: Jay Silver] MaKey MaKey is a new Arduino interface board that let’s you convert everyday objects into touch-based input contraptions. Instead of using your mundane keyboard and mouse, this board lets you type and click with odd objects like pennies and candy, for example.

Here's how the system works: The MaKey MaKey board connects to your computer via USB (without any additional software), as well as to whatever controller interface you want via a set of alligator clips. It can connect with up to six objects that conduct even the tiniest bit of electricity, so most metals and food items are fair game. You can also make it work with non-conductive objects by applying some copper tape or spritzing them with water.

[Credit: Electric Imp]Everything! Your blender, toaster, washing machine, light switch, and just about every electronic doo-hickey you have in your house could one day be connected to the Internet.

Electric Imp is a start up founded by Former iPhone engineering manager Hugo Fiennes, former Gmail designer Kevin Fox, and firmware engineer Peter Hartley. The company's mission is to turn every product you own into an Internet-connected contraption with the addition of a tiny Imp card.

Traffic appears to be moving smoothly in the north hallway... [Credit: Honda]Remember the day the Segway came out and you thought that you’d never have to walk again? Honda has announced an even better machine, the Uni-Cub. It's a Segway-like way of getting around that you can use sitting down.

Unlike a Segway that’s used by mall cops and Steve Wozniak, Honda's creation is really small. In fact, the Uni-Cub is so compact that it can easily glide around in small offices and into an elevator.

[Credit: Rodd Godshaw]Back in February, we covered a nifty little device that let you feel the temperature outside instead of displaying a numerical temperature readout. The cube, built on an Arduino microcontroller that connects to the Internet to get the temperature was pretty much a proof of concept at the time. Now, we're getting word that Robb Godshaw, the man behind the project, has taken to Kickstarter to make the Cryoscope weather cube a reality.

The mass-produced Cryosphere works just like the prototype: It lets you feel tomorrow’s air temperature through your skin. Instead of guessing if you need a jacket or not based on a weather report, you can feel just how warm 56-degree Fahrenheit is.

[Credit: Microfacturing]Today's DLSRs can capture high-definition video with sharp lenses that make your movies just as crisp as a high megapixel image. The only problem is that those same lenses weren’t exactly made track focus on your subject in live motion.

For me, it’s pretty much impossible to turn the focus ring on my lens without jostling the camera and ruining whatever steady footage I had. If you have the same problem, Daniel Bauen and Mark McJunkin have a Kickstarter Project called the “Lens or Focus Shifter” (depending on who you ask, but more on that later), that will help save your awkwardly shot movies and turn them into cinema quality films.