berlin

Uber began operation in Germany today, giving Berliners their first taste of the fast-growing private car-summoning service.

The service, which the company said is being conducted by "Secret Ubers," is in the testing phase, with more drivers being added each day, Jena Wuu, an international launcher, wrote in a company blog post today. The new service, which allows users to request rides via their smartphones, will apparently be limited to the capital, at least initially.

Interestingly, the service's first passenger was Alexander Ljung, cofounder of the steaming audio host SoundCloud, who was mysteriously "spotted" and … Read more

BERLIN -- Medical science, boosted by manufacturing and information technology, is on the cusp of being able to grow human tissue.

So believes Nina Tandon, a senior fellow at Columbia University's Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering, who for her Ph.D. thesis grew cardiac cells that beat like tiny hearts.

A third age of medicine is beginning, she said in a speech here at the TEDx Berlin conference held in conjunction with IFA consumer-electronics show. The first age, most of human history, had only a primitive understanding of the body. The second age ran from the first … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Microsoft squares off with new logo.

- Scientists discover that music memories are stored in a different part of the brain than the rest.

- Buzzfeed interviews a Google employee whose job required vetting thousands of terrible images a day.

Bathroom break video: Ghostbusters theme on eight floppy drives.

Video voice mail: Matt from Colorado Springs deserves a trucker hat.

If you want to know how to get a bunch of Germans riled up in 2010, try putting out a video game that depicts the shooting by East German border guards of refugees trying to flee into the West.

That's certainly been the experience of Jens Stober, the creator of 1378 (km), a new game that according to Reuters, has been "condemned as 'utterly inappropriate' and 'insensitive' by a victims' group."

Yet, despite the public outcry, 1378 (km) has apparently become a big hit in Germany. As Reuters reported, "Demand for the game brought down servers … Read more

Researchers at Berlin's Free University today announced they have developed new technology that lets drivers steer cars using only their eyes.

Raul Rojas, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Institute of Computer Science, and his team from the Artificial Intelligence Group demonstrated how they can steer a specially equipped vehicle with one eye.

A demonstration took place at the former Berlin Tempelhof Airport using a Dodge Caravan called Spirit of Berlin.

Using EyeDriver, the driver wears a converted bicycle helmet that is equipped with two cameras and an infrared LED. One of the cameras points in the same direction … Read more

Upon the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin has launched a remarkable “living” online memorial: the Berlin Twitter Wall.

Using the hashtag #fotw, people can share their thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall and tell the world “which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.” The Web site scrolls messages along a backdrop of the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the wall still standing and painted with murals. By clicking "stop" and "play", older tweets are shown. A click … Read more

BERLIN--The global gadget tour touches down this week here in the German capital, having wound its way through Las Vegas and Taipei, and before it heads off to Tokyo.

IFA, which stands for Internationale Funkausstellung, kicks off Wednesday afternoon. In terms of attendance, IFA Berlin is the largest consumer electronics trade show in the world. Like its American counterpart, the Consumer Electronics Show held every January in Las Vegas, it's a place for names large and small in consumer electronics to roll out their latest gizmos so the public, journalists, analysts, and retailers can eye them up close.

For an idea of just how big it is, IFA Berlin in 2008 took up 1.3 million square feet of exhibit space, and brought 215,000 visitors through the doors of the Berlin Messe to see more than 1,200 exhibitors. CES this year had a lower-than-expected attendance of 110,000, 1.7 million square feet of exhibitor space, and 2,700 exhibitors.

IFA brings out the big names you'd expect like Samsung, Sony, LG, Nokia, Acer, Asus, and more, plus hundreds of smaller companies that make computers and gadgets just for the European market. We'll try to highlight the notable stuff that will be available in North America as well.

IFA has been around in some form since 1926, and has an interesting, if dark footnote.… Read more

Let's face it--auto racing can be dangerous. And there probably isn't anything scarier to a driver than being in a car going over 100 mph, crashing, and having the thing catch fire. So as a tribute to the brave men and women of auto racing who risk their lives every time they hit the track, I am dedicating this week's blog post to some of the scariest car fires in modern Nascar history.

The catalyst that led to me doing this week's post on car fires and their brave surviving drivers came from reading an article … Read more

An anthropologist has built what she claims to be the most realistic reconstruction of Johann Sebastian Bach's head.

Using computer-modeling techniques, anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee in Scotland, created a new image of Bach. Most of us when envisioning the composer think of a saggy old man with a white, curly wig. Instead, he was rather big-boned with a slight underbite and short hair, as the new rendering shows.

The bust is currently on display at Berlin's Charite medical school and will then be the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Bach Museum in Eisenach, … Read more