How does Shazam work Have you ever wondered how Shazam works? I asked myself this question a few years ago and I read a research article written by Avery Li-Chun Wang, the confounder of Shazam, to understand the magic behind Shazam. The quick answer is audio fingerprinting, which leads to another question: what is audio fingerprinting? When I was student, I never took a course in signal processing. To really understand Shazam (and not just have a vague idea) I had to start with the basics... Coding Geek

Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury 4GB review with Crossfire results Last month was a big one for AMD. At E3 the company hosted its own press conference to announce the Radeon R9 300-series of graphics as well as the new family of products based on the Fiji GPU. It started with the Fury X, a flagship $650 graphics card with an integrated water cooler that was well received. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it was a necessary move for AMD to compete with Nvidia on the high end of the discrete graphics market. PC Perspective. More reviews.

Japan's new satellite captures an image of earth every 10 minutes A sense of perspective is unavoidable from 22,000 miles out. Looking down at Earth from that distance – almost three times farther than the diameter of the planet itself – allows a view of the globe as a massive organic system, pulsing with continuous movement. Below, images from the Himawari-8 weather satellite's first official day paint a living portrait of the western Pacific... The NY Times (also, A real-time map of all the objects in Earth's orbit)

A researcher made an organic computer using four wired-together rat brains The internet of brains is coming, the internet of brains is here. The brains of four rats have been interconnected to create a "Brainet" capable of completing computational tasks better than any one of the rats would have been able to on its own. It's the latest successful experiment out of a Duke University laboratory that has been consistently publishing research that seems to have more of a place in science fictionthan in reality. Vice

Boeing patents an engine run by laser generated fusion explosions Boeing has had a patent approved for an aircraft engine that uses laser generated nuclear fusion as a power source, according to a Friday story in Business Insider. The idea is already generating a great deal of controversy, according to the left leaning website Counter Punch. The patent has generated fears of what might happen if an aircraft containing radioactive material as fuel were to crash, spreading such fuel across the crash site. Examiner

How technology could kill the art of lying Lies are a fact of life. But technology may soon make them obsolete. "Almost everybody lies now and then," said Tim Levine, chair of the Communications Studies Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Most people are pretty good at it, in that you can't tell when they are lying just by watching and listening to them." But our digital, data-hoarding culture means more and more evidence piles up to undermine our lies. The Washington Post

Starting from scratch: How do you build a world-class research lab? What does it cost to build a research center from scratch these days? Gerry Rubin, who runs the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, estimated that his organization will spend a few billion dollars before it's clear if HHMI's research will work out. Ken Herd, who helped set up GE's new research center in Rio de Janeiro, said the building alone carried a $150 million bill. Ars Technica

Moxie Marlinspike: The coder who encrypted your texts In the past decade, Moxie Marlinspike has squatted on an abandoned island, toured the U.S. by hopping trains, he says, and earned the enmity of government officials for writing software. Mr. Marlinspike created an encryption program that scrambles messages until they reach the intended reader. It's so simple that Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp made it a standard feature for many of the app's 800 million users. The Wall Street Journal

Open world games are becoming too bloated to be fun I've been struggling to answer a very simple question lately. It's cropping up a lot, slithering into my brain and filling it up until it's fit to burst. I've been getting lost, you see. Hopelessly lost in massive open worlds that are designed especially for me, the player. The question is why? Why am I doing this? Why am I hunting down crates, their gem icons strewn across the map in Far Cry? PCGamesN

Microsoft security tool fails malware detection test There are many great choices out there for malware protection and detection. Unfortunately, Microsoft's offering isn't one of them. In recent tests by AV Test, the German lab that is pretty much the de facto standard in malware testing, Microsoft came in a distant last place. AV Test's most recent experiment pitted 30,000 known samples of malware against Windows 7 AV programs. Network World

2,200-year-old Andalusian town runs on Twitter Mayor José Antonio Rodríguez Salas (@JoseantonioJun) has encouraged all Jun residents to get a Twitter account to communicate easily with the town government. That way they can report issues about public services and infrastructure, send suggestions, participate in the town decisions and "talk" to the mayor and council members directly. Cities of the Future

Tech time warp of the week: Before Wired, there was the eccentric Mondo 2000 When Wired launched in 1993, few people had seen anything like it. Unlike other computer magazines, it focused on people instead of machines. It was colorful – psychedelic even – at a time when computers were beige boxes made by and for the sort of people that Dilbert was about. But Wired wasn't totally alone. Wired

U.S. personnel agency chief resigns over massive data breach The chief of the U.S. federal hiring office resigned on Friday after massive computer hacks at the agency that put the personal data of more than 22 million Americans at risk, including people seeking sensitive security clearances. Reuters

Goodbye Moto Under the Galvin family, Motorola had soaring achievements. This was the company, remember, that invented the cellphone. Those days are over. What went wrong? Scroll or arrow down to keep reading. Chicago Business (image heavy)