Meet your new area code, Houston. The Public Utility Commission (PUC) on Thursday announced the addition of area code 346 to accommodate continued growth in and around Houston. The 346 area code will overlay existing area codes 713, 281 and 832 in Harris, Fort Bend, Waller, Austin, Montgomery, San Jacinto, Liberty, Chambers, Galveston and Brazoria [...]
Posts under ‘Technology, science, and math’
Check this out
Scan while you shop, and other technological advances to get you checked out faster. In February, San Antonio-based H-E-B invited customers to try out a new scanning “tunnel” for the first time at its McCreless Market location on South New Braunfels Avenue. The company spent about three years developing the so-called Fast Scan technology, which [...]
Mobile payments
Austin is a hot spot for the hot new thing in retail technology. Mobile payments technology is gathering steam across the country, but Austin is one of the hot spots, both for deployment of new technology and for development of new software for payment systems and payment processing. Dozens of merchants have affiliated with Square [...]
The HPV vaccine
This story about HPV and its vaccine is from a couple of weeks ago, but it needs to be read. The vaccine that blocks a sexually transmitted infection that causes cervical, oral and other cancers was hailed as a home run when it was approved seven years ago, but, given usage rates, doctors still aren’t [...]
What other environmental groups think about “One Bin For All”
As you know, last week the city announced that it had won the $1 million runnerup prize from the Bloomberg Foundation that would enable it to begin work on a single-bin solution for solid waste and recycling. While this announcement was generally met with cheers, the Texas Campaign for the Environment was not among those [...]
Nationwide WiFi?
This sounds like a big deal. The federal government wants to create super Wi-Fi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month. The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion [...]
Free WiFi finally coming to Houston airports
And there was much rejoicing. Free WiFi is set to land at Houston’s two main airports by year’s end. As wireless fidelity service becomes a consumer expectation, the Houston Airport System told the Houston Chronicle it is working to develop a complimentary – as well as fast, reliable and easy to use – network for [...]
The 311 app is here
I’ve been waiting for this. The brand-new Houston 311 app will allow residents to file a complaint and then track its progress. The program officially goes live Tuesday, city officials said. Here’s how the 311 app works, city spokesman Chris Newport said: “Say you see a pothole on your street. Before you even leave for [...]
Green batteries
This is very cool. In one more step of a global effort to develop greener battery technology, researchers at Rice University say they have found a way to replace a costly metallic component in lithium-ion batteries with material from a common plant. While many of today’s lithium-ion batteries incorporate cobalt, which has to be mined [...]
Aereo
From Dwight: Aereo, which already has disrupted the television landscape in New York City, is coming soon to Houston and 21 other U.S. markets – but only if it survives legal attempts to kill it. On Tuesday, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia announced at CES in Las Vegas that the company would embark on a major [...]
CompSci in the curriculum
HISD Trustee Paula Harris coauthors an op-ed in the Chron advocating computer science to be part of the standard school curriculum. While STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education is a hot topic in education circles these days, only math and science courses are required for graduation from high school. The few computer science courses [...]
Recreating a Galapagos tortoise?
How amazing would this be? Lonesome George, the late reptile prince of the Galapagos Islands, may be dead, but scientists now say he may not be the last giant tortoise of his species after all. Researchers say they may be able to resurrect the Pinta Island subspecies by launching a cross-breeding program with 17 other [...]
Driverless cars in Texas
You have perhaps heard the news that Google’s driverless car has been approved for street usage in California; specifically, California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a bill that requires the California Department of Motor Vehicles to draft regulations for autonomous vehicles by Jan. 1, 2015. You may be wondering, with varying degrees of wonder or [...]
Electric cars and the power grid
Fascinating. It doesn’t take too long for visitors of Mueller, a 700-acre master-planned community in Austin, to realize that the neighborhood is peculiar. The planned community, built on the site of the former Mueller airport, boasts almost too-perfect rows of homes with cheery pastel exteriors and quaint front porches. And then there are the neighborhood’s green flourishes—solar panels [...]
Dan Wallach: Energy pricing 2012
This is a guest post that follows up on an earlier guest post. Last year, I wrote a guest article for Off The Kuff where I discussed the complexity of trying to get a good price on your electric bill. In Houston, we have seemingly hundreds of companies who will gladly take our money in [...]
Pothole app
Harris County now has an app for reporting potholes and other problems. Users must download the app and set up a profile. After that, one can take a photo of the problem, point to its spot on the map or let GPS technology mark the location, label the report with a category – say, “dead [...]
Happy birthday, Atari
The iconic video game company turned forty last week. Although it wasn’t the first company to make video games, Atari was the first to make a lasting impression on an entire generation. At arcades — or at video game bars such as Barcade in the trendy Williamsburg section of Brooklyn — nostalgic patrons still gather [...]
Environmental drones
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! A plane! A drone! One year into a $260,000 two-year grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, [civil engineer Thom] Hardy and his crew of biologists, geographers and spatial analysts have used the drone to track bird habitat in Galveston Bay and the growth of invasive [...]
Apps for apes
This new program at the Houston Zoo sounds great, but we all know how it ends, right? A digital revolution is sweeping the ape house, and now its denizens, formerly preoccupied with classic chimpish activities, are turning their attention to computer offerings originally developed for human toddlers. “Chimps and orangutans and other apes are very [...]
Fighting identity theft
The U of Texas is studying it. Identity theft is a cradle-to-grave problem that costs U.S. businesses $50 billion and affects at least 10 million consumers each year. At least 1 million children’s identities are stolen over the course of a year — often misused by their parents, said Stephen Coggeshall, chief technology officer at [...]
Electric car update
From the Texas Green Report. NRG Energy has committed $10 million to launch America’s first privately-financed electric vehicle charging network and plans to fully wire Houston to support electric cars without straining the grid in the next couple of years. NRG is operating through eVgo in North Texas and is expected to build 70 electrical charging [...]
Mobile broadband in Texas
For your perusal. Almost half of adult Texans, about 8.9 million, use mobile broadband devices — cellphones, laptops or tablets using a cellular network — to keep the Internet a constant companion, according to a survey by Connected Nation, a nonprofit that is working to map and improve broadband use in several states. According to [...]
Homeless Hotspots
You’ve probably heard about this by now. If you’re looking for WiFi at the South by Southwest tech conference this week, instead of heading to a cafe or bumming off of a neighbor, you might just ask a homeless person. That’s right. New York-based advertising agency BBH Labs introduced a trial run of its new [...]
Pluto stamp petition
It’s the least we can do. Two decades ago, the Postal Service issued a series of stamps depicting Earth, its moon, and the spacecraft sent to explore each of the other planets in the solar system. The 10th stamp, featuring tiny, distant Pluto, was the only one to read “not yet explored.” Those three words [...]
Cover that cough
Fascinating. A decade-long study found passengers on certain Metro bus routes were more likely to have tuberculosis, raising the question of whether they contracted the disease on the bus. “We see a higher prevalence of clustering with bus riders,” said Edward Graviss, an epidemiologist who collected the data. “It’s not direct evidence that transmission occurred [...]
The science of fire
Great story about how scientists have been figuring out what really happens when a building burns, and why so much arson “evidence” is bunk: At laboratories throughout the United States—some large enough to contain a three-story house—researchers have been lighting rooms and houses on fire and analyzing the results with the kind of scientific scrutiny [...]
“How to Choose a Texas Electric Provider the Wrong Way”
Recently, my friend Dan Wallach wrote a guest post here about how to find the best deal on electricity in Texas. Robert Nagle, another friend of mine, took issue with some of the things Dan wrote and penned a response on his blog, called How to Choose a Texas Electric Provider the Wrong Way. A [...]
Can we have some of your rainwater?
This is just crazy enough that you would hope it might work, but it probably can’t. As the soggy East tries to dry out from flooding and Texas prays for rain that doesn’t come, you might ask: Isn’t there some way to ship all that water from here to there? It’s an idea that has [...]