BAKKACIMA BLOG

  Say what you want about the exterior design of the new second-gen Porsche Panamera that debuted Tuesday afternoon in Berlin, Germany. But there's no denying the all-new luxury sports sedan is smart. Let me explain.

The mad roboticists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have produced another biomimetic mechanoid — this one based on the lithe locomotion of the salamander. “Pleurobot” imitates the amphibian’s ambulation with its own articulated vertebrae, allowing it to slither along on land or at sea. “Animal locomotion is a very interesting interplay between the body, the spinal cord, and the environment,” explained the leader of the project, Auke Ijspeert, in a video from EPFL.

A family in Fresno, California is currently suffering through the biggest nightmare any new parent could imagine after their pet dogs accidentally killed their newborn daughter. According to police, the 3-day-old infant named  Susie Kirby  was left alone on the couch for mere seconds on Monday afternoon when the family's two shar pei/pit bull mixes entered the living room and proceeded to kill her.

A bad case of garlic breath can ruin a date, even if you both have it. These foods, if eaten after a garlic-y dish, might be able to save the day. In this video from the  SciShow YouTube channel , host Michael Aranda explains the stinky science behind  garlic’s ultimate weapon : allyl methyl sulfide. Additionally, Aranda shares some tips on how to save your date from garlic’s overwhelming power. While researchers aren’t exactly sure why, these foods have shown some evidence of neutralizing garlic’s odor:

As part of  the unprecedented $14.7 billion settlement  released earlier today, Volkswagen will offer substantial cash payments to owners of the 482,000 diesel four-cylinder cars affected by the emissions cheating scandal. If you own one of  Volkswagen’s NOx-spewing machines , here are step-by-step instructions on how you can calculate how much money you’re owed.

ANAHEIM, California —  Apparently, Facebook wants to be a little more like Snapchat.  At VidCon on Thursday,  Facebook announced that people using the face filters on the  MSQRD app will be able to go live on Facebook directly from within the app.  Facebook acquired  MSQRD  — which is a "masquerade" face-tracking and 3D face-placement app — in March.

When  Apple  unveiled its own version of the stylus in 2015, the  Apple Pencil , it wasn't the most exciting development to come from the company. After all, we've all seen styluses before. Now it looks like Apple could be experimenting with giving the tried-and-true styles a technological upgrade, according to  Apple Insider . An Apple  patent  published Thursday details a stylus with a touch-sensitive body, meaning it can detect your fingers' positions, rotation and how much force is being used.

Windows 10    is unequivocally Microsoft's   best operating system release in years .  That's not saying much since Windows 8 was a  huge mess , and Windows 10 is basically an open admission that jettisoning the Start menu and de-emphasizing the desktop was a huge mistake. But that's OK, because in the tech world, no company is perfect. With Windows 10, we've forgiven all of the sins accrued under ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Police are looking for a man who slashed a woman's neck while trying to rape her on a Bushwick street on Sunday morning. The assault happened at approximately 5 a.m. near Wyckoff Avenue and Starr Street, next to the Jefferson Street L train stop. Police say the suspect approached the 25 year-old woman from behind, placed a sharp object to her throat and told her to bend over. The woman screamed for help and, after a brief struggle, was able to break away from the man, but not before he slashed her neck. She ran and sought shelter in a nearby store.

Live Demo:  Collaborative Stickies In this tutorial, you will be shown  how to use PubNub to build a real-time collaborative web app using  React.js , which lets you manipulate the DOM very efficiently, and the next generation of JavaScript,  ES6 . I have created two versions of the same Stickie Note app: the one I  hosted on this CodePen  uses CDN-hosted versions of React, and another is  on GitHub , using package managers. In this tutorial, I use the “lite” version of the latter. I will walk through how to build the app, using all the goodies: npm, webpack, Babel for JSX, and ES6!

APPLE PHOTOS In 2014, Apple  announced  they would end support for two popular pieces of photography software: Aperture and iPhoto.  Aperture  was the company's professional-level offering and   iPhoto  was a simple photo editor and organizer for the casual crowd. In 2015, Apple retired Aperture and iPhoto and released Photos 1.0, with a "best of both worlds" feature set.

  Aside from a few iMac and Mac mini models, every new Mac comes with an SSD as standard. This is great if you love having a blazing fast computer, but not so good if you want to be able to store hundreds of movies on it without taking out a second mortgage. For a few years, large HDDs were the standard so you just didn’t have to worry too much about space constraints. Now, you’re lucky to have more than 500 GB of usable space to play with.  As well as drives getting smaller, files are getting bigger. Things like HD, or  high definition , movies and photos from DSLRs take up massive amounts of storage. I'll show you how you can take control of a Mac’s hard drive space. Back Up Everything Before going all trigger happy with the delete key, it’s important to make sure you can’t accidentally erase anything important. Run the Mac through its usual backup routine. If you don’t have a backup plan set up, you should check out and implement the tutorials below before continuin

I mean, I’m as excited about The Last Guardian as the next unwashed blogger, but you didn’t really think we were going to get out of tonight’s pre-E3 Sony press conference without a little hardware news, did you? And it’s 2016, after all, so it’s time for Sony to join the Oculus Rifts and HTC Vives of the world with its own VR offering.

Earlier today, they were but flashes on the big screen at Microsoft’s big E3 kickoff event. Now they’re pieces of metal and plastic in the same venue that hosted the aforementioned event (presently the site of an Xbox mixer with, mercifully, with an open bar). The  Xbox One S console  is, of course, noticeably more svelte than its predecessor – 40-percent so, in fact. The first thing you really notice about the device, however, is that bright white coat of paint, the starkest of contrasts from its much darker predecessors.

Google has unwrapped two significant  announcements  for its enterprise customers, the most notable of which is the rollout of Springboard, a new digital assistant to help enterprise companies that make use of Google’s services for business. Springboard, which has been in testing with “a small set of customers,” is a little like Google Now for enterprise workers. That’s to say that it offer a single search interface which utilizes artificial intelligence to surface information within a user’s suite of Google products — such as Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs and more. That’s important because, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, VP of Engineering for Google Apps, “the average knowledge worker [currently] spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information.”

LONDON — The title of "world's most famous animal" would be a hotly contested one, but Koko — a Western Lowland gorilla living in Woodside, California — is certainly in the running. Koko's been on the cover of National Geographic on more than one occasion. She's hung out with Leonardo DiCaprio and William Shatner.  The reason for her fame? She can communicate with humans.