Brannan Blog

How does the prospect of tucking into tissue-engineered skeletal muscle take you? Hmm, thought not. But if researcher Mark Post has anything to do with it then laboratory-grown meat will be coming to a plate near you. Post is the Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University in the Nethe

How much water do you eat? That was the oddly compelling title of a Ted-style 15-minute talk by Jane Withers at the inaugural IQ2 “If” conference  at the Royal Geographical Society in London on Friday. The self-styled aquaholic is on a one-woman mission to raise awareness about water consumption and

I’ve had only the briefest of acquaintances with Toozla, a Russian-based augmented reality outfit that is using location-triggered audio to pep up experiences for tourists, but I like the idea enough to flag it up here. Unlike most AR apps that overlay text on a camera view, Toozla uses voiced infor

A couple of weeks ago I spoke about mobiles, metadata and the future at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas. One of the other speakers I met was Seth Lewis, an assistant journalism professor at the the University of Minnesota, who gave a presentation on the ways in whic

It’s great to see the Huffington Post pushing the boundaries of social media integration to better serve readers, especially since it endorses a point of view I’ve long held and promoted. The site’s social media editor, Rob Fishman, has blogged about letting readers follow topics, reporters and blog

Four of the nine projects at the Beta crowd-funded photojournalism site, emphas.is, have reached their funding goals, attracting pledges of more than $40,000 between them. It’s an impressive start for a site that only launched back in March but it’s too early to say whether the model will successful

Old media companies still haven’t grasped that they’re going to have to forge new alliances and collaborate with once bitter rivals if they’re to survive and thrive. Newspapers and broadcasters have always operated as walled gardens and the model has served them so well that some have come to think

A crowdfunded project that caught my eye recently was Aaron Huey’s Pine Ridge Billboard initiative on emphas.is. Huey has spent six years documenting life on native reservations in the US, places where he says unemployment runs at 80-90%, where most people live in poverty and where life expectancy f

My gadget of the week is the GoPano Micro 360-degree video lens for the iPhone 4. Inventor Michael Rondinelli went to Kickstarter looking for $20,000 funding to get it into production and 1,600 backers have already pledged more than $90,000 with 30 days of the campaign still to go. It’s just the job

It burned brightly in its short lifespan but the Flip Ultra camcorder is toast, gobbled up by ever-smarter smartphones, the disruptive power of which forewarns of bigger convulsions to come and which will change the news landscape forever. Cisco learned their lesson the hard way, shelling out $590m