Google's got its hands in a lot of cooke jars. It's juggling Android, and ChromeOS, and maps, and Gmail, and Glass, and self-driving cars. But the real, secret goods are (presumably) hidden deep inside the secret "Google [x]" lab, and Bloomberg got an awful close—but not quite uncensored—peek.

Located in a rather unremarkable two-story brick building around a half a mile away from Google's main campus, the Google [x] lab isn't itself a well-kept secret, but contains plenty of them. Born primarily to foster Google's self-driving car project, Google [x] is now—possibly—home to other wild projects from space elevators to god knows what else. But Bloomberg's recent chat with the lab's director, Astro Teller, sheds just a little bit of light on what it's like in there.

From Bloomberg:

Teller and colleagues say they’ve spent time contemplating levitation and teleportation. The latter was nixed as an area for further study in part because any unique item that you would want to teleport—a Picasso, say—would have to be completely destroyed before it could be reconstituted on the other end.

And on the topic of more feasible, but still insane projects, Teller refused to comment on a rumored Google [x] plan to give the whole world Internet via broadband transmitters on high-altitude balloons, but did tell Bloomberg that sounded like a Google [x] sort of project.

The real nitty gritty of what mind-blowing projects are in their infancy in that little brick building wil probably never sneak out, but a nice little peek like this just makes you want them all the more. I guess we'll just have to wait until they start changing the world. You can hop over to Bloomberg to read more about Google [x], but don't expect to uncover any real secrets. [Bloomberg]

Since it touched down in August, Curiosity has been taking tons of pictures. We've already seen some of the best shots, but there's hundreds more where that came from. Fortunately, you can breeze through the whole nine months' collection in just a minute.

YouTuber Karl Sanford took the whole big collection of all the black and white RAW photos Curiosity has shot with its front left hazcam since August 8th (Sol 0), the most recent dating back to just yesterday. The resulting timelapse is awesome, but a bit choppy because Curiosity can only send pictures back when an orbiter is overhead, so some of its data is still waiting on board.

Curiosity's whole mission is 23 Earth-months in total, so there are plenty more photos to come. And so long as those get thrown into a bite-sized video clip too, they'll probably all be worth seeing. Keep on rovin' little guy. [PetaPixel]

Structure fires are never a good thing, but that doesn't mean they can't be damned impressive. Last Sunday, this railroad trestle in Texas caught fire, and when authorities decided it'd be too dangerous to fight, they just let it burn. The result is a spectacular show of what have to be some of the most dangerous dominoes in the world.

The unintentional fire-show ultimately cost about $10 million in damages, and while the resulting footage probably isn't worth quite that much, it's something to see. Especially the way the rails themselves fall like puny little wires. Fortunately the fire was contained to just the bridge, and no one was injured in the process. And as far as disasters go, this is a fun one to watch, relatively guilt-free. [KWTX via Reddit]

The first crazy leaps into a Star Trek future just showed up in the latest stable build of Chrome. As of now, "Conversational Search" has now rolled out, which means that Chrome can now remember what you're searching for if you ask a couple of questions in a row.

Like Google demoed at I/O, the search engine can now basically keep track of pronouns. So if you search. "Who is Daniel Craig?" and then ask "How tall is he?" it'll still know who you're talking about with help from the Knowledge Graph. All you have to do is have Chrome up to date. If you've opted in to Google's Search Trial, there are other goodies awaiting to. For instance, you can just ask Google "What's going on today" and get a list of calendar events.

The big feature, being able to just say "OK, Google" to initiate search, hasn't rolled out quite yet, but it should be coming very soon. Everything else seems to be in place though. How awesome it is just depends on how self-conscious you are about asking your stupid questions out-loud. [Android Central via The Verge]

I hope you like motion control because it ain't going nowhere. Microsoft just announced its new Kinect and though it's not literally wired into the Xbox One, it'll be coming with every One sold. But this time, Kinect is less about about gaming, and more about media than ever.

Kinect has always had voice control built in, but now Microsoft is pressing it harder than ever. Virtually everything on the Xbox One can be controlled by voice, thanks to the Kinect's ears. Its eyes factor in too, letting users perform subtle hand gestures while sitting down (!!!) to control the interface without any controller in sight.

Kinect also behaves as the control hub for your whole Xbox One experience. When you sit down on the couch with your controller in your hand, Kinect will take note, and turn your system on for you. Creepy, but awesome.

Kinect's innards are beefier than ever. Its new sensors can not only pick up on all your joints, and model your body, extrapolating things like your balance, and even figuring out your heartbeat from just staring at you. That last bit alone means its camera must be damned serious. It can pick up video at 60 FPS in 1080p, and has a field of view that's 60 percent bigger than the old Kinect's.

And this time, Kinect is outfitted with a modulated IR beam and "time-of-flight," radar-esque tech that tracks the time it takes photons to bounce off the room in front of it. That should do away with the pesky lighting issues that plagued the original Kinect. The new Kinect should work in complete darkness, if you're into that.

From a practical perspective the new Kinect will doubtlessly be able to see little things like faces, and open versus closed hands, instead of guessing along with what vague body-shapes it can make out. And it'll have to if it wants to go toe-to-toe with the Playstation 4 Eye, which boasts 1280x800, Kinect-style body tracking, an 85-degree field of view, and works with accessories (including the DualShock 4 controller) as well as on its own.

All that said, the first Kinect looked pretty damned impressive when it was first shown off, and then it turned out to be not nearly as awesome (or functional) in the wild. Microsoft has doubtlessly learned a lot from the experience though, and they're betting big big big on their whole "you are the controller thing" so hopefully that means some genuinely awesome motion control gaming this time around. And even if not, the comprehensive media control makes Kinect way more than some peripheral. Not like you've got a choice of whether or not you want one anyway.

I want to see the idea of Voice become a huge part of everything Google, and to do that it has to get away from this little pet-project service Google's never going to care about.

Well, and also saying "better now than later." SO I GUESS, KIND OF

Clinging to this kind of stuff for now provides solutions that are great for some people, I get that. But we're going to be stuck with ridiculous artifice forever if we don't learn to let go. And it's only going to get worse as time goes on.

It'd really be nice if they'd put some fire behind Voice, but they haven't in years and there's literally NO reason to expect them to start now.

My only real concern would be about keeping that number....

Even if it's not quite as amazing as it could be, Google Voice does some wonderful things. That's what makes it hard to admit the truth: It's time for Google Voice to die.

A Problem Child

When Google Voice launched in 2009, it was straight-up awesome. The concept of re-inventing the basic systems of telephonery for the digital age came with a whole bunch of fantastic features, many of which still kick ass today. Getting a transcript of your voicemails in your inbox? Perfect. Phone calls ring all your phones instead of just one? Instant must-have. Sending SMS and making voice calls from your computer? How did I ever get by without it?

But Voice has never been able to live up to its sizable potential. Features like MMS support have been "in the works" for years without ever coming to fruition. Voice mobile apps have been slow to update on the rare occasion they've received meaningful updates at all. The Google Voice web interface is wonky and awkward and sometimes just doesn't work. And when it breaks, there's pretty much nowhere to turn.

Of course, it's doesn't help that Google lets its other services step on Voice's toes. Just like Google Talk's chat feature rendered Google+ Messenger chat bizarrely superfluous, Google Talk's voice calling was both at odds but also weirdly reliant on Google Voice.

Voice's greatest strength is that it makes phone calls easier, but its greatest weakness is that it almost always requires an actual phone. And when it doesn't, there's some weird handoff going on. Voice can't do PC-to-PC calling; that's a Talk's feature. Taking a call from a phone on your PC? Also Talk, but a Google Voice connection is mandatory. Calling phones from your PC? Talk again, but this time with optional Voice support. Sound convoluted? It is.

And when you add tablets—mobile devices but technically not phones, at least most of the time—to the equation, the distinction between devices that are phones and ones that aren't is more irrelevant—and more infuriating—than ever. Ever try to make a Voice call from a tablet? Don't. It will make you sad inside.

When something's this badly borked, you don't just tweak it. You blow it up and start fresh.

One Client to Rule Them All

That, of course, is where Google's new Hangouts come in. A single, unified Google chat service has been a long time coming, rumored for months before it finally burst on the scene at Google I/O last week. Assimilating Google communication services like a chat-client Borg cube, Hangouts is eating its predecessors alive; the really unnecessary ones—like Google+ Messenger—have already bit the dust in Hangouts' wake. This is a much needed culling, a big simplification.

And fortunately, Google Hangouts isn't a complicated mess; it's less than the sum of its parts, and better off for it. During the big merge, things like Google Talk's online/offline/invisible statuses got simplified right out of existence. And so did the ability to make Google Voice calls out from your computer through Google Talk. And while plenty of users have cried out in anguish, this was a long time coming. If this is going to be Google's One True Chat Client (and it is), it can't afford to be bloated from the start.

And sure enough, Google's Nikhyl Singhal has come out on Google+ to promise that features like outbound web calls are coming to Hangouts, just like SMS support. Voice will be coming to the party too:

Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.

"Hangouts will integrate Google Voice." Just what everyone wanted, right?

Just Die Already

Google Voice integration may sound like more Hangouts features on the way (and who doesn't like more features?), but it's probably just another collection of problems in disguise. Google Voice has always been a great idea, but it's never been a great service. Its proposed features have always sounded idyllic, but they've never quite been functional or even existent. More literal Google Voice functionality in Hangouts will only ensure one thing: that Voice features that barely work now might continue to barely work down the line. We shouldn't settle for that.

The corruption is happening already; the Google Voice plague is spreading. Hangouts lost the ability to make outbound calls the way Talk could, but it can take inbound ones. How? By getting in bed with Google Voice. Less than a week into this brave new world, and Voice is already latching on to the new kid, bringing its arbitrary distinctions between phones and not-phones along with it like body odor.

So long as Google Voice is still around, its features—however awesome—are going to continue to be hamstrung by its faults. And as we've seen for the past three years, Google is never going to throw its weight behind Voice in the way it'd need to to make that service succeed.

Hangouts, on the other hand, is the search giant's great hope for the future of messaging. It'll get all the nurturing it needs and more. Just look at the unrelenting, like-it-or-not push Google has made behind its One True Social Network, Google+; Google will make Hangouts succeed through denial and sheer force of will if that's what it takes. So maybe if Google Voice shuffled of this mortal coil, the best features it had—and the ones it never got around to having—could roll into Hangouts in their purest form, instead of being haphazardly crammed in by way of forced cooperation with a broken legacy.

Sure, the risk is that Google Voice dies, and its best features never actually materialize in Hangouts. But the alternative—tying ourselves to a service increasingly held together by digital duct tape and shoved ever further in the corner—isn't much better. The best thing we could ask for is for Google Voice to die right now so that its best broken promises are free to go to Hangout heaven. And then we cross our fingers and hope they make it there.

Companies including Australia’s ANZ Bank, Nielsen, and Royal Bank of Canada plan to put this supercomputer to work answering questions by SMS, online chat, email, or through a compatible app. Watson will not only be saving humans from having to answer hundreds upon hundreds of inane questions about insurance plans and loan interested, but also help provide better information, since he doesn't zone out when reading fine print.

Watson doesn't have any voice recognition capability yet, but that could come later this year, putting him toe-to-toe with things like Siri and Google Now. IBM's likely to continue pimping out Watson's noggin to more companies as down the line, and really, we could all benefit from having more, smarter computers answering our questions for us. But it just seems like he's settling. We just hope he's happy, happy as a lifeless machine brain can be.

Update: IBM has contacted us to clarify that Siri and Watson are not competitors because Watson has conversations and actually learns from them, whereas Siri just does Q&A. It's a fair distinction.

We've already seen what the Leap Motion can do in apps that support it, but it stands to make your everyday OS-level boredom into a futuristic gesture-controlled wonderland too. This new video shows exactly what kind of applications you can look forward to on your Windows 8 machine, at it seems at least as cool as touch.

A similar video showing off the device's Mac potential is in the works as well, but we're already sold. The first stand-alone Leap Motion controllers start shipping this July for $80, and if using them is even half as cool as it looks, we're all in for a treat. [Leap Motion]

AT&T has caught a lot of flak for being excruciatingly picky about what apps can do video chat over data on what kind of plans. It's been equal parts annoying and confusing for everyone involved. But now, the carrier is about to simplify it by letting everyone do everything by the end of this year. Finally.

The provider put it this way in a statement:

For video chat apps that come pre-loaded on devices, we currently give all OS and device makers the ability for those apps to work over cellular for our customers who are on Mobile Share or Tiered plans. Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry have chosen to enable this for their pre-loaded video chat apps. And by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from those three manufacturers.

Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.

Today, all of our customers can use any mobile video chat app that they download from the Internet, such as Skype.

Until now, users who wanted to use video-chat applications that come pre-installed on their phones (like FaceTime and recently Hangouts) over data have had to be on Mobile Share or Tiered plans. And while Wi-Fi was the only option for folks holding unlimited plans that had been grandfathered in, until AT&T eventually threw them a 3G bone. Fucntionality has been rolling out slowly, but the whole process has just been absurdly complex.

This new update won't be rolling out until the second half of this year, but it should finally clear up all the weirdness for everyone and make video chatting over a cell network something that doesn't require you to consult a spreadsheet first. You can just do it, instead. It's about time. [The Verge]

Compared to electric gadgetry, something like a trumpet is a pretty simple contraption, but the way it actually works is super clever when you see it in action. The principle is very straight-forward, but the construction of the actual pieces that re-route your hot air are damn cool to see at work.

Now does anyone have a cross-sectional GIF of how an embouchure works, because I still can't figure that one out.