Here's another latest in robotics: researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have developed a robot that flips pancakes. The most interesting aspect of the project is the use of kinesthetic teaching, in which the user "trains" the robot by example. The user grasps the robot's limb, and guides it through the motions the user would like it to adopt. This bot takes about 50 trials to get it, but in the end succeeds. Previously, I Want a Robo-Chef in My Kitchen.
With 32 countries, comes 32 different ways to verbally defile your mom. Watch out Rooney, FIFA is cracking down on your dirty mouth. Sure, a British official could catch his dirty mouth, but Saturday's England-US game was officiated by a Brazilian.
You walk over to your laptop, wiggle your mouse to wake up the screen, then fire up your browser to come visit Null Byte. Catching the article about Anonymous and how they presumably will not take down the Internet, you find yourself wondering... how would someone take down the Internet? Could they even do it?
We've all heard of the power that red wine holds. It can help lower risks of heart disease, boost your brain power, and can even recharge your car battery. But last year, a group of Japanese physicists made headlines when they announced that they could induce superconductivity by soaking metals in red wine. But why red wine?
Have an HTC smartphone? Chances are that some of your stored personal data has been hijacked by malicious apps on your device. Android apps that have permission to access the Internet, which is pretty much every ad-supported app out there, can snag valuable information such as email addresses, location history, phone logs, text messages, and more.
In recent years, communication has become more intimate with the advent of applications like Skype and FaceTime, but what about the longing for actual physical contact? What if you could feel a loved one's hand, or even exchange a kiss? Impossible, right?
Nintendo's Wii Remote came close, but never has a video game peripheral garnered such adoration from the hacker community than the Kinect.
The Telegraph reports that a team of researchers lead by Dr. Sang-Woo Kim of the Institute of Nanotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul have developed a method for converting the energy from sound into electricity. They've applied the research to the charging of mobile phones, and while you don't have to yell with all the emotion and fear exhibited above by Drew Barrymore in Scream, it sounds like the more energy the better. Dr. Sang-Woo Kim says:
DIY is a far-reaching term—though culturally it tends to refer to hacks, mods, crafts and constructions, its meaning can also extend to the ongoing trials and tribulations of the evolution of mankind: astonishing developments in technology, desperate acts of self-preservation or as in today's topic, discoveries in science that truly move the needle.
How far would you go to be resourceful? Early Britons used each others' skulls as drinking cups and bowls. Recently, researcher Silvia Bello found human skulls with the top cut off laying in Gough's Cave, England. Skillful cut marks make it look like fellow humans scraped off the dead skin to clean the bone, and chips around the rim of the skull cup make it look like the edges were evened out for a better drinking experience. Researchers have found other skull cups in France and Germany, but ...
Holy… Lord, help us all—this isn't CG, it's for real. Meet Geminoid DK, the latest spawn from Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's legion of ultra-realistic Androids.
Now girls need to take up gaming, seriously. According to a new research, girls who played the games with a parent got a lot of benefits.
What feature would we most like to see in the robots of tomorrow? Why, the ability to interact with human beings without crushing them to death, of course. Happily, thanks to a new pressure-sensitive synthetic skin technology, the dream is within reach:
Androgynous. Stumpy. Creepy. The horror movie robot, created by the notorious Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, is projected to be available for around $8,000 later this year.
We've seen extremely pricey, extremely artfully crafted sex dolls. Matt McMullen's dolls are so well crafted, in fact, that it is hard to imagine a superior alternative. Until now...
Love folk art but could do without the folk? Prepare to have your heart stolen by a self-folding origami automaton.
The newest fuel alternative on the horizon? Pee. U.S. researchers have been experimenting with using urine as a method of producing hydrogen. Not only could this virtually free and readily available resource possibly power automobiles, but it could also aid in the clean up of municipal wastewater.
Hiroshi Ishiguro is at it again, but this time "it" has a winning smile. Japanese researchers have developed a humanoid robot that can laugh and smile, mimicking a real person's facial expressions. The android, called Geminoid F, is modeled after a woman in her twenties, with long black hair, silicone skin and lifelike teeth.
Remember Dan White's "Twinkie defense" in 1979? Well it turns out that the the ability to convert food into glucose is correlated with the ability to control oneself.
Observations of a distant dust-filled solar system have shed light on the process of planet formation.
Neuroscience (live!) resumes its 50 hour slicing session 8:00 am PST this morning. According to Gizmodo,
In my early life I was deeply impacted by the work of physician and psychoanalyst John C. Lilly. I still have my dog-eared copies of The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1968). Lilly's work, with dolphins and the development of the sensory deprivation tank, has formed the basis of movies, music and television productions.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play with us on our free server.
University video game design programs have been spreading like wildfire around the world over the last ten years. They allow students, researchers and game developers to work on their craft in an academic environment away from the harsh realities of the market, and have led to some interesting products like Fl0w from USC and Ulitsa Dimitrova from Germany. Both games take on topics not often addressed in mainstream games and do so in simple, poignant ways that aim to influence the rest of the ...
Mobile devices can do just about anything these days, thanks to third-party developers. iPhones and Android devices have been known to do some pretty wild things. Need a dupe key made? Scan and order one with your iPhone. Want to know if you're hotter than Justin Bieber? Compare your facial features. Are you a policeman who needs to ID a suspect? Scan their fingerprints and irides. Want to control your Canon DSLR remotely? Use your Android phone.
With Microsoft's release of the Kinect SDK, things seem to have slowed down a bit in the world of Kinect development. Have developers exhausted the uses of Kinect already? No way! Four researchers at Cornell University have created an AI-based system on the Kinect that can recognize what you're doing, and maybe even who is doing it.
Were you horrified when Gwyneth Paltrow's head ended up in a box in Se7en? Do you share Harrison Ford's opinion that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi? Think Kurt Russell could have handled aliens better in The Thing? Well, sorry—you're out of luck. There's nothing you can do to prevent William Wallace's beheading or Carrie's mayhem. But thanks to MyndPlay, controlling the plot to future films is totally possible.
Since its inception in 2007, the Pwn2Own computer hacking contest has been challenging the vulnerability of mobile phones and web-related software. In 2010, the fruit of two full days of hacking came down to the exploitation of the following web browsers: Safari 4 on Mac OS X, Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, and Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7. The winners walked away with the successfully hacked computer, plus a cash prize, but they left one Godly browser intact: Google Chrome. Even the savviest ...
We've covered a variety of life perks, short cuts, and cheats (35 to be exact), but what about your health? Neatorama has compiled a list of "tricks" to staying healthy and keeping off the pounds.
National Geographic recently published a retrospective of the lovely Jane Goodall, one of the world's most accomplished conservationists. The feature includes every image of Goodall to ever appear in the magazine for the past fifty years.
By "God," I mean Morley Davidson, John Dethridge, Herbert Kociemba, Tomas Rokicki and about 35 CPU-years.
Scientists have recently released a mathematical breakdown of the perfect handshake. The University of Manchester researchers discovered that nearly one-in-five people hate the handshake, listing complaints such as sweaty palms, limp wrists, gripping too hard and no eye contact.
Since the rise of private property and industrial production, modern capitalism has been on a undeniable crash course with Mother Nature. It's no so much that we'll end up murdering the entire planet, but just that the planet will quietly smother us with a pillow of famine, heat, cold and hurricanes. We over-farm land and replace the nutrients in the soil with oil. To package our oil-based produce, we wrap them in synthetic oil-based plastics, soon to be discarded in a trash heap or ocean.
Things have been a bit quiet on the Google+ Insider's Guide this week. With the launch of the new Facebook, Google+ is finding itself a bit on the defensive. However, recent data shows that by making Google+ available to the general public, their traffic has jumped 13-fold, according to Mashable. With the new growth also comes the introduction of cool new features, which further enhance sharing.
Nobody could predict the success of Microsoft's Kinect, not even Microsoft themselves. So, it was quite a surprise when it ended up earning a Guinness World Record for fastest-selling consumer electronics device, and an even bigger surprise to see people buying one that didn't even own an Xbox 360.
How is it possible that Iron Man is not yet a reality? DVICE reports that super-powered exoskeletons are indeed within our grasp (if not quite as flashy as Hollywood SFX just yet). Real life exoskeletons fall into the realm of not-too-distant futuristic warfare.
The United Kingdom has long been known as an international hub of yellow tabloid journalism. The News Of The World, one of the nation's largest tabloids, is famously in court right now because of the deplorable methods it used to acquire salacious information about interesting people. It appears, given their recent string of video game related reportage, that daily newspaper Metro has also had its fair share of morally dubious reporters on staff.
Founded by Zach Kaplan, a "serial entrepreneur" with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, Inventables is a futuristic online hardware store based out of Chicago. The company sells innovative materials at much smaller quantities than typically available—largely to artists, inventors, developers, and researchers. If you've got a brilliant idea and cash to spare, careful, you just may go hog wild. My premature "Dear Santa" wishlist-in-progress:
In 2007, Nintendo introduced the world to motion control video games with the Wii. Microsoft and Sony built on Nintendo's phenomenal success and released their own motion control products for the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 late in 2010: the Kinect and the Move. The Move is basically an improved Wiimote that looks like a sci-fi Harry Potter wand, but the Kinect just might be the most important video game peripheral of all time.
The rush to secure face masks and hand sanitizers in March left many Americans concerned for their safety. With an expected second wave this fall, consider stocking up on PPE now.
