Monthly Archives: August, 2010

Cardionet, Concept = Win, Strategy = Epic Fail

Cardionet MCOT allows you to monitor your heart in realtime, which can be of major benefit for those prone to heart attacks and disease....

Student Teaches Lessons to Willow Garage Robots (video)

I'm not sure what you're favorite summer job was during high school but I bet it wasn't nearly as cool as Ze'ev Klapow's. He's...

Low Dose Omega-3 No Help with Heart. Say it Ain’t So, Fish Oil!

A new study by Dutch scientists found that low doses of omega-3 fatty acids provided little to no help preventing future heart attacks in...

SU Ends 2nd Year With a Dozen More Ways to Help a Billion People

Dreaming big is easy when you believe in the exponential growth of technology. Singularity University just wrapped up its second summer Graduates Studies Program....

Lego NXT Latest to Use the Robot Operating System (video)

Those little Lego robots you've been building just became much more powerful. Willow Garage recently announced that it designed code to link the popular...

Biosynthetic Cornea Completes Phase I Trials

Researchers in Canada and Sweden have successfully treated corneal damage by implanting human collagen into patient's eyes. According to results recently published in Science...

Cute Video of Nao Registering Itself at RoboCup

Robots aren't just copying human athletes, they're copying human sportsmanship. At RoboCup 2010 in Singapore, a Nao robot was programmed to register itself for...

Endhiran – Movie Featuring Singing, Dancing, and Robots!

Get ready for another blockbuster science fiction flick, but this time it's gonna be Bollywood* style. September 3, 2010 will see the release of...

Japan’s Augmented Reality Teleconference Room (video)

Get ready for teleconferencing in the round. NTT, the world's second largest telecomm, has developed a new video room that allows users to share...
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PBS Discusses Kurzweil, The Singularity, and Bio-ethics

The Religion and Ethics News Weekly program on PBS recently interviewed Ray Kurzweil about his predictions for how humanity will change in the years...

Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds

My smart phone can let me access the collective knowledge of humanity from almost anywhere, but is that access making me smarter or simply...

Will iRobot Produce the Healthcare Robot of the Future? I Have My Doubts. (video)

Colin Angle's presentation at TEDMED this past year has me wondering about the future of home healthcare. According to the CEO of iRobot, makers...

Google Puts Artificial Intelligence into the Cloud With New API

Ok Google I have an addendum to your unofficial motto: "Don't Be Evil...And Don't Create Skynet". The Silicon Valley giant has made its machine...

China’s 10 Day Traffic Jam – Exponential Growth at its Worst

Now for a traffic update - if you're on the G110 highway north of Beijing, don't expect to do anywhere for a few days!...

The Law Of Futurology

In pretty much all walks of life, humans are prone to making their theories and ideas conform to their own personal hopes and dreams....

Embryonic Stem Cell Research Outlawed By Federal Judge

Stem cell research in the United States was dealt a recent blow when a US district judge ruled that public funding for embryonic stem...

Support The Future: Become A Singularity Hub Sponsor

Do you or your organization like what we are doing here at the Hub?  Then why not become an official Singularity Hub sponsor and...

The vOICe System Rewires the Brain’s Audio into Visual

Imagine if all the sounds in your world translated into visual experiences. Sound psychedelic? The cross-blending of sensory input – called synesthesia...

11 Videos of Willow Garage’s PR2 Robots Goofing Off

When confronted with a new social scene, even robots need ice breakers. Willow Garage recently gave away 11 of its PR2 robots to research...

Robots Monitor And Repair High Voltage Canadian Power Lines

Canadian robots aren't afraid of a little power. Hydro-Quebec's Research Institution (IREQ) created an inspection and maintenance robot that can traverse overhead transmission lines...

RoboDynamics Reveals Hard Truth About Telepresence Robots

Like many of us, Fred Nikgohar remembers watching Star Wars and dreaming of the day he would have robots of his very own. Unlike...

Willow Garage’s Big Announcement: PR2 Robots Will Go On Sale Next Month

Someone please lend me a few hundred thousand dollars, I have something I need to buy. Willow Garage just announced that its PR2 research...

Michael Vassar’s Insightful Look at the History of Science (video)

What is science and why do we trust it as much as we do? Short answer: it's rational and empirical. For the long answer,...

The Newest Walking Robot is Iranian! (Video)

Forget your worries about Iran developing a nuclear bomb, they've set their sights on a much more powerful technology: cute walking robots. Last month...

Reverse-Engineering The Brain: Kurzweil Defends Ideas In Open Letter

At the most recent Singularity Summit on August 14, 2010 Ray Kurzweil delivered a keynote promoting his thesis on how and when mankind might...

When Will Computers Match the Human Brain? Kurzweil vs. Myers

10 years? 20 years? 100 years? Never? There are about as many predictions for when artificial intelligence will match human intellect as there are...

Motoman Robot Dresses Up and Serves Ice Cream In Tokyo Theme Park (video)

What do you get when you mix robotics, soft serve ice cream, and a mind-melting theme song? You get Yaskawa-kun. Now appearing in Tokyo's...

The Craig Venter Interview Gives a Grim Perspective on Genetics

"We have learned nothing from the genome." That's the grim message that J. Craig Venter recently gave Der Spiegel in an amazing interview. Venter,...

Lawnmower Robots Get Millions in Funding, Head Towards the Golf Green

Precise Path just received an additional $4.5 million dollars in funding for their robots that mow grass. According to their recent press release, the...

Solar Powered Bags Get You Ready To Go Back To School

Every time my mobile phone battery dies while I'm on the go, it takes a little part of me with it. Thankfully I can...

Autism Diagnosed with a Fifteen Minute Brain Scan (Video)

A new technique developed at King’s College London uses a fifteen minute MRI scan to diagnose autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scan is used...

Nao Robot Develops Emotions, Learns To Interact With Humans

Science fiction has taught me to fear and respect robots with emotions. Now scientists are teaching robots to fear and respect humans with emotions....

Singularity Summit 2010: Optimism, Intelligence, the Future – Oh My

The Singularity is near...it's at the Hyatt in San Francisco. This past weekend I saw some of the leading minds in accelerating technologies gather...

DLR’s Cool Looking Upper Body and Lower Body Robots (video)

Show me two robots that look like they can fit together and I start having fantasies about real world versions of Voltron. Such was...

12 Videos That Will Help You Love the Future

What are you going to be doing twenty years from now? Wrong. Whatever you pictured wasn't nearly crazy enough. Technology is advancing too quickly...

Berkeley Won’t Give Personalized Results to Students for Genetic Tests

UC Berkeley sparked a bit of controversy earlier when they announced they would be giving 5000 incoming freshman the option of taking a simple...

The Alzheimer’s Drugs You Still Can’t Get

Twenty years ago, researchers made serious headway in the battle against Alzheimer’s disease (AD). They discovered a link between the brain damage in...

Voice-Actions on Android Look Great – Star Trek Quality!

Google may have hit a homerun with the development of its latest App for Android phones. Their Voice Search application now features 'voice-actions' which...

WowWee’s New Roboscooper Toy Robot Is WALL-E With a Different Name

Designing new toy robots is hard...unless you have a major motion picture to base them on. WowWee produces award winning robots for work and...

Taking a Ride Inside RoboDynamics TiLR Tele-Robot (video)

My job has its perks and one of the best is test driving robots. I recently had a chance to login to a TiLR,...

Gapminder Makes Statistics Awesome – Now On Your Desktop (video)

It's probably the experimental physicist in me speaking, but there are few things I find sexier than a good graph. In that sense the...

App Lets You Make a Phone Call With Your Mind (Video)

And you thought having a touch screen was cool. ThinkContacts is a new smart phone app under development that uses your brainwaves to...

Robot Culture: Home-made R2D2 Droids from Star Wars

There are few geek-gasms as powerful as those that are created when a home made R2D2 Droid rolls into a comic-con. There's something about...

Who Owns You? 20% of the Genes in Your Body are Patented

Here’s a disconcerting thought: for the past thirty years, genes have been patentable. And we’re not just talking genetically modified corn – your genes,...

Check Out Kawada’s Humanoid Walking HRP-2 Robot (video)

Kawada's HRP-2 'Promet' robot has conquered its most diabolical nemesis: foam mats. The humanoid bipedal robot recently demonstrated its walking prowess by autonomously traversing...

We Live in a Jungle of Artificial Intelligence that will Spawn Sentience

You don't have a flying car, jetpack, or ray gun, but this is still the future. How do I know? Because we're all surrounded...

This Fall, Don’t Forget Your DNA on Your Way to College

Thanks to new programs at UC-Berkeley and Stanford University, some students around the country have a new item to add to their back to...

Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Your Phone Does. Geo-Tracking Heats Up.

Call it LoJack for your loved ones. Multiple smart phone developers have hit upon the same idea: use the GPS in phones to allow...

Tan Le Demos Headset That Reads Brainwaves (video)

Tan Le isn't just interested in reading your mind, she wants to have fun while doing it. Le is one of the founders of...

Sirtuins Can Prevent Alzheimer’s…In Mice. Good News for Resveratrol?

New research from MIT shows that sirtuins may be able to prevent or suppress Alzheimer's Disease. Sirtuins are a class of proteins which may...
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