Sometimes when words just aren't sufficient, adding an image can spark understanding and inspiration. Welcome to the National Science Foundation’s International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2012, a competition that awards creative communication of scientific concepts by way of images, videos, charts, and even games.
Navigating space isn’t easy—there’s no air, water, or earth to push your spacecraft in another direction. Rocket fuels and gravity assist have been our...
Scientists at Brown University have made brain-machine interfaces that are even more hip that BMIs researchers are using now. Like an upgrade from landlines...
The latest in a slew of press from major automakers, BMW and Continental recently announced a partnership to develop new technology for self-driving cars. The collaboration aims to develop an “electronic co-pilot” system for highway grade driverless cars over the next year. And they think we’ll have partially automated cars by 2016, highly automated cars by 2020, and fully automated cars by 2025.
He never got used to the graying person that greeted him in mirror every morning decades later. But even though his condition left him incapable of remembering new facts and new people, including his own aged self, the AAAS session that gathered in Boston last month affirms that he will always be remembered by a field on which he left a lasting mark.
An inadvertent computer error leads to a string of offensive T-shirts, including "Keep Calm and Rape A Lot", but you can bank on one thing for sure: this will happen again and again, in one form or the other. Why? Because computers have no way of knowing what upsets people unless they are programmed to.
Could a large American retail store produce as much energy as it consumes? Walgreens is going all 'green' to find out. The company recently announced a plan to erect a 'net-zero' energy store to replace an older one located in Evanston, Illinois. Through thoughtful and innovative design, the prototype store is specially designed to utilize various renewable energies technologies, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, in order to produce as much or potentially even more energy than it actually needs to operate.
In another exclusive interview with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil provides an update about his first two months as Director of Engineering at Google as he builds his team to collaborate with other groups at Google in order to tackle natural language processing.
In the world of genomics, Chinese biotech giant BGI is big and getting bigger. The firm agreed to purchase Bay Area juggernaut Complete Genomics for a bargain basement $117 million in 2012. BGI owns 156 DNA sequencers and produces 10% to 20% of the world's genetic information. Now the firm is putting their DNA sequencing might behind an investigation into the genetics of genius.
Filmmaker Jason Silva’s latest philosophical short, “The Mirroring Mind,” is a stream of consciousness—about consciousness itself. If you like brain yoga, Silva's your man. He likens the mind’s ability to mirror an external environment that includes the mind itself to “plugging a video camera into the TV and then aiming the camera at the TV—the recursive loop that is formed extends itself ad infinitum.”
3D printing has become one of the most exciting and talked about technologies of 2013. Last year, a group of researchers at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria refined a 3D printing technique that allowed the construction of sophisticated structures (a F1 racecar and a cathedral) smaller than dust mites in about 4 minutes. Now, a company called Nanoscribe GmbH that emerged from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has made 3D printer called the Photonic Professional GT which can produce detailed structures on a similar scale but faster.
Last November, neighborhoods in Kansas City became the first to enjoy the 1Gbps Internet speed made possible through Google Fiber. As Google considers the possibility of bringing Fiber to other communities (some signs points to Canada as a possible spot), a group of remote farmers in the UK with sluggish Internet speeds decided they didn't want to wait on their ISPs, the government, or even Google to deliver an upgrade to their broadband speeds. They opted to build an ultrafast fiberoptic network themselves.
NBC's Today Show provided a little insight today about how mobile has changed society with a comparison of two images from St. Peter's Square: the announcement of Pope Benedict in 2005 and Pope Francis in 2013. At a celebration for a tradition that extends back nearly two millennia, the rapid proliferation of technology into everyday society is visually striking and telling.
Unlike other gesture control devices that rely on positioning through camera tracking, the MYO armband senses electrical activity in the muscles that control hand and finger motions. Its worn on the forearm and flexing of various muscles serve as gesture inputs. These inputs are communicated via Bluetooth, which are then translated into motions on the screen thanks to some machine-learning algorithms.
These robotic window washers are not afraid of heights, high winds, or hard-to-reach places. Gekko Façade and its sister, solar panel cleaning robot Gekko...
Singularity Hub has faithfully followed flexible displays over the last few years—and now researchers are hard at work fabricating flexible components to match. In a recent paper, Yonggang Huang and John A. Rogers of Northwestern University and the University of Illinois demonstrated a lithium-ion battery embedded in a rubber substrate that can be stretched, folded, twisted, and charged wirelessly.
Another video has been released profiling Nigel Ackland showing off some of the cool things he can do with his bebionic3 prosthetic arm, part of a series of videos from manufacturer RSLSteeper. This round, Nigel responds to some 'fan' requests of things he can do with the hand, but then shifts into more pragmatic daily uses that most of us take for granted, like tying a shoe or taking a dog for a walk. Clearly, the more he practices with the device, the more actions he is able to accomplish.
Now neuroscientists are practicing telepathy. In a recent study, the brain signals of a rat performing a task were transmitted to another rat to help it perform the same task.
There’s a robotic arms race on. Aerospace firms in concert with defense agencies are upping the ante on airborne attack drones. Not to be outdone by its ally across the Atlantic, the UK’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) is said to be soon testing a superdrone called Taranis. The drone is designed to fly intercontinental missions at supersonic speeds, undected by radar—and almost completely free of human direction.
What cost would humanity be willing to pay to make contact with intelligent life in the universe? It's a question at the interface of technology and ethics, an area that a new film called 'Project Kronos' looks to explore at a deeper level. The film, scheduled to be released on April 15, is presented as a faux-documentary that takes place in the future, in which personnel involved in an interstellar space travel program describe what the project was and their involvement with it.
Addressing fellow scientists, he dismissed the singularity as “a bunch of hot air,” and went on further to declare that “the brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it.”
A new system scheduled to be released this spring aims to take heart monitoring for athletes to the next level. Under Armour has announced Armour39, a chest-strap monitor that sits near the base of the sternum, measures heart rate, and syncs up to 16 hours of stored data via Bluetooth with a mobile devices or a separate display watch. On the surface, this appears to be just another heart monitor; however, the company claims that the difference is the introduction of a new metric: WILLpower.
Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb—but he did relentlessly test the materials and design that took the technology mainstream. Edison’s first incandescent bulb powered on in 1879. A little over 130 years on it remains king, but semiconductor technology is making a run at the throne. IMS Research says that by 2018, consumers will prefer LED bulbs over incandescents.
Periodically, Boston Dynamics releases video documenting its robotic protégé BigDog’s development. Prior BigDog hits include video of it walking, running, and toting heavy loads. We can now add to the list video of BigDog hurling cinderblocks with a giant pincher-equipped arm where its head ought to be.
Seems like every other week there’s a new plan to push humans a little farther into space. Last week, Dennis Tito—the world’s first space tourist—announced the formation of his foundation, Inspiration Mars, and pledged to partially fund a 2018 manned flight (a married couple to be precise) to circle the Red Planet and return to Earth. The project will cost at least $1 billion, and Inspiration Mars will seek philanthropic and potentially government funding in addition to Tito’s contribution.
A year after its 2012 launch, online education platform Coursera is booming. The startup recently added 29 partner universities, expanding their catalogue to 313...
The late Hollywood actress Audrey Hepburn personified grace and elegance, and today, her iconic status still carries on strong. With her panache and discerning tastes, she serves almost as an archetype of quirky style in modern culture. Naturally, anything that can be connected strongly with the film legend associates some of those same qualities to itself...even something as trite as chocolate. That's right -- Galaxy (also known as Dove) has put out a commercial showing a virtual Hepburn in a 1960s Mediterranean backdrop enjoying a piece of chocolate.
A montage of scribbly cartoon faces, each imbued with distinct personality, would make any parent proud of their child's artistic creation...except a child didn't produce these faces; a computer algorithm did. Meet the randomly-generated caricatures that are part of the Weird Faces Study, the product of a computer algorithm developed by media artist Matthias Dörfelt. Surprisingly, each face is not only recognizable, but has human qualities conveyed through the rudimentary sketches.
Leap Motion caused quite a stir in 2012 when they unveiled their super precise motion-sensing device, the Leap Motion Controller. (The Leap sensor is capable of detecting details as small as the head of a pin.) On Wednesday, Leap Motion announced plans to ship the first batch of pre-ordered Leap Controllers Monday, May 13th—less than a year after the tech was introduced. The device will be available in Best Buy stores May 19th.
While ambitious private space outfits like SpaceX and Planetary Resources grab headlines, a quieter grassroots transformation is underway. To that end, Infinity Aerospace recently launched their first creation, ArduLab, at the Kairos 50 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. ArduLab is a plug-and-play microgravity research module, NASA approved, and ready to be installed in the International Space Station out of the box—starting at just $1,999.
In what is sure to be only the beginning of human vs. robot confrontations, a surveillance robot belonging to the police was recently shot after a six-hour standoff with a 62-year-old heavily inebriated man. A camera-equipped robot entered the home to locate the man and the guns. A second larger bot was then sent in, but when the owner spotted it, he opened fire with a small caliber pistol damaging it.
Yuri Milner, billionaire Silicon Valley investor, recently joined forces with tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and their wives Anne Wojcicki (founder of 23andMe) and Priscilla Chan to shower riches on a group of unsuspecting scientists. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (Breakthrough Prize) awarded eleven researchers a total of $33 million ($3 million apiece) for their research into stem cells, cancer, and genetics.
Forget the Weight Watchers, forget Atkin’s, because apparently one community that’s already living it up with warm-watered, picturesque beaches has got healthy cuisine figured...
Graham Ryland believes that robots belong in the classroom. As the CEO of Barobo, the maker of modular robots called Mobots, he has witnessed firsthand the enthusiasm students get for math and science when they can learn the subjects in the context of robots. He gave a recent talk at TEDxSacramento to share his enthusiasm for what tobots can do for education.
Throughout history, war and innovation have gone hand in hand, whether it's breakthroughs out of heavily funded R&D programs or makeshift contraptions thrown together with spare parts. Soldiers are trained to use the technology on hand to get the job done, one way or the other.
Hointer is a startup selling men's designer jeans that launched in Seattle last November and offering customers a 21st century shopping experience. The store has no salespeople, confusing signs, or stacks of clothes to riffle through to find the right size. Instead, lines of clothes in hundreds of styles hang for you to browse through. When you find something you like, you scan the QR code on the tag, pick your size on the Hointer app with your smartphone, and your selection automatically drop into a chute in a changing room from the robot-operated stockroom. Once you find everything you want, you put your items in a bag, checkout by swiping your credit card at a station, and walk out the door...just like that.
What kind of movement would Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Gabe Newell of Valve, and Microsoft's Bill Gates all back enthusiastically? A call for more computer programmers, specifically really young ones. The nonprofit organization Code.org recently commissioned a short film titled What Most Schools Don't Teach that profiled some of the most recognizable names in technology, along with musician will.i.am and Chris Bosh of the Miami Heat, to put out a call to get kids excited about something that is shrouded in geekitude: computer programming. The film strongly drives home two main messages: coding is not as hard/geeky/foreign as you think and it's as vital to your future career as any subject in school (perhaps more so).
