November 10th, 2011 Don’t miss the video. Via: CNN: A “startup kit” of robots would cost $1 million to $2 million, and a large warehouse operation with 1,000 robots costs $15 million to $20 million. Setting up the software and grid systems inside the warehouse requires six months of planning, simulated modeling and testing. Then [...]
November 7th, 2011 I love how they mention that this facility will create jobs! Yeah, 2000 jobs for people who are tasked with figuring out how to eliminate millions of other people’s jobs. This is definitely one for your Arbeit Macht Frei file folder. Via: Cnet: iPhone maker Foxconn aims to manufacture its own robots [...]
115-Year-Old Electric Car Gets Same 40 Miles Per Charge as Chevy Volt October 15th, 2011 Via: Daily Caller: Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt — the much-touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson [...]
IARPA: Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’ October 11, 2011 Print Version Source: NYT MORE THAN 60 YEARS AGO, IN HIS “FOUNDATION” SERIES, THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELIST ISAAC ASIMOV INVENTED A NEW SCIENCE — PSYCHOHISTORY — THAT COMBINED MATHEMATICS AND PSYCHOLOGY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE. Now social scientists are trying to [...]
DARPA Harnessing “Crowd Wisdom” to Develop New “Perch and Stare” Robot Spy Drones October 10, 2011 Print Version Source: Defense-Update Different services of the U.S. military are working on different solutions providing persistent intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) supporting the warfighter with miniature autonomous vehicles designed for ‘Perch and Stare’ mission profile. One of [...]
‘Steve Jobs, The Pioneer Of The Computer As A Jail’ October 8th, 2011 Via: Stallman: Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m [...]
September 23rd, 2011 Via: Wall Street Journal (TinyPaste): For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply “the Hacker.” Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device—a stingray—were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest. Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when [...]
Researchers Develop fMRI-Based Model to Reconstruct Moving Images that People Are Seeing September 23rd, 2011 Many articles that I’ve read about this don’t mention the little detail that this is based on data obtained through the use of fMRI. This MIT Technology Review piece deals with that right up front. In case you don’t know, [...]
U.K. Researchers to Test “Artificial Volcano” for Geoengineering the Climate September 15th, 2011 Via: Scientific American: Next month, researchers in the U.K. will start to pump water nearly a kilometer up into the atmosphere, by way of a suspended hose. The experiment is the first major test of a piping system that could one [...]
‘New Emotion Detector Can See When We’re Lying’ September 14th, 2011 [???] Via: BBC: A sophisticated new camera system can detect lies just by watching our faces as we talk, experts say. The computerised system uses a simple video camera, a high-resolution thermal imaging sensor and a suite of algorithms. Researchers say the system could [...]
US Military Plane Forced Down By North Korean Electronic Attack September 10, 2011 Print Version Source: AFP SEOUL – A US military reconnaissance plane came under electronic attack from North Korea and had to make an emergency landing during a major military exercise in March, a political aide said Friday. The aide said the plane [...]
A 20-Square-Mile Model of a Small U.S. City Will be Built in New Mexico to Test New Technologies September 7th, 2011 Via: Salon: New Mexico, home to several of the nation’s premier scientific, nuclear and military institutions, is planning to take part in an unprecedented science project — a 20-square-mile model of a small [...]
Researchers Harvest Beetle’s Wing Energy to Power the Mind Control Chip in Its Brain September 5, 2011 Print Version Source: Geek O System As you may or may not have been aware, DARPA and other organizations have been trying to make small aircraft that are modeled on insects. The problem they ran into, however, was [...]
Spider Silk Used to Make “Bulletproof” Human Skin August 21, 2011 Print Version Daily Tech – Tiffany Kaiser The patch of skin has proved to be bulletproof as long as the bullet isn’t traveling too quickly Spider silk is an undoubtedly tough material. Just last year, a zoologist from the University of Puerto Rico [...]
IBM unveils chips that mimic the human brain. August 18, 2011 Print Version Source: Computing.co.uk IBM has unveiled a new experimental computer chip that it says mimics the human brain in that it perceives, acts and even thinks. It terms the machines built with these chips “cognitive computers”, claiming that they are able to learn [...]
