Technology

Students are often driven by baser concerns and robotics students even more so - hungry all of the time?  Invent a robot that can cook.   Need to take over the Republic?   Build some robots that, oddly, use colored swords.    The Experimental Robotics course at Stanford gives students a chance to show off their automated ideas to classmates in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.     The course is a chance for students to take the math and programming skills they learned in the Intro to Robotics course and use them to direct a pre-fabricated robotic arm…

Univ. of Illinois announced a silver pen for writing conductive cursive.  Researcher Jennifer Lewis notes “Pen-based printing allows one to construct electronic devices ‘on-the-fly,’".  I think, imagine just tracing a circuit schematic instead of having to wire and solder it. The pen advancement is just one step of improvement over the existing method of conductive paint.  As in, you can already buy paint to 'paint' the wiring and interconnects of your circuit.  Even better, you can buy conducting glue, to use instead of solder for fastening your components. Both…

Long before "Star Wars", science-fiction had talked of robot walkers.  In "War of the Worlds", even aliens from Mars had giant, mechanized tripeds and they got killed by a few germs.   But the real world worked on them also.   Now on display at the US Army Transportation Musem at Fort Eustis is GE’s Pedipulator, or “Walking Truck", which was developed for the U.S. Army in the mid-‘60s.  This quadroped first lumbered through testing paces  Pittsfield, Massachusetts, circa 1962. It wasn't actually a 'Walking Truck', of course, it was a Cybernetic Anthropmorophous…

When is a multi-million dollar business that charges money before a science article can be seen by the public superior to another multi-million dollar business that charges money before a science article can be seen by the public?  Apparently only if they claim to be non-profit. Scientists are not business people so it is easy to understand why anyone would confuse non-profit status with "doesn't make money".   They all want to make money.   So if one publisher can charge you $1,200 to buy out the copyright and another charges readers $150 to read science, who is superior…

BeautifulPeople.com, a dating and networking community which claims to be exclusively for good-looking people,  apparently has programming and security that was done by beautiful people rather than smart ones.   30,000 ugly people recently invaded the site, bypassing the  "strict rating stage" where currently designated beautiful members decide the fate of new applicants.  The rating module was brought down last month, allowing anyone - regardless of looks(gasp!) - to be accepted.   Greg Hodge, managing director of BeautifulPeople.com, said, "We got suspicious…

Does 3-D television seem like a waste of time to you?   Perhaps you will like Smell-O-Vision more. Or not.  Even if you like neither of those things, they are waypoints on the path to immersive, interactive environments.  So buy this stuff today and some day we Science 2.0 folks can solve mysteries on the Holodeck with Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Television programming executives want to be able to trigger your emotions as effectively as possible so engineers have focused on sight and sound - but that doesn't mean it has to stop there.   Wouldn't Pizza-Hut…

Only nostalgia zealots can argue we are not in a Golden Age for animated movies. 2010 gave us classics like "Megamind", "Toy Story 3" and the one movie to rule them all, "Tangled." These awesome animated family movies are just a few of the reasons why we are in the Golden Age of cartoons, and we do not even have to include "The Incredibles", "Finding Nemo", or "Up". The characters and story had heart and compelling plots. They also had physics. Suspension of disbelief is one thing but impossible physics (like that bus in "Speed" making a low speed jump over a gap and somehow landing on the…

Everyone is a journalist due to the modern Internet, we are told.   Not so, says a University of Georgia analysis.    Instead, 2 percent of people who start discussions attract about 50 percent of the replies and that is good news for traditional journalism. The downside is they used Internet newsgroups to validate this belief - if you aren't familiar with newsgroups, that's because Web-based interfaces killed their popularity but throughout much of the 1990s newsgroups were popular and even Google makes the newsgroup interface more attractive. Newsgroups are already a…

Othar Hansson, Software Engineer at Google.com writes: *** Today we're beginning to support authorship markup -- a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results. We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and…

Bigpoint Inc. today released a teaser trailer and game site for its upcoming action-adventure title, The Mummy Online.  Developed in collaboration with Universal Partnerships&Licensing, The Mummy Online brings the blockbuster film franchise to the free-to-play MMOG space.  The 3D action-adventure game will include original storylines, battles and opportunities to explore mysterious and exotic locales.  The game will be free-to-play directly via your web browser. Game Setting - Amarna  Located at the southern tip of the Nile, Amarna is the homeland to priests and…