Technology

Robocup 2008 will be a lot more interesting with the addition of more realistic soccer-playing robots. So realistic some can even walk like people. Researcher Daan Hobbelen of TU Delft has developed Flame - a new, highly-advanced walking robot. This type of research, for which Hobbelen will receive his PhD on Friday 30 May, provides insight into how people walk. If you try to teach a robot to walk, you will discover how complex an activity it is. Walking robots have been around since the seventies but some, like factory robots, are limited in flexibility. TU Delft is a pioneer in the other…

Researchers from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have unveiled unveiling a grasshopper-inspired jumping robot that weighs a miniscule 7 grams but can jump 1.4 meters - more than 27 times its body size. That's ten times farther for its size and weight than any existing jumping robot. These jumpers could be fitted out with tiny sensors to explore rough, inaccessible terrain or to aid in search and rescue operations. "This biomimetic form of jumping is unique because it allows micro-robots to travel over many types of rough terrain where…

Like hot peppers? Pungent garlic? Mouth-howling pain? You can thank TRPV1 and now, thanks to researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, you can also see it in full 3D. A research team led by Dr Theodore G. Wensel, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at BCM, generated the first three dimensional view of the protein that allows you to sense the heat of a hot pepper. The outside stimulus used in this study was the heat of a chili pepper. It has been known for years that the burning sensation results from the action of a chemical known as capsaicin on TRPV1 found on…

If you take a top-of-the-line express train in America, nothing more modern than an electric shaver can even be plugged in much less have any practical use while onboard. 10 times as long as plane flights, more expensive and no computer use? Why aren't trains more popular here again? Not the case in Europe. They are using technology from the European Space Agency to allow internet addicts to get their fix even in mass transit. Thalys is launching full commercial operations for a wireless broadband internet service on board high speed trains, the result of their project "Broadband to…

Satellites currently use radio waves to exchange data. Now the data rate has been increased a hundredfold in two test satellites by using lasers instead of radio signals. The tests between German satellite TerraSAR-X and US satellite NFIRE, covering more than 5000 kilometers in space without any errors, was special in that the space tests recently performed by Tesat-Spacecom was that the data was transmitted by laser. The bandwidth achieved in the test was a hundred times greater than during conventional communication by radio waves, enabling a data rate equivalent to roughly 400 DVDs per…

A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Nigel Bannister’s calculations were used for the Channel 4 Dispatches program “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off.” He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text. “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that," Bannister said. “The maximum…

Insects have provided the inspiration for a team of European researchers seeking to improve the functionality of robots and robotic tools. The research furthers the development of more intelligent robots, which can then be used by industry, and by emergency and security services, among others. Smarter robots would be better able to find humans buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building, for example. The EU-funded SPARK project set out to develop a new robot control architecture for roving robots inspired by the principles governing the behavior of living systems and based on the…

There was a recent study that provided a revised view of the Internet Structure in the U.S. The Global information Technology Report was released a few weeks ago. The study was done by Insead, the French business school, on behalf of the World Economic Forum. The conclusion was that the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best. This, of course, is a different conclusion than recent opinion that suggested the U.S. is lagging far behind the rest of the world. The report used an index generated from 68 variables including market factors, technological…

If you've ever used an internet translation tool, you know how immature the translation technology is compared to other sorts of computer programs. Punctuation errors, misplaced words and grammatical mistakes can make them almost unintelligible. Verbal language translation is ever worse. Mo one has been able to develop an automatic translation system that comes anywhere close to the capabilities of a human translator or interpreter. ‘Constrained speech’ utilities that can only translate certain predefined words and phrases are adequate for a tourist booking a hotel but useless if you want…

Patients in therapy to overcome addictions have a new arena to test their coping skills — the virtual world. A new study by University of Houston Associate Professor Patrick Bordnick says that a virtual reality (VR) environment can provide the climate necessary to spark an alcohol craving so that patients can practice how to say “no” in a realistic and safe setting. Bordnick, of the UH Graduate College of Social Work, investigates VR as a tool for assessing and treating addictions. He studied 40 alcohol-dependent people who were not receiving treatment (32 men and eight women). Wearing a VR…