Robotics/Electronics
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Video: Japan's New Goateed Geminoid Robot Is Uncomfortably Realistic
Geminoid, Skin On and Skin Off Geminoid The latest Geminoid robot is one of the most realistic, and thus creepiest, android we've ever seen. The skin, hair, goatee (!), and facial expressions are real enough to fool you for a few seconds while it sinks in that something very, very weird is going on. This specific model is called the Geminoid DK, and it comes from the same studio that gave us the robotic actress, Geminoid F .
By:Crystal Ja/AAP with AG Staff | September-27-2010 Quantum computers could change our lives and a new breakthrough takes them one step closer to mass production. Illustration of a phosphorus atom (red sphere) coupled to a silicon single-electron transistor (Credit: W. Algar-Chuklin/UNSW).
Aussies make supercomputer breakthrough
Men: Pee And Wash In The Same Fixture!
Lenny Bruce would have had such fun with this, but this just makes so much sense, a sink built on top of a urinal! And designer Yeongwoo Kim has made it look good, too. The theoretical sequence is that you use the urinal, then wash your hands and the washwater rinses the urinal, saving water. Since of course, everybody washes their hands after peeing, right? It makes even more sense in multiple units in mens rooms, saving both space and water. According to Yanko, it is a iF Concept Design 2010 winning entry.
Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Lowell laugh in the face of Intel's weedy handful of cores in its new CPU lineup: They've just squeezed over a thousand processor cores onto a single chip. We've heard a lot about the potential for future desktop -sized supercomputers , but more than anything else this research proves that in the not-too-distant future it's likely to be a reality. Interestingly enough, there's also a green angle to this idea: FPGA chips can be more power efficient than their competitors, and if less computer time is needed to process complex tasks, then the overall power consumption of computers using the tech could be impressively low. The advance was made by Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede's team, who programmed an advanced chip called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).
1,000 Core CPU Achieved: Your Future Desktop Will Be a Supercomputer
Texas Instruments has just outed a chip well ahead of its 2012 availability date, but it's such a hot ticket item it's worth knowing about--because it may enable your tablet PCs of next year to surpass your laptops of this year, with whizbang features like real-time 3-D video. The OMAP 5 chip packs two ARM Cortex A15 cores inside (a tech we've covered before) running at up to 2GHz. So right from the start it'll outperform the single-core 1GHz chips inside the current crop of tablet PCs--including the Cortex A8-based iPad--as well being twice as fast as upcoming A9-based tablets, which may include the iPad 2.
TI's Chips Will Make 2012's Tablets Real-Time 3-D Supercomputers
Light Touch projector makes any surface a touchscreen
8 January 2010 15:49 GMT / By Dan Sung A previously little-known company from the UK called Light Blue Optics has demoed a projector at CES which allows users to interact with the light image as if it were a touchscreen. The Light Touch throws a 10-inch image at WVGA resolution at incredibly short distances thanks to the holographic projection technology involved. At the same time the infra-red touch sensitive system allows users to interact with social networks, multimedia sharing and any other applications that can use the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth support in the device to connect to the Internet. It comes with 2GB of onboard flash memory, a microSD card slot for expanding the storage and the battery life will last 2 hours. Expect to hear more from this one on the OEM front as interest grows.
From Wired How-To Wiki Illustration by Lab Partners Your laser pointer could be doing so much more than highlighting PowerPoint slides and blowing your cat's mind. It could be sculpting ice, sparking campfires, or searing one bad mofo on your leather jacket. Here's how to give a standard pointer a power upgrade. This article is a wiki .
Amp Up a Laser Pointer
Researchers at the Laboratory of Nanomagnetism and Spin Dynamics are working on a form of memory that will work 100,000 times faster than today’s hard drives. Not only are they faster, they are also far more efficient. Current computers take an average of 2-3 minutes to transfer information from the hard disk to the RAM. This new technology would allow for computers to boot up instantly and retrieve data 100,000 times more rapidly. In addition to lightning fast speeds it is also extremely efficient.
Racetrack memory will make computers 100,000 times faster - Tucson Technology
If the Matrix or I, Robot 's view of artificial intelligence sent chilly shivers down your spine, then prepare for frostbite: IBM's artificial brain is now as smart as a cat--just a stop or two down the line from human powers. Speaking at the SC09 high-performance computing conference this week, IBM representatives from the cognitive computing team will be unveiling all the technical details behind their successes with large-scale cortical simulation and brain-like emulation. But it boils down quite neatly to news that the team has, for the first time, performed an in-computer simulation of a brain's workings at a near-instantaneous speed. The magic is all done in software, with particularly clever program elements that emulate the biochemical and electrical activity of neurons and synapses in real flesh-and-blood brains.
The Robopocalypse Cometh: IBM's Cyberbrain Smart as a Cat, Getting Smarter
Oct. 25, 2010 Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper The human hand is an amazing machine that can pick up, move and place objects easily, but for a robot, this "gripping" mechanism is a vexing challenge. Opting for simple elegance, researchers from Cornell, the University of Chicago and iRobot Corp. have created a versatile gripper using everyday ground coffee and a latex party balloon, bypassing traditional designs based on the human hand and fingers. They call it a universal gripper, as it conforms to the object it's grabbing, rather than being designed for particular objects, said Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science. The research is a collaboration between the groups of Lipson, Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago, and Chris Jones at iRobot.
Universal robotic gripper
Nanowire battery can hold 10 times the charge of existing lithium-ion battery
Stanford Report, December 18, 2007 Courtesy Nature Nanotechnology Photos taken by a scanning electron microscope of silicon nanowires before (left) and after (right) absorbing lithium. Both photos were taken at the same magnification. The work is described in “High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires,” published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology .Video: Holograms go 4D Holography has just gained a fourth dimension, bringing the prospect of Star Wars -style holographic telepresence into the real world. Ever since Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks made the first laser holograms in 1963, holography has been the future of three-dimensional imaging . Once created, a hologram can be illuminated to create a pattern of light waves that replicates the light reflected by the original object, generating a 3D image without the need for special glasses.