DARPA Tried to Build Skynet in the 1980s I really don't understand the Google acquisition of Boston Dynamics, and how the government allowed it to happen. BD is a company that pretty much exists because of military contracts. Basically everything they've done thus far has been for DARPA or the Army. We've poured countless hundreds of millions into them with the expectation that the military will have access to this technology. And then Google comes in and scoops them up and says that they won't accept any new military contracts? Well isn't that wonderful. I cannot believe that this didn't ruffle some feathers at the Pentagon and in Congress, and I really can't believe that we're not hearing about it.
Quietest place on Earth mutes all sounds, messes with your head | Unplugged Twine, A Tiny Gizmo That Holds The Internet's Future | Co. Design "In the future, your house will send you a text message to warn you that your basement is flooding." Sounds like the kind of hooey you only hear in those fantastical "future of…" videos, doesn’t it? Not anymore. Two MIT Media Lab graduates have created a "2.5-inch chunk of the future" called Twine that does exactly that, and more, and is available right now. Well, not quite: It will be available in early 2012, thanks to its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. Here’s the basic idea behind Twine: Software and physical stuff should be friends. Twine is a small slab of gray plastic that hides that PhD’s worth of engineering magic--a bunch of internal and external sensors and a Wi-Fi hub--"the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing," in Carr and Kestner’s words.
No Light Work: Researchers Claim to Have Created World’s Lightest Solid Scientists are breaking new ground in the eternal quest to create ever lighter materials – this time forging a metal so weightless it can sit atop a dandelion. Yahoo News reports that the team of U.S. researchers from University of California at Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology has developed the metal, which is about 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. They constructed a metallic lattice of hair-thin pipes to show off their latest creation, beating out the previously lightest substances in the world, aerogels. (LIST: The 50 Best Inventions) The work is significant because the strategy employed by the team could lead to the development of more materials of extraordinary strength and lightness, according to detailed findings in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Science. LIST: All-TIME 100 Gadgets
An Open Source Artificial Life Project Called OpenWorm OpenWorm is a very cool project that also scares me a little bit: a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form -- a simple worm, computationally created from the cellular level to a point where it's sophisticated enough to solve, as the site explains, "basic problems such as feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance". This would be the first digital life form of its kind, but if the project is successful, more sophisticated species are sure to follow. I first heard about this open source project because OpenSim pioneer John Hurliman recently joined OpenWorm's development team, helping with improving the code's deployment processes. "In the future I'd like to help with the physical and neural simulation aspects," he tells me. How's progress on the worm itself going? "Not a lot from the 'download and run it' perspective, it's a pretty massive undertaking," John tells me. Please share this post with people you like:
Mysteriously dark Mars regions are made of glass - space - 15 April 2012 THEY look dark, but mysterious expanses on Mars are mainly made of glass forged in past volcanoes. The dark regions make up more than 10 million square kilometres of the Martian northern lowlands, but their composition wasn’t clear. Past spectral measurements indicated that they are unlike dark regions found elsewhere on the Red Planet, which consist mainly of basalt. Briony Horgan and Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe analysed near-infrared spectra of the regions, gathered by the Mars Express orbiter. The glass likely takes the form of sand-sized grains, as it does in glass-rich fields in Iceland. On Earth, such rinds coat volcanic glass weathered by water. More on these topics: PhotoSketch Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage Tao Chen1 Ming-Ming Cheng1 Ping Tan2 Ariel Shamir3 Shi-Min Hu1 1TNList, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University 2National University of Singapore 3The Interdisciplinary Center Abstract We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. Paper Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009, ACM Transactions on Graphics, to appear Tao Chen, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ping Tan, Ariel Shamir, Shi-Min Hu System Pipeline Retrieval Results Composition Results Video Supplementary Materials 1. General supplementary materials, including intermediate results and comparisons. 2. High resolution compositions and detailed statistics of the user studies. Sktech2Photo Team Tao Chen, Kun Xu, Fang-Lve Zhang, Meng Ding and Ming-Ming Cheng Update: A web-based Sketch2Photo application: click here (Chinese), collaborated with Tencent. Acknowledgments Note Original Name: PhotoSketch.
Best iPad 2 apps So you've got an iPad 2, and now you need to fill it with lovely iPad apps. But with 65,000 apps available just for the iPad what are the best ones to get and are there any that take advantage of the new features of the iPad 2. We've scoured the massive collection of iPad apps available (mid March) on iTunes to see what's on offer and what you should download. We've tried, tested and reviewed all of the following free iPad apps ourselves, rather than just guessing whether they're good or not. READ: Best new iPad apps to show off the Retina Display GarageBand Let’s get it out of the way from the start. You get to play piano, guitar, bass, drums, vocals, and if you’ve got the right dongle, even record your own guitar playing as well. The whole experience is incredibly easy, and depending on your musical skill rather than computer skills, you can create a track in minutes rather than hours. Playing music is one thing, but you probably want to record it too, and here Apple makes it very easy.
OpenWorm milestone: artificial worm gains muscle sensation James sez, "Mini-milestone in the OpenWorm Project, the collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form from the cellular level to the point where it's able to have basic problem-solving abilities. They've now artificially recreated internal muscle sensation, a building block for movement, entirely through code -- watch the eerie video!" "The core algorithm for the physics simulation is called PCI-SPH, which is a somewhat advanced but well understood particle simulation method. The main source of complexity is the architecture: going from brain firing signals to muscle contractions to moving particles around." So yes, it accurately simulates the muscle algorithm for these kinds of worms: "Any time you do a simulation like this you're trying to make intelligent abstractions," John allows. Artificial Life Milestone: OpenWorm Team Recreates Internal Muscle Sensation Entirely Through Code (Thanks, James!)
Neutrinos best studied in space Neutrinos are flowing through the Earth all the time, and many of them come from the Sun. In this computer simulation, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada has detected a solar neutrino, which then produces a small burst of light, depicted by the colourful lines. The new research suggests the mass of neutrinos is better measured in the galaxy than in experiments such as this one. Image: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory The lightest known subatomic particles in the Universe are now able to be more accurately scrutinised, in light of new astronomic research two years in the making. After more than 200 nights of galaxy-gazing and thousands of calculations, an international team of astronomers, including researchers from The University of Queensland, has published a new study that has made a remarkable headway in the way the mass of neutrinos are measured. “One of the major challenges is that galaxy formation is not well-described theoretically,” said Dr Riemer-Sørensen.
This Is What the Desk of the Future Looks Like EXOpc has posted a video of its EXOdesk — an interactive desk environment that lets you do all sorts of tasks on a virtual space on your desk — in action and it looks amazing. The actual device is a tabletop computer, somewhat similar to Microsoft Surface, offering 40 inches of high definition space, where you can manipulate virtual objects by touching them and dragging them around. The video offers a taste of what you can do with EXOdesk: add a virtual keyboard, an RSS feed stream and apps to your tabletop surface. A piano simulation app is shown, and though we don't see much of its functionality, it looks stunning when expanded to the entire surface of EXOdesk. Although the release date is vaguely set for 2012, we already know EXOdesk will cost $1,299.
Comment transformer 1.000 dollars en 264 milliards grâce à la Bourse? Se lancer dans le trading avec 1.000 dollars (733 euros aujourd'hui) en poche le 1er janvier 2013, être le plus riche de la Terre en novembre, possible ou non? David Yanofsky, de Quartz, s'est posé la question. Dans un article publié le 16 décembre 2013, il imagine le trader le plus chanceux et talentueux qui ait jamais été. Notre trader, donc, se lance dans la finance avec 1.000 dollars le 1er janvier 2013. publicité A ce rythme, elle aura gagné 53.200 dollars, soit le revenu annuel médian américain, le 4 mars. Cependant, tout n'est pas si simple. Un obstacle bassement matériel peut aussi contredire les plans de notre trader à la conquête du monde. The Week a publié un article démontrant point par point pourquoi est-ce qu'une pareille épopée est simplement impossible. Une enquête de Barber & Odean menée à Taipeï en 2004 a prouvé que le day trading, le fait d'acheter le matin pour revendre le soir –précisément le mode opératoire de notre trader– fait perdre de l'argent dans 80% des cas.
Pulsar The precise periods of pulsars makes them useful tools. Observations of a pulsar in a binary neutron star system were used to indirectly confirm the existence of gravitational radiation. The first extrasolar planets were discovered around a pulsar, PSR B1257+12. Certain types of pulsars rival atomic clocks in their accuracy in keeping time. History of observation[edit] Discovery[edit] The first pulsar was observed on November 28, 1967, by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish.[1][2][3] They observed pulses separated by 1.33 seconds that originated from the same location on the sky, and kept to sidereal time. The word "pulsar" is a contraction of "pulsating star",[7] and first appeared in print in 1968: An entirely novel kind of star came to light on Aug. 6 last year and was referred to, by astronomers, as LGM (Little Green Men). Milestones[edit] In 1974, Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. and Russell Hulse discovered for the first time a pulsar in a binary system, PSR B1913+16. Nomenclature[edit]