News - Self-sculpting sand robots are under development at MIT. 3 April 2012Last updated at 13:46 ET The MIT team have built test modules with microprocessors and magnets to prove their theory Tiny robots that can join together to form functional tools and then split apart again after use might be ready for market in little more than a decade, according to researchers. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it has developed about 30 prototype "smart pebbles" and the software to run them. The sides of each cube are 1cm (0.4 inches) in length. Efforts are now focused on creating smaller models. The researchers from the university's Distributed Robotics Laboratory liken the ultimate product they are trying to develop to "self-sculpting sand". "We want to have a bag of this material that can form any shape you demand," PhD student Kyle Gilpin told the BBC.
Limited memory The test cubes have electropermanent magnets embedded into their sides to allow them to stick together. 'A decade away' Destroying Mercury To Build A Dyson Sphere Is A Bad Idea. Combien de candidats en faveur de “l’immortalité biologique” ? Vous en avez assez de lire des articles qui parlent du transhumanisme à la place des transhumanistes ? Silicon Maniacs donne la parole aux transhumanistes.
Lisez, si vous l’osez… Cette semaine, Didier Coeurnelle, président de l’association HEALES, prend une position pour le moins originale sur les élections présidentielles : Combien de candidats aux présidentielles en faveur de “l’immortalité biologique” ? Attention, “immortalité biologique” n’est pas immortalité, il s’agit avant tout de mettre en avant l’importance sociale de l’allongement de la vie. “L’humanité se décrit par ses franchissements de frontière, des choses qui paraissaient impensables. Voici ce que déclarait Jean-Luc Mélenchon, le candidat du front de gauche aux présidentielles le 12 janvier 2012 au cours de sa longue et, selon beaucoup brillante, prestation durant l’émission “Des paroles et des actes”.
“Le Point fait cette semaine un numéro très excitant sur l’avant garde des sciences en France. (…). Tags: feature. News - Can computers have true artificial intelligence? 2 April 2012Last updated at 19:03 ET Professor Owen Holland explains how the world's first anthropomimetic robot works Is it possible to create true artificial intelligence and, if so, how close are we to doing so, asks mathematician Professor Marcus du Sautoy. It was while I was making my last BBC TV series, The Code, that I bumped into a neuroscientist I knew. "Have you heard the news about Watson? " he asked me. I wasn't quite sure what he was referring to. "Watson beat the world champions at Jeopardy last night," he added. Jeopardy is an American television quiz show which tests general knowledge. But then he revealed that Watson was not a person, but a computer.
Continue reading the main story MAN v MACHINE A series of challenges have been suggested to test if a computer can match the human mind: Ever since Alan Turing's seminal paper back in 1950 asking whether machines could ever think, scientists have been striving to create machines that can rival our intelligence. Trivia challenge. Printable Robots: MIT Project Wants to Let You Design and Fabricate Your Own Machines. An insect-like robot designed and printed using new fabrication techniques developed by MIT researchers. Photo: Jason Dorfman, CSAIL/MIT Who knew that origami could be the future of robotics? Today, if you want to design and build your own robot, you have to order components, write software, and then assemble and test your creation.
Of course, the more sophisticated your robot gets, the more time and money you have to spend on it. Now imagine if you could use a computer program to specify the overall capabilities and appearance of your robot and, with the push of a button, have the robot fabricated by a special printer right in your living room. Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the project aims to reinvent how robots are designed and produced by developing technology to allow an average person to create programmable robots in a matter of hours.
The researchers are just starting to explore how to accomplish that. More images: Vladimir Putin Confirms Russian Zombie Radiation Gun. High-Flying Turbine Blimps Could Cut Wind Electricity Costs By 65 Percent. Researchers create incredibly thin solar cells flexible enough to wrap around a human hair. Will the Dream of a Flying Car Finally Become a Reality? Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter PAL-V in its first flight. Image courtesy PAL-V. We’ve all dreamed of having a flying car, but two companies are working to make this dream a reality. The latest in flying car designs is the Personal Air and Land Vehicle (PAL-V) One, which is advertised as going from high performance sports car to flying car in just minutes. Based in the Netherlands, the PAL-V company says this is “the ultimate vehicle to go wherever and whenever you want to, easily overcoming all sorts of barriers. Sign me up! See a video of the PAL-V in flight, below.
While the PAL-V is designed more like a helicopter, another flying car prototype we reported on, the Terrafugia Transition, operates more like a airplane. PAL-V uses gyroplane technology for flying, with rotors that fold up when you want to drive the vehicle on land. For more info, see the PAL-V website. Tagged as: flight, flying car, Technology. Un écran flexible pour livre électronique chez LG. Google Gets Transparent with Glass, Its Augmented Reality Project | Epicenter. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long had the dream of a hands-free, mobile Google, where search was a seamless process as you moved around the world. As the years progressed the vision did, too, expanding beyond search to persistent connections with the people in your lives. In other words, Google’s view of the world now has the social side fully baked into it. Today, Google is revealing that it is taking concrete steps towards that vision with ProjectGlass, an augmented reality system that will give users the full range of activities performed with a smart phone — without the smart phone.
Instead, you wear some sort of geeky prosthetic (one of those pictured is reminiscent of the visor that Geordi La Forge wore on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but Google has also been experimenting with a version that piggybacks on regular spectacles.) On top of your field of vision, you get icons, alerts, directional arrows, and other visual cues that inform, warn, or beg response. Nuff said. 'Epidermal electronics' tattoos: a giant step forward for cyborgs. The latest patch developed by Dr Rogers’s team can both measure muscle activity and stimulate those muscles so they could be used for rehabilitation. But Dr Rogers envisages broader applications – from monitoring sporting performance to seeing how hydrated your skin is with solar-powered epidermal electronics.
Which brings us back to Edgar Allan Poe. In an 1839 short story, The Man That Was Used Up, Poe told the tale of a wounded soldier whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts, including the “handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun”. This was an early account of what we now know as a cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism”, a term coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in an article about the advantages of merging technology with the human body to help astronauts to survive in space. What I find fascinating is the way that cyborgs have stealthily evolved on Earth. Forget about the rise of cyborgs, or indeed the Borg of Star Trek and the Cybermen of Dr Who. Watch "smart sand" figure out how to perfectly copy an object.
New Surveillance System Identifies Your Face By Searching Through 36 Million Images Per Second. When it comes to surveillance, your face may now be your biggest liability. Privacy advocates, brace yourselves – the search capabilities of the latest surveillance technology is nightmare fuel. Hitachi Kokusai Electric recently demonstrated the development of a surveillance camera system capable of searching through 36 million images per second to match a person’s face taken from a mobile phone or captured by surveillance.
While the minimum resolution required for a match is 40 x 40 pixels, the facial recognition software allows a variance in the position of the person’s head, such that someone can be turned away from the camera horizontally or vertically by 30 degrees and it can still make a match. Furthermore, the software identifies faces in surveillance video as it is recorded, meaning that users can immediately watch before and after recorded footage from the timepoint. The power of the search capabilities is in the algorithms that group similar faces together. [Media: YouTube] AI robot: how machine intelligence is evolving | Technology | The Observer. Marcus du Sautoy with one of Luc Steels's language-making robots.
Photograph: Jodie Adams/BBC 'I propose to consider the question "Can machines think? "' Not my question but the opening of Alan Turing's seminal 1950 paper which is generally regarded as the catalyst for the modern quest to create artificial intelligence. His question was inspired by a book he had been given at the age of 10: Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster. The book was packed with nuggets that fired the young Turing's imagination including the following provocative statement: "Of course the body is a machine. If the body were a machine, Turing wondered: is it possible to artificially create such a contraption that could think like he did? Last year saw one of the major landmarks on the way to creating artificial intelligence. Watson is not IBM's first winner. Playing chess requires a deep logical analysis of the possible moves that can be made next in the game.