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Robotics

Bionic Elephant's Trunk, Manta Rays and Jelly Fish 27

Posted by Soulskill from the gadgets-that-can-terrify-children-and-adults dept.
Zothecula writes "Festo, the automation company that designed the bionic penguin and its robotic stablemates – AirRay, AquaRay, AirJelly and AquaJelly – has found another natural model in its latest application of biomimicry – the elephant's trunk. Festo's Bionic Learning Network research program focuses on mechatronic and bionic concepts using nature as a model. 'The AquaJelly is possibly the most interesting of all the bionic creatures as it has been designed to autonomously emulate swarming behavior of wild jellyfish. Like the others, it consists of an electric drive unit and intelligent adaptive mechanism, but with a control board housed by a translucent dome, a water-tight body and eight tentacles. The control board has pressure, light and radio sensors that work with eight blue and eight white LEDs allowing communication between the AquaJellies.'"
Google

FFmpeg Announces High-Performance VP8 Decoder 80

Posted by Soulskill from the harder-better-faster-stronger dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Three FFmpeg developers — Ronald Bultje, David Conrad, and x264 developer Jason Garrett-Glaser — have written the first independent, free implementation of a VP8 video decoder. Benchmarks show that it's as much as 65% faster than Google's official libvpx. The announcement also gives a taste of what went into the development process, as well as the optimization techniques used. Currently it's only fully optimized on x86, but ARM and PowerPC optimizations are next in line for development."
Social Networks

Cow Clicker Boils Down Facebook Games 237

Posted by timothy from the lo-to-their-gelatinous-end-stage dept.
mjn writes "Game designer and academic Ian Bogost announces Cow Clicker, a Facebook game implementing the mechanics of the Facebook-games genre stripped to their core. You get a cow, which you can click on every six hours. You earn additional clicks if your friends in your pasture also click. You can buy premium cows with 'mooney,' and also use your mooney to buy more clicks. You can buy mooney with real dollars, or earn some free bonus mooney if you spam up your feed with Cow Clicker activity. A satire of Facebook games, but actually as genuine a game as the non-satirical games are. And people actually play it, perhaps confirming Bogost's view that the genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on."
Education

Quantum Physics For Everybody 145

Posted by kdawson from the this-time-without-the-math dept.
fiziko writes in with a self-described "blatant self-promotion" of a worthwhile service for those wishing to go beyond Khan Academy physics: namely Bureau 42's Summer School. "As those who subscribe to the 'Sci-Fi News' slashbox may know, Bureau 42 has launched its first Summer School. This year we're doing a nine-part series (every Monday in July and August) taking readers from high school physics to graduate level physics, with no particular mathematical background required. Follow the link for part 1."
Software

Seeing the Forest For the Trees 64

Posted by kdawson from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.
swframe writes "A new object recognition system developed at MIT and UCLA looks for rudimentary visual features shared by multiple examples of the same object. Then it looks for combinations of those features shared by multiple examples, and combinations of those combinations, and so on, until it has assembled a model of the object that resembles a line drawing. Popular Science has a summary of the research. I've been working on something similar and I think this accomplishment looks very promising."
Input Devices

Research Lets You Type Words By Thought Alone 114

Posted by StoneLion from the put-on-your-thinking-cap dept.
An anonymous reader writes "How about typing on a computer just by thinking about it? The downside is you have to wear a skull cap with electrodes that capture your brain waves like an EEG machine. According to this EE Times story, a team of researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands has presented Mind Speller, a thought-to-text device intended to help people with movement disabilities. The system does rely on a lot of processing on a remote computer, but it is a wireless system. And these thought-to-computer systems have wider applicability than medical support. One of the research groups involved in this development has already looked at wireless electroencephalography (EEG) to enable measures of emotion to be fed back into computer games."

Comment Re:Not really surprising... (Score 1) 245

by GrievousMistake (#31106540) Attached to: European Credit and Debit Card Security Broken

I see this attitude a lot on /., but I don't understand where it comes from? It seems obvious to me that having a strong verification system in place is a good thing for everybody but the fraudsters.
In this case it turns out that it wasn't actually secure, which raises concern about whether the protocol was subject to adequate public scrutiny before it was decided to employ on such a massive scale. But do you have any reason to say that they aren't actually interested in preventing fraud?
Are there more secure methods that they are refusing to employ? Or are you saying that the problem of secure authentication is inherently unsolvable, and that they should just give up and resign themselves to laughable measures like signatures and card numbers?
Biotech

Next X-Prize — $10M For a Brain-Computer Interface 175

Posted by timothy from the does-it-come-in-small dept.
The first X-Prize was about reaching space. Now, reader destinyland writes "This time it's inner space, as Peter Diamandis holds a workshop at MIT discussing a $10 million X-Prize for building a brain-computer interface. This article includes video of Ray Kurzweil's 36-minute presentation, 'Merging the Human Brain with Its Creations,' and MIT synthetic neuroscientist Ed Boyden also made a presentation, followed by discussion groups about Input/Output, Control, Sensory, and Learning. Besides the ability to communicate by thought, the article argues, a Brain-Computer Interface X Prize 'will reward nothing less than a team that provides vision to the blind, new bodies to disabled people, and perhaps even a geographical 'sixth sense' akin to a GPS iPhone app in the brain.'"
Input Devices

Typing With Your Brain 262

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-a-waste-of-the-force dept.
destinyland writes "This article asks, 'Why bother to type a document using a keyboard when you can write it by simply thinking about the letters?' A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can 'type' using just their minds. The study involved electrocorticography — a sheet of electrodes laid directly on the surface of the brain after a surgical incision into the skull. ('We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy,' explains one Mayo clinic neurologist.) And besides typing, there's new brain wave applications that can now turn brain waves into music and even Twitter status updates — by thought alone."
Graphics

Building 3D Models On the Fly With a Webcam 93

Posted by kdawson from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.
blee37 writes "Here is an excellent video demonstration of a new program developed by Qi Pan, a graduate student, and other researchers at the University of Cambridge. The 'ProFORMA' software constructs a 3D model of an object in real time from (commodity) webcam video. The user can watch the program deduce more pieces of the 3D model as the object is moved and rotated. The resulting graphics are of high quality."

Comment Re:I would change browser out of protest (Score 1) 272

by GrievousMistake (#30204898) Attached to: Opera Closes China Loophole; Reinstates Censorship

I don't see that Opera has done anything particularly protest-worthy here. Maintaining proxies to circumvent oppressive regimes' firewalls, admirable as it might be, is not in my default expectations of a browser company, and I can't help but notice that neither the Mozilla Project, Microsoft or Apple provide such a service, leaving you with few places to turn if you're going to boycott everyone who isn't in the trenches fighting the CPC.
It's regrettable that the government of China chose to operate this way, but Opera merely chose to follow the local law by restricting access to a service, much as every search engine of note has done, in China, Germany, the US and elsewhere.
If we as a society really don't want to economically aid a state employing political censorship, we should stop pussy-footing around and enact a proper embargo. Yeah, that won't happen.

I differentiate between not actively resisting, and actively aiding, though. If, for instance, Opera released the internet browsing history of individuals on request, that'd be a serious breach of trust in my eyes, and I'd do my part to name and shame.
Biotech

Intel Says Brain Implants Could Control Computers By 2020 314

Posted by timothy from the phalanges-are-fine-thanks dept.
Lucas123 writes "Scientists at Intel are working on developing sensors that would be implanted in a person's head in order to harness brain waves that could then be used to control computers, televisions, cell phones and other electronic equipment. Intel has already used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) machines to determine that blood flow changes in specific areas of the brain based on what word or image someone is thinking of. People tend to show the same brain patterns for similar thoughts. 'Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts.' said Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau."

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