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China

Why Is China Building Gigantic Structures In the M->

Submitted by cornholed
cornholed writes "

New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge metallic stripes, the second structure seems to be some kind of giant targeting grid, and the third one consists of thousand of lines intersecting in a titanic grid that is about 18 miles long.

"
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Anime

Meet Meka's anime robot girl->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "It seems, as a culture, we have a deep-seated interest in robots and automatons, and if we can love an animal or other non-humanoid creature, what’s to stop us from falling in love with a robot? Introducing Meka Robotics’ S2 Humanoid Head: It has seven degrees of freedom, high-resolution FireWire cameras in each eye, zero-backlash Harmonic Drive gearing in the neck, and a ton of unnervingly-human movements and postures. She weighs 7.6kg (16.7lbs), has a pair of luminous, waggling doggy-like ears, and can be attached to a Meka torso and arm, if you prefer your robots to be slightly more corporeal. The girly, anime face is just a custom skin, incidentally: Meka will customize the shell to look like anything you desire. We’re told that they value their client’s confidentiality — and more importantly they don’t judge. Powered by the open-source and extensible M3 control software, the S2 head (and body and arm) could be quite easily upgraded to use Hooman Samani's artificial endocrine and psychological models — and if you had the choice of falling in love with an amorphous, decidedly odd-looking furball, or a cute, perky anime girl, which would you choose?"
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Biotech

Artificial Leaf Produces Hydrogen from Sunlight->

Submitted by Orbity
Orbity writes "MIT researchers have developed an artificial "leaf" that when exposed to water and sunlight produces oxygen and hydrogen — can you say fuel cell? From the article: 'You drop it in a glass of water and you walk outside and hold it in the sun, and you’ll start to see bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen,’ explained Daniel Nocera, an MIT professor who led the team that invented the device.""
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Cloud

Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying->

Submitted by oker
oker writes "From the article: "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (...) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. (...) we predicted the interests and Social Security numbers of some of the participants (...) the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data 'accretion.' ". Do we really enter "Minority Report"-like world?"
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Data Mining Shakespeare Texts for New Insights->

Submitted by Orbity
Orbity writes "In a fascinating cross between computer science and reading literature is the practice of Quantitative Literary Study, which uses data mining techniques to reveal new insights into texts old and new. For example, in Hamlet, we can learn that "of all the characters who speak to both Hamlet and Claudius, only two manage to survive." What else can be learned from this technique?"
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The epic story of Polaroid's SX-70->

Submitted by
harrymcc
harrymcc writes "In 1972, Polaroid introduced an instant camera called the SX-70. Four decades later, the amount of innovation and creativity they crammed into it remains dazzling. If the point of technology, as Arthur C. Clarke said, is to be indistinguishable from magic, I can't think of a greater gadget than the SX-70. And the parallels between Polaroid founder Edwin Land and Steve Jobs are remarkable."
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Where do you go to get anorexia? -- Shelley Winters