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Iphone

Submission + - The Robot With a Smart Phone Brain (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: One of the limitations of robot kits is that they can be complicated to use and build, and even the simplest ones require some hardware expertise. But now any smart phone can be a robot, thanks to the folks at Romotive.

The concept is quite simple: put a wheeled chassis on a smart phone or iPod Touch that allows for using the device as the “brain.” But that simplicity is what makes the robot, called Romo, powerful. Since the controls are contained entirely within the phone, they can be downloaded as apps. One can add new physical capabilities to Romo -– a claw, or a scoop -– but that doesn’t require any new additions to the phone.
Also, the controls are through the headphone jack. That simplifies the design and means that the robot doesn’t need to be linked with only one brand of smart phone.
Space

Submission + - New Telescopes Might See Alien City Lights (discovery.com) 2

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Forget radio signals. Two scientists, Abraham Loeb, of Harvard University and Edwin Turner, from Princeton University, have said it may be possible with the next generation of telescopes to pick up the lights from cities on alien planets. On Earth, city lights are so bright they can be seen from space — and their spectral signature differs from that of the gases in the atmosphere and the sun. If one were looking at an alien civilization, one would expect to see the same thing.

The reason they proposed this is that aliens may not generate as much radio energy as their technology improves, given that on Earth we bleed less radio energy into space as we have moved to fiber optics.
Hardware

Submission + - Gecko-Inspired Robot Rolls Up Walls (discovery.com)

Submitted by
RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: "We all love climbing robots. A group of researchers in Canada has decided to combine the mechanism geckos use to stick to walls with the simplicity of a tank tread. The result is a 'bot that can roll up smooth (and some not so smooth) surfaces. Such robots are easier to control than those that try to simulate walking directly."
The Military

Submission + - Terminator-Like 'Bot Moves LIke a Human (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Boston Dynamics, with funding from DARPA, has built a robot that simulates human movement and looks a lot like the Terminator. But it isn't designed for hunting down enemy soldiers — it's for testing out military equipment such as chemical and biohazard suits. By moving realistically it can test the suits without needing to call for volunteers.
Microsoft

Submission + - Robots Take Paparazzi's Jobs! (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Eddie, short for Expandable Development Discs for Innovation and Experimentation, is a robot platform developed by Microsoft that uses a Kinect, a DSLR camera as well as an array of infrared sensors to snap party pictures.

Eddie roams the room, looking for a person. Once it finds one, it gets them centered in the image and clicks the shutter. Though the potential for embarrassing shots here is pretty large, one question is what happens to the paparazzi at those big celebrity shindigs. It is a lot easier to control what a robot does and it won't care about a big payout from he tabloids — Kate Moss would have been safe from any revelations about (possible) drug use.
Science

Submission + - Fish Evolve Immunity To Toxic Sludge (economist.com) 2

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Fish in the Hudson River and the harbor in New Bedford, Mass., have evolved resistance to PCBs. In the Hudson, a species of tomcod has evolved a way for a very specific protein to simply not bind to PCBs, nearly eliminating the toxicity. In New Bedford, the Atlantic killifish has proteins that bind to the toxin (just as the do in mammals) but the fish aren't affected despite high levels of PCBs in their cells. Why the killifish survive is a mystery.
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Pico-projected Images Can Now Touch (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: From the annals of “wouldn't it be cool if you could” comes SideBySide. It’s a projection system that allows mobile devices to put an image on a wall that can interact with another image projected by another device.

So, if two people wanted to play a version of, say, a boxing game, they could project the images onto the wall from two separate phones, without needing to hook up to a single computer or gaming system. No other equipment is needed.

The technology, invented by a team at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University, works is by projecting both visible light and infrared. The devices the researchers built have a camera that monitors the projected images, a sensor that measures range and an inertial measurement unit similar to the accelerometer components in tablets and many smart phones.
Transportation

Submission + - Cars Will Now Read Yor Texts To You (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: As long as people are going to text while driving, you can at least cut down the distraction, and that's what Ford has done. The latest version of the company's SYNC system reads texts to the driver, so you don't need to pull out the phone to read them. If nothing else it keeps the eyes on the road.
Hardware

Submission + - Robot Builds Itself With Foam (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Combine off-the-shelf insulation foam and modular robot components and you get a self-assembling robot that could be fit to a variety of tasks.

The Modular Robotics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, in a project led by Shai Revzen, has created a robot that can be assembled from foam that hardens and pieces that allow the robot to move. The “foambot” looks ungainly, and it is. But once you have a shape — and a task — in mind, the foam sprayer can lay down a body plan that fits.

The robot’s parts are CKBot modules, which can be taken apart and reassemble themselves, because the components can recognize where they are in relation to each other. The foam is commercially available insulation, and it turns out such foam is a great material. The foam expands up to 30 times their initial size, and is actually quite strong. That means that the apparatus building a robot can be smaller than what it is building.
Science

Submission + - Alarm Clock Syncs With Your Brain (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Sleep has a cycle that lasts about 90 minutes and involves four stages, two of which are lighter and easier to wake from. If you wake somebody up during the light periods they feel more refreshed, whereas doing so during deep sleep produces the urge to turn over and pull the blanket over your head. By monitoring the stages of sleep a person is in, an alarm clock could be set to only go off at times when a person is sleeping lightly.
A research team in India put electrodes on a subject’s head to monitor their brain activity with an EEG, and linked the output to the alarm clock. That isn’t so convenient, but a headband could be set up that would be worn whilst in bed. The electrodes could even be wireless.
This is more than just a comfort exercise: sleep is important to maintaining cognitive function and overall health. (In fact, depriving someone of sleep is classified as torture in many countries). Even though the precise functions of sleep are still unknown, it’s clear that a lot of adults in the industrialized world aren’t getting enough of it.
Crime

Submission + - DNA Could ID Gacy's Last Victims (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: 30 years ago John Wayne Gacy killed 33 young men and boys. He buried most of them under his home and threw other victims in a river. Eight of them were unidentified, but modern DNA techniques could do what forensic scientists in the 1970s could not: give them back their names.
Government

Submission + - Run Your City Like A Computer (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Living PlanIT, a European technology company wants to build smarter cities using an operating system, called Urban OS, that works similar to operating systems in ordinary computers. The key is coordinating a network of sensors that would feed the information into the operating. By monitoring waste, water use, traffic flows and even the temperatures of individual rooms, the entire city could be run at peak efficiency. That means saving energy, water and even reducing the waste that goes into landfills (Living PlanIT says it has a system for extracting useful compounds from garbage). It also means being able to respond to emergencies more quickly than now.

Some issues remain: Privacy, the possibility of hacking, and the relative openness of the system. Living PlanIT has several technology partners but it isn’t clear how open the standards used will be; if the UrbanOS is designed in a way similar to Apple’s OS products, then it means a given city would be locked into a single set of vendors.
Facebook

Submission + - Why Occupy Wall Street Chose Tumblr (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Earlier this year, Facebook and Twitter played a crucial role in mobilizing protestors in Iran, Cairo and Tunisia. Now Tumblr has been uniquely appropriated for a U.S.-based protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street, which has been coalescing in New York, Boston and Chicago to challenge the influence of corporate money on government and the growth of social and economic inequality.

A hybrid of ordinary blogging platforms, such as Typepad or Wordpress, and of the microblogging site Twitter, Tumblr gives users the ability to post photos, videos and messages and share with people they don’t know.

The site has been a force behind the Occupy Wall Street protests, growing the number of demonstrations from just dozens of people in late September to thousands on Wednesday, as several local unions joined in on a march down Broadway.
Power

Submission + - Glitter Makes Better Solar Power Cells (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Sandia National Laboratories will be using a solar cell the size of a grain of sand in a larger-scale project to produce electricity this month.

Called microsystems-enabled photovoltaic (MEPV) systems, the cells have an estimated efficiency of up to 20 percent. Nielson says they could cost $1.80 per watt-peak (a measure of how many watts a panel produces when sunlight is at its peak). The current cost for a PV system is about $4 per watt-peak for a utility-scale system.

The project will involve putting thousands of them onto a one-foot square array. The cells were developed in 2009, but it took some time to find the right application, improve the consistency of performance and raise the power efficiency, said Greg Nielson, team leader on the project.

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