Interactive designer Alexia Léchot has built a delta robot with a ‘personality’ that interacts with humans through iPads. Deltu uses three moving arms, a couple Unity3d applications, and Arduino to play simple mimicking games.
Boeing CEO: We’ll Beat Musk to Mars
Boeing Co. once helped the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the race to the moon. Now the company intends to go toe-to-toe with newcomers such as billionaire Elon Musk in the next era of space exploration and commerce.
sketched out a Jetsons-like future at a conference Tuesday, envisioning a commercial space-travel market with dozens of destinations orbiting the Earth and hypersonic aircraft shuttling travelers between continents in two hours or less. And Boeing intends to be a key player in the initial push to send humans to Mars, maybe even beating Musk to his long-time goal.
What Replaces Gasoline?
Hydrogen may be winning the zero-emissions battle.
In 2016, those who still say battery-electric vehicles don’t have a future probably haven’t spent much time in California. The California Air Resources Board (CARB)’s policies, which predate those of the federal government, treat the internal-combustion engine as a chronic offender that is beyond hope for reform. For 26 years, the state has been keeping the faith in a single solution: zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), a category that includes both hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles and battery-electric vehicles.
Robots Are Developing Feelings. Will They Become “People”?
AI systems are beginning to acquire emotions. But whether that means they deserve human-type rights is the subject of a thorny debate.
When writing the screenplay for 1968’s 2001, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were confident that something resembling the sentient, humanlike HAL 9000 computer would be possible by the film’s namesake year. That’s because the leading AI experts of the time were equally confident.
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Why UPS Finds Drones Interesting
The package delivery giant is testing drones for sending medical items to rural locations.
The United Parcel Service has high hopes for drones.
In late September, the package delivery giant and a drone startup, CyPhy Works, said they had successfully tested a drone delivery, in which a flying robot delivered an asthma inhaler to a children’s summer camp on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts.
Volvo’s Silent Electric Bus Detects Pedestrians And Honks At Them
Electric vehicles come with a huge benefit: peace and quiet. But that’s just what manufacturers are afraid of.
Volvo has come up with a novel way to for its silent electric buses to let pedestrians know that they’re there: The new bus detects humans in the road ahead and honks at them, just like a human driver might.
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Introducing the World’s First Large-Scale Tidal Power Farm
Scotland unveiled the first turbine for the MeyGen tidal stream project, the world’s first large-scale tidal energy farm. The project will initially install four turbines, but will eventually have 269 turbines, enough to power 175,000 homes.
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Scientists say making babies without eggs may be a possibile
Scientists say early experiments suggest it may one day be possible to make babies without using eggs.
They have succeeded in creating healthy baby mice by tricking sperm into believing they were fertilising normal eggs.
The findings in Nature Communications, could, in the distant future, mean women can be removed from the baby-making process, say the researchers.
For now, the work helps to explain some of the details of fertilisation.
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Comma.ai will make your car semi-autonomous for $24 a month
Comma.ai, the self-driving car startup helmed by iPhone hacker George Hotz, has unveiled new details about its first commercial product, the newly named Comma One. According to a report from TechCrunch, the company claims this $999 after-market kit will allow buyers to give their cars semi-autonomous abilities on a par with Tesla’s Autopilot. The physical product will be shipping before the end of the year, says Comma.ai, and will require a $24 monthly subscription fee for access to Comma.ai’s software, as well as certain in-car features like electronic power steering. The aim, said Hotz when we spoke to him earlier this year, is to provide “ghost riding for the masses.”
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Microsoft hopes to ‘solve’ cancer within 10 years by ‘reprogramming’ diseased cells
Microsoft has vowed to “solve the problem of cancer” within a decade by using ground-breaking computer science to crack the code of diseased cells so they can be reprogrammed back to a healthy state.
1.5 Million Connected Cameras Hijacked to Make an Unprecedented Botnet
Last week, hackers forced a well-known security journalist to take down his site after hitting him for more than two days with an unprecedented flood of traffic.
That cyberattack was powered by something the internet had never seen before: an army made of more than one million hacked Internet of Things devices.
The hackers, whose identity is still unknown at this point, used not one, but two networks—commonly referred to as “botnets” in hacking lingo—made of around 980,000 and 500,000 hacked devices, mostly internet-connected cameras, according to Level 3 Communications, one of the world’s largest internet backbone providers. The attackers used all those cameras and other unsecured online devices to connect to the journalists’ website, pummeling the site with requests in an attempt to make it collapse.
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Netflix’s catalog is 50% less than a few years ago
If you’ve felt like Netflix’s US catalog has shrunk dramatically since the company started making its own shows and movies, you’re absolutely right.
Since 2012, Netflix’s selection of titles has dropped over 50%, from roughly 11,000 titles to about 5,300, according to streaming blog Exstreamist, which cites multiple former Netflix employees.
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