If Evolution Had Taken a Different Turn, Could Dragons Have Existed?
Posted by admin in Science on 31. Jul, 2010 | 2 Comments
Group Effort Dragons don’t exist (as far as we know), but some of their individual characteristics can be found throughout the animal kingdom. It would have taken quite a few turns for natural selection to have produced dragons, but if you’re willing to stretch a bit, most classic dragon characteristics do exist in other species. [...]
Microsoft’s Terapixel Project Creates Clearest, Biggest Night Sky Map Yet, Using More Than 3,400 Telescope Photos
Posted by admin in Computers, Space on 18. Jul, 2010 | 0 Comments
Terapixel Night Sky Microsoft’s Terapixel project, part of Microsoft Research, stitched together more than 1,700 pairs of photographic plates from two powerful telescopes to create the clearest, largest night sky map yet. First they gave us a high-res tour of Mars — now Microsoft has made the largest and clearest night-sky map ever. It’s a [...]
One Man’s Giant Pacific Garbage Patch Is Another’s Beautiful Island Nation
Posted by admin in Concept on 16. Jul, 2010 | 0 Comments
Aerial Rendering of Recycled Island Recycled Island Project It’s an ambitious recycling project to be sure, but Dutch visionaries want to turn the Pacific Garbage Patch into a self-sufficient, green island paradise that draws its resources from the ocean and the garbage floating therein. “Recycled Island” would be a nearly 4,000-square-mile oasis with three primary [...]
ROILA, a New Spoken Language Designed for Robots
Posted by admin in Robots on 15. Jul, 2010 | 2 Comments
Pito loki wikute tuji! That’s ROILA for "I like fruit." These Lego Mindstorms NXT robots are learning ROILA, Robot Interaction Language, as part of a team of robots donated by Lego. The next step is to allow the NXT robots to talk in ROILA via text-to-speech synthesis. Soon, when you want your helper robot to [...]
Fast thinking flies to help build better robots
Posted by admin in Medicine, Science on 14. Jul, 2010 | 0 Comments
A fly being shown a striped LED pattern (left), and the area of the fly’s brain that processes motion As anyone who has ever tried to swat a fly will know, the little beasties have almost impossibly-fast reflexes. It turns out, in fact, that they have a response time faster than that of any computer. [...]
