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“The germ of Stargate Universe began as a movie by Robert Cooper, as do many of our ideas,” Wright told the magazine. “We always come up with a movie, pitch it to MGM, and they say, ‘Terrific, let’s make it a TV show.’  When we were spinning the film idea, we knew deep down that Universe was really a series because it had so much scope.”

Dynamite Entertainment is set to launch its new series of Stargate comic books in 2010, starting with Vala Mal Doran #1.  The limited series is set in the SG-1 universe and features the sexy thief played on television by Claudia Black. Series writer Brandon Jerwa talks about the story in a new interview with Comic Book Resources. Jerwa, known for his work on G.I. Joe, Highlander and Battlestar Galactica, revealed that the story will feature a “heist” for which Vala assembles an Ocean’s 11-style group of cohorts. “Vala’s working with a crew of science fiction ne’er-do-wells that are all new to the franchise,” Jerwa told the site. “I’m going to keep the hard details under wraps for now, but let me give you some glimpses into my madness: Vala’s crew has a weirdo alien pilot, an officious robot, a tiger warrior, a midget assassin and a hot chick with a space monkey.” Look for the SG-1 team to be involved too, of course — including Jack O’Neill.

Walking, swallowing, respiration and many other key functions in humans and other animals are controlled by Central Pattern Generators (CPGs). In essence, CPGs are small, autonomous neural networks that produce rhythmic outputs, usually found in animal's spinal cords rather than their brains. Their relative simplicity and obvious success in biological systems has led to some success in using CPGs in robotics. However, current systems are restricted to very simple CPGs (e.g., restricted to a single walking gait). A recent breakthrough at the BCCN at the University of Göttingen, Germany has now allowed to achieve 11 basic behavioral patterns (various gaits, orienting, taxis, self-protection) from a single CPG, closing in on the 10–20 different basic behavioral patterns found in a typical cockroach. The trick: Work with a chaotic, rather than a stable periodic CPG regime. For more on CPGs, listen to the latest episode of the Robots podcast on Chaos Control, which interviews Poramate Manoonpong, one of the lead researchers in Göttingen, and Alex Pitti from the University of Tokyo who uses chaos controllers that can synchronize to the dynamics of the body they are controlling.

The wait is almost over!  Exactly four months after “Justice” left us hanging, Stargate Universe fans are eagerly anticipating the show’s return to Syfy Channel in the U.S. this Friday at 9 p.m. (8 Central).  But many want to know:  Why was the mid-season break so long? We asked Stargate fans via Twitter what their ideal length would be for the mid-season break, and got a variety of responses.  But we also heard straight from Syfy’s Craig Engler, Senior V.P. of Syfy Digital, who said, “No mid-season break could mean [32] weeks or more between full seasons.  Basically, every schedule choice has a trade-off. … We split seasons so there are not huge gaps between full seasons.”

The portal is about in and around the world of entertainment. Also information links to other places that cater for event listings and news from the demoscene. Demo groups and music artists have a contributional aspect to the making of this inspirational website. Some links will open a new browser window. Enjoy..sjt

Until now you can have big elaborate robots or very small microbots but it is very difficult to have both. A blog post from New Scientist (where this video is from) points out the research on microbots, very small machines that will move, navigate and perform simple tasks. The ability to remotely power a microbot, thus eliminating the need for onboard battery or fuel, is already proven and one of the methods is the application of an AC field to a liquid where the robot is located. This microbot is essentially a diode, a one-way electric conductor. The different electric charges at its ends force the neighboring ions to move thus creating a small thrust that propels the bot. The team of Rachita Sharma and Orlin Velev from North Carolina State University developed a method where a controlled application of an additional DC field changes the ion distribution around the microbot and this time the ion field creates a torque that rotates the microbot. The DC field is applied until the completion of a 180-degree turn. Then the microbot moves again, now in the opposite direction. It is only 1.3mm long and as claimed by other scientists like Vesselin Paunov from the University of Hull, UK this arrangement can be further scaled down where it can be useful for diagnostic and localized drug supply applications.

aims at developing swarms of flying robots that can be deployed in disaster areas to rapidly create communication networks for rescuers. Flying robots are interesting for such applications because they are fast, can easily overcome difficult terrain, and benefit from line-of-sight communication.

In traditional short-haul microwave transmission (that is, line-of-sight microwave transmissions operating in the 18 GHz and 23 GHz radio bands),RF design engineers typically are concerned with signal aspects such as fade margins, signal reflections, multipath signals, and so forth. Like an accountant seeking to balance a financial spreadsheet, an RF design engineer normally creates an RF budget table, expressed in decibels (dB), in order to establish a wireless design. Aspects like transmit power and antenna gain are registered in the assets (or plus) column, and free space attenuation, antenna alignment, and atmospheric losses are noted in the liabilities (or minus) column. The goal is to achieve a positive net signal strength adequate to support the wireless path(s) called for in the design.

The R programming language was featured about a year ago in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources for people who want to get started with R.   The first place to start is the R Project web site at http://www.r-project.org/. Next, you'll actually want to install R itself. There are several options, depending on your environment.

bowl and pairing off to come up with a way to create and commercialise sensors and switches that generate their own power. The idea is that the parts will make external power sources redundant - because they can convert energy from body heat, light and vibrations straight into electricity. Self powered electronics have already sporadically been used in technology like wall-mount remote control units for air conditioners, says Nikkei, but existing parts are bulky and cost a couple thousand yen a piece. 3,000 yen is about $35 - which means they're not the best bet, financially, yet.

Rube Goldberg couldn’t have designed a more elegant confluence of convoluted causal relationships.  Start analyzing the perplexing paradox of the FPGA synthesis market and each link of the chain reveals a bizarre force vector that eventually doubles back onto itself into an unlikely equilibrium that miraculously has held stable for a full decade despite disruptive forces of epic proportions. For over a decade now, Synplify has navigated these waters and has continued to survive and thrive through the unlikeliest of conditions.  Now in the hands of EDA giant Synopsys, the Synplify family of FPGA synthesis tools continues to evolve - with a major upgrade this fall.  When you put a digital design into an FPGA, there are two technologies that determine whether your design fits or doesn’t fit, whether it meets your timing constraints or does not, whether the power consumption will be within your limits (or those of the FPGA), or whether it fails completely, leaving your project at the mercy of major mulligans.   Those two technologies are synthesis and place-and-route. 

platform :   Linux   Windows   MacOSX Intel type :   diskmag release date : august 2010 release party : Evoke 2010

As many long time readers know, I am an enthusiast of the F# programming language.  I make no apologies for the fact that, if you are developing software on the .NET platform, F# is one of the better choices you can make for numerous reasons.  It is one of the reasons I proudly contributed as a co-author to the book, Professional F# 2.0, which is being published by Wrox in October. Some of the oft cited benefits of F# are that, to distill them quickly, it is good at doing intensely mathematical operations, it is built for parallelism, and it is good at helping define domain specific languages.  Those benefits are so often cited by speakers on the F# speaker circuit that they pretty much seem cliche to me at this point (note, yours truly is proud to call himself a member of said circuit, and often gives this talk!)  As great as these features are, there are a couple features, that in my more mundane F# experiences, seem to stand out as things that “save my ass”, for lack of a better phrase, more often than not.

INTEL HELD AN EVENT in London last night to talk up its Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. To highlight the ceaseless march of technology and Chipzilla's own adherence to its beloved Moore's Law, the company was showcasing technology from the last 20 years as well as having a few demos about things we may expect to see in the future. Among these was this demonstration about the sorts of applications, such as advanced 3D rendering, that become feasible when a single processor can have 48 or more cores. µ