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Remember the last time that something a friend did caught you off guard? Probably—and that's because the human brain is specially tuned to remember things that are out of the ordinary. But just how the brain treats those instances has remained uncertain. Some scientists had hypothesized that an unexpected stimulus would trigger a loop that involved both the hippocampus (responsible in part for long-term memory) and nucleus accumbens (involved in reward and pleasure) to make those memories super sticky. But without peering into these centers, researchers could not know for sure.

Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were awarded no less than $34.5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue their outstanding work in the field of prosthetic limb testing, which has seen them come up with the most advanced model yet. Their Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system is just about ready to be tested on human subjects, as it has proved successful with monkeys. Basically, the prosthetic arm is controlled by the brain through micro-arrays that are implanted (gently) in the head. They record brain signals and send the commands to the computer software that controls the arm. To be honest, it will be interesting to see just how these hair-chips are attached to the brain, but the APL say clinical tests have shown the devices to be entirely harmless. The monkeys didn’t mind them too much, at least.

You may think that all of those crazy robot competitions that we like to cover are just fun and games, but there’s a serious side. Really, there is. For reals. Mindful of this, ROBO-ONE held the second annual Humanoid Helper Project last weekend, where teleoperated human-sized robots completed (or attempted to complete) three seemingly simple tasks, including pouring liquid from a plastic bottle into a cup, carrying ping-pong balls on a tray, and a 30 minute endurance race. I don’t know about you, but the last two would be a bit of a challenge for me, and they certainly were for the robots:

No currently accepted scientific theory makes use of the notion of causality. Scientists may interpret some math equations involved in a scientific theory to denote causality—but unlike, say, “force” or “attraction”, causality is not really part of the formal language of modern science. Roughly, causality consists of “predictive implication, plus assumption of a causal mechanism.” Predictive implications are part of science: science can tell us “If X happens, then expect Y to happen with a certain probability.” But science cannot tell us whether X is the “cause” of Y, versus them both habitually being part of some overall coordinated process.

In what comes as a bit of a surprise, Fuji Soft Inc.’s new humanoid robot platform for hobbyists and researchers has been given the name PALRO (pal + robot).  Naturally we feel this name is a superb choice!  Sales to research institutions will begin on March 15th, 2010 with a general release following later in the year.  The robot combines Fuji Soft’s software prowess with an open architecture which will give developers plenty of room to experiment. PALRO stands 39.8cm (15″) tall and weighs 1.9kg (3.5 lbs), and here’s the good news: it costs 298,000 JPY ($3300 USD).  Considering PALRO has 20 DOF, a camera, 4 directional microphones, a speaker, LED arrays in its head and chest, 4 pressure sensors in each foot, 3-axis gyro sensor, an accelerometer, and an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU, it is priced very competitively.  A comparative robot kit like Vstone’s Robovie-PC for example, costs $1100 USD more and doesn’t have such a fancy exoskeleton.

I remember when, a decade ago, Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading, in the U.K., implanted a radio chip in his own arm. The feat caused quite a stir. The implant allowed him to operate doors, lights, and computers without touching anything. On a second version of the project he could even control an electric wheelchair and produce artificial sensations in his brain using the implanted chip. Warwick had become, in his own words, a cyborg. The idea of a cyborg -- a human-machine hybrid -- is common in science fiction and although the term dates back to the 1960s it still generates a lot of curiosity. I often hear people asking, When will we become cyborgs? When will humans and machines merge? Although some researchers might have specific time frames in mind, I think a better answer is: It's already happening. When we look back at the history of technology, we tend to see distinct periods -- before the PC and after the PC, before the Internet and after the Internet, and so forth -- but in reality most technological advances unfold slowly and gradually. That's particularly true with the technologies that are allowing us to modify and enhance our bodies.

Today face.com is proud to announce the opening of our platform APIs! After scanning billions of photos and tagging over 50 million users through Photo Tagger and Photo Finder, we’re moving ahead with our goal of making face recognition approachable and available to all. In this open alpha stage, we’re letting any developer tap into our face detection and face recognition tech through simple REST API calls. Whether you’re looking to build a cool photo tagging application, create personalized e-cards or campaigns, or any other sci-fi idea that comes to mind, we’re here to serve. A friend of the company, world-famous programmer, developer and founder of Technorati David Sifry got an early look at our API.  In David’s own words: “I’ve been impressed with Face.com’s API, and their plan for working closely with developers to build great applications that incorporate face detection and face recognition. Open platforms like this one will enable the creation of exciting new applications that we’ve never seen before at scale.”

Let’s face it. Most of the gear you use at work or play has multicore processors in it. Your laptop has them (the CPU itself has two cores, and the dedicated graphics processor has many more). That game console in the living room has still more, and even a high-end smartphone typically has a CPU and graphics core on a single chip. Out of sight but definitely not out of mind–particularly if they cease working–are the servers and high-throughput network routers, all which have numerous multicore processors in them. The multiple cores in these devices work in concert to provide quick responses to user queries or to manage the smooth flow of data throughout the office.

A couple things come to mind. For one, this is our last issue of "Angel" the ongoing hitting this week, but there's still one more issue of "Spike" which ties directly into Spike's reappearance in "Buffy." That hits next week, and then the week after is "Angel Yearbook" which is our final note with all these characters in the Whedonverse. I do a little two-page story that's essentially a goodbye and thank you to everybody. And what I'd leave you with here is just a huge appreciation for the fan base. These are a lot of people who haven't read comics regularly, and they are going to the shop every week and talking on message boards. That kind of passion and loyalty is really hard to get, and it's something you want to live up to. As we've done "Angel" for the last six years, the best I can hope for is that people are sad it's going away. I know fans will follow the characters to Dark Horse and their stories will continue, but the fact that there are a lot of people who have said they'll have a really hard time going on after us speaks a lot to their passion and loyalty for what we were doing. That's hugely appreciated on our part and made this really fun to do.