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A "four-wheel drive car" less than one billionth the length of an average SUV has been built and operated by researchers in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

"Molecular machines are common in nature. Motor proteins, for example, can move along a surface to transport molecular-sized cargo and are often used to build structures within living cells. " reminds me of the fantastic movie on what happens inside a cell ...

For all the AI guys (Christos, Marek, Ed, Markus and co ...) and of course Luiz, Sante ... You will like this one :-)

Quite a lot of blabla, some usual misconceptions (like QT the source of randomness in nature), but a -- from my point of view -- very true (though in the text somehow hidden) conclusion: Free will, creativity etc. from the point of view of fundamental physics are just randomness! Many physicists won't like this conclusion, though, and in this respect also the title is rather misleading!

you will love this one ...

Hilarious! Perhaps I should join Facebook and Twitter just to commit suicide afterwards!!

Has this not been underway for quite some time now? Not sure if this 'new era' is coming any day soon. Thoughts?

If they want to give the computers "senses" they should also go ahead and give them a body slightly taller than humans ...and guns. So once they reach a critical level of consciousness they can really go to town... http://0-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/tg/image/1385/54/1385549501025.jpg

Neural networks!!! However, indeed, "senses" will not make any sense towards human-like computing without bodies that physically interact with the world. That's where most of these things are going wrong. Perception and cognition are for action. Without action coming from the machine side all these ideas simply fail.

The enormous solar plant-jointly owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Google-opened for business today ... well yesterday, but still impressive!

impressive pictures - looking at the 2nd to last and 4th to last one, I am wondering how this distributed individually control of the mirrors works - and idea?

Machine learning obviously. Most likely neural networks :P On the other hand: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-is-killing-birds-meltin-1525107821

As people point out in the comments: a bit fake. But nevertheless a good production and a definitely cool advertisement for KUKA! I enjoyed it!

yeah check out the making of, it's a nice movie and what would robotics movies be without movie magic :) somewhere they mentioned a vision system, which I think based on the making-of video they haven't really used for the video shoot

"In the future, if you need a new smartphone case, you might not have to drive to the store and purchase one that comes wrapped in even more plastic." Actually I was thinking more of printing whatever LEGO blocks you might need for a certain home project

Kirobo, a knee-high talking robot with red boots and a black and white body, has blasted off from Japan for the International Space Station to test how machines can help astronauts with their work.

Reminds me of the Robotic Servant from our brainstorm session :)

Funny idea.. Maybe we should install it on the coke machine downstairs? :)

a point called plasma/fuel break-even is reached where the energy released is higher than the power absorbed by the pellet. Of course, to produce 192 high power lasers does also have an efficiency. Thats why 'machine break-even' or even 'grid break-even' is more important and still quite a long way off. It does show that laser fusion is catching up quickly, although with serious bumps along the road.

Known technically as a surface plasmon polariton (SPP) wave, the effect will allow the nano-antennas to operate at the low end of the terahertz frequency range, between 0.1 and 10 terahertz - instead of at 150 terahertz With this antenna, we can cut the frequency by two orders of magnitude and cut the power needs by four orders of magnitude," said Jornet. "Using this antenna, we believe the energy-harvesting techniques developed by Dr. Wang would give us enough power to create a communications link between nanomachines." As always, graphene seems to be the answer to anything, but steady progress is being made although one needs to find out first an easy method of generating high quality graphene layers (btw that is also one of the reasons to do the supercapacitor study...)

Well plasmonics is also the solution to everything it seems...

As far as I'm concerned, a crucial component of every life support system...

Interesting historical perspective. Progress since the late '80 really seems to be fairly slow. ?: Do we need to wait for the singularity until speech recognition works without flaws?

"I thought I would give it a try on my android sexy seems to work pretty well and I'm speaking more less at normal speed" Actually I was speaking as fast as I could because it was for the google search input - if you make a pause it will think you finished your input and start the query. Also you might notice that Android thinks it is "android sexy" - this was meant to be "on my Android. THIS seems to work...". Still it is not too bad - maybe in a year or two they have it working. Of course it might also be that I just use the word "sexy" randomly... :-\

The problem is that we don't yet understand how speech in humans actually works. As long as we merely build either inference or statistical language models we'll never get perfect speech recognition. A lot of recognition in humans has a predictive/expectational basis to it that stems from our understanding of higher lvl concepts and context awareness. Sadly I suspect that as long as machines remain unembodied in their perceptual abilities their ability to either properly recognize sounds/speech or objects and other features will never reach perfection.

TED talks are so random even recurrent neural networks can do it

:D this is so good !!

my favourite sentence: "or to be able to solve the data in an astronaut a spider"

Dissolving in sodium hydroxide vs freeze-drying... which one for you?

Be careful, the article is written by the company who did the migration to Ubuntu. Here is a comment by a police guy from IT (in french...). In brief he says that tyhe migration was not a problem for most of the people; exepc for some probleme with access. But it did cost money ! and the saving was not the main argument. "Personnellement concerné par la news qui n'en est pas une, je peux vous assurer que le message de Canonical est surtout commercial... Le choix d'Ubuntu est dû à son hégémonie et le fait que ce soit basé sur du Debian qui est considéré comme très stable. La distrib est d'une maintenance plus aisée que la plupart de celles qui ont été testées. "4500 postes" veut dire "4500 unités de gendarmerie" donc dans les brigades que vous connaissez... Pour ce qui est d'OpenOffice, le passage s'est fait assez tranquillement sauf pour les applis Access qui ont eu un peu de mal à passer sur le module Base...La plupart ont été reprise au sein d'applis php/mysql ou d'applis centralisées... Aujourd'hui, les gendarmes qui je le rappelle ne sont pas informaticiens mais vivent pour vous (au sens le plus strict je vous l'assure) utilisent donc firefox/thunderbird et oppenoffice en clients lourds, le reste étant des applis sur l'intranet ou "invisibles" pour l'utilisateur. Le passage à Ubuntu ne gène en rien dans l'utilisation car le trio précédemment cité est déjà connu et maîtrisé par nombre de mes collègues. Je ne suis pas censé m'exprimer en lieu et place de mes supérieurs mais à titre personnel, le choix d'Ubuntu est un choix intelligent car c'est une distribution avec une prise en main très accessible et avec une maintenance vraiment aisée pour les spécialistes informatiques dont je fais partie...Il ne faut pas oublier qu'une distribution plus élitiste aurait été maîtrisée par moins de monde et donc la maintenance aurait été plus coûteuse... Donc aujourd'hui nous "maîtrisons" cette part de notre infrastructure et la trans

Lotus Notes doesn't run on Linux anyway...

Might be of some interest to Christos?

funny how a curve can change (pre)History !

Reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/687/ :)

xkcd must be the new calvin and hobbes, where luzi usually has an example for any given situation