Group items tagged

Big Head Todd & The Monsters

"Blue Sky" was written by the band as a tribute for Discovery's return to flight mission (STS-114) in 2005. The song received the most votes in NASA's "Top 40 song contest." The top two songs were played as wakeup music for the shuttle crew. [ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ] Receiving 722,662 votes (29 percent), "Blue Sky" outdistanced the "Theme from Star Trek." The theme received 671,133 votes (27 percent) and was played to wake the crew Monday morning with a special introduction by William Shatner, the actor who played Captain James T. Kirk.

It would be scary to be chased by a military robot. It would also be scary to be chased by a cheetah. So, imagine what it would be like to have a military robotic cheetah sprinting after you. Such a scenario could one day be possible, as robotics company Boston Dynamics recently announced that America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded it a contract to design and build such a ... critter. The contract also includes the creation of an agile, bipedal humanoid robot. It's hard to say which one might ultimately be creepier.

Japanese machinery and robotics manufacturer Sakakibara-Kikai has released the first genuine bi-pedal exoskeleton - a landmark event and one which is certain to attract a lot of attention for the company. Mechanatrons and BattleMechs have long been the subject of scifi books, comics and movies with the promise of cyborg technology popularised by the smash sixties television series "The Six Million Dollar Man." We've previously seen some celebrated exoskeletons in films such as Alien (Sigourney Weaver's Ripley takes out the Queen alien in an exoskeleton), Star Wars (the AT-ST Imperial Scout Walker) and RoboCop (the ED209), but until now, the nearest thing we've seen in the metal was the 3.5 metre superhero exoskeleton Enryu from Tmsuk in Japan. Sakakibara-Kikai's Land Walker is just a tad shorter than Enryu at 3.4 metres, weighs 1000kg and shuffles along at 1.5kmh. Enryu is a lot faster than Land Walker but uses caterpillar-like tracks rather than legs to perform its chores - the strapping 3.5 metre Enryu will be called upon to rush into burning buildings, lift heavy objects and rescue people.

When it comes to technology, the sex industry is no laggard, and as robots become more human-like in their appearance and abilities, US-based company TrueCompany is poised to launch Roxxxy - the world's first sex robot - that has many more capabilities than your average sex doll. Apart from having better defined physical features than previous dolls, Roxxxy has been programmed with her own personality and her manufacturers say she can listen, talk, carry on a conversation, feel your touch and respond to it, as well as move her private areas inside when she is being "utilized" to deliver an unforgettable erotic experience. There are even plans for a male version - Rocky the Robot.

he RoboMara or robot marathon has just come to a close in Osaka Japan, with a pair of bipedal bots battling it out in surprisingly close dash to the finish. After 422 laps of a 100-meter track, two robots found themselves only inches apart as coming out of the final turn.

31-year-old Lucas Kocab called the cops around dinnertime on February 17 because there were 30 intruders in his house. The police arrived to find exactly zero intruders, but did find Kocab frantically running around and "acting paranoid." He told the cops that the intruders were intentionally blending in with chairs and trees, incognito-like, so that no one could see them. But he could see them. He knew they were there. Those 30 invisible ninjas weren't putting anything over on our brave hero.

"It's important to build robots that meet people's social expectations because we think that will make it easier for people to understand how to approach them and how to interact with them," said Andrea Thomaz, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech's College of Computing. Thomaz, along with Ph.D. student Michael Gielniak, conducted a study in which they asked how easily people can recognize what a robot is doing by watching its movements.

Formerly Azureus, cross platform, fairly stable bit torrent client

"The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that's the key. A random polling of several torrent site's downloads-ILLEGAL downloads-has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times," he wrote. Now, 100,000 downloads is a lot, especially for a band like One Soul Thrust who have just 176 Twitter followers and a single short, non-musical video on their YouTube channel which at the time of writing has 79 views. Incidentally, the video is quite nice, since they have actually taken the time out to thank a radio station for playing one of their songs. However, the band are less pleased that people are apparently sampling their music using newer methods, i.e BitTorrent. "We paid to create that album totally out of our own pockets. People think of illegal downloading not hurting anyone, but we're real people too- with real mortgages, real family to feed and real bills to pay," said lead-vocalist Salem Jones. "By downloading our album from pirate sites, people have stolen from us, our families, everyone involved in the production of our album, and their families."