It bugs me that they call these machines "robots", when not a single one of those mentioned as being in use in combat situations are at all autonomous. We shouldn't be worrying about robot ethics or robots going postal until we actually build true artificial intelligence into them.
Of course, by then, the technological singularity will likely kick in, at which point they may well kill us all and we won't be able to do anything about it. So I guess there is that.
GREAT FALLS, Montana (AP) -- Those having trouble remembering the newly assigned 11 planets, including three dwarfs, are getting help from a fourth-grader.
Maryn Smith, the winner of the National Geographic planetary mnemonic contest, has created a handy way to remember the planets and their order in distance from the sun.
Her award-winning phrase is: My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.
The 11 recognized planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris.
Ceres, Pluto and Eris are considered dwarf planets.
National Geographic Children's Books created the contest in response to the recent announcement about the planets.
The Great Falls, Montana, student's mnemonic will be published in astronomer David Aguilar's next National Geographic book, "11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System."
It also will be recorded into a song by Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter Lisa Loeb.
Both are scheduled to be released in March.
Pretty cool that the winner's submission gets made into a song. It's a pretty good mnemonic, as mnemonics go.
If you've ever wanted to be the Bionic Woman or a Terminator, new research may at least let you see with their eyes. Scientists have taken the first step toward creating digital contact lenses that can zoom in on distant objects and display useful facts.
For the first time, engineers have installed an electronic circuit and lights on a regular contact lens.
The prototype they created does not actually light up or display information. But it proves that it is possible to build an electronic lens that is safe to wear and doesn't obstruct vision.
"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington who worked on the project. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising."
The project was led by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz's now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., who presented the results this week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems in Tucson, AZ.
It was difficult for the researchers to graft the tiny electrical circuits, built from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick (for comparison, the width of a typical human hair is about 80,000 nanometers), onto the contact lenses, which are made of organic materials that are safe for the body.
The engineers tested the finished lenses on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no problems.
Eventually, the technique could yield a plethora of gadgets. Perhaps drivers and pilots could see their direction and speed projected across their view, or people could surf the Web without looking at an external device's screen. Video gamers could immerse themselves in game landscapes directly in front of their eyes. Maybe the technique could even create sight aids for visually-impaired people.
"People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about," Parviz said. "Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it's safe."
Personally, I've never wanted to be the Bionic Woman. They don't explain how you're supposed to focus your eyes on something right in friggin' front of your eyeball and somehow not have that obscure your vision. My eyes are literally watering right now at the thought of such painful constant refocusing.
I saw the thing about the dwarf star pnemonic. Ceres? What is that?
And bionic eyes are awesome. I'd love something like those, as long as I could better control how I focus them. That's a good point, it would be painful to constantly refocus like that.
Ceres is the largest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt. Eris is a far-out object (maybe an Oort Cloud reject? Hard to say) which is larger than Pluto, which is what started this whole planet vs. dwarf planet debacle. I like how the article is calling them all planets, it's a very diplomatic solution to a touchy subject.
Nagoya University researchers have succeeded in regenerating parts of dogs' jawbones by using stem cells collected from their puppies' teeth, Nagoya University Professor Minoru Ueda said Friday.
The group has formed a primary tooth bank so it can use stem cells from the teeth to conduct regenerative medicine research and apply the technique to fractures and other treatments.
In the experiment, the group used two pairs of dogs, with each pair consisting of a 2-year-old animal and one of its 2-week-old puppies. The group then collected stem cells, which have the ability to grow into other various types of cells, from the dental pulp of the puppies' primary teeth and differentiated them into bone cells by cultivating and multiplying them.
The group then mixed the differentiated cells with platelet-rich plasma, which was made by concentrating the parents' blood, and embedded the substance into holes made in the dog's alveolar bones at the bases of their teeth.
The holes were about 1 cm in diameter and 1 cm deep.
Four weeks later, new bone appeared in the holes where the substance was embedded.
Damn, I could use that. Since I got mugged and punched in the mouth (in case I didn't mention, it was on my birthday), one of my teeth has had a slight purpley/black tinge to it.
And yes, if it was on youtube I'd post the appropriate clip from the Family Guy episode "McStroke"
A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, scientists now report.
Unlike the moon-sized Death Star from Star Wars, which has to get close to a planet to blast it, this blazing spiral has the potential to burn worlds from thousands of light-years away.
"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel," said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.
The fiery pinwheel in space in question has at its heart a pair of hot, luminous stars locked in orbit with each other. As they circle one another, plumes of streaming gas driven from the surfaces of the stars collide in the intervening space, eventually becoming entangled and twisted into a whirling spiral by the orbits of the stars.
The pinwheel, named WR 104, was discovered eight years ago in the constellation Sagittarius. It rotates in a circle "every eight months, keeping precise time like a jewel in a cosmic clock," Tuthill said.
Both the massive stars in WR 104 will one day explode as supernovae. However, one of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, the last known stable phase in the life of these massive stars right before a supernova.
"Wolf-Rayet stars are regarded by astronomers as ticking bombs," Tuthill explained. The 'fuse' for this star "is now very short — to an astronomer — and it may explode any time within the next few hundred thousand years."
When the Wolf-Rayet goes supernova, "it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way," Tuthill said. "If such a 'gamma ray burst' happens, we really do not want Earth to be in the way."
Since the initial blast would travel at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival.
Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe. They can loose as much energy as our sun during its entire 10 billion year lifetime in anywhere from milliseconds to a minute or more.
The spooky thing about this pinwheel is that it appears to be a nearly perfect spiral to us, according to new images taken with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. "It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," Tuthill said.
The findings are detailed in the March 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal.
Unfortunately for us, gamma ray bursts seem to be shot right along the axis of systems. In essence, if this pinwheel ever releases a gamma ray burst, our planet might be in the firing line.
"This is the first object that we know of that might release a gamma ray burst at us," said astrophysicist Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who did not participate in this study. "And it's close enough to do some damage."
This pinwheel is about 8,000 light years away, roughly a quarter of the way to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. While this might seem far, "earlier research has suggested that a gamma ray burst — if we are unfortunate enough to be caught in the beam — could be harmful to life on Earth out to these distances," Tuthill said.
Although the pinwheel can't blast Earth apart like the Death Star from Star Wars — at least not from 8,000 light years away — it could still cause mass extinction or possibly even threaten life as we know it on our planet.
Gamma rays would not penetrate Earth's atmosphere well to burn the ground, but they would chemically damage the stratosphere. Melott estimates that if WR 104 were to hit us with a burst 10 seconds or so long, its gamma rays could deplete about 25 percent of the world's ozone layer, which protects us from damaging ultraviolet rays. In comparison, the recent human-caused thinning of the ozone layer, creating "holes" over the polar regions, have only been depletions of about 3 to 4 percent, he explained.
"So that would be very bad," Melott told SPACE.com. "You'd see extinctions. You might see food chain collapses in the oceans, might see agricultural crises with starvation."
Gamma ray bursts would also trigger smog formation that could blot out sunlight and rain down acid. However, at 8,000 light-years away, "there's probably not a large enough effect there for much of a darkening effect," Melott estimated. "It'd probably cut off 1 or 2 percent of total sunlight. It might cool the climate somewhat, but it wouldn't be a catastrophic ice age kind of thing."
One unknown about gamma ray bursts is how many particles they spew as cosmic rays.
"Normally the gamma ray bursts we see are so far away that magnetic fields out in the universe deflect any cosmic rays we might observe from them, but if a gamma ray burst was pretty close, any high-energy particles would blast right through the galaxy's magnetic field and hit us," Melott said. "Their energies would be so high, they would arrive at almost the same time as the light burst."
"The side of the Earth facing the gamma ray burst would experience something like getting irradiated by a not-too-distant nuclear explosion, and organisms on that side might see radiation sickness. And the cosmic rays would make the atmospheric effects of a gamma ray burst worse," Melott added. "But we just don't know how many cosmic rays gamma ray bursts emit, so that's a danger that's not really understood."
It remains uncertain just how wide the beams of energy that gamma ray bursts release are. However, any cone of devastation from the pinwheel would likely be several hundred square light-years wide by the time it reached Earth, Melott estimated. Tuthill told SPACE.com "it would be pretty much impossible to for anyone to get far enough to be out of the beam in a spaceship if it really is coming our way."
Still, Tuthill noted this pinwheel might not be the death of us.
"There are still plenty of uncertainties — the beam could pass harmlessly to the side if we are not exactly on the axis, and nobody is even sure if stars like WR 104 are capable of producing a fully-fledged gamma-ray burst in the first place," he explained.
Future research should focus on whether WR 104 really is pointed at Earth and on better understanding how supernovae produce gamma ray bursts.
Melott and others have speculated that gamma ray bursts might have caused mass extinctions on Earth. But when it comes to whether this pinwheel might pose a danger to us, "I would worry a lot more about global warming," Melott said.
I always like hearing about space-based events that could annihilate us. Even better if there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.
I wouldn't worry too much. When playing eight-ball on a cosmic scale, "nearly exactly" isn't close enough. Unless this gamma ray burst is large enough to blast through the entire Solar System, I suppose, but that's a pretty damn large area of the Universe. Besides, there's evidence that Earth has been irradiated with gamma rays in its distant past, and life seems to have done pretty well.
Boston Dynamics keeps working on their BigDog quadruped robot, which will probably grow to be the future AT-AT of the Pentagon. Its evolution since the last time we saw it is nothing short of mindblowing, and a bit spooky.
It looks like an actual biological quadruped. Seeing it climb through rubble, snow, jumping over obstacles like a wild goat, and saving a near-fall on iced ground at the last second (fast forward to the middle of the video) defies belief. It feels so "animal" that I almost feel bad when they hit it to demonstrate how it regains balance on its own.
The new version of the robot can now carry 340 pounds, which is almost triple the previous weight. It looks to me that that $10 million funding they got from Darpa has been put to good use.
The eerily lifelike walking combined with the incessant droning of its motors adds up to just about the creepiest thing I could imagine coming toward me. It's like it's powered by bees! Very impressive technology.
Now that you mention it, Mario, this thing could be just like in Clock Tower. You're wandering around inside this gloomy castle looking for a way out, and in the distance you start to hear this droning... and it gets louder and louder and louder, and you know this thing is coming for you... damn.
My: aaaaaaaaaaaaugh
My: i thought that thing had died
Hammy: Nope, they got like millions of dollars of funding
My: OH GOD
My: ITS EVEN CREEPIER
Hammy: check it out when it's in the snow
My: OH GOD
My: wtf
My: they kick it and it still lives
Hammy: keep watchin
My: HOW DO YOU DEFEAT THAT THING
My: OH MY GOD
My: THE SNOW AAAH
My: sdhfjh
My: SO CREEPY
My: AAAH
My: THE ICE HOLY FUCK
My: ham
My: what the fuck
My: this is terrifying.
Hammy: =D
My: oh my god.
My: It wont DIE
My: IT WONT DIE
My: oh my god
My: look at it flounder around
My: GNAWGAWGA I WILL GET YOU RAUAHFGH
My: human litheness means nothing to this thing
My: holy shit it runs
My: holy jesus christ ham
My: OH GOD THE JUMPING
My: AND THE RUNNING
My: AAAAAH YOU CANT ESCAPE
My: OH MY GOD
Comments
Of course, by then, the technological singularity will likely kick in, at which point they may well kill us all and we won't be able to do anything about it. So I guess there is that.
Pretty cool that the winner's submission gets made into a song. It's a pretty good mnemonic, as mnemonics go.
Also, these are contact lenses, which means they could very well have optics that make it appear that the information is a few metres away from you.
I saw the thing about the dwarf star pnemonic. Ceres? What is that?
And bionic eyes are awesome. I'd love something like those, as long as I could better control how I focus them. That's a good point, it would be painful to constantly refocus like that.
Sucker!
:takethat:
That's not a robot!!! Robots are completely autonomous! The correct term for this machine would be "telerobot".
Still, spraying drug dealers with a water gun is pretty awesome.
And yes, if it was on youtube I'd post the appropriate clip from the Family Guy episode "McStroke"
I always like hearing about space-based events that could annihilate us. Even better if there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Yes...but...
What if we could?
Incorrect, let's take example A here:
And example B:
And our last example:
So you see here, this proves that Gamma rays do in fact cause many problems on Earth. :tmyk:
Boston Dynamics keeps working on their BigDog quadruped robot, which will probably grow to be the future AT-AT of the Pentagon. Its evolution since the last time we saw it is nothing short of mindblowing, and a bit spooky.
It looks like an actual biological quadruped. Seeing it climb through rubble, snow, jumping over obstacles like a wild goat, and saving a near-fall on iced ground at the last second (fast forward to the middle of the video) defies belief. It feels so "animal" that I almost feel bad when they hit it to demonstrate how it regains balance on its own.
The new version of the robot can now carry 340 pounds, which is almost triple the previous weight. It looks to me that that $10 million funding they got from Darpa has been put to good use.
My: i thought that thing had died
Hammy: Nope, they got like millions of dollars of funding
My: OH GOD
My: ITS EVEN CREEPIER
Hammy: check it out when it's in the snow
My: OH GOD
My: wtf
My: they kick it and it still lives
Hammy: keep watchin
My: HOW DO YOU DEFEAT THAT THING
My: OH MY GOD
My: THE SNOW AAAH
My: sdhfjh
My: SO CREEPY
My: AAAH
My: THE ICE HOLY FUCK
My: ham
My: what the fuck
My: this is terrifying.
Hammy: =D
My: oh my god.
My: It wont DIE
My: IT WONT DIE
My: oh my god
My: look at it flounder around
My: GNAWGAWGA I WILL GET YOU RAUAHFGH
My: human litheness means nothing to this thing
My: holy shit it runs
My: holy jesus christ ham
My: OH GOD THE JUMPING
My: AND THE RUNNING
My: AAAAAH YOU CANT ESCAPE
My: OH MY GOD
I want to stick a chair on it and use it as the most awesome form of transport ever. Also machineguns.