Parrot has setup a YouTube channel to carry all the important info about the AR-Drone. You can watch more videos of the bots as they get tested for the first time, calibrate their vertical camera, and run their batteries in the snow. This thing is just so freakin’ cool. Evidently everyone seems to think so as Parrot’s website is over capacity for traffic. We’ll keep you up to date as pricing and availability become known. Anyone who gets their hands on one of these things should let us know…and then send me their AR-Drone. Please.
American artist Tony Conrad employs a battery of amplified strings, film projectors, electric drills and assorted machinery to create a high-octane sonic assault. Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective is a live performance conceived specially for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. The musicians and their unorthodox instruments are visible to the audience only as projections cast onto giant screens. TateShots was there to capture this one-off experience.
Nathan Myhrvold is a former technology officer for Microsoft who has found his own company, Intellectual Ventures, which is involved in a number of technology development programs, including new forms of energy generation. Nathan Myhrvold also thinks that he has found a cheap and reliable way to solve global warming, which does not involve upending and perhaps destroying the world’s economy. The global warming solution proposed by Nathan Myhvold involves running a hose up to the stratosphere with balloons and using that hose to pump out enough sulfur particles to dim the sun’s heat just enough to counteract the effects of global warming. The estimated cost would be about two hundred and fifty million dollars. Nathan Myhrvold suggests that volcanoes and other natural processes already pump out sulfur into the stratosphere and that his scheme, if adopted, would increase that amount by only one percent. Nathan Myhrvold therefore thinks that there would not be any unintended consequences (like starting a new ice age.) Nathan Myhrvold’s anti global warming scheme is intriguing, even for those people (increasingly most people) who doubt that man caused global warming is actually real. The climate gate scandal involving leaked emails suggests that the data that supports the idea of man caused global warming has been doctored to some extent. Thus there is increasing resistance to the idea of arbitrarily cutting back on carbon emissions before clean energy technology is mature enough to take the place of fossil fuels, thus causing wrenching disruptions in economic growth and personal lifestyles.
Ever wish you could read minds? While the technology to correctly call your poker buddies’ bluffs still eludes us, researchers in the UK have shown that brain-to-brain communication is indeed possible. All you need is some electrodes, a computer, and an Internet connection.
Brain-computer interfacing, or BCI, isn’t new. Researchers have used computers to read signals from the brain before — DARPA is sponsoring initiatives to use such technology to develop prosthetic limbs that respond to neural commands — but Dr. Christopher James at the University of Southampton has taken BCI a step further, showing that person-to-person communication is possible through true brain-to-brain interfacing.
In James’s experiment, two people are hooked up to EEG amplifiers that measure activity in specific parts of the brain. The first person generates a series of zeros and ones, imagining moving his left are for zero and his right arm for one. The first subject’s PC recognizes those thoughts as ones and zeros and transmits them over the Web to the second subject’s PC, which flashes an LED at two different frequencies for one and zero. The EEG extracts the LED light’s information from the subject’s visual cortex and parses it back into binary code. Thus, brain-to-brain communication is achieved.
Steorn Announces Public Demonstration of Orbo Technology
Steorn is pleased to announce that public demonstrations of its controversial Orbo technology will begin today in Dublin and continue for the next six weeks.
Orbo technology, which has been in development for six years, provides free, clean and constant energy at the point of use. It can be engineered to power anything from a phone to a fridge to a car. It is controversial because it is an “over-unity” technology, meaning that it produces more energy than it consumes without the degradation of its constituent parts. This is an apparent violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The implications, not just for energy production but for society as a whole, are profound.
The public demonstrations – which will include live test and replication sessions – will take place in the Waterways Visitor Centre, Grand Canal Basin, Dublin. They begin today, 15th December 2009 and will run until 31st January 2010 (with a break between December 24th and January 4th, inclusive). The demonstrations will also be streamed live at www.steorn.com/orbo.
“This is a pivotal moment for the company,” said Sean McCarthy, Steorn CEO, “and potentially, for us as a species. There exists now an opportunity to change everything. At the end of the six week demonstration period, developers will be able to access our technology and start the process of developing Orbo technology-powered products. The Waterways demonstration is the beginning of the Orbo revolution.”
The personal computer may soon be not-so-private, with the U.S. and some European nations working on laws allowing them access to search the content held on a person’s hard drive.
Trade agency pledges to review its transparency
ITworld.com –
… requests seeking details about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a trade pact being negotiated among the US and several other countries. … http://www.itworld.com
Obama Administration Says Treaty Text Is State Secret
PC World –
The USTR under Obama seems to be taking the same position about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as it did under former President George Bush, … http://www.pcworld.com
Obama administration won’t release secret ACTA docs either Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com
Obama Administration Claims Copyright Treaty Involves State Secrets?!? Techdirt http://www.techdirt.com
US Wrestles With Transparency As Europeans Urge Release Of ACTA Texts
Intellectual Property Watch –
“There’sa lot of opportunity for change in the way that things have gone on ACTA and on trade policy,” he added, especially with new USTR Ron Kirk now sworn … http://www.ip-watch.org
Secret treaty could change digital rights
smudailycampus.com –
Known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty is obviously not secret in name or existence, but in content. … http://www.smudailycampus.com
Ars TechnicaEuropean Parliament to EU: Turn over ACTA docs!
Ars Technica –
… documents related to the ongoing international negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) publicly available,” says the amendment. …
European parliament votes for greater ACTA transparency Georgia Straight http://arstechnica.com
A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference.
The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices.
Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.
“There is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or feet of where there is very inexpensive power,” he said.
Trillions of dollars, he said, had also been invested building an infrastructure of wires “to get power from where it is created to where it is used.”
1. Magnetic coil (Antenna A) is housed in a box and can be set in wall or ceiling.
2. Antenna A, powered by mains, resonates at a specific frequency.
3. Electromagnetic waves transmitted through the air.
4. Second magnetic coil (Antenna B) fitted in laptop/TV etc resonates at same frequency as first coil and absorbs energy.
12 June 2009, has federation completed the “Operation V” !? Now mobile suit Gundam stands up in Tokyo Japan. It is 18 meters tall, real 1/1 scale model for GUNDAM 30th anniversary.
Aurora Flight Sciences video of the first flight of its Excalibur experimental vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aircraft. The 13ft-long UAV is powered by a tilting jet engine and three battery-powered lift fans. The aircraft made its first hover flight, lasting just under 2min, at Aberdeen proving Gorund in maryland on June 24. Excalibur is a proof-of-principle testbed for a 400kt VTOL unmanned combat aircraft. (This is a slightly different version of the video previously uploaded – my apologies.) For more info on Excalibur, visit www.aviationweek.com
The hotly tipped future talent of the minute is Federico Alvarez, a 30 year old Uruguyan behind the YouTube smash sci-fi short called Panic Attack – which you can see below the break. So far, Alvarez seems to be following a very similar racing line to the one Neill Blomkamp has roared around over the last few years.
Whereas Blomkamp’s breakthrough short was Alive in Joburg, a shaky-cam alien invasion picture set in South Africa, Alvarez has now made his crash landing with Panic Attack… a shaky-cam alien invasion picture set in Uruguay. The latter features rather more giant robots, however, which you may see as a very good thing.
Blomkamp’s protector/mentor in making the transition to feature length filmmaking was Peter Jackson, while Alvarez has in turn been taken under the wing of Sam Raimi. Apparently the two have already spoken at length and the expectation is that Raimi will help Alvarez make the transition to feature filmmaking without too much interference from suits and money men.
At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the “Sixth Sense” wearable tech, and “Lost” producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery.
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10
Mobilizy, the company from Salzburg, that brought us one of the world’s first Augmented Reality browsers, Wikitude, just released a major upgrade which crosses that significant line between technology and its effects in the ‘real’ world. Their idea was to build a virtual memorial in remembrance of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. The result will be the ability to point their Android and iPhone application at the place where the World Trade Center once stood and witness a 3D rendering of the Twin Towers, once more.
This may well appear at first to be an unwise, and possibly disrespectful, idea. However, Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, one of Wikitude’s founders, was actually in New York during the attacks. He says the idea of reviving the World Trade Center within the Wikitude World Browser 3D was a personal one. He obviously feels it’s going to be received as a respectful remembrance, not as a slight on the memory of those who died.
The effect was made possible by upgrading Wikitude’s Android App to 3D and it’s newly released iPhone app, out today (here from iTunes in the US only). From now on anyone in New York, using an AR enabled mobile phone, has the ability to see a virtual World Trade Center through the phone’s display. Wikitude demo shows how a “Memorial of light” at Ground Zero could be the next-generation of ‘virtual’ memorials. View a full video demonstration of this after the jump.
This robot steers clear of obstacles thanks to a pile of rat brain cells.
Footage courtesy Reading University
What happens when a man is merged with a computer or a robot? This is the question that Professor Kevin Warwick and his team at the department of Cybernetics, University of Reading in the UK have been trying to answer for a number of years.
There are many ways to look at this problem. There is the longer term prospect of freeing the mind from the limitations of the brain by uploading it in digital form, potentially onto a computer and/or robotic substrate (see the h+ interview with Dr. Bruce Katz, Will We Eventually Upload Our Minds?). There is also a shorter term prospect at a much more limited scale — a robot controlled by human brain cells could soon be wandering around Professor Warwick’s UK labs.
Professor Warwick (who incidentally has a device implanted in his left arm that enables his nervous system to be connected to a computer) and his colleague Ben Whalley from the School of Pharmacy recently created a robot that is controlled by cultured rat neurons. The next step in their research is to use a human neuron cell line, a type of “wetware.”
As reported in New Scientist, some 300,000 rat neurons grown in a nutrient broth and producing spikes of electrical activity were connected to the output of a small robot’s distance sensors. The neurons proved capable of steering the robot around an enclosure. Here’s the New Scientist video of the robot courtesy of the University of Reading:
This research is the first step in examining how memories create neurological structures in the brain, and how the brain stores specific pieces of data. The researchers hope that this will lead to a better understanding of diseases and disorders that affect the brain such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke, and brain injury.
Warwick comments, “This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorizes its experiences. This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine.”
Warwick, Whalley, and colleagues don’t need specific ethical approval from the University or the UK government.to move forward with the human neuron cell line as soon as they are ready. The cultures are available on the open market and “the ethical side of sourcing is done by the company from whom they are purchased,” according to Whalley.
The use of the term “wetware” has been around since the mid-1950s. In the recent academic literature, it refers to cells (that are “wet”) built out of molecular circuits that perform logical operations, as electronic devices do, but with unique properties. Mathematician and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker used the term as the title of his 1988 cyberpunk novel, and later defined it in the book Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge (edited by some fellow named R.U. Sirius) as the “physical DNA in a cell.” Rucker now refers to physical DNA in a 2007 blog entry as “lower level” wetware, with higher-level wetware defined as, “The arrangement of a body’s cells –- and the all-important tangling of the cortical neurons…”
According to a University of Reading press release, the “wetware” biological brain used by the UK robot is made up of cultured neurons that are placed onto a multi-electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes that pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells.
The biologically-generated signals drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, the electrodes generate signals to stimulate the brain. In response, the brain’s output is used to drive the wheels of the robot left and right so that it avoids hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer –- its sole means of control is from its own brain. Dr. Whalley comments, “One of the fundamental questions that scientists are facing today is how we link the activity of individual neurons with the complex behaviors that we see in whole organisms. This project gives us a really unique opportunity to look at something which may exhibit complex behaviors, but still remain closely tied to the activity of individual neurons. Hopefully we can use that to go some of the way to answer some of these very fundamental questions.”
While this isn’t exactly merging a man with a computer, it is merging some significant human carbon-based “wetware” (in Rucker’s 2007 definition of the term) with some sophisticated silicon-based circuitry in robotic form. Does this mean that whole brain implants into cyborg bodies are in our future
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The use of the term “wetware” has been around since the mid-1950s. In the recent academic literature, it refers to cells (that are “wet”) built out of molecular circuits that perform logical operations, as electronic devices do, but with unique properties. Mathematician and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker used the term as the title of his 1988 cyberpunk novel, and later defined it in the book Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge (edited by some fellow named R.U. Sirius) as the “physical DNA in a cell.” Rucker now refers to physical DNA in a 2007 blog entry as “lower level” wetware, with higher-level wetware defined as, “The arrangement of a body’s cells –- and the all-important tangling of the cortical neurons…”