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Moonshoe
Blue Mantis
Registered: 05/28/04
Posts: 27,202
Loc: Iceland
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Re: The Emerging Future News Thread [Re: Does]
#19717725 - 03/19/14 09:43 AM (10 years, 12 days ago) |
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10 Robots to Watch in 2014
(Click the link for pictures)
Think of it as Fashion Week for robots. As robots continue their journey towards more intelligent, human-like behavior, they show off their individual sense of style. Here are 10 head-turning robots that do everything from entertain, to vacuum, from propel a paralyzed human, to navigating places where no humans would dare to tread.
Comedic, heart-wrenching, utilitarian and filled with attitude, these robots will change the way we do just about everything.
QB from AnyBots QB from AnyBots is a remotely controlled, self-balancing, virtual presence robot. It'll represent you and let you 'go' places and interact when you can't physically attend. For example, a child under medical treatment could use QB to attend classes. Or a manager could inspect a factory from a remote office. 2014-01-30-AnyBotsQBcopy.jpg
Unbounded Robotics UBR-1 is a working man's robot. It's designed to help with everyday tasks in factories, warehouses, supermarkets and even elder-care facilities. It's a great fetcher and placer. 2014-01-30-UnboundedRobotisUBR1.jpg
Keecker Keecker is a lifestyle robot, working in your home to provide entertainment and communications. With Keecker, you can use its built-in projector to watch a movie (or surf the web) on any nearby wall, or just immerse yourself in its music offerings. A roving projector/jukebox! 2014-01-30-Keecker.jpg
Ekso Bionics Ekso is a bionic exoskeleton that can enable a paralyzed person to walk. Here, it's being used by Paul Thacker, an X Games record holder who was paralyzed from the chest down in an accident. With Ekso, Paul can stand and has regained the ability to walk. Bionics like these are still in their nascent stage but will continue to play a growing part in rehabilitative therapies. 2014-01-30-EksoBionicscopy.jpg
Orbotix The Orbotix Sphero 2.0 is a rolling robot ball, designed for play. Controlled by your mobile device, it features downloadable games, and can navigate an obstacle course, or a race course. You can even take it for a swim and they play with each other. 2014-01-30-OrbotixSphero.jpg
Revolve Robotics KUBI (which means neck in Japanese) is robotics applied to the conference room. With KUBI, people not in the room, gain a presence. With these remotely controlled iPads on a stick, they can look around, speak, and interact with the local participants in a natural and engaging manner. 2014-01-30-RevolvKubi.jpg
Origami Robotics Romibo is a remotely controlled, self-balancing social robot designed for learning and sharing. With mobility, speech, gesture and face-tracking, Romibo has what it takes to bring friendship and companionship year round. Besides, who wouldn't love a furry robot? 2014-01-30-OrigamiRoombio.jpg
Double Robotics Double is a remotely controlled teleconference robot. Conversations can happen anytime, anywhere, across town or across the world. Double can be your double when you can't be there in person. And it has no problem traveling from room to room or meeting to meeting. 2014-01-30-DoubleRobotics.jpg
Neato The Neato is "the world's most evolved robot vacuum." It vacuums any floor surface and any type of dirt, mapping the best course, never repeating its steps and avoiding obstacles in its path. Power, intelligence, and even perhaps charisma, applied to cleaning your floors. 2014-01-30-Neato.jpg
Parrot The Parrot Mini Drone and Jumping Sumo are fun robots. They've made robotics an affordable toy to delight and amaze. The new Mini Drone flies, and has programmed acrobatic moves that can be controlled from your smart device. The Jumping Sumo, also controlled by smartphone, jumps as high as two-and-a-half feet, and does mean right angle turns at high speeds. 2014-01-30-parrotmimidrone.jpg
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-raskin/ten-robots-to-watch-in-2014_b_4696766.html
-------------------- Everything I post is fiction.
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Corporal Kielbasa
Registered: 05/29/04
Posts: 17,235
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Re: The Emerging Future News Thread [Re: Moonshoe]
#19725645 - 03/20/14 08:30 PM (10 years, 10 days ago) |
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Thermal vision
"ANN ARBOR—The first room-temperature light detector that can sense the full infrared spectrum has the potential to put heat vision technology into a contact lens.
Unlike comparable mid- and far-infrared detectors currently on the market, the detector developed by University of Michigan engineering researchers doesn't need bulky cooling equipment to work.
"We can make the entire design super-thin," said Zhaohui Zhong, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "It can be stacked on a contact lens or integrated with a cell phone."
Infrared light starts at wavelengths just longer than those of visible red light and stretches to wavelengths up to a millimeter long. Infrared vision may be best known for spotting people and animals in the dark and heat leaks in houses, but it can also help doctors monitor blood flow, identify chemicals in the environment and allow art historians to see Paul Gauguin's sketches under layers of paint.
Unlike the visible spectrum, which conventional cameras capture with a single chip, infrared imaging requires a combination of technologies to see near-, mid- and far-infrared radiation all at once. Still more challenging, the mid-infrared and far-infrared sensors typically need to be at very cold temperatures.
Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms, could sense the whole infrared spectrum—plus visible and ultraviolet light. But until now, it hasn't been viable for infrared detection because it can't capture enough light to generate a detectable electrical signal. With one-atom thickness, it only absorbs about 2.3 percent of the light that hits it. If the light can't produce an electrical signal, graphene can't be used as a sensor.
"The challenge for the current generation of graphene-based detectors is that their sensitivity is typically very poor," Zhong said. "It's a hundred to a thousand times lower than what a commercial device would require."
To overcome that hurdle, Zhong and Ted Norris, the Gerard A. Mourou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, worked with graduate students to design a new way of generating the electrical signal. Rather than trying to directly measure the electrons that are freed when light hits the graphene, they amplified the signal by looking instead at how the light-induced electrical charges in the graphene affect a nearby current.
"Our work pioneered a new way to detect light," Zhong said. "We envision that people will be able to adopt this same mechanism in other material and device platforms."
To make the device, they put an insulating barrier layer between two graphene sheets. The bottom layer had a current running through it. When light hit the top layer, it freed electrons, creating positively charged holes. Then, the electrons used a quantum mechanical trick to slip through the barrier and into the bottom layer of graphene.
The positively charged holes, left behind in the top layer, produced an electric field that affected the flow of electricity through the bottom layer. By measuring the change in current, the team could deduce the brightness of the light hitting the graphene. The new approach allowed the sensitivity of a room-temperature graphene device to compete with that of cooled mid-infrared detectors for the first time.
The device is already smaller than a pinky nail and is easily scaled down. Zhong suggests arrays of them as infrared cameras.
"If we integrate it with a contact lens or other wearable electronics, it expands your vision," Zhong said. "It provides you another way of interacting with your environment."
While full-spectrum infrared detection is likely to find application in military and scientific technologies, the question for the general tech market may soon be, "Do we want to see in infrared?"
The device is described in a paper titled "Graphene photodetectors with ultra-broadband and high responsivity at room temperature," which appears online in Nature Nanotechnology.
Source: University of Michigan"
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Moonshoe
Blue Mantis
Registered: 05/28/04
Posts: 27,202
Loc: Iceland
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Re: The Emerging Future News Thread [Re: Tmethyl] 1
#20447416 - 08/20/14 09:25 AM (9 years, 7 months ago) |
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PLANKTON found in space: Sea creatures are discovered living on the exterior of the ISS
Traces of plankton and other microorganisms have been found living on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS), according to Russian space officials.
They claim the plankton were not carried there at launch – but are thought to have been blown there by air currents on Earth.
Incredibly, the tiny organisms were found to be able to survive in the vacuum of space despite the freezing temperatures, lack of oxygen and cosmic radiation.
The discovery was made during a routine spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts Olek Artemyev and Alexander Skvortsov, who were launching nanosatellites into space.
They used wipes to polish the surface of windows - also known as illuminators - on the Russian segment of the ISS and later found the presence of plankton and other microorganisms using ‘high-precision equipment’.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2728979/Never-mind-alien-life-SEA-PLANKTON-space-Creatures-living-surface-ISS-officials-say.html#ixzz3AsI54iZh
-------------------- Everything I post is fiction.
Edited by Moonshoe (08/21/14 08:12 AM)
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Tmethyl
Smear in the shale
Registered: 07/16/12
Posts: 16,431
Loc: Florida
Last seen: 1 year, 6 months
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Re: The Emerging Future News Thread [Re: Moonshoe]
#20447480 - 08/20/14 09:48 AM (9 years, 7 months ago) |
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I knew that fungal spores could survive space, but plankton are tiny creatures!
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Moonlightblue
Registered: 12/07/12
Posts: 455
Last seen: 1 month, 24 days
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Re: The Emerging Future News Thread [Re: Tmethyl]
#20447507 - 08/20/14 09:58 AM (9 years, 7 months ago) |
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Maybe plankton came from space But anyway that's awesome
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Moonshoe
Blue Mantis
Registered: 05/28/04
Posts: 27,202
Loc: Iceland
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Signs of Earth Changes July and August 2014
Giant Cracks Appearing in the Earth
-------------------- Everything I post is fiction.
Edited by Moonshoe (08/21/14 08:03 AM)
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Moonshoe
Blue Mantis
Registered: 05/28/04
Posts: 27,202
Loc: Iceland
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Re: The Emerging Future News Thread [Re: Tmethyl]
#20574419 - 09/16/14 08:56 AM (9 years, 6 months ago) |
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The $1 Million Race For The Cure To End Aging
The hypothesis is so absurd it seems as though it popped right off the pages of a science-fiction novel. Some scientists in Palo Alto are offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can end aging. “Based on the rapid rate of biomedical breakthroughs, we believe the question is not if we can crack the aging code, but when will it happen,” says director of the Palo Alto Longevity Prize Keith Powers.
It’s a fantastical idea: curing the one thing we will all surely die of if nothing else gets us before that. I sat down with Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation and co-author of “Ending Aging,” to discuss this very topic a few days back. According to him, ending aging comes with the promise to not just stop the hands of time, but to actually reverse the clock. We could, according to him, actually choose the age we’d like to exist at for the rest of our (unnatural?) lives. But we are far off from possibly seeing this happen in our lifetime, says de Grey. “With sufficient funding we have a 50/50 chance to getting this all working within the next 25 years, but it could also happen in the next 100,” he says.
If you ask Ray Kurzweil, life extension expert, futurist and part-time adviser to Google’s somewhat stealth Calico project, we’re actually tip-toeing upon the cusp of living forever. “We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy,” he told the New York Times in early 2013. He also wrote in the book he co-authored with Terry Grossman, M.D., that “Immortality is within our grasp.” That’s a bit optimistic to de Grey (the two are good friends), but he’s not surprised this prize is coming out of Silicon Valley. “Things are changing here first. We have a high density of visionaries who like to think high.”
And he believes much of what Kurzweil says is true with the right funding. “Give me large amounts of money to get the research to happen faster,” says de Grey. He then points out that Google’s Calico funds are virtually unlimited. “Kurzweil asked Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] how much he had to work with and they said to let him know when he runs out of money and they’ll send more,” de Grey tells me.
Whether it’s 15, 25 or even 100 years off, we need to spur a revolution in aging research, according to Joon Yun, one of the sponsors of the prize. “The aim of the prize is to catalyze that revolution,” says Yun. His (very well-connected) nanny actually came up with the initial idea. She just happens to be an acquaintance of Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google’s Eric Schmidt. But it was the passing of Yun’s 68-year-old father-in-law and some conversations with his friends that got him thinking about how to take on aging as a whole.
The Palo Alto Prize is also working with a number of angel investors, venture capital firms, corporate venture arms, institutions and private foundations within Silicon Valley to create health-related incentive prize competitions in the future. This first $1 million prize comes from Yun’s own pockets.
The initial prize will be divided into two $500,000 awards. Half a million dollars will go to the first team to demonstrate that it can restore heart rate variability (HRV) to that of a young adult. The other half of the $1 million will be awarded to the first team that can extend lifespan by 50 percent. So far 11 teams from all over the world have signed up for the challenge.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/15/the-1-million-race-for-the-cure-to-end-aging/
-------------------- Everything I post is fiction.
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Gilgamesh18
Herbivore Man
Registered: 03/01/12
Posts: 11,671
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Re: The Emerging Future News Thread [Re: Moonshoe]
#20574476 - 09/16/14 09:14 AM (9 years, 6 months ago) |
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I'm fine with dying at 50 life expectancies are already to high. With more increases already strained social programs for retirement may be stretched to the breaking point.
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