The future is now
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2012-05-13
Source: crave.cnet.co.uk
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2012-05-10
SUPERMECHANICAL.BLOG: String and Stone
We’re pleased to announce that Twine will talk to the Pebble smartwatch. In Twine’s web app, you’ll be able to relay word of real-world events, like a basement flooding or a door opening, to the Pebble on your wrist. Welcome to the future!
(via slantback)
Source: supermechanical
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2012-04-18
South Korea’s robotic prison guards have arrived.
The 5-foot-tall guards come equipped with advanced 3-D cameras and microphones to detect signs of erratic or dangerous behavior — to prevent things such as suicide attempts — and can summon human allies when necessary.
(via flavorpill)
Source: theweek.com
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2012-04-16
jstn:
Hologram Tupac at Coachella. It’s definitely the future now, right?
Apparently he never even did this song live while he was, uh, living. So… motion-captured actor with Pac’s face digitally attached? (à la Winklevoss) Vocals by Dave Chappelle?
(via jacob)
Source: jstn
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2012-04-10
“Sandia researchers have invented a dart-like, self-guided bullet for small-caliber, smooth-bore firearms that could hit laser-designated targets at distances of more than a mile (about 2,000 meters). The four-inch-long bullet has actuators that steer tiny fins that guide it to its target.”
“A tiny light-emitting diode, or LED, attached to a bullet shows a bright path during a nighttime field test that proved the battery and electronics could survive the bullet’s launch. (Photo by Scott Rose)”
Sandia’s self-guided bullet path (by SandiaLabs)
Source: flickr.com
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2012-04-02
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model.
That may sound like a scene from a Harry Potter novel, but it’s the vision animating a research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May — the world’s premier robotics conference — DRL researchers will present a paper describing algorithms that could enable such “smart sand.” They also describe experiments in which they tested the algorithms on somewhat larger particles — cubes about 10 millimeters to an edge, with rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets on four of their sides.
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Self-sculpting sand - MIT News Office
We live in the future.
(via spytap)
(via kenyatta)
Source: web.mit.edu
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2012-03-14
Aerogel
Also known as frozen smoke, Aerogel is the world’s lowest density solid, clocking in at 96% air. It’s basically just a gel made from silicon, except all the liquid has been taken out and replaced with gas instead. If you hold a small piece in your hand, it’s practically impossible to either see or feel, but if you poke it, it’s like styrofoam.
Aerogel isn’t just neat, it’s useful. It supports up to 4,000 times its own weight and can apparently withstand a direct blast from two pounds of dynamite. It’s also the best insulator in existence, which is why we don’t have Aerogel jackets: it works so well that people were complaining about overheating on Mt. Everest.
Price: $35
Source: crazyasabagofhammers.com
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2011-10-02
Google and Carnegie Mellon researchers team up on cloud-powered facial recognition that would enable you to take a photo of a complete stranger and track their real identity in mere minutes
creepy
Source: The Atlantic
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2011-09-28
Nick Turse: Obama’s Arc of Instability: Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time
It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.” It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them—from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia—Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.
war as the new peace, robot drones as the new police, the future beginning to resemble some sort of amalgamation of the dystopias imagined by all our best sci-fi writers. Related: Is the CIA the worst terrorist organization the world has known since the end of World War II? and finally: Is your way of life built upon this? Is the perpetuation of it predicated on abuse/war/subjugation?
Source: hungryghoast
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2011-09-23
PICTURE: This set of paired images provided by Shinji Nishimoto of the University of California, Berkeley on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011 shows original video images, upper row, and those images reconstructed by computer from brain scans. While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011 and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. (Via 3 Quarks Daily)
Source: criminalwisdom
