Nov 25, 2010

Submarines fly

GUILLEMOTS and gannets do it. Cormorants and kingfishers do it. Even the tiny insect-eating dipper does it. And if a plan by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) succeeds, a remarkable airplane may one day do it too: plunge beneath the waves to stalk its prey, before re-emerging to fly home.The DARPA plan, announced in October 2008, calls for a stealthy aircraft that can fly low over the sea until it nears its target, which could be an enemy ship, or a coastal site such as a port. It will then alight on the water and transform itself into a submarine that will cruise under water to within striking distance, all without...

Nov 16, 2010

First piloted solar

A solar powered aircraft masterminded by a Swiss adventurer has made history as the first manned plane to fly around the clock on the sun's energy, bringing a step closer the dream of perpetual flight. The aircraft, built by Swiss company Solar Impulse, also broke the records for highest altitude and longest duration for a piloted solar flight. The craft took off at 6:51 local time yesterday morning from the Payerne airbase in Switzerland. Its power was collected by 12,000 solar panels built into its 63-metre wingspan. During the hours of bright sun, batteries siphoned off some energy to power the plane through the night. The craft climbed...

Robot arm punches human to obey Asimov's rules

SAAC ASIMOV would probably have been horrified at the experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a powerful robot has been hitting people over and over again in a bid to induce anything from mild to unbearable pain - in apparent defiance of the late sci-fi sage's famed first law of robotics, which states that "a robot may not injure a human being". But the robo-battering is all in a good cause, insists Borut Povše, who has ethical approval for the work from the University of Ljubljana, where he conducted the research. He has persuaded six...

Nov 11, 2010

IBM Launches Five-Year Effort To Develop Quantum Computing

IBM is breathing new life into a quantum computing research division at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center, reports New York Times. The computer giant has hired alumni from promising quantum computing programs at Yale and the University of California-Santa Barbara, both of which made quantum leaps in the past year using standard superconducting material. Groups at both universities have been using rhenium or niobium on a semiconductor surface and cooling the system to absolute zero so that it exhibits quantum behavior. As the Times reports, the method relies on standard microelectronics manufacturing tech, which could make quantum computers...

Nurse Robot Gives Human A Sponge Bath

Cody Tenderly Removes Blue Candy From the Test Subject's Arm Perhaps in the past we’ve held back from having robots administer sponge baths for fear that they would just be too forceful. Now there’s Cody – a robotic nurse proven to be gentle enough to bathe humans.Presented by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Cody can be operated by a human, telling it where on the body to clean. It uses a camera and laser range finder to gather data before removing debris. Cody’s arm joints are slightly stiff, lessening the force of impact, and it is programmed to never exceed a specific threshold of pressure.Cody was tested on lead researcher...

Nov 9, 2010

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