Lifeboat Foundation

Digital designs for robotic creatures are shown on the left and the physical prototypes produced via 3-D printing are on the right (credit: Disney Research, Carnegie Melon University)

Now you can design and build your own customized walking robot using a 3-D printer and off-the-shelf servo motors, with the help of a new DYI design tool developed by Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University.

Continue reading “Disney Research-CMU design tool helps novices design 3D-printable robotic creatures” »

Mitsubishi Self-Driving Car

This new Mitsubishi self-driving car is so advanced it can parallel park itself.

Read more

Electric car owners get to enjoy a certain level of pride in saying that they never have to deal with gas stations and dirty fuel-filler nozzles.

Most of those owners would likely agree that not having to deal with cords and charging ports would be another great step forward, however.

Soon, if Nissan and several other automakers have their way, that day will come, as wireless (inductive) charging systems and smart charging controls will take away that “hands on” obligation—provided you park in designated charging spots.

Read more

Could the planet’s next catastrophe be averted by R2-D2? That’s the idea behind the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a robot Olympiad designed to create autonomous machines that can go where no man can or should go—nuclear disaster sites, minefields, Montauk over Labor Day weekend—and fix all the toxic messes we make. The stakes are $3.5 million. Oh, and possibly the future of mankind.

Read more

Resetting Your Biological Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres.

The telomere caps on the end of your chromosomes unravel bit by bit with every cell division, and if they’re not repaired division eventually stops altogether. Cells like stem cells express special enzymes to lengthen these caps, and we’ve now found another one that does the job.

A key player in aging?

Continue reading “Resetting The Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres” »

Feeling like the typical four or eight (Extreme Edition) cores in your current Core i7 processor are holding you back? Well, you’re in luck. Intel is going to offer up their very first Core i7 with ten processing cores before the end of next summer.

While it’ll be the first desktop-class CPU with that many cores, it won’t actually be Intel’s first 10-core processor. They’ve been making Xeon chips with at least 10 cores since 2011, and some with as many as 15. They’re aimed primarily at servers and enterprise-class workstations, though. Next year, however, they’ll finally offer up a deca-core processor for the consumer market.

That chip will be the Core i7-6950X, a 10-core beast with Hyper-threading support that allows it to handle 20 independent instructions at any given time. It’s based on Intel’s new 14nm process, down from 22nm on Ivy Bridge and Haswell. The 6950X should be clocked at 3GHz, but it’s not yet known where Turbo Boost will top out.

Read more

Meet Amun 3554. Doesn’t look like much, right? Little more than a mile wide, it’s one of the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroids yet discovered. Unless it ever decides to smash into us — a theoretical possibility, but extremely unlikely over the next few centuries — it will continue orbiting the sun, unknown and unmolested.

That is, unless Planetary Resources has its way. Planetary Resources is the asteroid-mining company launched Tuesday in Seattle, with backing from Microsoft and Google billionaires, along with the equally prominent James Cameron and Ross Perot Jr.

Continue reading “This $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company” »

#CraftYourFandom R2 Builders France R2-Central builders Club R2 Builders Sweden R2 Builders R2NL — Newfoundland R2-Builders #StarWars UK R2 D2 Builders FB Page.

Read more

In the past couple of years, Google has been trying to improve more and more of its services with artificial intelligence. Google also happens to own a quantum computer — a system capable of performing certain computations faster than classical computers.

It would be reasonable to think that Google would try running AI workloads on the quantum computer it got from startup D-Wave, which is kept at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, right near Google headquarters.

Google is keen on advancing its capabilities in a type of AI called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on a large supply of data and then getting them to make inferences about new data.

Read more