Wheeled Robot Hops Over Walls in a Single Bound

September 16, 2009

If you could combine a miniature HumVee with a pogo stick, you might get the Precision Urban Hopper, a military vehicle that can roll over bumpy terrain and, in the blink of an eye, spring vertically over obstacles as tall as 25 feet. The shoebox-sized, GPS-guided, unmanned robot was developed by the folks at Boston Dynamics, the same ones who brought us the creepily lifelike Big Dog robot.

The hopping is kind of cute. But it's also five times more fuel efficient than hovering if the object to be overcome is shorter than 30 feet feet tall. You can read more about it here, or just watch the video below.

Video Sums Up Cool Tech Jobs Wide Angle

June 25, 2009

Atom-Fusing Laser, Robotic Jellyfish, Invisibility Carpet, A Pregnancy Gene and More

July 18, 2008

These are the coolest tech stories I discovered this past week.

July 12 / The New York Times
Can’t Find a Parking Spot? Check Smartphone
If you live a big city, then you know what it's like to drive around and around looking for that elusive parking spot. But starting this fall, San Franciscans will be in for a treat. The city is testing the use of wireless sensors that will communicate to street signs or a smartphone the availability of free spaces. Now just don't run anyone over trying to get the spot first.

July 13 / Guardian
Doctors Rage At Being Rated Online
As a big fan of AngiesList and Yelp, I'm all for a Web site that will allow patients to rate their doctors online. Isn't it all about referrals anyway? And health care is a service for which we pay big bucks. So suck it up, GPs, and get with the times.

July 15 / Discovery News
Giant Laser in the Works to Achieve Fusion
Wouldn't Dr. Evil love this "laser?" It can't blow up the planet, but at 10 stories tall and 400 feet long, it will create enough heat and pressure to fuse atoms and create helium. The reaction will release massive amounts of environmentally friendly energy and enough helium to keep us all talking about it with high squeaky voices.

July 15 / New Scientist
Dirt-Repelling Tube Promises Cheap, Pure Water
Man, we've really messed up the world's water supply. Most of it can't be consumed without being purified first, and that's not good for people living in developing worlds. But a a new way of purifying water could offer a simple solution. The technique uses a material that naturally attracts water while at the same time repelling impurities.

July 15 / BBC
The Importance of Being There
You have to really not like your surroundings (or yourself?) to prefer a virtual world over reality. But even still, VR environments have a long way to go before they will supplant this world, says regular columnist Bill Thompson.

July 16 / Wired
Obama Wages Cyberwar
Even though the Bush administration has initiated a $30 billion effort to beef up cyber security, Obama says its too little too late.

July 16 / Popular Science
Robotic Jellyfish Just Like the Real Thing, But Without the Sting
Sure, it's great that the AquaJelly has sensors, a short-range radio system, LEDs for illumination and communication and is coated with conductive metal paint that helps it connect with a nearby charging station, but I think they're dern pretty and I sure wish I had one. Hint hint.

July 16 / Wired
Army Wants 'Psychologically Inspired' Robot Vision
Robots score a big "duh" when it comes to vision. They just can't see the world we do. That's why the Army has put out an APB for a "psychologically inspired object recognition system." But do we really want robots seeing the world through our eyes? What if they notice what a bunch of doofuses we are?

July 17 / Discovery News
Invisible Carpet Idea Close to Actual Invisibility
Invisibility cloaks are great for hiding giant spaceships, but an invisibility carpet is just way more practical. Scientists have created a material that can hide objects in visible light. My question: If we can't see it, how will we know it's working? (See what I mean about being a doofus.)

July 17 / Popular Science
A Gene for Baby Makin’
This could put an end to birth control pills, foams and devices and eliminate the need for testicle snipping. Scientists have located the gene that both regulates and blocks ovulation.

July 17 / Wired
Why China's Olympian Efforts to Clean Up Beijing's Air Won't Work.
China is doing a bunch of stuff to clean up the air in time for the Olympics. Smoking bans, traffic bans and turning off power plants to name of few. But it might not make any difference.

Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The Week (According to Me)

June 20, 2008

Don't spend all that time scanning your RSS feed reader. Just read my list.

13 June 08 / The Atlantic
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Nick Carr writes about how the Internet is changing the way we think.

June 13 / Tech Crunch
Quillpill: A Twitter For Cell-Phone Novelists
Even if they could, few people have the time to write a book. But what if they could Twitter one? For all those aspiring novelists out there, Quillpill might be the app to get them started.

13 June 08 / Guardian
Where Are All the Older Female Geeks?
Since starting her blog, Natalie d'Arbeloff has found that she is not the only older woman in the cybervillage. But they are still in the minority. Come on, she says, what are you waiting for?

June 13 / Wired
Potential New Weapon Against TB: Free Cell Minutes
Researchers at MIT believe they've discovered a new weapon in the battle against tuberculosis: Free cell phone minutes. For years, doctors have struggled to get some TB patients to take all their medication, which generally involves a six-month regimen of multiple drugs. Now a student-led group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a way to use cell phones to let patients test themselves. And if the tests show patients are following doctor's orders, they get rewarded with free minutes.

June 13 / Wired
IBM's Drumming Car Reads Your Lips. Seriously
The people at IBM are hard at work developing technology we never knew we don't need -- a steering wheel that reads your lips, responds to your facial expressions and turns into a drum machine. Tapping out a beat on the steering wheel while jamming to your favorite tunes will never be the same again.

June 13 / Technology Review
Doubling Laptop Battery Life
Intel's new integrated power management could dramatically reduce power consumption in your laptop by shutting down operations not being used.

June 13 / Technology Review
You've Had a Genetic Test. Now What?
A new project aims to incorporate the results of genetic screening into medicine.

June 16 / Discovery
Robots to Become Lovers, Predict Researchers
Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer the stuff of science fiction -- researchers expect them to become reality within four decades.

June 16 / Science Daily
Using Brainwaves To Chat And Stroll Through Second Life: World's First
On 7th June 2008, Keio University succeeded in the world’s first demonstration experiment with the help of a disabled person to use brainwave to chat and stroll through the virtual world.

June 16 / Nanowerk
NASA nanotechnology research into shape-shifting airplanes
Aircraft of the future will not be built of traditional, multiple, mechanically connected parts and systems. Instead, aircraft wing construction will employ fully integrated, nanotechnology enabled embedded 'smart' materials and actuators that will enable aircraft wings with unprecedented levels of aerodynamic efficiencies and aircraft control.

June 17 / BBC News
Victim of Its Own Success
Life without the internet is unimaginable for the millions who use it every day. But one of the world's leading academics on the impact of the net warns we could be facing its destruction.

June 17 / New York Times
Philadelphia Revives Citywide Wi-Fi Project
Philadelphia revived an effort on Tuesday to provide free citywide wireless Internet access in a project to be run by a new group of investors. The city aims to provide free-of-charge outdoor Web access throughout its 135 square miles, which would be the largest area covered by public Wi-fi of any U.S. city.

June 17 / Webmonkey
Clock Browser Speeds with Webmonkey’s Stopwatch
With Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Safari all claiming “faster than ever” speeds with its latest versions, we started wondering which one is really the fastest. After loading some pages and scratching our heads, we hacked together a small JavaScript stopwatch to find out.

June 17 / Discovery
Talking Robofish to Swim in Puget Sound
Marine creatures have communicated with each other for millions of years. Now swimming robots can too.

June 18 / Scientific American
Hands On Computing: How Multi-touch Screens Could Change The Way We Interact With Computers and Each Other
Multi-touch computing could one day free us from the mouse as our primary computer interface, the way the mouse freed us from keyboards.

June 18 / Scientific American
Wi-Maxing That Wireless Internet Connection
A wireless technology called Wi-Max has a much bigger range than Wi-Fi, making it possible to supply wireless internet accessibility to large areas with a few base stations. Christopher Intagliata reports.

June 19 / Etherized
Snail (And We Do Mean Snail) Mail
A group of artists, whose URL reads "boredomresearch," have created Real Snail Mail, the world's first web mail service using live snails. Yep. Three snails (Cecil, Austin and Muriel) have been fitted with RFID chips and antennae that can pick up data from hardware located in their enclosure. You fill out an email form, hit send and they take things from there.

June 19 / Technovelgy
Never-Stop Rail Transit System Proposed
Taiwanese inventor Peng Yu-lun imagines a main track with a large commuter train that does not stop. The train is serviced by smaller train cars that drop off new passengers while picking up those who wish to leave the train.

June 19 / The Engineer
Solar System
A team from MIT has tested a prototype of a new solar power system that consists of a 12ft-wide dish made from a frame of thin, aluminium tubing and strips of mirror.

June 19 / Discovery
New 'Terminator' Robots Go in Harm's Way
IRobot, best known for their cute Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, has teamed up with Metal Storm, purveyors of the million-rounds-per-minute electric gun, to create a slick, Terminator-like war robot for the U.S. military.

June 19 / New Scientist
Scrapping MPG Could Boost Sales of Greener Cars
What sounds like an arithmetic brain teaser could in fact hold the key to reducing the amount of gas consumed by Americans – and by extension their CO2 emissions. Richard Larrick and Jack Soll of Duke University in the US say that a simple switch from expressing a car's fuel efficiency in miles per gallon (mpg) to gallons per 100 miles makes it much easier for people to assess how much money they could save on fuel.

Autonomous Snowmobile Rovers Could Monitor Ice Shelves

May 28, 2008

If you've ever seen the movie "Touching the Void," you know that falling into a crevice is no picnic. But it's the kind of risk--among others--faced by scientists who study why and how ice shelves are melting. What's a researcher to do? Send in a robot, that's what, and preferably an inexpensive one.

So Ayanna Howard and her team at Georgia Tech and Penn State are working on autonomous snowmobile-like robots equipped with cameras and sensors that can monitor conditions such as temperature, wind speed, humidity, and solar energy reflecting off the snow and ice. Their SnoMote rovers have a new method of location and communication between them and represent the first kind of autonomous bots that can maneuver on ice and snow. The robots will work as a team, traversing potentially dangerous environments to collect data, which scientists will use to build computerized climate models.

If the motes look like toys, that's because they are. Howard and her team quickly realized that a toy snowmobile durable enough to withstand the rigors of play would work better than a rover built from scratch by engineers. So they're using the toys to test the systems. Eventually, the motes will have to be toughened up to endure the harsh arctic and antarctic climates.

Photo: Georgia Institute of Technology

Robot Knows Itself

April 30, 2008

I'm reminded of the menacing cyborg in the movie "T2," which when blown into bits of liquid metal, oozes back together. This robot is not liquid. It's blocky, a little slow, and not very menacing. But you can see where this is going, right?