Lifeboat Foundation

Sabine Dziemian, a postgraduate in Faisal’s research group, says, “If I want to draw a straight line, I look at the start point and the end point, and the robot moves the brush across that line.”

Blinking three times puts the robot in color selection mode, in which it moves the brush over to a variety of pre-dispensed colors. At that point, the user only needs to look at the color he or she wants to use next, and the arm applies the color to the brush.

Continue reading “This robotic arm lets people paint with their eyes” »

Narrative Science’s Chief Scientist Officer, Kris Hammond, discusses the difference between Artificial Intelligence then and now.

Read more

According to scientists photons can travel through time. They already have simulated directing quantum light particles to the past for the first time in the history. University of Queensland scientists learned that a simulation of two wormhole-travelling photons might interrelate; signifying hopping through time is conceivable at smallest scales. Their study might help to comprehend how time-travel could be conceivable in the quantum realm. PhD student Martin Ringbauer spoke to The Speaker: “For the first, ‘photon one’ would travel through a wormhole into the past and interact with its older version. In the second, ‘photon two’ travels through normal space-time but interacts with a photon that is stuck in a time-travelling loop through a wormhole, known as a closed timelike curve (CTC).”

Tim Ralph, UQ Physics Professor, said: “We used single photons to do this, but the time-travel was simulated by using a second photon to play the part of the past incarnation of the time travelling photon.”

Read more

Virtual reality headsets can trick our eyes and ears into believing we’re someplace else. Fooling the rest of the body is a little trickier though. Companies have tried spinning chairs and omnidirectional treadmills, but nothing comes close to the “Cable Robot Simulator” developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The player wears a wireless VR headset inside a carbon fibre cage, which is then suspended in mid-air and thrown around the room using eight steel cables. The exposed pod is able to tilt, bank and move with an acceleration of up to 1.5g in response to the VR experience. Researchers have shown off some basic flight and racing simulations, but we’re already imagining how it could be used in our favorite video games. A dogfight in Star Wars: Battlefront Tearing around corners in F-Zero GX The possibilities are endless. It’s still very much a prototype, and hardly suitable for home use, but we’re desperate to have a go ourselves.

Read more

Turing Test-style competitions in writing stories, music & poetry.

HT: @Grady_Booch

DigiLit is a competition that encourages the creation of algorithms able to produce a “human-level” short story of the kind that might be intended for a short story collection produced in a well-regarded MfA program or a piece for The New Yorker. The prize seeks to reward algorithms that could, for example, write stories for a creative writing class in which students are asked to submit a new short story each day. (Artwork by Annelise Capo http://www.annelisecapossela.com)

Read more

Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the importance of internet access in combating extreme poverty at the United Nations’ 70th annual general assembly session.

Read more

A new type of battery could provide better storage for renewable energy than Tesla’s Powerwall. Here’s how it works.

Read more

Scientists believe they have found a better pair of molecular scissors to use with the genome-editing technique that is revolutionizing biology.

Read more

Transparent solar panels!

Imagine a city that’s actually a vast solar energy harvesting system. A team of Michigan State University researchers has developed a technology that can turn transparent surfaces, from building windows to cell phones, into solar collecting surfaces – without obstructing the view.