Will the Dream of a Flying Car Finally Become a Reality? Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter PAL-V in its first flight. Image courtesy PAL-V. We’ve all dreamed of having a flying car, but two companies are working to make this dream a reality. The latest in flying car designs is the Personal Air and Land Vehicle (PAL-V) One, which is advertised as going from high performance sports car to flying car in just minutes. Sign me up! See a video of the PAL-V in flight, below. While the PAL-V is designed more like a helicopter, another flying car prototype we reported on, the Terrafugia Transition, operates more like a airplane. PAL-V uses gyroplane technology for flying, with rotors that fold up when you want to drive the vehicle on land. For more info, see the PAL-V website. Tagged as: flight, flying car, Technology
Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework Microsoft CorporationOctober 2009 Introduction Microsoft Sync Framework is a comprehensive synchronization platform enabling collaboration and offline for applications, services and devices. Developers can build synchronization ecosystems that integrate any application, any data from any store using any protocol over any network. Sync Framework features technologies and tools that enable roaming, sharing, and taking data offline. A key aspect of Sync Framework is the ability to create custom providers. A number of providers are included by Sync Framework that support many common data sources. Database synchronization providers: Synchronization for ADO.NET-enabled data sourcesFile synchronization provider: Synchronization for files and foldersWeb synchronization components: Synchronization for FeedSync feeds such as RSS and ATOM feeds Developers can ultimately use any of the out-of-the-box providers or can create custom providers to exchange information between devices and applications.
'Epidermal electronics' tattoos: a giant step forward for cyborgs The latest patch developed by Dr Rogers’s team can both measure muscle activity and stimulate those muscles so they could be used for rehabilitation. But Dr Rogers envisages broader applications – from monitoring sporting performance to seeing how hydrated your skin is with solar-powered epidermal electronics. Which brings us back to Edgar Allan Poe. What I find fascinating is the way that cyborgs have stealthily evolved on Earth. Yet all the while, humans have steadily fused with devices such as pacemakers, contact lenses, prosthetics, insulin pumps and cochlear and retinal implants. “But take a look at the museum’s collections and you can see how we always exploit new technical leaps to suit ourselves, so that the rise of ever-smarter machines does not mean a world of us or them but an enhancement of human capabilities in a subtly integrated way.” Researchers are now looking at exoskeletons to help the infirm to walk, and implants to allow paralysed people to control limbs.
Human brain has been 'shrinking for the last 20,000 years' By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 18:05 GMT, 31 December 2010 It's not something we'd like to admit, but it seems the human race may actually be becoming increasingly dumb. Man's brain has been gradually shrinking over the last 20,000 years, according to a new report. This decrease in size follows two million years during which the human cranium steadily grew in size, and it's happened all over the world, to both sexes and every race. Old big head: A 3D image replica of a 28,000-year-old skull found in France shows it was 20 per cent larger than ours 'Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,' Kathleen McAuliffe writes in Discover magazine. 'The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.' Some paleontologists agree with this diagnosis, that our brains may have become smaller in size, but increasingly efficient.
Vladimir Putin Confirms Russian Zombie Radiation Gun Counter Intelligence: 800 Degrees in Westwood Pininfarina designs Ferraris. Pininfarina designs Maseratis. But on a sleepy Wednesday afternoon in Westwood, the Pininfarina design that is attracting attention is a soda dispenser in the new pizzeria 800 Degrees. Teenagers approach the sleek, glistening slab like apes drawn to the monolith at the beginning of "2001: A Space Odyssey." This machine, one of the first in the Los Angeles area, dispenses 300 different soft drinks from its maw, all variants on the basic Coca-Cola product line but with every permutation of those you could imagine. On this afternoon, a junior-high-age boy stands in front of the machine, kneading the console with his fingertips like a ballpark organist. 800 Degrees is the newest project of Adam Fleischman, the entrepreneur who guided Umami Burger from a gastrogeek obsession into a growing national chain. When you get to the place, you will stand in a line, usually curving down the block, that moves much faster than you think. The pizza goes into the oven.
New Surveillance System Identifies Your Face By Searching Through 36 Million Images Per Second When it comes to surveillance, your face may now be your biggest liability. Privacy advocates, brace yourselves – the search capabilities of the latest surveillance technology is nightmare fuel. Hitachi Kokusai Electric recently demonstrated the development of a surveillance camera system capable of searching through 36 million images per second to match a person’s face taken from a mobile phone or captured by surveillance. While the minimum resolution required for a match is 40 x 40 pixels, the facial recognition software allows a variance in the position of the person’s head, such that someone can be turned away from the camera horizontally or vertically by 30 degrees and it can still make a match. Furthermore, the software identifies faces in surveillance video as it is recorded, meaning that users can immediately watch before and after recorded footage from the timepoint. The power of the search capabilities is in the algorithms that group similar faces together. [Media: YouTube]
Exclusive: a behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California at a site that used belong to Sun Microsystems. A large sign with Facebook's distinctive "like" symbol—a hand making the thumbs-up gesture—marks the entrance. When I arrived at the campus recently, a small knot of teenagers had congregated, snapping cell phone photos of one another in front of the sign. Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world. But few know the equally intriguing story about the engine humming beneath the social network's hood: the sophisticated technical infrastructure that delivers an interactive Web experience to hundreds of millions of users every day. I recently had a unique opportunity to visit Facebook headquarters and see that story in action. As I passed through the front entrance of the campus and onto the road that circles the buildings, I saw the name on a street sign: Hacker Way.
Printable Robots: MIT Project Wants to Let You Design and Fabricate Your Own Machines An insect-like robot designed and printed using new fabrication techniques developed by MIT researchers. Photo: Jason Dorfman, CSAIL/MIT Who knew that origami could be the future of robotics? Today, if you want to design and build your own robot, you have to order components, write software, and then assemble and test your creation. Now imagine if you could use a computer program to specify the overall capabilities and appearance of your robot and, with the push of a button, have the robot fabricated by a special printer right in your living room. Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the project aims to reinvent how robots are designed and produced by developing technology to allow an average person to create programmable robots in a matter of hours. The researchers believe that it currently takes too much time and effort to produce and program a robot, and that people are constantly reinventing the wheel. So perhaps origami is indeed the future of robots.
Nokia Lumia 900 review Long-awaited, heralded, longed for, lusted after, overdue, deal breaker, savior, second coming, dead-on arrival, revelation, last gasp, comeback, hail mary pass, flagship... finally! If that string of descriptors hasn't already tipped you off, Nokia's Windows Phone messiah has arrived stateside to either silence critics or give' em fodder for further nay-saying. Ensconced in a polycarbonate frame that's similar to the N9, the Lumia 900 on AT&T's LTE network is widely understood to be Espoo's first true stab at building a presence for a mobile brand that's ubiquitous everywhere but here. To understand the gamble the company's making with the Lumia 900, one need only look to another critically acclaimed, yet interminably stalled overseas import: Kylie Minogue. For the time being, though, it appears that Nokia's going all in, ready to see its folie à deux with Microsoft through to the end. Nokia Lumia 900 review See all photos 100 Photos Hardware Performance and battery life Camera 81 Photos Pros
News - Can computers have true artificial intelligence? 2 April 2012Last updated at 19:03 ET Professor Owen Holland explains how the world's first anthropomimetic robot works Is it possible to create true artificial intelligence and, if so, how close are we to doing so, asks mathematician Professor Marcus du Sautoy. It was while I was making my last BBC TV series, The Code, that I bumped into a neuroscientist I knew. "Have you heard the news about Watson?" he asked me. I wasn't quite sure what he was referring to. "Watson beat the world champions at Jeopardy last night," he added. Jeopardy is an American television quiz show which tests general knowledge. But then he revealed that Watson was not a person, but a computer. Continue reading the main story MAN v MACHINE A series of challenges have been suggested to test if a computer can match the human mind: Ever since Alan Turing's seminal paper back in 1950 asking whether machines could ever think, scientists have been striving to create machines that can rival our intelligence. Trivia challenge
Nasa For those of you waiting to see the results from our on-orbit checkout of the smartphone, this post summarizes our data. The Tests SPHERES operates inside the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM). Figure 1 - Coordinate Systems. After the on-orbit test, we ran a similar series of tests with a sphere and a smartphone on the ground. Figure 2 - SPHERES and HET Smartphone on an air carriage. The Logger App (available on the Android Market here) ran on the phone during all these tests. The Data In this section, we compare data collected in orbit to data collected on the ground. Figure 3 - Smartphone gyroscope data shows that the SPHERES unit moves differently in orbit than on earth. The X axis shows time in nanoseconds since the phone started up. The ISS sphere turned faster (reaching nearly -0.3 radians per second) than the ground sphere (barely 0.2 radians per second), resulting in the test taking less time to run on orbit (~25 s) than it did on the ground (~45 s). Figure 5 - Gravity Sensor.