weird science on technabob...

We can now add telepathy to the list of things that’s possible thanks to the Internet. Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have demonstrated that it is possible to transmit thoughts from one person’s brain to another person’s brain using nothing but pieces of tape, a couple of EEG amplifiers, some special…

I’ve always wanted a robotic butler. You know, like the personal service ‘bots in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Except without the sexual harassment part. Turns out that a team of industrious scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have already built one. And this one delivers snacks! Sweet!

CMU’s Snackbot is a roving wheeled ‘bot who’s…

If you thought that the derelicts they have walking around city streets donning smelly mascot costumes and trying to hand you flyers for hot dogs and prepaid cell phone cards weren’t creepy enough, have I got something for you! Pretty soon, those guys will be replaced by robots.

In a recent article in The Sun, famous inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil makes a lot of bold claims about our future, saying that by 2029 humans will be able to halt and even reverse the effects of aging. and then we’ll live forever, with the help of Hideo Kojima’s favorite plot device: nanomachines. Kurzweil,…

Scientists working for NASA have built a “variable gravity simulator” powerful enough to levitate drops of water up to 2 inches wide, and even young mice. The device is made of a “superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals.” I don’t know how the magnet can levitate…

The United Press International continues to build on their 100 years of journalistic excellence with their coverage of an Australian woman and her cattle dog. Polly – the dog – recently underwent emergency surgery to remove 1,000 magnets from her tummy. Owner Cathy James said that Polly swallowed the magnets in her – the owner’s…

What might television look like in hell? Maybe a bit like this.

This incredibly lo-fi SatanVision television set was designed by David Forbes. It’s outputs of an unbelievably crappy 128×96 resolution image, and all of the pixels are red. Here it is playing the only video game they have in the underworld, Pong. Oh, and…

Ron Bell has been a cinematographer for 25 years, but in his spare time he likes to play with bones. And copper. And aluminum. And glass. What does he do with all these components? Why, he constructs “osteomechanic” sculptures, of course!
If I had a fancy office to call my own, complete with a ginormous…

Sorry Homer. But what’s important is that a group of Korean scientists have successfully produced a genetically engineered pig whose organs could be compatible with the human body. Chung Nam University’s Jin Dong-il and local bio-tech firm Mgen claim that their cloned piglet contains a protein called fas ligand (FasL), which helps regulate our immune…

The man in the picture below is UC San Diego Computer Science Ph.D. student Stephen Checkoway. In his hands is a printout that proves that his team’s “return-oriented programming” exploit was successfully able to steal votes from a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine. Checkoway was probably like, “Yay! Our democracy is in danger!” Just…

Science is now a little bit closer to revealing the true you, thanks to research from Rutgers and UCLA researches on fMRIs, or functional MRIs. Can these brainscans read your thoughts? Not quite, but nosy scientists can get a general idea more than half the time!

The researches scanned the brains of 130 volunteers as…

Carnegie Mellon roboticist Dr. William Whittaker collaborated with Astrobiotic Technology to create a solar-powered unmanned rover that will revisit the Apollo landing site in 2011. The robotic explorer will be sent to look at the materials left behind by the astronauts to see how the lunar environment has affected them. It will also beam back…