Designed by Ruby Red Design, this “Who’s the Daddy?” Alien maternity t-shirt ($26 USD) features a sonogram image of an embryonic H.R. Giger creature growing inside your body.

Now you might ask why the alien is placed chest-high on the t-shirt instead of over your belly. The video clip below should offer ample explanation…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

On second thought, maybe you should ask for that epidural when it’s your due date.

Just as America’s Army was developed to simulate the Army experience without all that pesky paperwork and obedience, NASA’s game is set so simulate the astronaut experience. Astronaut’s aim is to expose a new generation to the intelligence and technology that the space program is built upon, and perhaps in doing so, recruit tomorrow’s engineers and astronauts.

The game is designed around mission-based play that promises to expose gamers to all the challenges of space exploration, just without the floating around. Personally, I could do without that anyway… but that may mean I’m not the target demographic!

[EDGE via Massively]

I like how one simple gadget can help solve a couple of environmental issues, but I’m not too sure if the Gaon can be turned into a real product. For starters, how much trash is needed to produce a decent amount of methane, and how long will it take before the trash produces the gas? And remember, only biodegradable waste will produce the methane, but in urban areas a large part of the waste comes in the form of plastic, glass and other non-biodegradable materials.

Still, Lee is onto something here. You think a version of the Gaon could work in real life?

[via Yanko Design via DVICE]

The demonstration had a sender think of either 1 or 0. For some reason the person in the video didn’t directly think of either number; he had to think of moving his left arm for 0, and his right arm for 1. I wonder why. The EEG attached to the sender amplifies his brain signals, which are sent to the receiver via the Internet. The receiver’s brain picks up the 1s and 0s via a set of LEDs that flashed a different pattern depending on the digit sent.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Obviously the demo wasn’t too practical, but if this technology is improved maybe we won’t need monitors in the future; instead data will be sent directly to our brain. Then while you’re b2beeing with your friend, you could mess with his brain and make him slap or pee on himself. Awesome.

[via FreshCreation via gizmag]

CMU’s Snackbot is a roving wheeled ‘bot who’s primary purpose is to roam the halls of the University’s buildings, delivering tasty treast to students and faculty. Snackbot not only drives around bringing snacks, he also brings plenty of goodwill, with a pleasant-sounding voice communication system and calm demeanor unlikely to be rattled by even the most demanding snack customer. He features a sophisticated “multi-sensor fusion algorithms” which let him understand where he’s going, navigate through crowds, and can autonomously learn new objects.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

My only complaint is that all that he seems to be delivering in the video clip above is granola bars and souvenirs. What kind of snacks are those? Where are my Ding Dongs, Ring Dings, Big Wheels and King Dons? Even Snackbot’s early prototype delivered M&Ms, Twix and Oreos…

While Snackbot was designed for a nobler cause – studying human-robot interactions, bringing snacks to my office each day would be plenty reason for me to invest research dollars – as long as there are creme-filled snack cakes, that is.

[via BotJunkie]

Thanks to the brilliant devious minds of Japan’s RT Corporation, this new robot known as RIC (Robot Inside Character) will soon be wandering the streets and aisles at trade shows, terrorizing children and old people to the point that they really will need to buy some Robot Insurance.

RIC might look cute and cuddly on the surface, but under its skin, it’s something that Sarah Connor would want to crush under an industrial press until the lights go out in its eyeballs. The good news is that you could probably overpower the thing if it ever ran amok. Thankfully, it only stands about 4 feet tall, and weighs about 15 pounds. It’s controlled by 20 Futaba servo motors and can be upgraded to as many as 30, based on the specific use case (and how many weapons you plan to attach).

If you’ve got 2,000,000 yen (appx $20,000 USD) lying around you can get your own RIC and set it loose on unsuspecting children and grandparents.

[RIC (translated) via ROBOTS DREAMS]

I’m sure there are lots of things that he knows that we common folks don’t. But to support his claims, Kurzweil, whose future self sent the picture below, also mentions recent breakthroughs in biotechnology, such as artificial pancreases for diabetics and neural implants for Parkinson’s patients.

Kurzweil – whose future future self sent the picture below, I don’t know how or why - also pulled the ol’ computer analogy: “Our phones now perform tasks we wouldn’t have dreamed possible 20 years ago. When I was a student in 1965, my university’s only computer cost £7 million and was huge.  Today your mobile phone is a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion times more capable for the same price.”

Using the Law of Accelerating Returns – which btw is his own theory – Kurzweil estimates that “we will experience another billion-fold increase in technological capability for the same cost in the next 25 years.” Dammit. I wasn’t planning to buy a new laptop till 2030! How expensive will a Core Quadrillion MacBook be by then? Kurzweil, whose future future future self drew the picture below, also mentions a bit of NSFW stuff that I’d rather not share with you.

What do you think of Krangzweil Kurzweil’s predictions? You can read his article here if you want. Our technological progress has really been exponential, so yeah, maybe he’s right.  But let’s not forget that despite all of our fancy gadgets and Gundam statues, we’re not really progressing a lot in other aspects: lots of people are still suffering in one way or another, and we still bicker and fight over lots of things.

If Kurzweil’s 2029 ever comes true, I hope it’s not just the rich or privileged who reap the advantage of this supposedly godlike technology. I’m telling you, as a Third World gamer and techie who spends most of his time browsing the net and reading about First World developments, sometimes it feels like you folks are already in the future, because I sure as hell don’t see or experience a lot of the things that I read about. Also, I’m finding it very hard to be dramatic and serious with Krangzweil around.

[via DVICE, Kurzminators via faceinhole]

The images above are of the first ever mouse that was made to float by the variable gravity simulator. The mouse apparently panicked, so the next mouse to float was sedated, and it “seemed content with floating.” Uhuh. Anyway I don’t know if the pics were shot from above or from below; either way the view’s kind of a letdown because you can’t really see that the little fella is floating. But what’s important is…Variable Gravity Simulator! Man what an awesome combination of words. The point of the device – and the mice – is to study the long term effects of gravity on humans. But I hope that we can build larger and stronger VGSes so us common people can try what these lucky mice are enjoying.

[LiveScience via Neatorama]

Amazingly enough, Polly still had room in her stomach for other stuff. James told the Melbourne Herald Sun, “The vet said it wouldn’t be that many, but when they operated there was half a gravel track in there as well.” And it gets better – but not for Polly – as James also revealed that her dog is a veteran swallower of things no one but a garbage truck is supposed to swallow. Her previous guilty pleasures include a computer mouse, gardening gloves, a large rubber band and several rolls of fax paper. Sadly, no cracker.

[image via ihasahotdog]

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 they only have one paddle down there, too.

And thanks to the low wattage red LEDs, it’s virtually useless in the daylight. Good thing that there is no daylight in hell.

All kidding aside, it took David months and over $1000 of his hard-earned dough (and an entire roll of duct tape) to build this intentionally crummy display. To pull it off, he built out an array of 8×8 LED panels he found over on eBay, and then built a custom controller circuit which converts the television signal into something you can display on the LEDs.

Want to build your own SatanVision TV? David provides a full set of schematics, PCB artwork and firmware for the controller over at his site, Cathode Corner.

[via adafruit industries]

If I had a fancy office to call my own, complete with a ginormous oak desk, I would adorn that desk with one of Ron Bell’s sculptures. Probably one that has a bovine-looking skull with wires crawling in and out of its eye sockets. So when clients came into my big, fancy office and sat themselves in the overstuffed leather chairs I provided for them their eyes would be instantly drawn to Bell’s bioelectrical steampunk contraption gone wrong.

This is probably why I don’t have my own office.

Bell created a whole mess of these sculptures, and his gallery, “Osteomechanics,” is on display at the Packer Schopf Gallery. According to Bell, his was inspired by 18th century Italian physician and physicist Luigi Galvani, who got a severed frog’s leg to hop again (loosely speaking) after introducing its exposed muscle to an electrical charge. Although, without all the gooey parts that go over the top of ‘dem bones, I don’t think Bell is going to have much luck animating his biomechanical monsters.

A few of Bell’s contraptions remind me of that device from Wild Wild West – the one Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline) used to project the last thing some dead scientist had seen, which were apparently imprinted on his eyes. Yeah, that’s right, obscure Wild Wild West references for the win. That’s how I roll.

[Via io9]

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the goal of experiments like this is to one day have an abundant (and hopefully cheap) supply of organs. Some people may not approve of this, but I’d rather breed donor animals than donor humans. Hopefully scientists will have breakthroughs with stem cells so we won’t have to resort to building organ farms.

The return-oriented programming approach is a “powerful systems security exploit that generates malicious behavior by combining short snippets of benign code already present in the system.” It was first described in 2007 by Shacham himself. While I have no doubt that it takes brilliant minds to achieve what Checkoway and his peeps achieved, we should instead focus on the implication of the achievement. And it’s quite unsettling: evil dudes “would need just a few minutes of access to the machine the night before the election in order to take it over and steal votes the following day.”

So how should governments react to this turn of events? Schacham recommends that the voting process should be as computer-free as possible. It may sound like a stupid idea – it’s certainly ironic – but if there’s anything we’ve learned from the history of Windows and video game consoles, and now this, it’s that anything can be hacked. Shacham is proposing the use of optical scanners, which would simply read paper ballots. If the scanner is compromised, then the ballots will be a fallback. It’ll take more time to process the votes, but that’s a small price for the truth.

Check out PhysOrg for the full story, plus a video interview with Hovav Shacham.

The researches scanned the brains of 130 volunteers as they were performing one of eight tasks in the experiment. Tasks ranged from pressing buttons to discussing rhyming pairs, and using the fMRI technology, the researchers were able to correctly guess which brain was performing which task 80% of the time. Sorry, guys. Your cheerleader fantasies may not remain a secret forever.

True mindreading is of course not possible (yet) with the technology, but it sure looks like things are headed in that direction!

[via MedGadget]

Problem is, the robot’s lithium ion batteries might succumb to the Moon’s nighttime temperature, which according to Inhabitat can be as low as -240°F (-151°C). Fortunately Whittaker and company still have more than a year to go to figure out a way to prevent the rover from suffering robotic hypothermia.

The rover has also been entered in Google’s $30 million (USD) Lunar X Prize, a challenge to build a robot that will – well whaddaya know – “safely land on the surface of the Moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the Earth.” Aside from the solar panels, the rover is also equipped with a total of 8 motors, 2 in the hub of each wheel, a radiator (I think it’s not in the picture above).

I wish Dr. Whittaker and his collaborators at Astrobiotic Technology good luck. Also Dr. Whittaker, I suggest you contact the folks at College Humor; I hear they’re selling something that might be able to help protect the batteries from the cold.

[via Popular Science]

Japanese studies on insect brains recently led a team of researchers to wire a moth to a robot. Using the scent of female moths to control the moth’s motion, they learned “the moth can steer the [robot] car and quickly adapt to changes in the way the vehicle operates — for example by introducing a steering bias to the left or right similar to the effect of a flat tyre.”

The article is full of magical fun uses for insect bots, but all I’m seeing is my imminent demise. Got to go; time to stock up on bug spray.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Researchers at North Carolina State University are developing a micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) built with a body structure that mimics a bat. These pint-sized flying bat-bots could be used for unmanned surveillance, military operations, exploration and rescue/recovery missions. Student researcher Gheorghe Bunget and Dr. Stefan Seelecke designed the robo-bat to flap its wings like a bat, and extensively studied the way real bats fly in designing their creation.

The teensy mechanical chiroptera weighs in at only about 1/6th of an ounce, and is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. And the best part – they’re working on giving the bat “metal muscles” created from “smart materials”. Can I get some too? Construction of the final, functional bat is still underway, but I’m hopeful we’ll see one of these take flight in the not too distant future. In the mean time, you’ll just have to settle for one of these.

[NCSU Press Release via FoxNews]

Also known as “The Crown Joule of Laser Science” (I’m not kidding, check out their website if you want proof), the NIF’s laser can deliver up to 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy. It can heat a packet of hydrogen “smaller than a match head” to temperatures of up to 100 million degrees and subject it to 100 billion times the normal atmospheric pressure at the same time. So what’s the point of creating such a powerful device? Mainly for nuclear science -  scientists hope that they will gain a better understanding of the physics of nuclear weapons with the NIF, and maybe even discover the trick to harvesting energy from nuclear fusion.

Check out the full article at Neatorama for more interesting trivia.

[image via NIF gallery]

As you can see, Jones’ tooth serves as as a support for the lens that was created out of a patch of his skin. What’s even more amazing (for me at least) is that the procedure, developed by surgeon Christopher Liu, has actually been performed about 50 times! So Jones isn’t the only guy with the Sauron-like eye. Check out Daily Mail’s report for more details.

[via gizmo watch]

Apparently the cells on the stumps of a salamander “only” need to revert to a “less mature” state instead of a day 1 embryonic state to differentiate and turn into the cells that will make up the new limb. Dr. Elly Tanaka, one of the biologists behind the study, said that this bodes well for us, because it means that tissue regeneration is much more probable than previously thought. But this is future-future tech, and further studies are needed before any human tests will be performed. I recommend that Dr. Tanaka and her colleagues read this document, published in 1963, so that we may avoid having to deal with the likes of this:

*shivers* Dr. Tanaka, please conduct research on radioactive spiders as well. It’ll be fun I promise.

[via Wired via Neatorama]