Tag: Research

Going green is all fine and good for the environment and it will help you a bit when it comes time to pay those utility bills too. I have tried some of the green florescent bulbs in my normal light fixtures before, but the weird colored light bothered me so I tossed them out.

Dr. Petar Kormushev and his colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology’s (IIT) Advanced Robotics Dept. love to teach human skills to robots. At first they were satisfied with harmless activities, like flipping pancakes, but now I’m starting to feel threatened by their research.

…and the trunk, and the left shoulder, and the left wrist. And the right knee. You got that? Let’s back up a bit and cover the basics first. The study, which I bet was performed in all seriousness, was performed by psychologists and researchers at Northumbria University in the UK.

This incredible, unusual robot can balance itself on any of its corners when stood on point. The Balancing Cube was developed by Sebastian Trimpe and Raffaello D’Andrea for the Institute of Dynamic Systems and Control. The strange looking robot uses a set of DC motors and sensors attached to six networked balancing mechanisms which allow the robot to constantly maintain an upright position.

Scientists at the University of Florida have figured out a way to create a super thin film which could turn any clear surface into a nightvision portal. Using a technology similar to that found in OLED displays, the nightvision material uses seven layers of OLEDs, which are designed to react to infrared light wavelengths.

While I’ve been getting used to the touch-only display on my new iPad, I have to say that I really wish I could use both my fingers and a pen for doing things like taking free-form notes.

With all the buzz about 3D televisions coming out this year, the biggest problem with these displays is that they require special glasses to create the 3D illusion in your eyeballs. While this new device prototype doesn’t produce truly stereoscopic images, the effect it produces is the next best thing.

Made by Steven Zhou and Syed Olmer Gilani of the National University of Singapore’s Interactive Multimedia Lab, What You Write Is What You Get (WYWIWYG) is a visual way of learning about language. Just like 5th Cell’s critically-acclaimed DS game Scribblenauts, WYWIWYG can analyze written words and come up with a virtual representation of the corresponding object.

Earlier this year, Luís Moniz Pereira of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in Portugal and Ari Saptawijaya of the Universitas Indonesia published a paper describing what they think is a stepping stone to having artificial intelligence that can analyze moral dilemmas and evaluate the consequences of the resolutions to the dilemma.

Almost every aspect of electronic devices have been vastly improved – or at least miniaturized – these days. Touchscreen displays are becoming common. Monitors and TVs are becoming larger, thinner and the overall quality of their displays are improving as well.

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 latest Neatorama exclusive talks about large-scale experiments and research and the massive and complex equipment that they require. I’m pretty sure that you’ve already heard of most of them, like the Hubble Telescope, the International Space Station, or the US and USSR’s space race, that culminated in the Apollo 11 moon landing.

DARPA‘s Self-Explanation Learning Framework (SELF) program “seeks to construct systems that can participate in their own construction.” Imagine a robot helping build itself. Who or what runs DARPA these days? Are there still humans in there?

Stanford researchers have designed these incredible little robots are about the size of a quarter for use in atmospheric research on Earth (and one day) on Mars. I just want them for conducting research in my office building.

This has got to be the best news for brain health since ever: playing strategy games might help prevent some ill effects due to aging. Your desire to control an animated portion of a tiny world (with your iron fist, naturally) just may be your saving grace in your twilight years.

Rhodri Armour, a PhD student from the University of Bath, has invented a robot that he hopes will be a model for future space exploration and land surveying robots. Called the Jollbot, it’s a spherical robot that rolls over smooth terrain and jumps “like a grasshopper” when it encounters obstacles.