Kokoro, a Sanrio Group company specializing in the design and manufacture of robots, unveiled its new Actroid DER2 feminine guide robot at Sanrio headquarters in Tokyo on October 4.
Actroid DER2 is an upgraded version of Kokoro’s previous fembot, Actroid DER, who has made quite a name for herself by providing services at a number of events, including the 2005 World Expo.
(Via Boing Boing.)
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a variety of distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.
The planet bonanza was uncovered during a Hubble survey, called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). Hubble looked farther than has ever successfully been searched for extrasolar planets. Hubble peered at 180,000 stars in the crowded central bulge of our galaxy 26,000 light-years away.
(Via Universe Today.)
The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.
"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.
"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement," he added.
Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.
(Via Boing Boing.)
The overtalented Steve Lodefink made a drawing robot for his kids out of a paper cup, a toy motor, a battery, felt pens, and duct tape. The video of the drawbot in action is a joy to behold.
The so-called Phantom Sentinel aircraft is Y-shaped, consisting of a single long wing attached to two short aerodynamic extensions which each end in a propeller. And the weight is carefully balanced so that the centre of mass is positioned between the two extensions. When the motors are running, the solid part of the aircraft spins around this centre of mass, and the longer wing generates lift. The whole thing moves so fast that persistence of vision turns it into a single blur.
(Via Unknown Country.)
For those who love New England's mild summer weather, scientists have some advice: enjoy it while you can.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current course, Massachusetts may feel more like sultry South Carolina by century's end, researchers said on Wednesday in a report on clear signs of global warming in the US Northeast.
As computing power grows, so will the search. "If we're scanning 100,000 channels this year, we'll be scanning a million next year. If we're scanning a million next year, it will be 10 million the year after that," Horowitz said. A massive new array of radio telescopes, bankrolled by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, will be able to scan the entire relevant range of radio frequencies, from 0.5 to 11.2 gigahertz. Construction of the Allen Telescope Array should finish around 2008.
Jittery nations have warned North Korea to abandon plans to test an atom bomb after the reclusive state again unnerved world leaders with a shock announcement on its nuclear capabilities. The UN Security Council was to meet in New York Wednesday to try to forge a unified international response after Pyongyang said Tuesday it would test the bomb to deter what it called the US threat of nuclear war. North Korea gave no date for the test and some analysts saw the announcement as an effort to gain leverage with the United States, but nations said they were taking immediate action and that the threat was serious.
(Via Signs of Witness.)
One should be skeptical of both the believers and the scoffers. The negative claims of pseudo-skeptics who offer facile explanations must themselves be subject to criticism. If a competent witness reports having seen something tens of degrees of arc in size (as happens) and the scoffer -- who of course was not there -- offers Venus or a high altitude weather balloon as an explanation, the requirement of extraordinary proof for an extraordinary claim falls on the proffered negative claim as well. That kind of approach is also pseudo-science. Moreover just being a scientist confers neither necessary expertise nor sufficient knowledge. (I wish it did, sigh.) Any scientist who has not read a few serious books and articles presenting actual UFO evidence should out of intellectual honesty refrain from making scientific pronouncements. To look at the evidence and go away unconvinced is one thing. To not look at the evidence and be convinced against it nonetheless is another.
It is one of the most dire forecasts so far of the potential effects of rising temperatures around the world - yet it may be an underestimation, the scientists involved said yesterday.
The findings, released at the Climate Clinic at the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth, drew astonished and dismayed reactions from aid agencies and development specialists, who fear that the poor of developing countries will be worst hit.
"This is genuinely terrifying," said Andrew Pendleton of Christian Aid. "It is a death sentence for many millions of people. It will mean migration off the land at levels we have not seen before, and at levels poor countries cannot cope with."
(Via Professor Hex.)
I'm a bit concerned about the New Frontiers Symposium.
I consider myself a serious person (history degree, law degree, professional filmmaker, Capricorn), and I think Stan Friedman (M.Sc. in physics), Bob Zimmerman (award-winning historian), Nick Redfern and Greg Bishop (published authors), and William Wise (software engineer, archivist) are serious people too.
And they'll be talking about serious subjects - history, physics, space exploration, evidence for the objective reality of the UFO phenomenon.
So what's to worry about?
Well, here's my concern - Mac Tonnies.
You see, I'm not sure we want to be associated with him.
And I also know that Mac Tonnies over at Posthuman Blues links to my articles from time-to-time. Posthuman Blues often deals with transhumanist and other future issues, but Tonnies's legitimate content is offset by his misguided focus on UFOlogy. As a result, the transhumanist movement may have a harder time gaining public acceptance and support with this kind of negative association.
The SKA will be a set of thousands of antennas, not a single giant instrument, spread over 3000 kilometres, but with half of the antennas located in a central region 5 kilometres across. The SKA will be 50 times more sensitive than the most powerful radio telescopes we now have. It will peer deep into the cosmos to pick up signs of the first stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang; it will trace the effects of the mysterious Dark Energy that is driving the Universe apart at an ever increasing speed; and it will map out the influence of magnetic fields on the development of stars and galaxies. Observations of pulsars will allow the SKA to look for the effects of gravitational waves from merging massive black-holes at the centres of other galaxies. If there are extra-terrestrial intelligences out there in the Milky Way with airport or ionospheric radars, the SKA will detect them.
I hope people I've inspired with my work would band together to help me out in my later years if I needed it. Which is at least part of the reason why I'm sending what I can to support cosmic thinking patriarch Robert Anton Wilson, whose infirmity and depleted finances have put him in the precarious position of not being able to meet next month's rent.
In a new paper, ANU researchers reject claims that the skeleton of a hobbit-like species was simply a very short human with a rare brain disease.
ANU Professor Colin Groves says after analysing the evidence, he has no doubt the discovery represents a new species of human.
"What is particularly interesting about it is it survived in isolation through those two-million-years or so in eastern Indonesia and its existence was quite unsuspected until very recently," he said.
Professor Groves says the evidence speaks for itself.
"Aspects of the shape of the skull are completely outside modern humans," he said.
Here's the good scenario: we have maybe a decade, fifteen years on the outside, before we need start seeing a significant and sustained global reduction of greenhouse gases if we are to avoid absolutely catastrophic environmental results. You know the litany by now: unstoppable sea level rise, famine from loss of agricultural land, countless deaths around the world from the heat and opportunistic diseases, extinctions galore, and on and on. Ten years is enough time to implement significant improvements in our transportation and energy technologies, our consumption patterns, and the design of our communities. We know the pieces that we need to put into place, it's just a question of getting them assembled in time.
Here's the not-so-good scenario: you know that decade we thought we had? It's more like a year or two. Good luck.
We are only beginning to have some understanding of how many planetary systems are out there and to learn about the properties of their largest planets. Knowing what we know now about the tenacity of life on Earth even in the most extreme environments, and knowing that there may well be Earth-like worlds in solar systems throughout the galaxy, we face the real possibility of alerting other civilizations to our presence before we know anything whatsoever about them. This may or may not prove dangerous, but it seems like something that deserves wide discussion.
The world is complicated enough for children without feeding them fantastically bizarre stories about gods, demi-gods, heaven and hell. At the same time we as parents are responsible for nurturing a sense of right and wrong behaviour in our children without blackmailing them via the idea that their negative actions will result in reprisals from Beyond. People should act in a moral manner not because an ancient book tells them to, or because of a fear of a delusional God, but because it feels right in both heart and mind.
Indeed, as Richard Dawkins notes in his new book, teaching religion to children borders on abuse. On this point I agree. I can't help but feel that parents who proselytize their children are acting pathetically -- targeting those members of society who cannot yet formulate their own opinions or methodological frameworks that help them make sense of their world and existence. Religion deserves an R rating.
The Malmö, Sweden, based company Polar Rose. will soon be introducing a Web-based search engine that can find photographs of people by analyzing pictures and identifying faces. The search engine-which will be the first of its kind in the world-is the result of research carried out by Jan Erik Solem at Technology and Society, Malmö University College.
The Suspicious Looking Device is a bright orange box with a countdown timer on the top. If you touch it, it lets out a loud siren and then scoots away on a set of hidden wheels. Its entire purpose is to look suspicious -- it has no other function.
Called "Super Nova," the lighting system consists of 2,880 blue LEDs arranged in two columns spanning the height of the 18-story building’s west wall. The embedded lights are activated by sensors that detect cosmic rays. According to Takuro Osaka, the University of Tsukuba Graduate School professor who designed the system, the brightness of the blue lights fluctuates according to the intensity of the detected cosmic rays, giving the building an ever-changing magical glow.
Maneuvering the robot so near a sharp drop-off is daunting, especially because it is now about 230 million miles away from Earth. But Opportunity has been programmed to be "self protective," the scientists said. While it responds to radio signals from Earth, it also can override them if its cameras and computers identify dangers in its path.
Squyres said that the terrain approaching Victoria Crater has been relatively benign, and that ultimately driving around it is plausible. NASA scientists say they expect the rover to remain at the crater for months.
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