April 2010

Google Health Care

This video, called Google Health Care, is another hilarious clip from Burnistoun. I hope it brightens up your weekend. While it may be a joke it raises a number of important issues about the rise of Google in particular and technology in general. For example, asking whether we over-use and over-rely on technology is no joke. Some other important issues that have previously been discussed here are: The future of the internet and its impact? Does technology make us smart or stupid? Is the internet killing our culture? I hope you laugh today and, maybe later, think about the issues seriously. Thus, eventually, you can have your say because the people who get to make the decisions obviously need more of your input. Cheers!

Share

Read the full article →

What is Rocket Racing?

by Socrates

Rocket Racing League (RRL) is a revolutionary new sports and entertainment franchise where teams of highly trained military and test pilots such as former “Top Gun” graduates from the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, fly rocket-powered aircraft through a 3D virtual Raceway-In-The-Sky (RITS). To be held at venues across the country, Rocket Racing will feature multiple rocket races, from closed circuit to drag-style racing, pitting 2 to 10 Rocket Racer aircraft roaring head to head for victory. The closed circuit format is planned to be a 4-lap multiple elimination heat on a 5-mile Formula One style raceway in the Sky. The drag style race will feature two Rocket Racers in drag-style side-by-side format. Exhibitions flights and demonstrations are planned to continue in 2010-2011. In the first video Peter Diamandis, co-founder and chairman of Singularity University, founder of the X-Prize foundation and [...]

Share

Read the full article →

Dennis Hong at TED: My 7 Species of Robots

by Socrates

Dennis Hong: “I still cannot forget the mind-blowing sensation when I first watched the movie Star Wars. I was fascinated by R2D2 and C-3PO. Since then, I decided to become a robot scientist and never changed my mind.” As his TED profile page says, Dennis Hong is the founder and director of RoMeLa — a Virginia Tech robotics lab that has pioneered several breakthroughs in robot design and engineering. As director of a groundbreaking robotics lab, Dennis Hong guides his team of students through projects on robot locomotion and mechanism design, creating award-winning humanoid robots like DARwIn (Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence). His team is known as RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) and operates at Virginia Tech. Hong has also pioneered various innovations in soft-body robots, using a “whole-skin locomotion” as inspired by amoebae. Marrying robotics with biochemistry, he has [...]

Share

Read the full article →

Form Constant: Dancing with Science

by Socrates

This dance clip titled Form Constant is a collaboration between dancer and choreographer Hope Goldman and her partner, visual artist and programmer Andrew Moffat. It was performed live in March 2010 in the Studio Dance 1 Concert at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts as Goldman’s Master’s thesis show. To perform the real-time tracking and effects, the piece uses infrared lighting and a custom-modded, $40 webcam along with custom software running on the GPU. The choreography was influenced by the ideas of fluid dynamics and the energetic quality of the imagery. Music by Ben Frost. Enjoy! Related articles by Zemanta Modern dance inspired by science (boingboing.net)

Share

Read the full article →

IBM Creates Smallest 3D Nano-Map

by Socrates

The documentary Nano, the Next Dimension is interesting and worth watching but is a bit dated because it was produced in 2002. Just two days ago IBM announced a fresh breakthrough in the field of nanotechnology and to demonstrate its capabilities created the world’s smallest 3D nanoscale map. See this video detailing the challenges and breakthroughs of the project: Read an excerpt from IBM’s Press Release: ZURICH & SAN JOSE, Calif. – 23 Apr 2010: IBM (NYSE: IBM) scientists have created a 3D map of the earth so small that 1,000 of them could fit on one grain of salt. The scientists accomplished this through a new, breakthrough technique that uses a tiny, silicon tip with a sharp apex — 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil — to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometers at greatly [...]

Share

Read the full article →

Nano, the Next Dimension

by Socrates

Nanosciences and nanotechnologies represent a formidable challenge. World-class infrastructure, new fundamental knowledge, novel equipment for characterisation and manufacturing, multi-disciplinary education and training for innovative and creative engineering, and a responsible attitude to societal demands are required. This documentary film, made available by the European Commission, provides a glimpse of some of the many activities that are being carried out in Europe in these fast-growing fields of research and technological development. This video was made available by the European Commission in January 2002.

Share

Read the full article →

Henry Markram at TED

by Socrates

This is a video of Henry Markram, the director of the Blue Brain Project, at TED. The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations. Here is Dr. Markram’s profile on TED: In the microscopic, yet-uncharted circuitry of the cortex, Henry Markram is perhaps the most ambitious — and our most promising — frontiersman. Backed by the extraordinary power of the IBM Blue Gene supercomputing architecture, which can perform hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, he’s using complex models to precisely simulate the neocortical column (and its tens of millions of neural connections) in 3D. Though the aim of Blue Brain research is mainly biomedical, it has been edging up on some deep, contentious philosophical questions about the mind — “Can a robot [...]

Share

Read the full article →