Working Model Factory Made With Lego Robots

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 21, @01:29PM 

from the because-you-can dept.

kkleiner writes"In his continuing obsession with all things Lego, robotic, and awesome, Chris Shepherd recently constructed the Lego Quad Delta Robot System, a full working model of an industrial robotics line in a factory. The Lego Quad Delta Robot System has four flexing arms that can move in three dimensions, each equipped with a pneumatically driven gripper. Those arms pick up blocks moving on two conveyor belts marked with special light sensors that detect the block's position and color. The system can move 48 of these blocks per minute. Oh, and the whole darn thing, including the impressive support frame, is made out of Lego!"

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Chili Fumes Poison Neighbors in Australia

Published April 20, 2011

| NewsCore

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MELBOURNE, Australia -- Aussies are famed for their love of barbecues -- but one would-be chef's attempt at outdoor cookery ended up poisoning his neighbors with chili fumes, Melbourne radio station 3AW reported Wednesday.

A number of people needed medical attention -- with symptoms including nausea and respiratory problems -- as the fumes spread down the street in Cranbourne, Melbourne.

Paramedics rushed to the scene amid confusion as to what was causing the widespread sickness.

"At one stage there was a large number of people standing in the street and we didn't know what had caused them to become ill," medic David Llewelyn said. "We had up to 10 people who were coughing and were dizzy and nauseated."

With households up to 500 feet away affected, paramedics and firefighters went house-to-house searching for the source of the stink.

"It emerged that someone was drying out strong chilies in the backyard and that's what caused the fumes," Llewelyn said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/20/chili-fumes-poison-neighbors-australia/#ixzz1KY7Ux2cH

E-Book Sales Have Tripled In the Last Year

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 15, @10:08AM 

from the now-we-only-kill-trees-out-of-spite dept.

destinyland writes"The Association of American Publishers revealed today that e-book sales have tripled in the last year. Sixteen publishers reported that in February e-book sales totaled more than $90.3 million, a 202.3% increase over e-book sales in February of 2010. Meanwhile, sales of adult hardcover books have dropped 43%, while mass-market paperback sales dropped 41.5% (earning just $46.2 million and $29.3 million, respectively). The book publishing association acknowledged that readers have 'made e-books permanent additions to their lifestyle,' arguing that publishers 'are constantly redefining the timeless concept of "books"' and identifying new audiences they can serve through emerging technologies. 'It's nice to see that book publishers are aware of the changes rocking their industry,' notes one e-book blog, 'and that they're approaching it with a sense of history.'"

Barnes & Noble treats Nook Color to Froyo; unveils Nook Apps

By Rachel King | April 25, 2011, 5:30am PDT

Summary

Just as promised, Barnes & Noble rolled out a major update for the Nook Color on Monday, which has the 7-inch slate looking even more like a tablet than an e-book reader now.

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New Nintendo HD Console Rumors Abound

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 15, @03:32AM 

from the control-it-with-your-brain dept.

pcgfx805 writes"Game Informer has reportedly received word from 'multiple sources' that a new HD console from Nintendo will be debuting at this year's E3. They report on conflicting information regarding the power of the console compared to the other current-gen consoles, but go on to speculate that 'Either way it will offer competitive specifications.'"This year's E3 is scheduled for June 7-9.

Genes That Control 'Aging' Steroid Identified

ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2011) — Eight genes which control levels of the main steroid produced by the adrenal gland, believed to play a role in aging and longevity, have been uncovered by an international consortium of scientists, co-led by King's College London.

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Sorting Algorithms As Dances

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday April 10, @11:19PM 

from the dancing-aroud-the-answer dept.

mikejuk writes"You may well have seen many simulations of sorting algorithms that aim to show how the algorithm works. However I guarantee that you have never seen anything quite in the same league as the videos made by Sapientia University — they are simply crazy but in the nicest possible way. They folk dance their way though bubble sort, shell sort, insertion sort and selection sort. Very, very weird but you find you can't but help checking that they are doing it right. Now anyone want to try quicksort?"

Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869?

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday April 10, @10:13PM 

from the learning-for-learning's-sake dept.

erfnet writes"The New York Times remembers back to when 'college was a buyer's bazaar' and digs up 19th-century classified ads from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and others. In competitive efforts to attract students from the limited pool of qualified candidates, applications were taken as late as September for an October freshman class. Vassar offered lush room accommodations. The expectations were high: Latin, Greek, Virgil, Caesar's Commentaries; Harvard's entrance exam from 1869 is posted(PDF). Could any of us pass the exam today?"

A funny kiddie vid that explains a nuclear meltdown through poops and farts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN2hSVxA

The Dying DVR Box and Woz Wisdom 200

The Dying DVR Box and Woz Wisdom 200


Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 08, @03:47PM

from the wozdom-should-totally-be-a-word dept.

Lucas123 writes

"At SNW in Santa Clara this past week, a diverse group of techies shared insights into their industries, such as the DVR market. TiVo's senior director of IT, Richard Rothschild, for instance, explained how those set-top boxes track everything you watch for advertising and marketing and then combine the information with supermarket membership card data to determine how effective ad campaigns are. Oh, and TiVo's planning to integrate its box with your flatscreen, so no more set-top device. And Steve Wozniak attacked the American education system, saying students should be graded on a single, long-term project rather than a short learning/testing cycle. 'In school, intelligence is a measurement,' he said. 'If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you're intelligent.'"

Star Falls Into Black Hole

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 08, @05:12PM

from the fascinating-from-a-great-distance dept.

thodelu writes with news that astronomers recently got a look at what they believe is a star falling into a black hole. Phil Plait explains:

"As the star approached this bottomless pit, the side of the star facing the black hole was pulled far harder than the other side of the star, which may have been a million or more kilometers farther away from the black hole. This change in pull stretched the star — this stretching is called a 'tide,' and is essentially the same thing that causes tides on the Earth from the Moon’s gravity and when the star wandered too close to the black hole, the strength of that pull became irresistible, overcoming the star’s own internal gravity. In a flash, the star was torn apart, and octillions of tons of ionized gas burst outward! This material whipped around the black hole, forming a disk of plasma called an accretion disk. Magnetic fields, friction, and turbulence superheated the plasma, and also focused twin beams of matter and energy which blasted out from the poles of the disk, away from the black hole itself. The energy stored in these beams is incredible, crushing our imagination into dust: for a time, they shone with the light of a trillion Suns!"

Gaming Is the Most Popular Use For Tablets

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 08, @11:50PM

from the only-because-nobody-admitted-to-tablet-porn dept.

The Guardian's Games blog reports on a survey from Google's Admob, which found that more people use tablets for gaming than for any other purpose, even viewing news or email. Quoting:

"According to the survey (PDF), 84% of tablet owners play games, ahead of even searching for information (78%), emailing (74%) and reading the news (61%). 56% of tablet owners use social networking services on their device, while 51% consume music and/or videos, and 46% read ebooks. ... The survey found that 38% of respondents spend more than two hours a day using their tablets, while another 30% spend 1-2 hours. It appears that tablets are predominantly domestic devices, with 82% of people primarily using their tablets at home, versus 11% who say they are used primarily on the go, and 7% who said at work. 28% of respondents say their tablet is now their primary computer, while 43% say they spend more time using their tablet than they do their desktop or laptop computer."

All Star Trek TV Coming To Netflix Instant

Posted by timothy on Saturday April 09, @05:18AM

from the hulu-minus dept.

tekgoblin writes

"This is great news for all the Star Trek fans out there. Starting in July, every episode from every Star Trek series will be available for Instant Watch over Netflix. Right now Star Trek TOS is available for Instant Watch, and the movies, but that's all. Soon it will all be here for our viewing pleasure."

Is Science Just a Matter of Faith?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday April 07, @12:24PM 

from the you-can't-test-faith dept.

Hugh Pickens writes"Pastabagel writes that the actual scientific answers to the questions of the origins of the universe, the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. When Richard Fenyman wrote "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," he was including himself which is disconcerting given how many books he wrote on that very subject. The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand. And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? "We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?""

Pandora App Sends Private Data To Advertisers

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday April 07, @08:50AM 

from the of-course-it-does dept.

Trailrunner7 writes"An analysis of the popular free mobile application from online music service Pandora.com that is the subject of a grand jury investigation into loose data privacy practices in the mobile application market confirms that the application silently sends reams of sensitive data to advertisers. The analysis was conducted by application security firm Veracode and found that Pandora's free mobile application for Android phones tracked and submitted a range of data, including the user's gender, geographic location and the unique ID of their phone, according to an entry on Veracode's blog."

Gartner: Android grabbing over 38 percent of smartphone market in 2011 on Symbian's demise

By Thomas Ricker  posted Apr 7th 2011 6:40AM

We like, ok, love poking fun at analysts' long term forecasts given the volatility of the smartphone market. Nobody, neither Gartner nor IDC, predicted the meteoric rise of Android and iOS, thus making their four-year projections (measured to a decimal point) laughable, to say the least. Shorten that timeline to the end of the year, however, and the accuracy of these forecasts tends to increase dramatically.

Gartner just released its smartphone projections that align very closely with the numbers released by IDC a few weeks ago. Both research firms see Nokia hemorrhaging its smartphone dominance in 2011 after announcing plans to adopt the Windows Phone platform. Gartner sees Symbian pulling in a remarkably low 19.2 percent (down from 37.6 percent in 2010 or an impressive 46.9 percent share held back in 2009) regardless of Nokia's insistence that it still has some 150 million Symbian handsets to ship -- IDC, as you'll recall, was a bit more gracious with a 20.9 percent projection for Symbian in 2011. Like IDC, Gartner sees Microsoft making a dramatic comeback just as soon as Nokia can flood its global channels with mid-tier handsets by the end of 2012 with the Windows Phone operating system ultimately rising to the number two spot in global marketshare (Gartner says 19.5 percent to IDC's 20.9 percent) by, eh hem, 2015. Gartner expects the iOS smartphone slice to peak with a 19.4 percent share (to IDC's 15.7 percent) in 2011 before dipping a bit under the strain of an Android juggernaut and Apple's reluctance to sacrifice margins (and profits) for market share. Gartner expects Android to increase the 22.7 market share it enjoyed in 2010 to 38.5 percent in 2011 (compared to the IDC's slightly more aggressive 39.5 percent share) on the way to dominating the competition with a 49.2 percent share in 2012. Bringing up the rear then is RIM with an estimated chunk of just 13.4 percent in 2011 (compared to 16 percent in 2010) with further declines through 2015 even after the BlackBerry maker migrates to QNX in 2012. Ouch.

As for WebOS: sorry HP, you're in the "other" category along with Bada.

Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in Indian Public Water Supply

ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2011) — Disease-causing bacteria carrying the new genetic resistance to antibiotics, NDM-1, have been discovered in New Delhi's drinking water supply.

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Progression of Smell Loss Offers Clues to the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease

ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2011) — Loss of smell is a characteristic early symptom among people with Alzheimer's disease, but the relationship between olfactory dysfunction and the progression of the disease is still relatively unknown.

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GameStop To Build Its Own Gaming Tablet?

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday April 07, @02:30AM 

from the company-destroying-optimism dept.

itwbennett writes"GameStop has been on a roll lately, purchasing both Impulse and Spawn Labs in the past week. Now it's ready to go after those casual gaming dollars, but first it needs to put a gaming tablet in your hands. GameStop President Tony Bartel told CNBC that his chain is going to start selling tablets later this year: 'If we can work with our partners and the OEMs and they come up with a great tablet that is enabled with a great gaming experience and coupled with a bluetooth controller, then there's no need to go out and develop our own. But if we can't find one that's great for gaming, then we will create our own.'"