This is the robot designed by the humanity hating folks over at EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory. It was built to run like a cat, but just a little one, unlike DARPA’s Cheetah inspired death machine. *cue Meow Mix commercial*
The purpose of the platform is to encourage research in biomechanics; its particularity is the design of its legs, which make it very fast and stable. Robots developed from this concept could eventually be used in search and rescue missions or for exploration.
Listen: I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. Anytime somebody tells you they’re developing some sort of robot technology for search and rescue, they really mean seek and destroy. That’s just a fact. Now the real question is *tosses robot, watches fall and shatter into pieces* if they’ll always land on their feet. That’s a no.
Hit the jump for a video.
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Someone call MIT’s researchers and tell them their terrifying cheetah robot has a long-lost teensy sibling in Switzerland. Developed in the laboratories of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the “cheetah-cub robot” is a four-legged metallic critter modeled after a house cat. The scientists focused on designing legs that can move like our feline friends’, paying particular attention to their stability while moving on uneven surfaces. While it has a long way to go before it becomes a graceful daredevil, it’s a fast little bugger that can run seven times its body length in one second. The researchers hope their creation gives rise to more robots for exploration and search-and-rescue missions in the future — a far more noble goal than some cat-owners’ dream to have their pets’ pictures land on the front page of Reddit.
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Paper Dino Software’s Save the Date is a rather unique game. You play as an unnamed character who is tasked with arranging a date with the object of your affections, Felicia. It plays out as series of multiple-choice questions, but after spending some time with the game, you’ll discover that the stakes are far higher than the average dating sim.
Save the Date is a powerful, frustrating game, and one that’s well-written and ingeniously designed. For maximum effect, you should discover the game’s overarching concept for yourself, so we won’t go in-depth into its finer details. Once you’re done with it, there are a couple of great reviews of the experience on Rock, Paper Shotgun and Geeky Universe. It’s available as a free download for…
You know what your life is missing? A speaker that looks like the inside of a high-end luxury car. Thankfully, Zeppelin-maker Bowers & Wilkins has just the thing for you. The 805 Maserati Edition is the result of a partnership with the Italian automaker, building on the 805 Diamond speakers with the addition of black leather, bird’s eye maple and the car company’s trident logo. The speaker hits audio stores come fall, and later this year, it’ll be joined by what we assume will be equally extravagant P5 Maserati Edition headphones.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD
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This is a newly discovered species of slug found on Mount Kaputar in New South Wales, Australia. I thought it looked like a melted AirHead. Or a unicorn turd. Unfortunately, scientists weren’t brave enough to poke it with a stick to see if rainbows and happiness shot out so there’s no guarantee it’s actually a slug. “It has tentacles.” Oh, like you’ve never seen a unicorn dropping with tentacles before? “I’ve never seen a unicorn dropping PERIOD.” It’s like you don’t even care if you win this argument.
Thanks to ChaosLex, who would have licked that thing no questions asked.
Question by Allenph: How do basic electronic components work Like transistors capacitors and resistors? Hi im allen i am 12 years old and ive been working with basic robotics for about a year but im still puzzled by what the components do mostly i have just used schematics but i want an idea about the components so i can design my own projects other then simple dc motors, so please answer quickly!
Best answer:
Answer by Bill CHi Allen, check out this link:
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/
Its basically a free book online about electronics and circuitry – covering AC, DC, and semiconductors.
Trying to type a response as to what each component does would take a very long time!! 
Good luck!
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
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Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change.
FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June.
Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company some people have written off, and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to part shortages for the One’s Ultrapixel camera and a brief injunction due to the HDR microphone it uses. It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — one look at its Q1 financials and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t.
For what it’s worth, HTC hasn’t disclosed how many Ones it’s shipped since it launched earlier this year. Meanwhile, rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has become the Korean electronics giant’s fastest moving smartphone — Samsung shipped 6 million units in just over two weeks, and it hopes to cross the 10 million unit threshold by the end of this month. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that Google’s Hugo Barra showed off a version of the S4 at the company’s I/O developer conference that runs a version of Android that’s unfettered by the software bloat that many a reviewer took umbrage at. Company representatives were careful not to call it a Nexus — even though it seems to harbor many of the advantages inherent to the Nexus line like a clean Android build and access to frequent software updates.
As I noted towards the end of my HTC One review, the wireless industry isn’t a meritocracy — the well-executed device doesn’t always wind up saving the day. Hopefully now that some of these production woes have been ironed out we’ll see HTC live to fight another day, but that’s still far from a given.
If you’re attending Google I/O this week, you will be a part of an experiment from the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. On its blog today, the team outlined its plan to gather a bunch of environmental information happening around you as you meander around the Moscone Center.
In the blog post, Michael Manoochehri, Developer Programs Engineer, outlines his team’s plan to place hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors around the conference space to track things like temperature, noise levels, humidity and air quality in real-time. This was spawned due to a fascination with wanting to know which areas of the conference were the most popular, so it will be interesting to see what the information the team gathers actually tells us.
At first glance, this seems a little bit creepy, but it’s no different than a venue adjusting the cooling system based on the temperature inside at any given moment. As with anything that Google does, this could have implications for tracking indoor events or businesses in the future, as Manoochehri shared:
Networked sensor technology is in the early stages of revolutionizing business logistics, city planning, and consumer products. We are looking forward to sharing the Data Sensing Lab with Google I/O attendees, because we want to show how using open hardware together with the Google Cloud Platform can make this technology accessible to anyone.
Notice the wrap-up of wanting to show people how open hardware combined with Google’s Cloud Platform benefits everyone. Ok, sure. What could data like this mean for businesses, though? Well, a clothing store would be able to track how many people came in and browsed, which areas of the store were hot-spots for interest and then figure out how their displays converted. It’s like real-world ad-tracking. It makes sense, but still seems a long way off.
What will be interesting is not each dataset that is collected, but what all of them tied together tell us about our surroundings:
Our motes will be able to detect fluctuations in noise level, and some will be attached to footstep counters, to understand collective movement around the conference floor.
Of course, none of this information is personally identifiable, but the thought of our collective steps, movements and other ambient output being turned into something usable by Google is intriguing to say the least…and yes, kind of creepy.
If this particular team can share all of the data it collects in an easy to digest way, then businesses will be clamoring to toss sensors all over their stores and drop the data on whatever cloud platform that will host it the cheapest. Google would like to be that platform.
During the event, the team will hold a workshop on what it calls the “Data Sensing Lab,” so if you’re interested on learning more about what the team is gathering as you walk around, this would be the place to go. You’ll also be able to see some of the real-time visualizations on screens set up throughout the conference floor.
We’ll be covering all of the action as we’re being covered by Google.
- Google|Tech Meets Blog
Question by smarth: does windows phone need zune to connect it to pc like itunes for iphone? can we files system like in android or is it locked to zune like iphone is locked to itunes?
Best answer:
Answer by Cindyyeah, WP7 requires sync to a phone via Zune software, similar to iOS and Android. You can enable wireless sync over your internal network – just dock it within wifi range and you’re good to go.
Add your own answer in the comments!
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This is a video (after the jump — that’s just an animated gif above for all you grandparents out there) of astronaut Chris Hadfield showing us earthlings what it looks like to cry in space. It’s weird. Besides, why would anybody cry in space anyways — YOU’RE IN F***ING SPACE. There’s absolutely no reason to cry if you’re in space. I don’t care if my spaceship is hurtling towards the sun and there’s no way to stop it — I’m gonna meet my maker with the biggest shit-eating grin on my face. *dies* Wait — why do you have horns?
Hit the jump for the video.
