This is the somehow already funded Kickstarter campaign for SVANKi, a wireless heated ice cream scoop ($59 early bird special, $75 after *spit-takes rainbow sprinkles*). The wireless scoop charges on a wired base, and is good for 30 minutes of 140°F -150°F (60°C – 65°C) use on a charge. It comes in three finishes: white, black, and fake bamboo. Don’t have the $60+ to blow on another kitchen gadget? I’ve got you: just leave the ice cream on the counter for five to ten minutes (or run your scoop under scalding water for a few seconds). That’s what I do, and I’m a firm believer that the simplest solution is often the best one. “You tried electrifying your entire apartment floor to kill cockroaches.” Come over, we’ll play the floor is lava.
Keep going for the Kickstarter video while I invented a super-chilled fork that prevents pizza bites from melting the roof of your mouth.
Thanks to Coleen, who agrees astronauts don’t have this problem with their ice cream.
This is a short video from Boston Dynamics of the latest iteration of their ATLAS humanoid robot doing a little untethered parkour. First it hops over a log to warm up, then jumps up three steps with shocking grace and agility. So, if you thought owning a two-story house was going to save you from the robots, it’s time you burn the paper placement/kid’s menu you drew your robot apocalypse survival plan on and start taking the threat seriously. We need to build a bunkbed. “You mean bunker?” That’s an even better idea. I mean yes of course that’s what I meant. *discreetly ripping up bar napkin*
Keep going for the full video.
Thanks to cjcjcjcj, who agrees the robots are evolving much, much faster than we ever will.
According to Sir Richard Branson, founder of the space tourism company Virgin Galactic, their latest spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, will be in space in a matter of weeks.
“We should be in space within weeks, not months. And then we will be in space with myself in months and not years,” Branson told CNBC on Tuesday in Singapore. “We will be in space with people not too long after that, so we have got a very, very exciting couple of months ahead,” he added. Branson has not yet officially expande
Amazon has patented technology that could let Alexa analyze your voice to determine whether you are sick or depressed and sell you products based on your physical or emotional condition.
The patent, titled “Voice-based determination of physical and emotional characteristics of users,” was issued on Tuesday this week; Amazon filed the patent application in March 2017.
The patent describes a voice assistant that can detect “abnormal” physical or emotional conditions. ”For example, physical conditions such as sore throats and coughs may be determined based at least in part on a voice input from the user, and emotional conditions such as an excited emotional state or a sad emotional state may be determined based at least in part on voice input from a user,” the patent says. ”A cough or sniffle, or crying, may indicate that the user has a specific physical or emotional abnormality.”
It’s not clear what ads would be sent based on a user’s emotional state, but someone who is sick might be asked if they want to buy cold medicine.
“A current physical and/or emotional condition of the user may facilitate the ability to provide highly targeted audio content, such as audio advertisements or promotions, to the user,” the patent said.
If the Amazon voice assistant determines that you have a sore threat, the system would “communicate with the audio content server(s)” to select the appropriate ad. “For example, certain content, such as content related to cough drops or flu medicine, may be targeted towards users who have sore throats,” the patent says.
Alexa might then ask, “would you like to order cough drops with 1 hour delivery?” After the order is made, the voice assistant “may append a message to the audible confirmation, such as well wishes, or ‘feel better!'”
System could raise privacy concerns
Companies get patents all the time for technologies that never make it to market, so there is no guarantee this capability will be implemented in future versions of Alexa.
Amazon would have to consider the privacy implications of letting its voice assistant analyze the emotional and physical states of Amazon customers. Amazon and other tech companies last month were called to a Senate Commerce Committee hearing to testify about consumer data privacy, and senators are considering whether to write a new privacy law.
Besides analyzing your physical or emotional states, Amazon’s patent says the system would take into account the user’s browsing history and purchase history:
Embodiments of the disclosure may use physical and/or emotional characteristics of a user in combination with behavioral targeting criteria (e.g., browse history, number of clicks, purchase history, etc.) and/or contextual targeting criteria (e.g., keywords, page types, placement metadata, etc.) to determine and/or select content that may be relevant for presentation to a user.
The system would use a “voice processing algorithm” to determine a user’s emotional state. The voice analysis would be able to detect “happiness, joy, anger, sorrow, sadness, fear, disgust, boredom, stress, or other emotional states.” It would make those determinations “based at least in part on an analysis of pitch, pulse, voicing, jittering, and/or harmonicity of a user’s voice, as determined from processing of the voice data.”
The system would apply tags to each physical or emotional characteristic. Those tags may be “associated with or linked to a data file of the voice input,” and “used to determine content for presentation to the user.”
The emotion-detecting system would be tailored to each user, determining the user’s “default or normal/baseline state” so that it can detect changes that indicate that “the emotional state of the user is abnormal,” the patent says.
Amazon’s analysis would presumably be more accurate when tailored to a specific user, but the patent says the technology can also determine the emotional state of “any user” regardless of whether they normally use that device.
A Soyuz rocket launches with Expedition 57 Flight Engineer Nick Hague of NASA and Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, Thursday, October 11, 2018.
NASA
On Thursday in Kazakhstan, at 4:40am EDT, a Soyuz rocket took off carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin toward the International Space Station. The ascent proceeded normally until the separation of one of the rocket’s booster stages, by which point the crew had already experienced microgravity.
Because the Soyuz spacecraft did not reach orbit at the point of this booster failure, the crew was forced to make a rapid ballistic descent likely under high g-forces. After about 20 minutes of uncertainty, Russian officials confirmed the crew were ok and had landed about 20km east of Dzhezkazgan, a city in central Kazakhstan. As rescue crews arrived, Hague and Ovchinin were reported in “good condition” and found out of the capsule.
Little additional information has been provided. Roscosmos, the Russian firm that operates the nation’s space agency and is responsible for Soyuz launches, will not hold any news conferences today. The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said a state commission has already been established to study the accident.
This failure raises serious questions about the future of the International Space Station, as, since the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011, the Soyuz spacecraft and rocket were the only means by which crews have had to reach it. With Thursday’s failed launch, just three people remain on the station: American astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, German ISS Commander Alexander Gerst, and Russian Sergey Prokopyev.
It is not clear how long the Soyuz vehicle will be grounded or how long the current crew can remain in orbit. NASA’s own transportation system, the commercial crew vehicles under development by SpaceX and Boeing, have yet to take uncrewed test flights to the station, and those are unlikely to occur before early 2019. The first crewed flights would not take place until several months after that, unless the space agency is willing to take additional risks with those missions. China has a human space flight capability, but it has no crew missions planned before 2020, and NASA is barred by Congress from working with the Chinese Space Agency.
Recent problems
Several recent problems with the Soyuz launch system will complicate the investigation. In December 2016, a Soyuz-U rocket carrying an uncrewed Progress spacecraft laden with 2.6 tons of food, fuel, and other supplies lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Following a normal launch, first-, and second-stage firings, things started to go wrong for Progress MS-04 at about six minutes into the flight, also with a booster issue. The spacecraft was lost. The rocket that launched Thursday was a slightly more modern Soyuz-FG booster.
Moreover, there was a problem with the last Soyuz spacecraft, which launched in June, when a small leak was found in the vehicle’s orbital module in space in August. Russian officials have been coy about what caused the problem, even intimating that a NASA astronaut may have drilled the hole while in space. An investigation is ongoing, but what most likely happened is that a worker accidentally damaged the spacecraft at some point during the manufacturing or integration process. This could have happened during the manufacturing phase at RSC Energia’s facilities in Samara, Russia or at the processing and integration facilities in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, from where the spacecraft was launched.
In the wake of this most recent mishap, NASA released a statement just last week saying it had full confidence in the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft that was launching Thursday morning. NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, was actually in Kazakhstan for the launch.
This story will be updated with additional information when it is available.
The Xbox One October update is rolling out today, offering a few new bells and whistles for the Microsoft console. The features in this update allow you to use more voice interactions, more easily watch HDR movies with streaming services, and personalize your Avatar.
The Xbox Skill feature lets you interact with your Xbox using Alexa or Cortana devices, with a greater degree of precision than the previous Kinect voice commands. As an example, Microsoft says you can tell Alexa to “launch Forza Horizon 4” and in response the Xbox One will start up, sign you in, and launch the game, all without additional commands needed. Other commands include starting Mixer broadcasts, capturing screenshots, and adjusting the volume. You’ll need to download the Xbox Skill in the respective stores to get started.
To promote the new functionality, Amazon will be offering a bundle that includes an Amazon Echo Dot with new Xbox One S or Xbox One X purchases. That deal is coming soon, but supplies will be limited.
The newly revised Avatars are available for all users today as well. These have a focus on inclusiveness, with a greater range of body types, more accessories, and the ability to dress in any kind of clothing you’d like. You’ll see the new Avatars on your own profile, in the activity feed and Gamerscore leaderboard, and more. You can use a Photobooth to take a picture of your Avatar to use as your profile image. Plus, if you want to stick with your original Avatar, that option is available too.
The update also adds Dolby Vision HDR streaming across supported televisions. For now it supports Netflix only, but Dolby Vision will expand to more apps in the coming months. You can enable it through the Settings menu. Finally the Narrator has added Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Australian English.
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
The simplistic design of a robot snake—a long articulated tube—is also what makes them appealing for a variety of applications. Sending one slithering down a pipe to look for blockages or damage is one obvious application, but they can also be useful for traversing countless types of terrain. Two-legged robots that walk are getting better at it, but the act of balancing is computationally intensive, resulting in robots like Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS costing millions of dollars.
Snakes are much simpler life forms than humans, and emulating how they move and locomote results in a simpler and cheaper robot, at least compared to a two-legged humanoid. And now, thanks to a joint research project at Kyoto University and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan, roboticists have improved where robot snakes can go. A newly developed gait, which has this robot snake bending and twisting its smooth body to create a series of connected shapes, allows it to slowly but securely wrap itself around each rung as it climbs a ladder.
It isn’t going to win any ladder-climbing races, but it means this robot can now more accurately recreate the abilities of a real snake, which include climbing trees and other obstacles. For disaster recovery situations, which robots like these are often developed for, the robo-snake could more easily traverse piles of rubble or damaged infrastructure that lay in ruins, which even humans, and human-like robots, would have trouble with.
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