For everything from family to computers…
Nearly every car has an ashtray, but for non-smokers, it just turns into a small hole that collects dust, trash, and other nonsense. Instructables user hells-oui shows us how to turn it into a smartphone dock. More »
from Lifehacker
What if you could control a robot — wait, don’t answer yet — with your mind? Pretty great, right? That’s what the Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment (VERE) group is working on, and it’s made some pretty good, you know, strides. New Scientist details a test utilizing fMRI brain activity-sensing technology to control a robot in France from a laboratory in Israel. The volunteer was able to perform tasks like walking around a room, following a person with the small ‘bot and locating a teapot, using visuals from a camera embedded in the robot’s head. There’s a “small” delay in the technology, but researcher Ori Cohen insists that it’s possible to anticipate and compensate for it.
The technology, which one scientist compared to Avatar, naturally, has some truly beneficial potential applications, and the scientists have plans to test it out with paralyzed subjects, giving them the opportunity to control a surrogate with their mind. The fMRI technology, meanwhile, may be swapped out for an electrode-based electroencephalogram system, and the scientists plan to try things out with a Japanese robot that is roughly the height of a human for future testing. Check out a video of the project in its current state after the break.
from Engadget
Judge Richard Posner, who recently threw out an entire patent lawsuit involving Apple and Motorola, has been nothing if not outspoken on the wildly busy US patent litigation system. In an interview published today by Reuters, he calls patent litigants animals struggling for survival and suggests that some industries—perhaps including software—shouldn’t have patent protection at all.
“It’s a constant struggle for survival,” Posner told Reuters in his chambers at the US Court of Appeals in Chicago. “As in any jungle, the animals will use all the means at their disposal, all their teeth and claws that are permitted by the ecosystem.”
While Posner said the pharmaceutical industry has a decent claim to patents because of the huge investment it takes to create drugs, he added that advances in software and other industries are less costly. The benefit companies get from being first to market would exist even if software patents didn’t. Smartphones are particularly problematic because they have thousands of patented components and features, he said.
from Ars Technica
Looks like playing games and watching sci-fi flicks didn’t do the University of Iowa’s Jack Scudder any harm. The NASA-funded researcher has been studying elusive magnetic portals connecting the Earth and Sun, and now he’s figured out how to find them. The portals, also known as X-points in Scudder-speak, are born from the mingling of Earth’s magnetic field with incoming solar winds. These astral connections create flux transfer events (we’ve got Doc Brown’s attention) — high-energy particle flows responsible for, among other things, the eerie twinkling of the polar auroras. Off the back of Scudder’s data wizardry, NASA‘s planning the 2014 Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS), sending four craft into the void to observe the portals. Each spacebot is capable of locating them, and when one is found, inviting the others ’round for a study date. Taking a leaf from Scudder’s book, Engadget researchers have tracked down a NASA video detailing the mission, located beyond the fold for your convenience.
from Engadget
Apple must be doing something right in the PC space — or PC makers or doing something wrong. The ratio of PC sales to Mac sales has dropped to the lowest point in about 15 years.
from Wired Top Stories
“We’ve observed a new particle.” That’s the opening statement in a video featuring Joe Incandela, the spokesman for the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS detector, made in a video that is currently publicly accessible on the CERN website. The video, first spotted by ScienceNews and now apparently pulled, appears to preempt the big announcement scheduled for early tomorrow morning. It also implies that this year’s data was enough to push the evidence for the Higgs past the five standard deviations needed to declare discovery.
“When we say we’ve observed the particle, it means we’ve just got enough data to say it’s definitely there, and it’s very unlikely to go away,” Incandela says in the video. In addition, we know it’s a boson because it decays into two photons.
Its mass is roughly 130 times that of the proton, making it the heaviest boson we’ve discovered so far—and the heaviest particle other than the top quark.
The two-photon decay is one of the strongest bits of evidence, and provides a narrow peak that helps define its mass. Strong evidence is also available through decay into two Z particles; the signal is there in other decay channels as well, but those are less definitive because of the background noise present.
from Ars Technica
