Thanks Japan. Yet another horrible robot from the center of the uncanny valley.
The HRP-4C, a walking, talking humanoid fashion model fembot developed by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), is ready for the runway.
With 30 motors in her body, the 158-centimeter (62-in) tall, 43-kilogram (95-lb) HRP-4C can walk around and strike a range of poses.
The black-haired robot also has 8 motors in her face, allowing her to wow the crowds with expressions of simple emotions like anger and surprise.
Oh no! Models out of business?! I suggest they start a car wash company.
DARPA time again! This time their crazy scheme isn’t quite so crazy – a giant near space blimp that can stay in flight for years and provide excellent photography for those on the surface.
For years, the idea of super-sized blimp that could see a whole city at once seemed like something only Darpa, the military’s far-out research arm, could love. Now, unexpectedly, the Air Force has signed on to the concept, as well.
Built around a giant, flexible antenna, the all-seeing airship — dubbed ISIS, short for Integrated Sensor Is Structure — would provide a God’s-eye view of the battlefield in real time. In theory, it could spot a cruise missile hundreds of miles away, or track a group of insurgents on the ground.
Darpa spokeswoman Jan Walker confirmed to Danger Room that the Air Force recently signed a memorandum of agreement with the agency on ISIS. It’s a fairly big deal: Most ideas that originate within Darpa do not have a long life unless a service picks up on it.
Next time you distract a cowboy by telling him the Goodyear Blimp is overhead, make sure it’s not a military spy platform watching you
With the apocalypse fast approaching, it’s obviously time to cash in. So it is with great fanfare that a new catalogue landed on our doorstop this morning, and for once it wasn’t for ‘Wizzy Kebabs’. Nope, because this is the time of year that the cheery optimists over at American Bomb Shelter have a sale!
Seems Obama’s positive attitude hasn’t convinced some people (Especially now that Putin has proved he can kill a tiger in a wrestling match), so home shelters are big business again. So it’s heartening to see that just $16,000 (about £3.27p) will net you:
All of the precision manufactured steel parts
All of the pre-cut and shaped rebar, including enough for one riser
A single blast hatch for that riser
Two 8-foot ladder sections for a 16-foot ladder
An ASR-100N-NBC Safe Cell air filtration/ventilation system
Two blast valves (one each for the air intake and exhaust pipes)
One overpressure valve
Free telephone technical support
As it’s the second Fri 13th this year, here’s some good news for those readers with paraskavedekatriaphobia (that’s a made-up fear of Friday the 13th by the way), as scientists in Amsterdam have suceeded in blocking human fear responses using Propanolol.
Because they are cool, they seem to have decided that the best way to test this was:
A: show volunteers a big, scary spider.
B: give them an electric shock at the same time.
(Man I love science). Apparently administering Beta-Blockers at the time prevented the memory of these events linking with inherant fear associations, so the victims were’nt scared the next time round. While this may seem like a complete waste of time, it does have uses in ES’s favourite thing: War! Basically, imagine legions of crack troops,or indeed legions of ill-equipped cannon fodder, all of them with no fear at all of being shot at. While the US rely on total coverage and we go for training, there are …other countries…out there where manpower isn’t really a problem that this would suit. Not to mention making it much easier to get creepy crawlies out of the bathtub(and possibly getting rid of my irrational fear of blind summits).
Weirdly for a country so God-bothered, US Scientist are always out in front when it comes to defying YHWH, and it’s heartening to see they are still at it. Claims today reaching us that a full on new lifeform could be a possibility within 5 years. According to Prof David Dreamer of Cal U, labs are closing in on an ominously named ‘Second Genesis’.
Quotes from the scientific community involved are generally along the lines of:
“Until you try this you just don’t know”
And of course:
“There’s nothing we expect to go wrong…”
Luckily New Scientist is on hand to quell any fears you may have, stating that any initial life forms would be very primitive. Like Godzilla.
