The Mighty Flynn has the original story and Mark Shea has the jokes. Yes, scientists have finally achieved the ultimate in mechanization: vomiting robots: The robot is named Vomiting Larry, and isn’t being used for sight gags, but is helping scientists to better understand the spread of noroviruses, also know as the winter vomiting bug, which can cause projectile vomiting, [...]
“It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of.” –Ronald Arkin, Georgia Institute of Technology– What’s the man talking about? Autonomous drones: dumb metal programmed by fallible humans to wage a more [...]
God help me, but I think I can identify at least 80% of these. Click here for the full size picture. The answer key.
Claire Lomas, paralyzed from the chest down, has completed the London Marathon, 16 days after it began. She was able to do it thanks to a ReWalk suit, which provides a motorized exoskeleton that allows the paralyzed to walk upright. The suit has leg supports fitted with motorized hips and knees, a body harness, a [...]
There is absolutely no question about it: battlefield robots and drones save lives. That’s crucial. At the same time, however, they can also take lives, and here we get into a morally muddy issue. Our government is just fine with drone assassinations of US citizens, without due process or even a presentation of the evidence. [...]
The early machines featured in this story are things of beauty, imagination, and elegance. The novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, along with the film version by Martin Scorsese, has renewed interest in the mysterious and captivating creations known as automata: mechanical people made long before the computer age. BBC has a nice 5 minute [...]
F’rinstance: South Korean prison guard. And this is necessary because … CCTV is too efficient and cost effective and doesn’t involve cool proto-Daleks? Now, if Robo-Guard wandered up and down gen-pop shouting “EX-TER-MI-NATE!” randomly, then I might be able to get behind this. This article at Phys.org appears to have an accurate read on this. It’s not [...]
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