Hasta La Gadget!

Simultaneously creating something awesome and setting up a real-world scenario for a future B-rated horror movie, researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a robot that is controlled by moths using styrofoam balls. You can check out a brief video of the moth-become-machine wonder after the break.

Over the course of the project, 14 silkmoth males were used in the robots, all of which demonstrated an uncanny ability to control the machine. The moths were placed in an area with a female sex pheromone present, and as is demonstrated in the video, they successfully navigated to the source, despite the fact that the researchers didn’t always make it easy.

As part of the project, one of the robots was given a turning bias that caused it to veer to the right when navigated. Despite this obstacle, the moth on board still managed to correct for the problem and successfully take the robot to the source of the pheromone. This is all part of a project tasked with improving autonomous robots.

According to Noriyasu Ando, part of the research team: “Most chemical sensors, such as semiconductor sensors, have a slow recovery time and are not able to detect the temporal dynamics of odours as insects do. Our results will be an important indication for the selection of sensors and models when we apply the insect sensory-motor system to artificial systems.”

[via Extreme Tech]

Researchers create robots controlled by moths using a styrofoam ball is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The ease of dumping our historic/inane messages into Twitter has fueled the service’s growth so far, but the ability to retrieve relevant ones later has, until now, lagged behind. CEO Dick Costolo promised last year that the company was working on “architecting search” to allow access to the archives, and today the company announced its search feature is finally able to include tweets that are more than a week old. That follows the release of archive dumps that allow users to mass download and search through their own tweets. Expanding the search function’s memory from goldfish to elephant size is going to roll out across the web and mobile apps — already sporting a freshly redesigned search — over the next few days. For now, Engineer Paul Berstein explains in a blog post that results will slowly continue to grow to include a greater percentage of tweets ever sent, with search results weighted by elements like number of favorites, retweets and clicks.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Mobile

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Source: Twitter Blog

Seattle Grace has been riddled with anxiety and friction since Dr. Alana Cahill arrived. The consultant — played by “Grey’s Anatomy” guest star Constance Zimmer — has been working on trimming the fat in order to get the hospital running efficiently.

Last week, Dr. Cahill closed down the ER, but it looks like that’s just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the most recent episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” she dropped quite the bomb: Seattle Grace is up for sale in the wake of the plane crash survivors’ settlement, which leaves the hospital responsible for $15 million per survivor.

Zimmer took the time to chat with HuffPost TV via phone about what’s ahead for her whip-cracking character on “Grey’s Anatomy” and much more. Below, find out if Dr. Cahill will be involved in one of Shonda Rhimes’ signature romantic entanglements, Zimmer’s reaction to her line in “House of Cards” that has the internet all atwitter and whether or not the woman best known as Dana Gordon will pop in the “Entourage” movie, which is happening for real this time.

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In what is a large blow to Google, a federal judge has invalidated 13 Motorola patent claims against Microsoft in what has been an on-going legal spat between the two companies. The claims concern a total of three patents that deal with a video codec standard, with Microsoft having had requested their invalidation based on a patent law, something the court ultimately agreed with.

The decision was laid down by Judge James L. Robart, the presiding federal judge over the case. The patents in question were 7,310,374, 7,310,375, and 7,310,376. Concerning the first patent in the series, claims 14 through 18 were invalidated. Regarding the second patent, claims 13, 14 and 16 were invalidated. And finally, regarding the last patent, claims 14, 15, 18 through 20, and 30 were invalidated.

Claims 8 through 13 for patent ’374 remain, claims 6 through 11 and 17 remain for patent ’375, and claims 22, 23, and 26 through 28 remain for patent ’376. These claims aren’t safe, however, and could still end up being invalided in the future, adding to the blows again Google. According to FOSS Patents, the invalidation was for “indefiniteness of means-plus-function.”

Said Judge Robart: “…even were a person of ordinary skill in the art able to devise an algorithm for decoding the function from the disclosed encoding description, that alone does not rescue the disputed means limitations from indefiniteness … The specification needs to provide a decoding algorithm from which to base the understanding of one skilled in the art, and the court can find no such algorithm within the specification.”

[via FOSS Patents]

13 Motorola patents against Microsoft invalidated is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

LOS ANGELES — Residents of Big Bear, Calif. were evacuated Thursday as police continued to hunt for suspected murderer Christopher Dorner, a former LAPD police officer and Navy reservist.

Dorner, who allegedly shot three police officers (one fatally) Thursday morning, is suspected to be in the mountain community because his truck was found torched on the side of a road.

Big Bear, about 80 miles from Los Angeles, is a popular ski resort area. When police confirmed that the truck belonged to Dorner, resorts shut down, guests were told to stay in their rooms and Big Bear Unified School District campuses went on lockdown, reports NBC LA.

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