Hasta La Gadget!

If science fiction films are to be believed, when an astronaut needs company in space, a robot can be a good companion. In keeping with that idea, Kibo the robot will soon join the crew of the International Space Station. The robot will be sent up with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata and of course it will be able to speak to him in his own language.


The idea is that Kibo will keep everyone entertained by interacting with them and taking pictures and updating his Twitter account back on Earth. Like any astronaut, Kibo has undergone training. He recently practiced in zero gravity, as you can see in the video clip below.

The little robot stands 13.4 inches tall, weighs just 2.2 pounds, and boasts natural language processing technology from Toyota. He also has facial recognition software in his head.

The robot was designed by Tomotaka Takahashi who created Panasonic’s Mr. EVOLTA mascot. Hopefully he fits in on the space station and they have lots of fun.

[via Daily Mail]

Hard to believe, but March is here, and with this lambing-lion of a month comes Engadget’s first-ever Expand conference in San Francisco. It also marks the impending culmination of our first-ever Insert Coin: New Challengers competition. Late last year, we asked makers to submit their projects for a chance to win $25,000 in prizes. We whittled that list down to 10 semifinalists and asked you to help up get it down to a final five, which will go up in front of our all-star panel of judges on March 16th and 17th. Finalist voting closed yesterday, and we’ve tallied the 5 projects that will be demoed on stage. Check them out after the break, and be sure to follow our coverage at Expand for a chance to help pick the Grand Prize and People’s Choice winners.

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What’s this we have here? It looks to be an invitation from Facebook telling us to “come see a new look for News Feed.” The event will take place next week on March 7 at 10 am PT. As for what the social network has in mind for the day’s events, we’re pretty adamant that they’ll be introducing yet another new redesign of the front-page News Feed.

The last time Facebook held an event actually wasn’t too long ago. About a month and a half ago, Facebook showed off their new Graph Search feature that’s currently rolling out to users as we speak. Now, the company is back for more, and it looks like they’re going to be giving their front page a little bit of a face lift.

However, as for what to expect with a News Feed redesign, we’re not really sure. It could be something that integrates better with Graph Search, but Facebook hasn’t been focusing too much on its News Feed, so it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. The company has mostly been focusing its efforts on Timeline profile pages recently.

Of course, just yesterday Facebook announces that it would be acquiring Microsoft’s Atlas ad server in order to give marketers and advertisers better tools for managing and tracking their ads on Facebook. We doubt that next week’s event will have anything to do with Atlas, but we wouldn’t be surprised if Zuckerberg brought it up on stage. Stay tuned!

Facebook event scheduled for March 7, News Feed redesign imminent is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Google’s latest attempt to squeeze data into increasingly smaller and smaller spaces comes with a rather silly sounding name inspired by Swiss bread. Zopfli is a compression algorithm that Mountain View claims can create files between three and eight percent smaller than Zlib. Of course, the trade off is that it requires between two and three times as much CPU time to finish shoving everything into a neat little package. Obviously this isn’t an ideal solution for on-the-fly compression. However, decompression speeds are unchanged and don’t require a special library to unpack. The most obvious use of the technology will be in the mobile space where static website elements an be compressed once and transferred frequently. That would mean quicker load times, less battery drain and, perhaps most importantly in this era of capped data plans, less bandwidth usage. For a few more details check out the source link.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Via: CNET

Source: Google

Considering what it’s involved, Mars Rover Curiosity’s mission has been going really well. Staggeringly well. But that couldn’t last forever. The rover has hit its first real road bump with a gnarly computer failure that’s going to delay all the science-ing for at least a week. More »