You might not think that spinach knows what’s up, but the produce in your fridge is still alive and aware. Which is creepy. But kind of awesome. According to new research, fruits and vegetables still have circadian rhythms up to a week after being harvested. And they respond to light patterns by producing chemical compounds to protect themselves against herbivores.
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Now that its bigger brother Blu-ray has stolen the spotlight, paltry 4.7 GB DVDs have slowly started to fade into obscurity. But could they be poised for a comeback? A trio of Chinese scientists have discovered a breakthrough process that could, at least in theory, allow a DVD to store a whopping 1,000 TB—or a full petabyte—of data. Suck on that, Blu-ray.
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Volvo has revealed self-parking tech that allows drivers to drop their car off at a parking garage and have it automatically navigate to a spare space, summoning the vehicle from their smartphone on their return. The system, installed on a Volvo concept car, can not only drive itself to a free location but avoid other
Robots that hallucinate humans to better understand a 3D space could one day lead to artificial intelligence not only better equipped to cohabit with us, but to autonomously navigate and interact with new environments. The research, “Hallucinating Humans for Learning Object Affordances” by the Personal Robotics Lab team at Cornell, posits that, for robots to
Realizing that cars that automatically parallel park themselves are old news, Volvo has taken the concept one step—actually several miles—further with a new concept vehicle that can actually find an empty spot and park itself in a lot. You just abandon your car at the entrance of a parking lot, and like a valet you never have to tip, it takes care of the rest.
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Glasses that prevent the wearer from being recognized by face detection software have been demonstrated in Japan, using LED light invisible to the human eye but confusing to monitoring cameras to mask identity. The privacy visor, under development by Isao Echizen‘s team at the Japanese National Institute of Informatics, works by packing a pair of
iPhone and iPad users who use their iOS device to share a 3G/4G connection are being advised to change the default Mobile Hotspot password, after researchers showed it was possible to crack them in under sixty seconds. Apple supplies mobile hotspot users with a preconfigured password when they enable the feature, but the default is
Convincing kids to sit still long enough to take their picture either takes a small army of distracting stuffed animals, or the University of Tokyo’s new high-speed camera tracking system which guarantees your subject is always in frame.
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Google’s artificial neural network which taught itself to recognize cats in 2012 has been left looking like a dunce, with a new network by NVIDIA and Stanford University packing more than six times the brainpower. The new large-scale neural network uses NVIDIA’s GPUs to pack in 6.5x more processing power than Google before it, but
Someone call MIT’s researchers and tell them their terrifying cheetah robot has a long-lost teensy sibling in Switzerland. Developed in the laboratories of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the “cheetah-cub robot” is a four-legged metallic critter modeled after a house cat. The scientists focused on designing legs that can move like our feline friends’, paying particular attention to their stability while moving on uneven surfaces. While it has a long way to go before it becomes a graceful daredevil, it’s a fast little bugger that can run seven times its body length in one second. The researchers hope their creation gives rise to more robots for exploration and search-and-rescue missions in the future — a far more noble goal than some cat-owners’ dream to have their pets’ pictures land on the front page of Reddit.
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