Treating pain is a tricky business—especially when it comes to the chronic, perpetually debilitating type. For things like back injuries, osteoarthritis, and bone cancer, you’re really only left with two options: deal with the often dangerous, unpredictable side-effects of prescription painkillers or suffer through it. But all that might change soon thanks to a Moroccan "cactuslike plant" and its toxin’s potential to kill localized pain—forever.
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Sure, they’re mostly just pictures of sand and rocks, but we still have to thank the Curiosity rover for beaming back images of landscapes we’ll never walk on. To give you a panoramic view of a Mars area called “Rocknest” with Mount Sharp visible on the horizon, NASA stitched together almost 900 exposure shots into a single 1.3-billion-pixel image. The photos were taken over the course of more than a month (from October 5th to November 16th last year) at different times of the day, so you can observe variations in illumination and thickness of dust in the atmosphere throughout the panorama. Head over to the source to access the whole interactive mosaic replete with pan and zoom controls, and if you’re lucky, you might even see a rock the rover’s laser zapped in the past.
[Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS]
Via: Wired
Source: NASA
If you’ve ever eaten the dehydrated "space food" sold in novelty shops, you probably thought, "Oh hey, not bad!" Now imagine eating the same thing for years on end. Yup, it would get boring.
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A new robot designed by the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has taken robot dancing out of the jerking movements of the 1980’s and made them modern. A pair of robots that are good enough to copy the dance moves of humans has been ordered by the folks over at Google.
LIDAR scanning has recently become cost-effective enough for archaeologists to use on large historical sites, and they’re taking full advantage. A helicopter jaunt last year has revealed a massive urban site below the jungles near Angkor Wat in Cambodia that likely housed thousands of people. New canals, temples and other man-made structures were discovered during a two-day scan, which emitted up to 200,000 laser pulses per second and would have taken years if done by traditional excavation methods. The technique can scope out features as small as a footprint, and is also being used in cities around the Egyptian pyramids and other archaeologically interesting regions — marking another way that Indy-style archeologists are becoming obsolete.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Ahhh, Switzerland. Not only Europe’s centralized hub for chocolate, cheese, watches, banking, and international apolitical neutrality (so lucky), the nation also boasts two of the finest science and engineering schools on the planet. Naturally, that begets robots, and on Monday, the EPFL begat a cat: the Cheetah-Cub.
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So, the Swiss Have Awesome Robots?
Totally, but for most, when thinking about top robot labs & makers, the mind goes quickly toward DARPA-funded work, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Tech, Honda, Tokyo and/or Osaka Universities, KAIST, etc. So maybe the Swiss just aren’t awesome at marketing, because the country actually is the geographical locus of robotics development in Europe, and its two big tech schools conduct research in no fewer than 6 disciplines each – here, look:
“Yet Another Highly Advanced Robot from Switzerland”
Not an overly common news headline, but probably should be.
Cheetah-Cub from EPFL
The Cheetah-Cub comes from the Biorobotics Laboratory at the French speaking École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in southern Switzerland (that’s the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, for those unable or unwilling to do the linguistic math).
Cheetah-Cub walks with the elastic, hoppity, distinct gait of the common house cat – and it’s fast for a robot of its size. Based on meticulous observation and reverse engineering, it’s legs were designed with springs and actuators to mimic the biomechanics of feline legs (also at comparable size & weight).
It’s a durable, inexpensive, easy to produce research platform that the team hopes will lead to small machines more closely approximating the physical dexterity of meat-based cats. Eventually they might assist with rescue and exploration efforts.
Of course, the shot of the engineer “walking” Cheetah-Cub brings up the question, but so far there’s no word on plans for a pet version. Again, that marketing issue… maybe it just isn’t in the Swiss cultural toolhouse. They should get on that (hire France or Germany, perhaps?), because a project to develop a non-shedding, non meowing, non-excreting pet/toy cat with an off button could make a lot of people happy (and probably get funding).
Alright, that’s a wrap – and not one lame “always lands on its feet” jab in the whole piece. Success!
AIBO Addendum:
In this context, one would be remiss to not mention the super-advanced, inexcusably canceled AIBO. What could more appropriately give Cheetah-Cub a chase? It’s true, the Saddest Robots in Japan Live Among the Sins of Sony.
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Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.
VIA: KurzweilAI, EPFL
Images: EPFL
You know how science can be brain-oozingly amazing
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We’ve seen different battery innovations popup this year, such as the microbatteries revealed back in April that are as powerful as they are small. The latest one to surface, however, is environmentally friendly, using tin, wood, and sodium to create a battery with an extremely long life cycle, able to be charged hundreds of times
While the Curiosity rover is chugging along on the surface of Mars, NASA is making other discoveries from samples taken from other Mars rovers. This time around, looking at rock samples from NASA’s Spirit rover, scientists have discovered that Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere some four billion years ago, which was long before when Earth
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