Pretty soon we won’t have to do anything for ourselves. Well, OK, that’s an exaggeration, but the list of tasks that robots can now perform as well as a human grows longer by the week. At the more mundane end of the scale (except in cultural terms, perhaps) Yaskawa Electric have fixed up one of their Motoman industrial robots to play taiko drums at a Japanese festival. Arguably more beneficial to the well-being of our species is the Sensei robotic arm at London’s St Mary’s Hospital, which is performing joystick-controlled heart surgery – with developers confident that a fully automated version is not far off.
All posts by Paul Raven
Iranians accost GPS-equipped spy-squirrels?
The news out of the Middle East just gets weirder by the day – often with an animal flavour to it, so it seems. Less than a fortnight after the British military had to deny deploying a crack team of attack badgers into Basra, the Iranian government has announced that they have captured a number of squirrels with GPS and other spying kit embedded in their bodies. I’m very skeptical as to how true this story will turn out to be, but it’s still one hell of a headline. [Image by Ogwen]
Civil servant has half-sized brain
Brain scans of a French civil servant reveal that, despite displaying no disability in his day to day life, his brain may be up to 50% smaller than average thanks to a bizarre complication of hydrocephalus. I don’t need to provide you with a punchline for this one.
Spying bugs take wing
The bugs used by spies and spooks have just taken a step closer to resembling their namesakes. Harvard University engineers have produced a life-size robotic fly that uses the same mechanical principles as living insects to get around. Its potential utility as a surveillance platform is obvious enough, and as the article notes, it might make a useful mobile sensor for hazardous or inaccessible locations … but I wonder what uses the street will find for this sort of technology once they can be fabbed cheaply en masse? I’m thinking advertising. [Gizmodo]
Is it time the print media stopped printing?
An article on the Business Week website suggests that some of the bigger American newspapers should stop printing physical copies and withdraw to publishing solely on the web – maybe not right away, but within the next year or two. It’s hardly a new suggestion, but it’s gaining more weight as time goes by – the logistics and overheads of print media are making it a tricky business in which to make a profit, and we’re consuming more media online all the time. The UK’s Guardian already lets you download the latest editions in PDF form, to print or not as you choose. How long will it be before all periodical publications are electronic? [Print Is Dead]