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Robot Snakes in a Mother-F*ckin’ Pipe

Bad tidings for drain-blockages and nervous defecators alike with the news that Norwegian scientists are developing a robotic snake (yet more biomimetics!) to navigate and clean complex pipe-systems:

The 1.5-meter long robots, which are made of aluminium, are being designed to inspect and clean complicated industrial pipe systems that are typically narrow and inaccessible to humans. The intelligent robots have multiple joints to enable them to twist vertically and climb up through pipe systems to locate leaks in water systems, inspect oil and gas pipelines and clean ventilation systems.

It seems snakes are a versatile form for robots, with applications for robot snakes in space exploration, military espionage, and surgical tools.

[story from PC World via Slashdot]

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Friday Free Fiction for 27th June

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Greetings, free fiction aficionados! We’ve got a pretty hefty batch here in compensation for my absence last week, so let’s get straight to it …

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Just a few from Manybooks.net:

“The Chamber Of Life” by Green Peyton Wertenbaker

“Nine Hard Questions About The Nature Of the Universe” by Lewis Shiner

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By comparison, the folk at Feedbooks have been busy beavers, and there’s enough here to keep you going for weeks, from proto-sf classics to pulp-era shorts. There are not only short stories …

… but full novels, too:

Crikey!

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Via SF Signal, there’s a veritable festival of Edgar Rice Burroughs at Project Gutenberg:

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A message hit the inbox from dj lotu5:

I think that this story I wrote – “Tissue Banking” – is about what Futurismic is about: the uncanny similarity between the future and the present. I’m a transgender artist, blogger and trouble maker, and I blog about the interplay of technology, transgender, sex and resistance.

Thanks, dj!

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Via Gareth D Jones, a new addition the the sidebar o’ justice: Concept SciFi webzine

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Warren Ellis makes a proclamation:

With the aid of the Colleen Doran Creator’s Grant, Kieron Gillen and Charity Larrison have completed their darkly magical graphic novel Busted Wonder, which you can read in its entirely online for free at bustedwonder.com.

You must go and read it now.

Obey the Ellis!

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From the High Lord of Free, Cory Doctorow:

For the 150th anniversary issue of The Bookseller […] the editors commissioned me to write a short-short story about the next 150 years of book sales. The result is called The Right Book, and it’s out in the current edition and online [first two pages, third page] as well.

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The increasingly ubiquitous Fantasy Book Spot is hosting a teaser chapter of Ken MacLeod‘s forthcoming novel The Night Sessions:

He slowed and dismounted fifty metres from the obstruction. A slope of rubble sprawled halfway across the road. The lower half of the front of a tenement block had been blasted out. Two floors had collapsed. No vehicles had been crushed, but the wreckage of several collisions remained slewed in the road. Ferguson hadn’t seen anything like this in real life for a long time, and now seldom even on television. He took off his cycle clips, pushed the bike one-handed and stared ahead. After a step or two he remembered the weight on his back.

Looking forward to that one – MacLeod novels rarely disappoint me.

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is up to instalment sixteen of Memory:

Bolts of green flame spewed from the cuayabs.

Quite!

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Here are the Friday Flash Fictioneer pieces from last week which were delayed by my gallivanting out of town:

And just to make everyone feel like total amateurs, Gareth D Jones offers his now-published-in-Nature piece – you can see “Travel By Numbers” in all its native (or should that be Natural?) glory.

And here’s this week‘s Friday Flash material:

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And that’s your lot – if that huge stack from Feedbooks can’t keep you occupied for a while, you must be some sort of reading machine. Don’t forget to make time to drop us in your tips and plugs for next week, though – deadline is 1730 hours GMT.

Have a great weekend!

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More biomimetics – whales and wind turbines

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Biomimetics: design solutions from the natural world. Futurismic has covered this kind of thing before, but the examples we’ve blogged about were relatively intuitive.

Iridescent beetle shells as inspiration for a photonic crystal? Fine. Robotic dragonflies for surveillance solutions? Okay. But the appendages of a humpback whale as inspiration for wind turbine design? Bit of a creative leap, surely?

Those knobby flippers were long considered one of the oddities of the sea, found on no other earthly creature.

But after years of study, starting with a whale that washed up on a New Jersey beach, Frank Fish thinks he knows their secret. The bumps cause water to flow over the flippers more smoothly, giving the giant mammal the ability to swim tight circles around its prey.

What works in the ocean seems to work in air. Already a flipperlike prototype is generating energy on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, with twin, bumpy-edged blades knifing through the air. And this summer, an industrial fan company plans to roll out its own whale-inspired model – moving the same amount of air with half the usual number of blades and thus a smaller, energy-saving motor.

So, there you have it – appropriately-named university professor finds application for cetacean hydrodynamics.

Punchy.

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Mars has component minerals for life

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NASA\'s Mars Phoenix Lander - artist\'s impressionLatest word from the Phoenix Lander suggests that the soil of Mars contains the right sort of minerals to support certain forms of plant life – apparently asparagus would thrive there. I now have visions of an Edgar Rice Burroughs chase scene set in a forest of towering asparagus … [image courtesy NASA]

Of course, if you listen to a certain irritatingly vocal minority of asshats, we shouldn’t be wasting our time and taxes searching for the origin of life on other planets because “[l]ife originated on Earth when God spoke it into existence“. O RLY?

I think I’ve reached a tipping point with creationists; I used to find them infuriating, but recently I’ve found I just pity them. If the glory of God serves only to blind you to the glory of the universe, life must be depressingly short on moments of genuine marvel.

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Storm botnet turns its hand to writing fiction

lightning strikeHere’s a new twist in the ongoing saga of the Storm worm spam network – it has started delivering fiction into our inboxes. [via Bruce Sterling]

Not science fiction, sadly – that’d make for an even better headline – but fake news headlines. Perhaps in response to people slowly wising up to email subject-lines about fake Rolex watches and “spec14l blu3 p1ll 4 b3dr00m”, the botnet is now replacing them with specious news stories about non-existent natural disasters and celebrity mishaps:

“The emails contain such headlines as ‘Eiffel Tower damaged by massive earthquake’ and ‘Donald Trump missing, feared kidnapped.'”

Pitching for the schadenfreude market, then … we’ll be able to judge the effectiveness of this new tactic by watching for how long they keep using it. [image by El Garza]

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