Some of our readers will remember ASIMO, Honda’s robot which turned 10 years old last year, Honda has just unveiled a new version of ASIMO, and he has had a few upgrades over the previous version.

The new ASIMO is now capable of continually moving without being controlled by an operator

and he is apparently also more intelligent and able to adapt to more situations and tasks.

The all-new ASIMO is now advanced from an "automatic machine” to an "autonomous machine” with the

decision-making capability to determine its behavior inconcert with its surroundings such as movements

of people. At the beginning of the development process, the following three factors were identifi ... Read more »

RIKEN and Fujitsu have today announced that their Japanese supercomputer named "K Computer” which took the number one slot for being the worlds fastest computer back in June has now increased its lead even more by passing the 10 petaflop milestone.

The K Computer broke its own record by improving its processing speed to 10.51 petaflop with its 88,128 processors executing over 10.5 quadrillion calculations per second. Which it managed to run for 29 hours straight without failure.

The measurements for the record were taken using Linpack and the K Computer has been developed as a joint enterprise between RIKEN and Fujitsu. The K computer brings together leading-edge technologies, including ultrafast and energy-efficient CPUs and a network capable of an immense amount of interconnectivity, to create a high-performance, highly-re ... Read more »

Scientists from the University of Hong Kong have found credible proof that the vastness of space supports an indescribable organism. Neither living nor dead, it posseses a chemical composition that’s comparable to fossil fuels here form Earth, meaning at some point they grew from living things.

If this is the case, then the universe as we know it is a bizarre place indeed, hardly just a broad canvas speckled with trillions of lifeless galaxies. What makes this new find from HKU (kudos to Prof. Sun Kwok and Dr. Yong Zhang) so compelling is it runs against widely accepted theory. By gathering data through an observatory and the Spitzer Space telescope, the scientists behind this amazing find observed that stars released complex inorganic compounds into the vacuum of space. Why? Who Knows? They just do.

So the emerging revelation from this research is that stars may have seeded the uni ... Read more »

After a few weeks delay due to a security breach at the kernel.org website, Linus Torvalds has released Linux kernel 3.1 update which brings with it a range of new features. The new Linux version took around 3 months to develop and includes enhancements that improve the speed or expand the capabilities of both the KVM and Xen virtualisation systems.

Linux 3.1 adds support for the open source OpenRISC CPU architecture, near-field communication (NFC), dynamic writeback throttling, a new iSCSI implementation as well as Nintendo’s Wii controller.

An overview of these and other advances in the kernel, and a look at upcoming changes in Linux kernel 3.2, is available in an article on The H Open:  ... Read more »

Actually it’s neither. Instead it’s calculating and ruthless, striking at the precise moment when your sleep is most shallow, thus amplifying the pain. It’s supposed to measure brainwaves, see, then gauge the most opportune moment to wake you. So how does this make it exceptional? Well, because it measures brainwaves during sleep, this alarm clock can pinpoint the best time to nightmarishly jolt you out of slumber. Great idea, no?

Since not even a prototype of this revolutionary device is in existence, seen above is a Defusable Alarm Clock featured last month here at Geeky Gadgets.

Defusable Alarm Clocks aside, experiments at the Jerusalem College of Engineering in India have produced startling results. Since human brains at rest have ‘layers’ of sleep or rain activity (this verges on Inception), electrode connectors allowed the scientist’s test alarm clock to measure whe ... Read more »

When it comes to global warming, the only people to blame for turning it into a tired and excessively muddied issue is ourselves. Yes, this is a powerful and provocative stance. But really, look at how it has become almost irrelevant in public discourse thanks to so many conflicting facts, falling prey to partisan politics and clever information sabotage. No wonder to this day, there are still global warming skeptics.

But you know what? Forget blaming people or pointing fingers. It’s no use. Our Earth’s temperature has risen since the beginning of the post-war years. That’s fact. Forget Al Gore, he merely transmitted the information.

On a lighter note, yes, that’s the planet Reach pictured above standing in for our homeworld.

Now allegedly independent findings from the Berkeley Research Project (BRP) confirm the worst: The previous decade was the hottest on records. So does this ... Read more »

Unlike most places in the world (other than Yemen or Afghanistan), a vibrant gun culture is still alive and kicking in the US. But a new company wants to put a fresh spin on every enthusiastic shooter/outdoor type’s departure from this life. The startup is called Holy Smoke LLC and its founders specialize in turning cremated remains into bullets. Part of their marketing campaign involves shooting people into the afterlife. Not surprising.

Holy Smoke got its start in unusual circumstances. A long while ago, Thad Holmes and Clem Parnell were contemplating existential matters. In the midst of their discussion came the idea for a radical service aimed at the gun-owning part of the population. Being enthusiastic game wardens and outdoor adventurers, the pair were experienced with making ullets for small arms. Shotgun shells are also among their specialties.

So this year, Holy Smoke ... Read more »

There’s no need to panic, ladies and gentlemen. The warmachines aren’t turning on their masters yet. For starters, most of the CIA and Air Force drones are stationed in the Middle East and Africa, meaning they’re far away. The mysterious virus logging pilot keystrokes is also quite benign, though its origin is unknown. So the humongous mystery that should be clouding everyone’s thoughts right now is: where did it come from?

Nobody knows for sure. Of course, it’s pretty much an awful open secret that when it comes to vulnerabilities, the American military and intelligence establishment is filled with them. But on drones?

The implications here are scary, since the US Air Force and Navy already envision a glorious future of unmanned fighting machines. It would suck if your legions of unmanned terminators can’t function in combat after they get hacked.

Warfare isn’ ... Read more »

A report from a Cornell University research team has revealed that across the world, a standardized emotional rhythm runs our daily lives. So what kind of methodology did they use? Tweets, lots and lots of tweets. Like somewhere in the neighborhood of two million people across several dozen countries. The end result was published in the journal Science.

Thanks to the social media revolution, scientists engrossed with the study of human behavior have veritable gold mines at the tip of their fingers. This was exactly the case at Cornell, where the findings were used to analyse a person’s behaviour throughout the week. The broad analysis necessary included harnessing words deemed positive and even the use of emoticons. So this means the more : ) there are, the happier the person.

Several familiar patterns e ... Read more »

The truth is it’s not exactly a carpet that’s floating around a lab at Princeton. More like a plastic sheet that has an electric current running through it. The creation of a grad student inspired by a paper he read by some MIT prof, the footage of the experiment has since gone viral. Innovation at its best, ladies and gentlemen. Below is a fantasy stock image of a flying carpet, because the real footage (after the jump!)  looks awful.

It took graduate student Noah Jafferis two years and a lot of painstaking labor to finally get his sheet to, uh, hover. To what end? Vindicating some paper he read that was authored by an MIT prof. Of course, when the prof heard about Jafferis’ work, he was mighty proud.

The ‘carpet’ is actually a thin plastic sheet and if it does prove useful in any applications, it could make an impact on VTOL technology. Quite exciting, s ... Read more »