AP Wire | 09/25/2005 | Robots to face off for $2M Pentagon prize

Things are starting to happen, and this time it sounds like they may even break that 8 mile barrier...

Newcomers have joined a handful of last year's teams to form a motley mix of garage tinkerers, academia and corporations. All hope that their machines - fitted with the latest sensors, cameras and computers - have aged a generation since last year.

Damn! I'll be searching for my Lego MindStorms Robotics kit again.

This year's race shows signs of being extremely competitive. Some vehicles have logged hundreds of self-guided miles in the Southwest desert during summer practice runs. Several even tested on last year's course, which spanned the Mojave Desert between Barstow, Calif., and Primm, Nev.

And they are ambitious this year:

DARPA Director Anthony Tether hopes that a robot will be able to traverse the course in under 10 hours and snatch this year's prize. "It's going to be a long day out in the desert," Tether said.

I reckon...

Technorati tags: robotics, artificial intelligence

Nanogirl Dermal Display

Windows getting under your skin. 'Pixel bots' and 'programmable dermal display'. On the back of your hand. Perhaps this will be the future of cell phones. Or tattoos? Animated tattoos, perhaps.

Anyway, your health first...

Technorati tags: nanotechnology, medicine

BBC NEWS | Technology | Deadly plague hits Warcraft world

An virtual plague devastating a virtual world. This is just so cool. Science fiction is charging down this way from somewhere in the future.

Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing "hundreds" of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.

Blizzard tried to control the plague by staging rolling re-starts of all the servers supporting the Warcraft realms and applying quick fixes.

However, there are reports that this has not solved all the problems and that isolated pockets of plague are breaking out again.

Blizzard is the company that created the online game (World of Warcraft) which was infected far more than intended by a virtual plague.

Technorati tags: virtual worlds, science fiction

SPACE.com -- Astronotes | Space Elevator Gets FAA Lift

They are actually doing something. I'm obviously too cynical and narrow-minded (insular would also be a reasonable word to use here, I think). Still, like the man said, it's a 'trillion-dollar moneymaker'. Come to think of it, what would a trillion-dollars look like in Rand?

The lifters are early prototypes of the technology that the company is developing for use in its commercial space elevator to ferry cargo back and forth into space.

The tests, which are planned for early fall, will simulate a working space elevator by launching a model elevator “ribbon” attached to moored balloon initially up to a mile high. The robotic lifters will then be tested in their ability to climb up and down the free-hanging ribbon, marking the first-ever test of this technology in the development of the space elevator concept.

I'll keep track of this - would like to see some images of these balloons and their ribbons...

When is 'early fall'? Would that be early spring in the Southern Hemisphere?

Technorati tags: space, science fiction, technology

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Flying reptiles just got bigger

This entry is for Thomas (the mammal, but also the tyrannosaurus and, recently, the velociraptor). This beautiful picture is from the BBC website in the heading above. Hopefully, they'll let me keep it on the page.

New findings in the Americas (they mention Mexico and Brazil) show that some of these creatures had wingspans of over 18m! Small aeroplanes!

"Their skeletons were exceedingly light: their bones were very thin and hollow, and those hollows were filled with an air-sack system. They'd also got rid of their reptilian scales and their wing membrane was very, very thin.

"All this meant there wasn't that much weight to get off the ground, and so they probably flew really rather well," the researcher said.

Technorati tags: science, paleontology, pterosaurs, mesozoic

EETimes.com - Hitachi claims Cambridge qubit silicon success

Another step. At this rate I'll definitely be heading to the wikipedia page soon. The problem is that someone needs to fill in the years between 2001 and 2005...

Actually, I was going to write 'Another small step...', imagining myself being fiendishly clever with the play on quantum and small and all that, but then I thought that perhaps to these scientists it's not such a small step. Or even worse, it may seem like I have no idea what I'm writing about...

As qubits can be combined in a variety of two-dimensional circuits, as in conventional microprocessors, there is the possibility of scaling-up from one device to a large quantum circuit, which is Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory's next project.

Believe me, we here at topolog will be keeping an eye on that project.

Technorati tags:
science
quantum

Trading Rockets for Space Elevators

We all know what a space elevator is, right? We've all read Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise. Well, I read it many many years ago, and can actually only remember that it mentioned a space elevator. Okay, but the space elevator idea isn't new, and it has left the realms of science fiction. NASA, starting somewhere in 2000, has been looking at this as an option (although, I don't suppose that necessarily means the idea has a more solid basis.)

The news is that the process discussed on this blog a couple of days ago, whereby sheets of nano-carbon tubes can be produced at...7m a minute or something like that...that process has profound implications for the space elevator idea, since the cables along which the elevator will be moving will consist of 'at least 50% nano carbon tubes'.

The quote that I enjoyed in this article is the following:

"This is a trillion-dollar moneymaker for a ten billion dollar investment," said Bradley Edwards, whose work with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts has made him a go-to expert on space elevators. "Some of the largest companies in the world are just waiting for the word that this is possible."

Reminds me of something from Austin Powers...