MIT’s Media Lab has created LineFORM, a “Shape Changing Interface” that presents new ways for us to interact with technology. LineFORM is a serpentine robot that has the ability to form a number of shapes, mixing flexibility with rigidity. The lab’s Tangible Media Group believes it opens up “new possibilities for display, interaction, and body constraint,” and has demonstrated its potential for all three on video.
via Read More → "MIT’s shape-shifting bot can be a phone, lamp or exoskeleton"

Neurosurgeon Phil Kennedy, a pioneer in brain-machine interfaces that enable “locked-in” patients to control computers with their minds, is trying to build a system that will translate imagined speech into computer speech so that severely paralyzed people could “talk” just by thinking. He couldn’t find the right research subject to work with and even if he did, the FDA, concerned about prior experiments, wouldn’t approve his company, Neural Signals, to do more implants. So last … Read More → "Neurosurgeon had brain-computer interface installed in his own head"

The PiKon project is a low-cost telescope kit using 3D printed components, an off-the-shelf heating duct, some Meccano, and a Raspberry Pi camera with the lens removed.

Earlier this year at Maker Faire UK, we talked to Mark Wrigley about the PiKon telescope, and how he went about building the 3D printed, Raspberry Pi powered, telescope.

… Read More → "This 3D printed telescope is powered by Raspberry Pi"

For most hobbyists, building a robot mostly involves buying a robot and assembling it and then (if that first part doesn’t make you hate robots) programming it to do stuff. Designing your own robot from scratch is much more difficult, especially if it’s a robot that has legs that are supposed to do something practical. ETH Zurich, in collaboration with Disney Research and CMU, has developed “an interactive design system that allows casual … Read More → "Disney software makes it easy to design and print custom walking robots"

Before the New Horizons spacecraft zipped past Pluto four months ago, planetary scientists weren’t sure what they were going to find at the tiny, distant world. But they did not expect to discover active volcanoes. And yet that’s precisely what scientists appear to have found after combining images with topography data.

“When you see a mountain with a big hole in the top of it, that basically points to … Read More → "Volcanoes on Pluto look a lot like those on Earth and Mars"

The Zoolophone is a glockenspiel with keys shaped like zoo animals. It’s adorable, right? Turns out it’s also a pretty cool engineering experiment.

Although it looks like a children’s toy, the musical instrument is the result of two years of research by professors at MIT, Harvard, and Columbia universities. They wanted to know how they might use a … Read More → "This animal-shaped glockenspiel is really a rad experiment"

Between 1913 and 1920, many Americans sent their children around the country by mail. Provided your child weighed less than 50 lbs, you could simply affix stamps to their clothing and send them off with the postmaster. They’d be whisked across the country in the railway system’s mail compartments and delivered to relatives safe and sound.

Unsurprisingly, this practice rather alarmed the authorities, who, beginning in 1913, began to issue directives against the practice, starting with postmaster general Burleson’ … Read More → "It was once socially acceptable and surprisingly affordable to send children by parcel post"

Human beings are not great at lie detection. One study found that people can guess when someone is lying just a little more than 50 percent of the time. However, machines may be able to catch us lying more often. A group of researchers working at the University of Michigan have developed an algorithm that can detect lies from videos at higher rates than human interrogators. 

The algorithm, developed by Rada Mihalcea, a professor … Read More → "A machine can read lying faces better than humans"

We’ve seen neural nets that are trained to identify animals in photos. We’ve seen neural nets trained to describe videos. Last week, Google said it’s using a neural network to generate responses to your emails. Alongside all of this progress, researchers and tinkerers have created dozens of experiments using open-source neural networks, uploading their results to GitXiv.

Today, one of those tinkerers–Samim Winiger, whose work  … Read More → "Someone taught a neural network to talk with romance novels"

This is My Wife’s Lovers, a painting by Austrian artist Cal Kahler. It’s a majestic display of feline beauty consisting of 42 cats on a canvas that measures 75 by 102 inches. If you’re looking for the world’s ultimate cat painting, you’ve found it.
via Neatorama

< … Read More → "World’s largest cat painting sells for $826,000"