A group of researchers from Tufts University, Brown University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are collaborating with the US Navy in a multi-year effort to explore how they might create robots endowed with their own sense of morality. If they are successful, they will create an artificial intelligence able to autonomously assess a difficult situation and then make complex ethical decisions that can override the rigid instructions it was given.
via < … Read More → "Scientists try to teach robots morality"

To celebrate the annual Lithuanian music festival Street Musician’s Day, artist Tadas Maksimovaslaunched an experimental project to see if he could make music out of his own hair. As this entertaining video shows, the answer is yes.
via Laughing Squid

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If you’re a fabulously wealthy person in the market for a new home, you might want to head over to Transylvania: the castle that inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula is now for sale. Buyer beware, though–it apparently has no bathrooms…

If you’re interested in owning this little piece of Gothic history, Herzfeld & Rubin, the firm handling the sale, … Read More → "Dracula’s castle now for sale to the right bidder"

Humans are good at catching fast-moving objects — just ask any baseball fan. Robots typically lag behind, however, which is why the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has developed a robot arm with the reaction time needed to catch just about anything. After learning the basic concepts by imitating human behavior, the machine uses its cameras to predict the path of a flying object and grab it … Read More → "Scientists build a robot arm that catches objects in the blink of an eye"

People afflicted with bipolar disorder must live with the fact that at any moment, they could launch into a major depressive or manic mental state. These mood swings can be so severe that dangerous, erratic behavior including suicide attempts can result. Researchers at the University of Michigan, however, are developing something that could prove to be very helpful. It’s an Android app that listens to a patient’s phone conversations, and detects the signs … Read More → "Bipolar disorder app predicts mood swings by eavesdropping on phone conversations"

Lucid dreams offer us the heady chance to shape our own fates in a fantasy world. In these dreams, sleepers realize they’re dreaming and can sometimes take over their dreams’ plots, allowing them to turn the tables on their enemies, soar into the sky, or embrace that special someone. Now, researchers in Germany have demonstrated that they can trigger lucid dreamsby zapping sleeping people’s brains with electricity.   

The researchers … Read More → "Zapping sleepers’ brains causes lucid dreaming"

… Read More → "This manmade island floats on over 150,000 recycled plastic bottles"

Repairing seriously damaged bones is normally a delicate art; while you want to regrow bones quickly, you also have to carefully manage that growth to produce the right shape. Thankfully, Rice University has created a gel that makes it easier to produce only the bone tissue a patient needs. The material kickstarts bone regeneration using a patient’s stem cells, but it also dictates where that growth occurs by forming a scaffold that degrades … Read More → "New medical gel grows bone tissue exactly where you need it"

Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California have produced a living bacterium that has a strand of artificial DNA made with chemical “letters” not found in nature or any other organism…

The result of years of research going back to the late 1990s, the TSRI team’s project aimed to find molecules that would pair like those in DNA and would form stably on the helix … Read More → "Engineered bacterium is first living organism to use artificial DNA “letters”"

Walt Disney pioneered the art of animation and pushed the boundaries of robotics with his audio-animatronic presidents, but now the research lab that bears his name, along with ETH Zurich, have figured out a way to combine both art forms. Dubbed Pixelbots, Disney scientists have unleashed a swarm of teensy two-wheeled robots can traverse a surface and create dynamic animations in real time.

Mechanically, these circular robots are … Read More → "Disney invents robots that swarm into colorful animations"