We tend to think of reason and emotion as being two different things, but it turns out that there may not be a choice between the heart and the head. A University of Illinois team, led by neuroscience professor Aron Barbey, has made the first detailed 3D map of emotional and general intelligence in the brain, that shows a strong overlap of general and emotional intelligence.
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The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service tells the story of MI6’s transformation since the end of WWII, using stories and anecdotes from actual, real-life agents who worked through and helped shape the course of world events over the last 70-or-so-years. 
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Remember iRobot’s RP-VITA telepresence robot? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared it for operation in hospitals, making it the first of its kind.

The RP-VITA is a telepresence robot controlled by an iPad interface and allows a doctor to “visit” patients and hospital staff remotely. Its navigation is sophisticated to the point where it can be told to go to a specified location without crashing into things at a … Read More → "iRobot’s telepresence robot first approved for hospital use"

Quadcopters come in all different shapes and sizes, with most of them skewing on the large side. The MeCam goes small — tiny enough to fit in the palm of your hand — and brings a few neat tricks with it.

The MeCam (not to be confused with this other product with the same name) is as barebones as a quadcopter gets. Its four tiny propellers carry a module … Read More → "Voice-controlled quadcopter follows you around, films everything"

It’s been three years since we first heard about DARPA’s ARGUS-IS, but thanks to a PBS Nova special entitled “Rise of the Drones,” we finally have more information about the 1.8-gigapixel camera that is supposedly the highest-resolution surveillance system in the world. The documentary showed video footage of the imaging system in action, though the camera itself remains shrouded in … Read More → "DARPA’s 1.8-gigapixel cam touts surveillance from 20,000 feet"

Sometime last week, while you were at work, or at home, or at school, a little robot built here on Earth shone its lights onto a tiny patch of rocks on a planet about 200 million miles away, and — click — it took a picture, and sent that picture back home.

Using the camera at the end of its long robotic arm, Curiosity has taken a picture of a rock illuminated by the rover’s ultraviolet LEDs. 

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The SFJAZZ Center, America’s first freestanding concert hall specifically built for jazz performance, opened last Wednesday in San Francisco. The 700 seat Center is the new home of SFJAZZ, a 30 year old non-profit organization dedicated to the presentation of jazz and related music forms. NPR Music has posted excerpts from the opening night concert.
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Chances are, the quad-core processor powering your desktop computer or high-end laptop is vastly underworked. But it’s not your fault: Writing code that executes in parallel is difficult, so most consumer applications (save for some compute-intensive video games that really need help, for example) continue to run on just one core at a time. Which makes it all the more impressive that a … Read More → "While we waste four cores, scientists use a million at a time"

Would you use this shadeless umbrella? Meet James Dyson Award entry Airblow 2050

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