As Gaga walked over to the rose-gold keyboard that was planked atop two robotic arms, the piano moved up to meet her hands as she started to play. The setup swayed as Gaga belted out Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” The mechanical arms moved in and out to the rhythm of the song, all while keeping the keyboard steady enough for the singer to … Read More → "NASA built Lady Gaga’s robotic keyboard for the Grammys"

After decades of theorizing and searching, scientists are reporting that they’ve finally found a massive reservoir of water in the Earth’s mantle — a reservoir so vast that could fill the Earth’s oceans three times over. This discovery suggests that Earth’s surface water actually came from within, as part of a “whole-Earth water cycle,” rather than the prevailing theory … Read More → "Scientists discover an ocean 400 miles beneath our feet that could fill our oceans three times over"

If I were a supervillain, I’d want my name to be Vantablack. Unfortunately, that moniker is already taken, but not by a Hollywood bad guy. No, its owner is even more dark and mysterious: Vantablack is the darkest material ever made.

Created by a British company called Surrey NanoSystems, Vantablack absorbs all but 0.035 percent of visible light. It is grown on sheets of aluminum foil and consists of a bunch of microscopic carbon nanotubes so tightly packed … Read More → "Vantablack: a material so dark, you can’t see it"

And when it comes to transportation, the best way to make something appealing is to make it fast. By the end of this year, Copenhagen wants to cut bus travel times by 5 to 20 percent, and cycling travel times by 10 percent. It wants to reduce the number of times cyclists have to stop by 10 percent. (Copenhagen hasn’t forgotten about cars. The city hopes to keep travel times … Read More → "Copenhagen’s new traffic lights recognize and favor cyclists"

Scientists at the University of Southampton, however, recently announced something a little more subtle, but perhaps with wider applications. They’ve developed a bat-inspired membrane for use in MAV wings, that changes shape in order to improve its performance.

The membranous wing works like an artificial muscle, using electro-active polymers to stiffen and relax in response to an electrical current. That current is in turn automatically … Read More → "Shape-shifting drone wings inspired by bats"

Researchers at Georgia Tech developed a robotic arm that gives drummers an extra arm to help boost those skills. The project from the university’s Center for Music Technology aims to push the limits of what humans can do with a hand, er, arm from smart robotics. In this case, the device attaches to a drummer’s shoulder and reacts to changes in tempo and movement. If the musician … Read More → "Robotic arm gives drummers an extra hand to thrash with"

This summer, the U.S. army is taking its next steps towards instituting autonomous military vehicles by dispatching a convoy of self-driving trucks on a highway in Michigan to test vehicle-to-infrastructure technology, Automotive News reports. That’s right: huge, self-driving trucks will be driving on public roads.
via Gizmodo</ … Read More → "There’s a convoy of autonomous army trucks driving through Michigan this summer"

Scientists have long been on a quest to find a way to implant electrodes that interface with neurons into the human brain. If successful, the idea could have huge implications for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. Last month, a team of researchers from Italy and the UK made a huge step forward by showing that the world’s favorite wonder-material, graphene, can successfully interface with neurons.

Read More → "Graphene successfully interfaced with neurons in the brain"

Punctuation marks are the unsung heroes of writing. They determine the story’s rhythm and clarity, but are doomed to play second fiddle to the author’s words. Inspired by a series of posters featuring literary punctuation, scientist and writer Adam J Calhoun decided to compare how different literary figures throughout history have wielded punctuation. He stripped down novels like Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Ulysses</ … Read More → "What famous novels look like stripped of everything but punctuation"

Etzioni and the non-for-profit Allen Institute recently ran a contest, inviting nearly 800 teams of researchers to build AI systems that could take an eighth grade science test, and today, the Institute released the results: The top performers successfully answered about 60 percent of the questions. In other words, they flunked.

For Etzioni, this five-month-long contest serves as a reality check for the state of artificial … Read More → "The best AI still flunks 8th grade science"