Cutting Edge

DARPA plans 'Avatar' surrogate robots

Could soldiers of the future fight battles in robot bodies controlled from afar? DARPA apparently thinks so, and the agency wants to create an army of surrogate fighting droids.

The U.S. military's research wing apparently is planning surrogates like in the film "Avatar" but with robots instead of giant Na'vi. It has a $7 million program code-named "Avatar" in its 2013 budget, according to Wired.

The robots would reduce risk to human fighters, just as thousands of aerial drones are already keeping pilots out of harm's way.

Originally posted at Crave

Lovins: How to break the fossil fuel deadlock

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--To those who say the world needs dramatic technology breakthroughs to get off of fossil fuels, energy guru Amory Lovins has a succinct answer: integrated design.

Lovins has been working in the trenches of energy and efficiency for more than 30 years, gaining a reputation as a radical thinker able to imagine possibilities others can't. He was here at MIT yesterday giving a presentation on his latest book, "Reinventing Fire" and speaking to entrepreneurs and investors at an event organized by Xconomy.

The book, written by Lovins and colleagues at his "think and do tank" Rocky Mountain more

Nevada gives green light to self-driving cars

Nevada wants to befriend robotic cars.

The state's legislature on Wednesday approved regulations for self-driving vehicles, the first state in the country to do so.

"These regulations establish requirements companies must meet to test their vehicles on Nevada's public roadways as well as requirements for residents to legally operate them in the future," Bruce Breslow, director of Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles, said in a statement.

Nevada's DMV worked with Google, automakers, insurance companies, and law enforcement on the regulations. The department said that other states already have bills to allow self-driving cars and are likely more

Why 'big data' is a magnet for startups

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Armies of entrepreneurs are trying to make money sifting through mountains of data from the Web and other sources, but one of the biggest challenges is simply getting control of the data in the first place

Entrepreneurs at an event here this week said that the trend of "big data," or collecting and analyzing reams of information from varied sources, threatens incumbent technology providers and enables applications once considered impossible. Startups are harnessing massive amounts of data to generate personalized entertainment ideas, predict how media coverage will affect company stock prices, or analyze genomes in the search of more

Life's first cells may have evolved in geothermal pools

Earth started as a violent place, its surface churned by continuous volcanic eruptions and cloaked in an atmosphere that would have been poisonous to today's life-forms. Furthermore, the thin primeval atmosphere may have provided only scant protection from the young sun's harsh ultraviolet glare. Given these inhospitable conditions, scientists have long wondered: How did the first cells come to be nearly 4 billion years ago?

Conventional scientific wisdom holds that life arose in the sea. But a new study suggests that the first cells--or at least the ones that left descendants still extant--got their start in geothermal pools, more

RoboBees ready for mass production. Thanks, Harvard!

Harvard University has developed a method for churning out coin-size microrobots en masse.

By drawing on the ideas of origami, researchers have engineered a fabrication technique that produces a small flying robot much the way a children's pop-up book creates a structure.

The method can be used for different types of millimeter-scale electromechanical machines, Harvard said yesterday. But researchers developed the system specifically to replace the painstakingly slow process of manually making insect-like flying robots for its RoboBees project.

"You'd take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue," Pratheev Sreetharan, a more

Can this 'janitor satellite' clean up space junk?

Swiss scientists believe they have a solution to help tidy up the junkyard of satellites over our heads.

It's called CleanSpace One and it's designed to tackle the 17,000-mph mess we've made around our planet.

The $11 million "janitor satellite" is under development at the Swiss Space Center in the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL). Its target: derelict satellites 430 miles up that threaten our communications and information networks.

There are some 16,000 bits of debris in the near heavens that are larger than 4 inches across. They're mostly satellite and rocket components hurtling around like hornets in a bag, and they can also endanger the lives of astronauts. The International Space Station has to adjust its orbit to get out of the traffic.

Originally posted at Crave

'Invisibility' cloak could dampen blow from earthquakes

Crucial structures such as power plants and dams could be protected from earthquakes by surrounding them with specially designed rubber cylinders, according to researchers.

A team from the University of Manchester's School of Mathematics yesterday proposed creating barriers that would "cloak" buildings from the seismic waves of earthquakes. The researchers applied the same techniques that others have on scattering waves of light to render objects invisible.

In a paper published last week, the researchers say that artificially engineered materials, called metamaterials, have the potential to safeguard critical buildings and other structures such as airport terminals and bridges better than more

Lemnis unwraps LED bulb under $5

Lemnis Lighting is taking a foot-in-the-door approach to LED lightbulbs.

The startup company today announced a new line of bulbs, priced at $4.95 and $6.95, respectively, aimed at getting consumers to try out LEDs for general lighting. The bulbs, though, have some limitations.

The Pharox Blu line comes in 200-lumen and 350-lumen versions, both of which give off less light a 40-watt incandescent bulb's 450 lumens. That means that the bulbs, which consume less than 5 watts and 8 watts, respectively, won't give off enough light for many uses, such as lighting a whole room.

The more