Robotic Water Snake

Watch the future, right here



This is the ACM-R5 from Hirose Fukushima Lab in Japan:

"ACM-R5 is equipped with paddles and passive wheels around the body (Fig. 5). To generate propulsive force by undulation, the robot need a resistance property as it glides freely in tangential direction but cannot in normal direction. Due to the paddles and passive wheels, ACM-R5 obtains that character both in water and on ground."

The designers are still having a few issues with control and motion, but as you can see, it would take a robotocist to notice.

I can't wait to get one.

found via grinding.be

Popo and Finnegan better watch out for this thing...

Science heroine - Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr - actress, dancer, scientist.

Called the most beautiful woman of her day, Hedy was much more than just a silver screen starlet.

She was an inventor.

In 1941, Lamarr, along with George Antheil, created the frequency-hopped spread spectrum invention.

What is this device? Simply, it is the basis of our wireless world.

Listen to this piece that ran on Studio 360 to find out more.

Nothing to do with Science...

or maybe everything.

This is Christopher Walken doing, possibly, the best dance routine in movie history.



Who would have thought a dancing pimp was in a movie called Pennies from Heaven?

I saw in an interview with Walken that after the premiere of Pennies from Heaven, two men came up and told him he was the best dancer they had ever seen.

Those two men? Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.

You'll never think of that Fat Boy Slim video again!

Sunday is...Ant day

Stumbled across a few ant videos, thought I would put them up...









Ants Engineering- Building A Bridge Within No Time - video powered by Metacafe

Trade Waiting, Episode 00

Hello,

Sterling here. I just want to let you know that future soon radio has expanded! We now have a co-production with Legends Comics called Trade Waiting!

We talk comics, comic history, odd and ends. And I try to top it off with the best music around.

So check out Episode 00.

note: Odeo is acting up on me, so you'll have to wait for the player in blog.
Also, the Science Chaser isn't dead, and a logo for future soon might not be that far away!

WATER ON MARS! WATER ON MARS! WATER ON MARS!

From The Mars Phoenix site:

Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

On Sol 24, Phoenix extended the first trench in the middle of a polygon at the "Wonderland" site. While digging, the Robotic Arm came upon a firm layer, and after three attempts to dig further, the arm went into a holding position. Such an action is expected when the Robotic Arm comes upon a hard surface.

Meanwhile, the spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver is preparing a software patch to send to Phoenix in a few days so scientific data can again be saved onboard overnight when needed. Because of a large amount a duplicative file-maintenance data generated by the spacecraft Tuesday, the team is taking the precaution of not storing science data in Phoenix's flash memory, and instead downlinking it at the end of every day, until the conditions that produced those duplicative data files are corrected.

"We now understand what happened, and we can fix it with a software patch," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. "Our three-month schedule has 30 days of margin for contingencies like this, and we have used only one contingency day out of 24 sols. The mission is well ahead of schedule. We are making excellent progress toward full mission success."

Six for Science

And in Science Weather today -

1. Dowsing for water.... FROM SPACE!

2. Three super Earth's in distant solar system - how long until a mere mortal Earth is found?

3. Diptrodon is not eight species, but one...maybe.

4. Steam + Solar = free power.

5. Spiders can use silk to mess around with the reality of flies.

6. Paleontologists searching for "the megafauna" in the Yukon.

Bonus - what Giraffe's would look like if they lived like North Americans.

Planning a trip? Don't forget to check the weather

As we've blogged about before, the Phoenix lander has landed on the red planet. And now, since their main contribution to the Phoenix was a weather station, the Canadian Space Agency is providing updates on the latest Martian weather conditions.

The Volcanic Metropolis - Project Indigo

Project Indigo is the most fantastic thing I've seen all week. An inverted, vertical city in the middle of the ocean with a literally stratified caste structure.

It's like living in a faded Venice while the Ottomans take over with the threat of Vesuvius as your bases of reality.

Jesse van Dijk is a genius.

Airship dreams - Airship City

A living city of an alternate today - living buildings, honey-combed domesticity and a great view of downtown.

Compton looks like a great place to catch a sky-ship.

Illustration by bioLINIA

Six for Science

Science in the brine.

1. Deep sea squid are toxic, and it's our fault.

2. The robotic fish can school - is the Singularity far away?

3. 95% of our coastlines are not doing so well.

4. There were two types of mammoths - I wonder which one was a leaner burger?

5. How to spot moons in distant solar systems - a new hobby for a new century.

6. Darwin was a genius, but we have Alfred Russel Wallace to thank for the Origin of Species.

Art: Dangermarc's Kraken.

He's really cool.

Airships - because it's my birthday

This is a tiny part of an amazing ABC series on the history of the airship.
Watch them all!

Sincerely,

FuturesoonAirshipControl

What technology promised - Dance

Weapons of death = beautiful movement.

And not in the usual "I like how it kills" sort-of way.

French "Mirage" fighter jet team performs truly spectacular show in the sky in June 2006. (Alphajet and a Mirage flying across Europe. 19:42 min long).

Found via Dark Roasted Blend

Six for Science

Into the deep we dive:

1. The Titanic was found because Ballard was looking for sunken nuclear sub's.

2. Now dolphin's are getting sick from the sewage we pump out.

3. Big wigs at NASA wanted you to think global warming wasn't too bad. It didn't work.

4. China just can't catch a break - now they're being blamed for New Guinean deforestation.

5. When you are a nautiloid you don't need specialized brain sectors for memory.

6. Phoenix is digging!

Phoenix on Ice

From JPL/NASA:

The image received Friday night from the spacecraft's Robotic Arm Camera shows patches of smooth and level surfaces beneath the thrusters.

"This suggests we have an ice table under a thin layer of loose soil," said the lead scientist for the Robotic Arm Camera, Horst Uwe Keller of Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.

"We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface," said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for Phoenix. "The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It's not impossible that it's something else, but our leading interpretation is ice."

It keeps getting better and better.