Incredible paintings of sci-fi suburbia will make you wish you were Swedish
By Dante D’Orazio from theverge.com: Welcome to rural Sweden, sometime in the late ’80s. Citizens go about their mundane lives and children explore the countryside. But something isn’t quite right. Robots and hovercrafts are commonplace, and decaying science facilities sprout from the harsh Scandinavian landscape. There’s even a rumor circulating that dinosaurs have returned from […]
Making Everyday Activities Trippy
By Alyssa Coppelman from slate.com: Left: Flying, 1980. Right: Dancing to TV, 1982. Mike Mandel Photographer Mike Mandel creates playful, trippy images that combine everyday activities with bursts of color and light that track his subjects’ motions. For his project and subsequent book, Making Good Time, which took the better part of the 1980s to […]
It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class
By Illah Nourbakhsh from MIT Technology Review: How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment? In the book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT’s Sloan School of Management present a chart showing U.S. productivity, GDP, employment, and income from 1953 to 2011. The chart looks as you would […]
Researchers Put Sense of Touch in Reach for Robots
By John Markoff from the New York Times. (Scroll down for video.) Finding and recognizing objects by touch in your pocket, in the dark or among items on a cluttered table top are distinctly human skills — ones that have been far beyond the ability of even the most dexterous robotic arms. Rodney Brooks, a […]
Syfy’s ‘Robot Combat League’ Makes Major Tech Dream Come True
By Brian Anthony Hernandez from Mashable.com: Robot Combat League, the Syfy network’s new reality series pitting 12 expensive, 8-feet-tall humanoid machines against each other in tournament-style face-offs, ends Tuesday night (4/23/13) with the final two robots. And while this season lasted only three months, it has been years in the making. “I really couldn’t believe […]
The Surgical Robot That Can Roam Around Inside Your Abdomen Like a Frog
By Jason Bittel from Slate.com: From the chest-burster in Alien to the bellybutton bot in The Matrix, most of us are a wee bit squeamish about the whole thing-crawling-around-inside-you experience. And if thoughts of parasites playing poker in your body cavity already keep you up at night, this article probably isn’t for you—because scientists are […]
Dash, the world’s first foldable, programmable, origami robot that you can build yourself
From the Dash Robotics website: Dash is the world’s first foldable, programmable, origami robot that you can build yourself! Inspired by nature, Dash runs like the world’s fastest animals. Dash fits in the palm of your hand and is so lightweight that you can run him off of tables or even buildings and he just […]
Draw on an egg (or anything spherical) with this computer controlled art robot
From EggBot.com: The Egg-Bot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball size to that of a small grapefruit — roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (4-10 cm). Super adjustable; designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” […]