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Say hello to Keiko. She’s the world’s first robot with Down Syndrome. She’s designed to help doctors diagnose people who come into the ER with a bad case of the Downs by answering their questions and responding to touch. What’s that? She’s not supposed to be retarded? Well what the hell is with that forehead…
I was never jealous of my friends who had those Viewmaster slide-viewer toys when I was a kid—they just seemed kinda boring, but I would have been jealous if the toy was as clever as this mod. This guy’s taken the toy and added an Arduino-driven display unit, accelerometers and a Bluetooth connection to a…
Acidmods just can’t get enough of hacking up our console controllers, and now the company has replaced the Wiimote’s A button with a clicking trackball (a la Blackberry Pearl). The result is an easier way to scroll through webpages and certain menu systems, as you can see in this video: However, this trackball was designed…
Here in America, we use paper to pay for things—maybe plastic if we’re lucky. But over in Japan, wireless RFID is gradually becoming the rage. And this NEC robot supports the trend of paying for something without feeling like you’re actually paying for something.Using the robot is easy enough. You push the touchscreen on its…
Pumping out a sustained 1.64 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (1.64 petaflops) after a recent technological overhaul, the Cray XT Jaguar is now the world’s latest fastest supercomputer (huge disclaimer coming) for non-classified research. And once you see what’s under the hood, you’ll know why.The system is powered by 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors that…
This weird looking chap is the Waseda Talker-7 robot, and it makes those strange vowel sounds not through a loudspeaker, but a biomechanical simulation of the way we humans speak. To that end, it’s got a 19 degrees-of-freedom motorized system that replicates lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips: basically the whole deal. Most interestingly, Takanishi labs…
You can’t wait for the movie. You have the t-shirts, the tricorder replica, the klingon doctorate, your room looks like the Enterprise’s bridge, your face has morphed already into a sexy Vulcanian, and you have been writing your first Star Trek novel for years now. But do you have these plates for your electrical wall…
Yes, the netbook market is tired and pretty jam-packed, but check out this shiny beast: it’s a mini-netbook from Korean manufacturer UMID. And it’s tiny. There’s no official size info, but it looks smaller than a paperback book, and comparable to the old Psion PDAs, if you remember ’em, but far more capable. It’s Atom-powered,…
Research group SquareTrade recently released the results of a massive cellphone study. They tracked 15,000 individual handsets over their first year of use, and they found some large discrepancies in reliability. The iPhone malfunction rate sat at a comfortable 5.6%. The Blackberry (in its various incarnations) jumped to 11.9%. But it’s all better than the…
Sony’s Win-Mo 6.1 Xperia X1 finally has a firm U.S. release date set: November 28, better known as Black Friday. Although unlike most things on sale on that fateful day of darkness, the Xperia will not be a particularly awesome deal at $800 for an unsubsidized, unlocked X1. It’ll work on AT&T’s 3G network here…
Rumors have been floating around for a few weeks now, but today Pharos has officially unveiled two new additions to their Windows Mobile GPS smartphone lineup—the Traveller 117 and 127. Generally, another GPS-enabled phone is nothing to get all that excited about, but tri-band 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 2-megapixel cam / front VGA cam and a VGA…
Data recovery service Datacent has put together an extensive collection of recordings of popular hard drives failing. This might sound pretty boring, but it isn’t just bunch of typical of click-click-bzzzzz heartbreakers — a lot of these sounds are downright bizarre. Who knew that Maxtor drives play a song when their spindles fail? Or that…
Behold, the amazing new character banners for Watchmen, a perfect mix of reality and illustration styling. One of the things that I loved about Watchmen back in the 80s—yes, I bought the original when it first came out—was the technology, omnipresent across the whole series. Dave Gibbons made every gadget and architectural structure perfectly futuristic…
There’s really nothing wrong with the semi-perfect Eye-Fi, other than maybe that we could use more than a piddly 2GB of SD storage when we’re away from our Wi-Fi network. To celebrate keeping the doors open for a year, Eye-Fi has announced the Eye-Fi Anniversary Edition card. It’s a limited edition version of their classic…
We’ve learned about some of its specifications, and had a first look, but it looks like USB 3.0 is going to get a proper unveiling next monday with an announcement of its final protocol specifications at the first SuperSpeed USB Developer Conference. But at WinHEC last week there also emerged a rumor that Windows 7…
Not content to sit still while Opera and Skyfire kick its ass in the Windows Mobile browser space, Microsoft is previewing Internet Explorer Mobile 6, the next version of the notoriously rendering-impaired mobile browser, through a downloadable emulator. The addition of a “desktop” mode is promising, as is the fact that it appears to correctly…
We learned about the Eternity, or A867 as it’s also known only last week, and now over at BGR they’ve got hold of more leaked info. It’s a slender full-touchscreen 3G cellphone, with GPS, AT&T mobile TV support. But it’s got just a 3-megapixel camera instead of the rumored 5-megapixel. It uses the Touchwiz UI,…
When Bang & Olufsen, maker of very expensive things that use electricity, let slip a photo of their upcoming BeoSound 5 home media controller, I saw a lot of potential. The interface looked nice, the hardware classy, and the screen crisp — in other words, if this thing connected with network music shares and played…
The Moshi IVR clock is one of those rare, heartwarming products that serves two marginalized demographics: the blind and the chronically rude. For blind folks the benefit is obvious, as all of the clock’s major functions are controlled with simple verbal commands. This includes alarm deactivation, but not necessarily how you’d expect. “Gggugugughghghhhhh” or “SHUT…
Nokia’s just dropped the E63 onto the scene, based on the E71, and aimed at bringing “the QWERTY keyboard form factor to a broader audience at a great price” according to Nokia itself. The skinny BlackBerry-alike candybar is also designed to meet the needs of a business phone and personal phone in one device, switching…
