DARPA: Robotic Hand Strong Enough to Hold 50lb Weight, Dexterous Enough to Use Tweezers
May 22nd, 2013Via: DARPA:
The ARM-H track of DARPA’s Autonomous Robotic Manipulation (ARM) program focuses on development of robust, low-cost and dexterous robotic hand hardware. DARPA funded performers to design and build hand mechanisms that could replace the claw-like hands currently used on robots with hands incorporating 3-4 fingers and useable palms. The teams successfully produced hands that can be manufactured for as little as $3,000 per unit (in batches of 1,000 or more), down from the $50,000 cost of current technology. The new hands also incorporate sufficient dexterity to enable manipulation of objects in their fingers when controlled by a skilled operator. This technology helps pave the way for adaptable, low-cost robots that can use a wide range of human tools to assist in dangerous defense missions.
The hand in this video was developed by iRobot of Bedford, Mass., with support from Harvard University and Yale University.
3-D Printed Food?
May 22nd, 2013“So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”
That’s hilarious, considering what already passes as food for a lot of people.
I’ll take a pass, and continue slaughtering cows in my driveway. Oh! Funny story: Kids from a couple of dozen homeschooling families have a gymnastics class together once per week in town. Becky and I take Owen and Reed to this class and they love it. This week, a Ukrainian guy came up to me and said, “I know you from Farmlet. I learned how to slaughter my own cows from that post you put up about doing in one of your steers.” He also wanted to discuss the Country Living grain mill.
New Zealand: It’s a village… Especially for homeschooling, homekilling, grow-your-own-food weirdos.
Via: Quartz:
If eating something spat out by the same kind of 3D printers that are currently being used to make everything from jet engine parts to fine art doesn’t sound too appetizing, that’s only because you can currently afford the good stuff, says Contractor. That might not be the case once the world’s population reaches its peak size, probably sometime near the end of this century.
“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” says Contractor. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
Third Party Testing Of Rossi’s E-Cat: ‘Energy Was Produced In Decidedly Higher Quantities Than What May Be Gained From Any Conventional Source’
May 21st, 2013The two test measurements described in this text were conducted with the same methodology on two different devices: a first prototype, termed E-Cat HT, and a second one, resulting from technological improvements on the first, termed E-Cat HT2. Both have indicated heat production from an unknown reaction primed by heat from resistor coils. The results obtained indicate that energy was produced in decidedly higher quantities than what may be gained from any conventional source.
…
In any event, the results obtained place both devices several orders of magnitude outside the bounds of the Ragone plot region for chemical sources.
More Poor People Are Now Living in Suburbs Than Cities
May 21st, 2013Via: Daily Ticker:
If you think of the typical American suburb as a refuge from the bustling city next door, you may want to think again. According to a new book from the Brookings Institution, the suburbs are changing and are becoming home to a larger number of poor people. The result: more poor people now are living in suburbs than in cities.
In “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” Brookings researchers found that 16.5 million poor people live in suburbs now versus 13 million in cities. The number of poor people in the suburbs has surged 67% between 2000 and 2010.
Brookings says structural shifts in the U.S. economy and two recessions helped shrink the American middle class, pushing more people into poverty.
Vaccine Injured Children in Small African Village Used Like Lab Rats
May 21st, 2013Via: VacTruth:
In December 2012, vaccine tragedy hit the small village of Gouro, Chad, Africa, situated on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Five hundred children were locked into their school, threatened that if they did not agree to being force-vaccinated with a meningitis A vaccine, they would receive no further education. These children were vaccinated without their parents’ knowledge. This vaccine was an unlicensed product still going through the third and fourth phases of testing.
Within hours, one hundred six children began to suffer from headaches, vomiting, severe uncontrollable convulsions and paralysis. The children’s wait for a doctor began. They had to wait one full week for a doctor to arrive while the team of vaccinators just carried on vaccinating others from the village. More children became sick.
When the doctor finally came, he could do nothing for the children. The team of vaccinators, upon seeing what had happened, fled the village in fear.
Fifty children were finally transferred to a hospital in Faya and later taken by plane to two hospitals in N’Djamena, the capital city of Chad. After being shuttled around like cattle, these sick, weak children were dumped back in their village without a diagnosis and each family was given an unconfirmed sum of £1000 by the government. No forms were signed and no documentation was seen. They were informed that their children had not suffered a vaccine injury. However, if this were true, why would their government award each family £1000 in what has been described as hush money?
Interestingly, during the time the children spent in the hospital, two more children joined them from another village.
To read the full stories of this tragedy, please see references at the end of this article from previous Vactruth world-exclusive reports. [1,2,3,4]
Since this time, Vactruth has been passed a series of secret documents, which fill in some missing gaps in this story and expose just how corrupt the organizations behind this tragedy really are.
Research Credit: alvinroasting
Chinese Hackers Who Breached Google Gained Access to Data on U.S. Surveillance Targets
May 21st, 2013Via: Washington Post:
Chinese hackers who breached Google’s servers several years ago gained access to a sensitive database with years’ worth of information about U.S. surveillance targets, according to current and former government officials.
The breach appears to have been aimed at unearthing the identities of Chinese intelligence operatives in the United States who may have been under surveillance by American law enforcement agencies.
It’s unclear how much the hackers were able to discover. But former U.S. officials familiar with the breach said the Chinese stood to gain valuable intelligence. The database included information about court orders authorizing surveillance — orders that could have signaled active espionage investigations into Chinese agents who maintained e-mail accounts through Google’s Gmail service.
My Email Has Been Down for About the Last Two Days
May 21st, 2013Update: Never Mind
The emails were sitting in a queue somewhere and they all just came through.
—
BlueHost migrated my account to a faster server, but the MX settings were botched in the process. Anyway, if you sent me any email or any story suggestions over about the last couple of days, I didn’t get them.
China Now Spends $125 Billion Per Year On Riot Gear And ‘Stability Maintenance’
May 20th, 2013Via: AFP:
Mannequins in riot gear, armoured cars and drones line a police equipment and “anti-terrorism technology” trade fair in Beijing as vendors seek to profit from China’s huge internal security budget.
The country is estimated to have more than 180,000 protests each year and the ruling Communist Party spends vast sums on ensuring order — more even than on its military, the largest in the world.
…
China’s domestic security budget across all levels of government is 769 billion yuan ($125 billion) this year, more than the country officially plans to spend on its armed forces, and an increase of more than 200 billion yuan since 2010.
Billions of the internal security budget, which also covers mundane items such as food safety and running courts, is earmarked for “stability maintenance”, a term used to justify arresting protesters and surveillance of dissidents.
CALEA II: FBI Wants Backdoors In Secure Communications Tools
May 20th, 2013Via: Freedom to Tinker:
Today I joined a group of twenty computer scientists in issuing a report criticizing an FBI plan to require makers of secure communication tools to redesign their systems to make wiretapping easy. We argue that the plan would endanger the security of U.S. users and the competitiveness of U.S. companies, without making it much harder for criminals to evade wiretaps.
The FBI argues that the Net is “going dark”—that they are losing their ability to carry out valid wiretap warrants. In fact, this seems to be a golden age of surveillance—more collectable communications are available than ever before, including whole new categories of information such as detailed location tracking. Regardless, the FBI wants Congress to require that voice, video, and text communication tools be (re-)designed so that lawful wiretap orders can be executed quickly and silently.
Eldercare Robots?
May 20th, 2013Via: New York Times:
Just like Frank, as the baby boomer generation grows old and if the number of elderly care workers fails to grow with it, many people might end up being cared for by robots. According to the Health and Human Services Department, there will be 72.1 million Americans over the age of 65 by 2030, which is nearly double the number today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country will need 70 percent more home aide jobs by 2020, long before that bubble of retirees. But filling those jobs is proving to be difficult because the salaries are low. In many states, in-home aides make an average of $20,820 annually.
“There are two trends that are going in opposite directions. One is the increasing number of elderly people, and the other is the decline in the number of people to take care of them,” said Jim Osborn, a roboticist and executive director of the Robotics Institute’s Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. “Part of the view we’ve already espoused is that robots will start to fill in those gaps.”
