After being moved to 11:56 two years ago, the Doomsday Clock is now back to ticking down and has gone to 11:55, a mere 5 minutes until armageddon, metaphorically at least. Admittedly, the Doomsday Clock isn’t a conventional clock in any sense of the word. Instead, it’s a meter by which scientists, specifically the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, can contextualize the intensity of their ever-present feeling that the world is ending. Right now, they’re feeling pretty pessimistic.

Although robots can be designed for absurdly specific tasks and carry out those tasks with ridiculous efficiency, one downside about using a robot to solve a problem is that you have to design and build that robot ahead of time. Yeah, a snake-like robot might be really good for climbing rocks, but you need to know about those rocks ahead of time, so you can design, build, and bring that robot with you. In situations like space exploration, that’s kind of an issue.

The Foambot, a creation of Shai Revzen and his team at University of Pennsylvania, provides a unique solution to this problem: A robot that can be built on the spot out of mechanical joints and sprayable foam. The Foambot has two basic parts, a wheeled “mothership” module that carries around the foam and has the sprayer, and a collection of joints which are used to power the Foambot proper that the mothership module sprays.

You can now add “letting your car do the driving” to the long, long list of things that you can legally do in Las Vegas. The state of Nevada recently passed Assembly Bill 511, which tasks the Department of Transportation with drafting rules for driverless vehicles.

This might sound absurd, and in many ways it is, but driverless vehicles aren’t the pie-in-the-sky projects they used to be. Google has tallied over 140,000 miles with a fleet of automated Toyota hybrids. Likewise, Volkswagen has shown off a semi-automated driving system based around established technology, bringing the possibility of mass produced automated cars even closer.

Nevada is trying to get out ahead of oncoming technology, perhaps aiming to ease the adoption of driverless cars should they ever come to market. And it makes sense, at least in the context of Las Vegas: with all the drinking and carousing, anyway to keep such people from getting behind the wheel is a good thing. Likely to be less enthused by such technology will be the numerous limo services in the area.

(via Forbes, image via Teck.in)

There are numerous things that robots can do, including make breakfast, create their own language, and sneak aboard ships, but creating art tends to be associated with the minds of living beings. But a new exhibit at the Tenderpixel Gallery in London may change our conceptions of what makes someone, or something, an artist.

Scientist, artist, and engineer Patrick Tresset has developed a robot that can look at your face and draw a portrait for you while you wait. However, this robot is not designed with precision in mind. Tresset’s robot is designed to have some of the clumsiness and fallibility that make human created works of art so unique.

So you got yourself a roomba, gave it a name and slapped some googly eyes on top. What’s next? matchlighter, from instructables, figured the next logical step is to let the little guy/gal/thing tweet whatever he/she/it is doing at the moment. Through a bunch of magic that you can check out in detail on the instructable page, matchlighter managed to allow his roomba to be remote controlled over the Internet as well as tweet when it is picked up, returns to dock, avoids a ledge and a few other scenarios. For now, the roomba’s vocabulary is pretty sparse, but after a few updates maybe it’ll be able to tell us when it’s ferrying kittens or engaged in a fight to the death, but I’m pretty sure it’ll keep all the robot uprising stuff to itself.

Check out what it’s up to on its twitter.

(via Hack a day)

The quadcopters that you know and love are now being allowed to operate autonomously in formation, making the eventual overtaking of their mortal masters far easier cooler looking. Not only that, they sound like a swarm of a thousand angry bees.

(IEEE via Gamma Squad)

A recent study by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin and Yale University sought to create the thinking of a schizophrenic mind on a computer using a virtual neural network. Their work is based on the so-called hyperlearning theory of schizophrenia, which holds that the disease springs from an inability to forget or ignore non-essential information.

In their work, the research team taught a series of stories to a computer model they call DISCERN. Using natural language processing, the computer maps out the stories in a manner similar to the human brain. In their model, a simulated dopamine release is used to mark significant information as DISCERN learns the stories. To model hyperlearning, the team increased the dopamine releases. This meant DISCERN “forgot” less, and perceived more information as “important.”

When asked to recount the stories, the hyperlearning DISCERN produced bizarre and delusional narratives from the input information.

The above video is that of a robot. Not a human dressed up as a robot, as it may seem. Created by Actroid company Kokoro and professor at Osaka University Hiroshi Ishiguro, and modeled after Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University in Denmark, the robot seen in the video is a Geminoid DK, part of the Geminoid series of realistic androids. The reason why the robot’s movements and expressions seem so realistic is because they are controlled by an operator who uses a motion-capture and facial-tracking system.

The supposed point of the realistic androids is study “emotional affordances” in human-robot interaction, as well as to study the perception of robots between different cultures, though we can all pretty easily see through that, can’t we? Head on past the break to see another video of an android that looks like a human if you watch said video while looking at your keyboard.