Mermaids Love Robots

What do you get for the Sci-Fi geek that has everything? Look no further because I have for you the best gift you can give to a 6 year old (or a 6 year old trapped in a 30 year old’s body). There is nothing more theatening (or shockingly coool) than a futuristic weapon that never runs out of ammunition. Even better is the fact that they are made by Weta, the New Zealand company responsible for the special effects and props in the Lord Of The Rings movies.

Jesus, I’m so excited. The website says the rayguns will be available for sale starting next year. I bet they’ll cost a pretty penny.

via The Fabulist

The Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Control Centre (ARICC) has developed an answer to our prayers. Yes, you guessed it, a robot that can play soccer. Actually it’s not just one robot but a series of protoypes belonging to the Robo-Erectus species.

The ARICC is comprised of a team of researchers and students at Singpore Polytechnical. The project started in 2002 and is still going strong. They recently competed in the 2006 RoboCup tournament but ended up losing to Team Osaka. I’m telling ya, the best stuff comes from asian countries.

Be there in th future when we get to see what happens when scientists finally clone a bunch of David Beckhams and put them on the field with a bunch of Robo-Erecti.

It’s kind of old news but I’ve been putting off actually posting this article. I present to you further proof that the Japanese are so much cooler than we are (even though they are silly):

Androids.

Yes, that right, human-like robots, not just made for your sexual enjoyment, although I can’t help but wonder…

“Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University says one day robots could fool us into believing they are human.”

So he built a robot, his first version looked like a 6 year old girl, but the newest looks like an adult female. Ishiguro says that sometimes people interacting with her sometimes forget that she is a robot.

While this seems cool and everything, haven’t we learned anything from watching I, Robot? This could be bad people, really bad. I mean just look at Ishiuro himself:

These robots are going to make us fall in love with them! These machines that could never love us back. I mean, why else would the professor look so forlorn?

From Robots.net:

Kim Goossens and marev sent us links about a new Japanese “wine-tasting” robot; one from the BBC Technology NewsYahoo’s AP wire service. As it turns out, the new NEC robot doesn’t actually taste wines, cheeses, and other foods. Instead, the Health and Food Advice Robot determines the chemical composition of wines and foods by using IR light from an “optical tongue” to determine a unique “spectral fingerprint” for each food. The articles note that the robot can only accurately identify a few dozen wines out of the thousands on the market. It also made a few interesting identifications during the demonstration: “Some of the mistakes it makes would get a human sommelier fired - or worse. When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.” If you really think you need a robot that can guess the name of foods and wines you show it, expect to pay “about as much as a new car”. They hope to eventually get the price down to $1,000 and make the robot’s guesses more accurate. For more information, see the NEC System Technologies news release.