how is it possible !!! Meet Nadine, a robot much capable of human emotions

Watch: Meet Nadine, the 'emotionally intelligent' companion robot

She's here to look after you.

What will robots look like in the future? Will they retain obvious signs of their artificial nature, or will they seamlessly blend in with people to such an extent that we might have difficulty telling them apart from living, breathing humans?

If Nadine – a new social and 'emotionally intelligent' robot from scientists in Singapore – is a sign of things to come, realistic-looking humanoid machines might just have the edge over their obviously artificial counterparts. How come? Because the physical resemblance to ordinary people could help us interact with a machine in a more natural way, whether at home, at work, or even if it were to look after us when we get old.

"Over the past four years, our team at [Nanyang Technological University] have been fostering cross-disciplinary research in social robotics technologies," said Nadia Thalmann, "to transform a virtual human, from within a computer, into a physical being that is able to observe and interact with other humans."

By employing linguistics and psychology in addition to conventional robotics fields such as engineering and computer science, the researchers have sought to blur the distinction between human and machine. Nadine – which is designed to look like a physical doppelgänger of a younger Thalmann – isn't exactly meant to fool us into thinking it's a real woman, but it's supposed to help us relate to 'her' as if the robot were any other ordinary person.

"This is somewhat like a real companion that is always with you and conscious of what is happening," said Thalmann. "So in future, these socially intelligent robots could be like C–3PO… with knowledge of language and etiquette."

With soft skin and fairly convincing-looking hair, Nadine is a pretty eerie emulation of an actual person, especially when the face is moving, as you can see in the video above. Of course, those vacant eyes could use a little work, and the robot's static, empty look in between actions gives away that this isn't a real person.

Still, these are the kinds of things the researchers are working on, and if some of Nadine's obvious 'tells' can be eroded, it's possible that people interacting with the robot would be more at ease, rather than less. Especially when it's programmed with a sense of personality and 'emotions', and is designed to remember you and details of previous conversations.

Nadine currently acts in the role of a 'receptionist' at Nanyang Technological University – a calling we've seen other, somewhat more conspicuous robots fulfil. But according to the researchers, this kind of technology could make the most sense as domestic companions in the home, especially for those who need help in caring for themselves.

"As countries worldwide face challenges of an ageing population, social robots can be one solution to address the shrinking workforce, become personal companions for children and the elderly at home, and even serve as a platform for healthcare services in future," said Thalmann.

If you've seen the TV show Humans, you'll have an idea of what that kind of system could look like. It might be a little while before robots like Nadine are as convincing as Humans' 'synths', but that day definitely looks like it's getting closer.

Scientists grow a 'person on a chip' - living human tissues on a mini 3D structure

Scientists grow a 'person on a chip' - living human tissues on a mini 3D structure

This could be the future of drug testing.

Scientists in Canada have developed a new method of growing human tissue outside the body, creating a miniature lattice structure that's capable of providing an external matrix for living cells.

Called AngioChip, the researchers say their 'person on a chip' technology could be a new platform for testing the effects of drugs on human tissue, with the mini 3D scaffold constituting a more realistic environment for growing cells than the flat layout of a petri dish.

"It's a fully three-dimensional structure complete with internal blood vessels,"said chemical engineer Milica Radisic from the University of Toronto. "It behaves just like vasculature, and around it there is a lattice for other cells to attach and grow."

Built from a biodegradable and biocompatible polymer called POMaC, the miniature scaffold is constructed from a series of thin layers that resemble microchips, each indented with a pattern of tiny channels measuring between 50 to 100 micrometres wide (about the same diameter as a human hair).

Once stacked and bonded together via UV light, these layers become a 3D structure of synthetic blood vessels. The lattice network is then bathed in a liquid containing living cells. The cells attach to the structure, and begin growing inside and outside of the tiny channels stamped in the polymer.

"Previously, people could only do this using devices that squish the cells between sheets of silicone and glass," said Radisic. "You needed several pumps and vacuum lines to run just one chip. Our system runs in a normal cell culture dish, and there are no pumps; we use pressure heads to perfuse media through the vasculature. The wells are open, so you can easily access the tissue."

Tyler Irving / Boyang Zhang / Kevin Soobrian

The engineers have so far used AngioChip to build small-scale living models of heart and liver tissues that function just like real organs. "Our liver actually produced urea and metabolised drugs," said Radisic.

What's more, connecting the blood vessels of two different artificial organs on AngioChips lets the researchers study the interactions between them, providing a testbed at the organ level.

Such testing could more accurately detect dangerous side effects of potential or existing medications, or safely study related interactions between various human organ compartments.

"In the last few years, it has become possible to order cultures of human cells for testing, but they're grown on a plate, a two-dimensional environment," said Radisic. "They don't capture all the functional hallmarks of a real heart muscle, for example."

The researchers' technology is reported in Nature Materials. They are now seeking to commercialise the system, which could end up having applications even beyond drug testing. They say it's possible the artificial AngioChip organs could be grown into tissues for directly implanting into patients' bodies to repair damaged organs.

So far, the researchers have only tested this application in rats, but the advantage of the system is that the polymer scaffold is itself biodegradable, so after time it safely dissipates within the subject's body, leaving only the newly grown tissue.

It sounds like it'll be a while before we see this kind of technique used for human patients, but even so, we can't wait to see where this research might lead.

This new code makes websites load 34% faster in any browser

This new code makes websites load 34% faster in any browser

Just what we’ve always wanted.

If website loading times can’t keep up with your browsing speed like your typing can’t keep up with your thoughts, hope is on the horizon, thanks to a new code called Polaris that reportedly makes websites load 34 percent faster in any browser. 

How, I hear you ask? Developed by a team at MIT, the code has been programmed to gather up and evaluate all the background files of a particular website, including image files, HTML files, and Javascript source code, way more efficiently than current systems. 

"As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up," says one of the team, Ravi Netravali. "Our approach minimises the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time."

You’re not the only one who gets frustrated by a site that doesn’t instantly load - pretty much everyone feels your pain, and are quite happy to drop a page like a sack of oranges if it’s going to keep them waiting. According to Amazon, every 100-millisecond delay in website loading time cuts their profits by 1 percent.

If you’re not familiar with the nuts and bolts of getting a website to display on a browser, it goes like this. To load a page, your browser has to connect to the network and fetch 'objects' such as HTML files, image files, and JavaScript source code. Each object has to be evaluated before it can be added to the display. 

The problem is that each of these objects is likely to be dependent on another object - called dependencies - so every time the browser wants to evaluate one object, it has to go and fetch its dependencies, which will also have their own dependencies, and so on. "As an example, a browser might have to execute a file’s JavaScript code in order to discover more images to fetch and render," the team explains.

That’s not so bad, but where things get slowed down is when browsers can’t actually see all the dependencies, so end up making multiple trips through the network to fetch and evaluate everything.

What the Polaris code does to address this problem is automatically track every single interaction between objects and their dependencies on a particular site, to creates a 'dependency graph' that allows the browser to make more efficient trips through the network. 

While this isn’t the first dependency-tracker to be developed, the team says this is the only one that’s able to capture the most subtle dependencies that exist on a page, which allows it to achieve such impressive speeds. Another benefit is that it can be written in JavaScript, which means it can work with any website.

The team hopes that the system will be integrated with browsers in the future, so every page you load on a particular browser will appear that much faster.

According to Jamie Condliffe at Gizmodo, Polaris has so far been tested on 200 different websites, including ESPN, Weather.com, and Wikipedia, and was able to load web pages 34 percent faster, on average. 

Their research has not yet been published or peer-reviewed, so keep that in mind, but the results of their work will be presented later this week at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in California, which means they’re ready for it to be scrutinised for publication.

"Tracking fine-grained dependencies has the potential to greatly reduce page-load times, especially for low-bandwidth or high-latency connections," Mark Marron, a senior research software development engineer at Microsoft, who was not involved in the research, told Gizmodo. 

"On top of that, the availability of detailed dependence information has a wide range of possible applications, such as tracking the source statement of an unexpected value that led to a crash at runtime."

We are so ready for this. And if they can figure out how to speed up gif loading times on mobile, our lives would be complete.

A hydrogen car just set the record for the world's longest continuous journey

A hydrogen car just set the record for the world's longest continuous journey

Welcome to the future.

There's no doubt that electric cars have a big role to play in the future of personal transport, but they're not the only alternative to petrol-powered vehicles in the pipeline. Cars running on hydrogen fuel cells are also in development, and a new trial in London just showed how much potential they really have.

A Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell car has just completed a record-breaking 9,810-km(6,096-mile) unbroken trip around the M25 (the motorway that encircles the capital) over the course of six days, stopping only to top-up on fuel. Not only did the car achieve the longest continuous journey ever, it also travelled 643 km (400 miles) on one tank of hydrogen - further than any other fuel cell electric vehicle ever made.

The trial was backed by the London Hydrogen Network Expansion project(LHNE) and is part of a broader push to promote the benefits of hydrogen-powered transportation, which include high efficiency, silent operation, the elimination of greenhouse gases from the whole fuel production cycle, and water as the sole by-product.

These cars are certainly good from the environment: the hydrogen itself can be produced from renewable sources such as water, and is then converted into electricity to drive a electric motor via a lithium-ion battery. Refuelling takes a matter of minutes too.

"What we need now for accelerated adoption of hydrogen vehicles is for the government to work with our industry to provide the right framework for the technology to become truly accepted by the public," said Diana Raine, European Business Manager for Hydrogen Energy Systems at Air Products, the firm leading the LHNE project.

The six-day, 50-lap run out in the Hyundai ix35 was completed by a team of drivers and included detours to four of the UK's hydrogen refuelling stations for top-ups. There are currently six of these refuelling stations in the country and the plan is to add six more within the next 12 months – crucial if more people are going to take the plunge and switch to hydrogen-powered transportation.

Hyundai's car has actually been commercially available since 2014, while last year Toyota introduced its Mirai FCEV (Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle). Honda's FCV Clarity is due to arrive at some point during 2016, while Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen, and Audi are among several manufacturers known to be developing FCEVs for the future.

The record-breaking journey was part of a designated Hydrogen Week, designed to raise awareness of the benefits of FCEVs. Meanwhile a fleet of eight hydrogen-powered buses have now clocked up more than 112,6540 km (700,000 miles) along a popular route in Central London.

Every 11-year-old in Britain is getting a free mini computer

Let the coding commence!

You've probably have heard of the Raspberry Pi - the barebones computing unit beloved by DIY hackers and coding enthusiasts everywhere. Well, now there's a similar device on the market: it's called the BBC Micro Bit, and every 11-year-old kid in Britain is about to get one for free.

Like the Pi, the Micro Bit is a small, low-power, embedded device with inputs, outputs, and a processor. It includes a variety of sensors, 25 LED lights, two programmable buttons, and Bluetooth, with power provided either through an external battery pack or an attached USB device. After several delays (it was originally intended to arrive last summer), the device is now making its way to around 1 million Year 7 and Year 8 (ages 11-12) schoolchildren in the UK.

In the near future, anyone will be able to buy a Micro Bit to use as the basis of their own computing projects.

Funding for the giveaway comes from the BBC's Make It Digital campaign, and the publicly funded corporation's remit to encourage educational schemes. It's hoped that the Micro Bits will "inspire a new generation to get creative with coding, programming and digital technology", says the BBC. 

The Micro Bit comes with a smartphone app and web portal that youngsters can use to get coding through a beginner-friendly interface. The makers of the small device are suggesting that the kit could be used to create games, simple robotic mechanisms, and fitness trackers, but the potential uses are almost limitless. It can also hook up to other devices such as the aforementioned Raspberry Pi.

"We can't wait to see what students will do with it," said Sinead Rocks, head of BBC Learning. "They've already come up with all kinds of ideas during testing and at events around the country - some ideas help solve some of life's daily challenges, some could have business potential, and others are just great fun."

"Teachers have been quick to embrace it too, which is so important to the success of the project, and they have already made valuable additions to our online resources," she added.

As we reported last June, when the final design was unveiled, the Micro Bit can become anything from a remote control to a metal detector. The ultimate goal is that children will leave school knowing how to program computers and not just how to use them. And who knows? Perhaps the next generation's Mark Zuckerberg will get his or her start with one of these new devices.

Heat-assisted storage could give you 10x more space on your computer's drive

Heat-assisted storage could give you 10x more space on your computer's drive

Never stop downloading.

If you're always running out of room for photos, videos, and music on your laptop, then science might have the answer. Using a laser to write data to magnetic storage, researchers have been able to increase the potential data storage capacity of hard drives by as much as 10 times - a process konwn as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).

Our computers write, read, and store information by controlling and detecting whether tiny regions of the disk are magnetised or not. This magnetic state corresponds to either a "1" or a "0" in the binary code - known as a bit - and our files are stored across thousands (or millions) of these bits at once. So if we want more space, we need to find a way to shrink those magnetic regions - which are made up of magnetic grains. And that's where this new development comes in. 

As Gizmodo reports, the new technique relies on shrinking the size of the magnetic grains used to store data, while minimising the interference with surrounding grains, and the researchers have now done that more effectively than ever before by using a precise laser alongside a magnetic field. 

But what does that mean? To unpack that, you need to understand a little bit about the limitations of today's magnetic storage, where there's a need to balance readability, writability, and stability.

Manufacturers have previously hit a limit in terms of making magnetic grains smaller and smaller, because the surrounding grains caused their magnetic field to drift and thus destroy the files saved on disk.

There's magnetic material that's more resistant to this drift, but it's also harder to write, and requires a bigger magnetic field to store data, which in turn causes more interference. That's where this new laser technique can help - it allows more precision (the resulting grains are just a few nanometres long) with a lower magnetic field by heating the grains first.

It's an approach that's actually been around for a while, but scientists are still working out the limitations of it. Enter a team of researchers from TU Wien in Austria, who've been able to use the technique to squeeze 13.23 terabits into a single square-inch of computer drive. That type of storage compares favourably to both Blu-ray (12.5 gigabits per square-inch) and the best hard drives on the market (1.34 terabits per square-inch).

"We have developed a realistic simulation model of the whole complex HAMR process, which allows to accurately calculate the write dynamics of a device in a reasonable amount of simulation time," study co-author Christoph Vogler told Phys.org. "Consequently, we could systematically optimise the major parameters of the write process in order to show that a HAMR device with 10 Tb/in² and more is feasible and how such densities can be reached."

Unfortunately, writing data in a laboratory simulation is not the same as packing it into a laptop that can sit on your desk, and the team says it will be a few years before the technology becomes viable enough to use in consumer electronics. So in the meantime, you might have to buy an external hard drive for all those photos.

The research has now been published in Applied Physics Letters.

Bill Gates is backing a waterless toilet that generates energy from human waste

Bill Gates is backing a waterless toilet that generates energy from human waste

Here's how it works.

 

 Five years after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation first challenged the world to design a sustainable and inexpensive toilet, researchers from Cranfield University may have a viable contender. It’s known as the Nano Membrane Toilet, and it was funded by the Gates Foundation in September 2012 for US $710,000.
March 22 is World Water Day, an appropriate time to highlight the grim fact that more than 2.4 billion people around the world still live in unsanitary conditions. Without access to clean running water, these at-risk communities face life-threatening sanitation-related diseases.

The Nano Membrane toilet’s design is meant to offset this scarcity. It’s waterless, easy to use, and provided it receives additional funding for field tests, could very well be part of the future of sanitation.
Alison Parker, a lecturer in International Water and Sanitation at Cranfield Water Science Institute, says her team’s new design is meant to serve poor urban areas, as those will be easiest to accommodate.
"It will be very hard to carry out the scheduled maintenance" in remote areas, Parker tells Tech Insider, mostly because the toilet needs maintenance every six months at a minimum to replace certain parts. "Instead, the toilet will be used in dense urban areas where a number of factors make providing good sanitation very challenging, but where it would be possible to facilitate visits from a maintenance technician."
The toilet’s actual design is rather complex.
After a person has done their business and closed the lid, the rotating toilet bowl turns 270 degrees to deposit the waste in a vat underneath. A scraper tool then wipes off any residual waste from the bowl.
The solid waste stays on the bottom while the liquid rises to the top.
Extremely thin fibres, known as nanofibres, are arranged in bundles inside the chamber. They help move the water vapour that exists as part of the liquid waste into a vertical tube in the rear of the toilet.
Next, water passes through specially designed beads that help condense the vapour into actual water, which flows down through the tube and settles in a tank at the front of the toilet.
As for the solid waste that’s left behind, a battery-powered mechanism lifts the remaining matter out of the toilet and into a separate holding chamber. There it’s coated in a scent-suppressing wax and left to dry out.

Every week, a local technician visits the community to remove the solid waste and water, and replace the toilet’s batteries if needed. Residents can then use the water for tending to their plants, cleaning their homes, cooking, and bathing. The solid waste ends up at a thermo-processing plant to be turned into energy for the community.
According to Parker, one toilet can accommodate up to 10 people for no more than $0.05 per day, per user - in line with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s original criteria for the prize. Field testing will begin later this year, Parker says.

  One challenge moving forward, which other designs have run into, is scalability.
While many designs work in theory, actually getting the toilets to the countries that need them isn’t easy.
Local communities have to create jobs specifically so that the toilets are safely and effectively maintained, and that training process can take time. Some scientists have spent years working on their designs, and they still aren’t perfect.
Parker admits the problem of toilet paper is still one the Nano Membrane Toilet has yet to resolve, as users have no choice but to toss the paper into a nearby waste bin.
In the future, the team hopes to devise a way for that paper to be burnt. It’s not the most environmentally friendly disposal method, but if it means adding years onto people’s lives, it could be a winning solution

Self-cleaning clothes are actually on the horizon

Self-cleaning clothes are actually on the horizon

Finally, clothes that wash themselves!

to make clothes wash themselves. The self-cleaning textiles developed at RMIT University in Melbourne only need a spot of sunshine to get rid of those spills and stains.

The method developed is a cheap and efficient way to grow special nanostructures, which can degrade organic matter when exposed to light, directly onto textiles. The work paves the way to nano-enhanced textiles which can clean themselves of grime simply by being put under a light bulb or worn in the sun.

"The advantage of textiles is they already have a 3D structure so they are great at absorbing light, which in turn speeds up the process of degrading organic matter," says Rajesh Ramanathan. "There’s more work to do to before we can start throwing out our washing machines, but this advance lays a strong foundation for the future development of fully self-cleaning textiles."
Cotton textile covered with nanostructures invisible to the naked eye. Magnified 200 times. Image: RMIT University
When the nanostructures are exposed to light, they receive an energy boost, creating hot electrons. These release a burst of energy which enable the nanostructures to degrade organic matter, such as spilled tomato sauce. The researchers from the Ian Potter NanoBioSensing Facility and NanoBiotechnology Research Lab at RMIT worked with copper and silver-based nanostructures known for their ability to absorb visible light.
The challenge for researchers has been to bring the concept out of the lab by working out how to build these nanostructures on an industrial scale and permanently attach them to textiles.
The RMIT team’s novel approach was to grow the nanostructures directly onto the textiles by dipping them into a few solutions, resulting in the development of stable nanostructures within 30 minutes.
When exposed to light, it took less than 6 minutes for some of the enhanced textiles to spontaneously clean themselves.
"Our next step will be to test our nano-enhanced textiles with organic compounds that could be more relevant to consumers, to see how quickly they can handle common stains like tomato sauce or wine," says Ramanathan.
The research is published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces. 

THIS $99 BOX TRANSFORMS ANY SMARTPHONE INTO A 3D PRINTER. NO, SERIOUSLY

If you’ve spent the last few years holding out for a 3D printer that costs under a hundred bucks, then we’ve got good news for you: The printer you’re waiting for is finally here, and it goes by the name of OLO. The device, which first popped up at last year’s Maker Faire in New York, has finally found its way onto Kickstarter — where it obliterated its $80K funding goal in just a few hours.

For those of you who might’ve missed the product’s debut, here’s the lowdown: OLOis designed to take your smartphone and transform it into a fully functional 3D printer. No joke — you seriously just fire up the app, choose the object you want to print, pop your phone into the device’s base, and pull out a completed part a few minutes later. It’s like magic, and the whole thing costs less than a pair of Nikes.

Here’s how it works: The printer consists of three main parts — a reservoir, a special photopolymer resin that you pour into it, and a mechanized lid that contains the build plate and control electronics. At the bottom of the reservoir, there’s a piece of polarized glass which you place your phone underneath, facing upward.

Basically, once you place the lid on top and the printer starts going, the app makes your phone’s screen light up with a specific pattern. The polarized glass then takes all this light (which shines outwardly to give your phone a wider viewing angle) and redirects it so that all the photons are traveling straight upward. So as your phone’s screen beams light up into the reservoir, the directed light causes a layer of resin to harden onto the build plate, which slowly moves upward as each new layer is created. It’s basically a tiny DLP printer that uses your phone’s screen instead of a projector — which is absolutely brilliant, because doing so replaces the single most expensive part of a stereolithography printer with something cheap and very common.

Pretty brilliant right? I mean, OLO probably isn’t going to steal too much thunder from more serious 3D printers like Ultimaker and Makerbot, but it could be a boon for democratizing 3D printing technology — especially since the whole thing retails for just $99. That brings down the barrier to entry considerably, although you’ll still need a smartphone for it to work. Also, depending on the size/complexity of the object you’re printing, you’ll likely have to surrender your smartphone for anywhere from one to four hours at a time — which is likely out of the question for most people.

Unfortunately, by the time you read this, most of the “early bird” backer rewards will have already been snatched up — but even if you’re late to the party, you can still get your hands on an OLO for a $99 pledge. If all goes according the plan, the creators expect to finish up production and begin shipping to backers as early as September

Scientists are developing the world's biggest wind turbine

Scientists are developing the world's biggest wind turbine

30 metres taller than the Empire State Building.

While other technologies are getting smaller and smaller with each passing day, wind turbines are going in the opposite direction, because in order for them to make enough power, they need to harness more wind. Following this logic, researchers are taking turbines to a seemingly impossible scale by giving them blades that are 200 metres (656 feet) long. 

As Rob Nikolewski reports for the LA Times, the new turbine will reach 479 metres (1,574 feet) into the sky - a height that's 30 metres (100 feet) taller than the Empire State Building. To keep it stable, the structure would have a diameter of roughly 400 metres (1,312) feet. This is the type of stuff that Don Quixote has nightmares about.

According to the team, the size of the turbine isn’t the only thing that separates their design from past models. One of the biggest differences is that this new turbine wouldn’t face the wind. Instead, it would face downwind to allow easier flow. Which makes total sense - why fight against the energy you’re harvesting? 

The 200-metre blades, which are almost too large to conceive of, would have segments that can spread out in light wind and tighten up in strong winds.

Besides collecting more wind at all times, the segmented design, dubbed Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotors, makes building and transporting the blades way easier than single-framed blades. Imagine trying to transport a blade that's roughly two football fields long - not an easy task. 

If everything goes the way they plan, the turbine could generate up to 50 megawatts of electricity - 25 times more energy than a traditional wind turbine. 

The team is currently working to produce a 1/10th scale version of their turbine, which they hope to have ready for testing by 2019. After that, they claim it will still take roughly 15 years or so to make a full-scale version. So far, the US Energy Department has given US$3.5 million to the project - a price tag that will be sure to rise as research continues.

Though the project is super-ambitious and will require a lot of research to pull off, some are already pointing out an obvious downside to having such a giant, tall turbine: it’s a bird murdering machine.

If the turbine does reach some 479 metres into the sky, it can pose a direct threat to migratory birds that wouldn’t stand a change if hit by one of the blades. To overcome this, the team hopes to construct their turbine off the coast of California, where it’s less likely to harm our avian friends. However, it remains unclear if that actually solves the problem, or just makes it harder to assess how many birds are affected by it. 

Questions like these are vital for us to ponder as we search for better ways to power our society. Only time will tell if the team’s new turbine will push us into a cleaner future, but it’s definitely an ambitious, hopeful step forward. 

Why a Machine Defeating a Human Does Not Signal the Apocalypse

The AI program AlphaGo's victory over Go master Lee Se-dol was impressive, but it was a relatively narrow achievement

Earlier this week, the AlphaGo program from Google DeepMind defeated one of the world's top players in the board game called Go, 4 games to 1. The achievement is a milestone in artificial intelligence and has led to intense debate about the long-term implications to society.The fact is—and this may sound gloomy—machines will likely replace us in any well-defined task. When two otherwise equal devices compete to solve a problem, the winner will be the one that is more streamlined. Getting rid of overhead and task-irrelevant capabilities makes a machine more effective, and we humans are good at just too many things to be the best at any one of them. Thus, whenever the goal of solving a desirable subproblem can be clearly and precisely specified, special purpose hardware or programming will outpace more general human intellect. There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon throughout history. A handaxe can dig up roots better than the human hand, but it is useless for holding a spear the way a hand can. A hoe is better still at digging up roots, but it's not good at cutting wood compared to a handaxe. Specialization makes things more effective at one task but less effective at others. Similarly, robot arms that are fast and predictable but lack the sensitivity to change a diaper or give a friendly pat on the back are going to be better at building cars than people on an assembly line. Computers that do nothing but direct network traffic are going to be better at connecting phone calls than human operators. Indeed, we have already lost these battles.There's nothing for us to be ashamed of here. If you hold the goal constant but repeatedly broaden the space of competitors, performance improves. Consider the case of deep sea diving. The deepest a person has even swum is 331 feet down. With the help of tools like fins, weights, and inflatable bags, the depth can be more than doubled to 702 feet. But, with unrestricted use of machines, people have traveled to the very bottom of the sea—around 5.9 miles. We can achieve much more with an expansive design space than with one that is more limited.

The same holds true in the mental domain. Computers have memorized more digits of pi than people (13 trillion compared to the human record of 70 thousand) and multiplied 8-digit numbers faster (858 trillion in the same time the best human being can do 10). Computer programs have achieved significantly higher ratings in chess (3100 Elo versus around 2900 Elo, which means the best program would beat the best person roughly 76% of the time in a head-to-head match). AlphaGo's defeat of Lee Se-dol suggests that Go may be another realm where machines have outpaced us.

So, if anything we humans might be good at will ultimately be done better by specialized machine, what hope do we have in remaining valuable?

I think the key is that human intelligence is constantly redefining and extending itself, incorporating new facets built on top of everything that came before. As such, the rules of the game constantly change. The metrics for success change. Even the very purpose of existence changes.

Future technology devices concept – Portable printer

Future technology devices concept – Portable printer

It was about time that someone came up with this, I mean we are in the portable era! Stick POP is a portable printer that can handle a small amount of load. You can’t overburden it with all your documents, just a small stash that you need pronto. Measuring 23 cm by 6 cm, it’s easy to fit it in your handbag. Just hook it up to your comp /device via USB and get printing! Oh, and an OLED screen on the bar displays the printing status.

   

Concept car tires of future

Concept car tires of future

What will be “dressed up” cars of the future? It seems that the US tire manufacturer Goodyear knows the answer to this question. Concept amazing spherical tiresv really impressive.

Eagle-360
Concept called Eagle-360 is a spherical tire associated with the vehicle by means of magnetic levitation. In the absence of traditional axes they can rotate freely in any direction, which gives the car most maneuverability.
In addition, Eagle-bus 360 has built-in sensors that allow to evaluate the traffic situation and to communicate with other vehicles. Tire tread also control its internal pressure, and regular wear during operation. Another know-how – 3D-protectors with a biometric design, operating on the principle  brain of coral. They represent a natural sponge, which in dry conditions becomes tough, and in the wet softened, reducing hydroplaning and improves controllability.

Intelligrip
This concept is more realistic, familiar look and is designed for sports cars. Intelligrip Tires may assess the condition of the road, are able to communicate with the vehicle control system, control the tread wear, temperature and pressure.
They work in conjunction with systems, collision avoidance, detection and adaptation to changing road conditions, adjust the length of the braking distance and stability on bends.
The company already works with car manufacturers to introduce some Intelligrip technologies, in particular, electronic control systems stabilize, brake and suspension control system. But who knows when this project embodied to life.