error101/science

Digital cameras can see a broader spectrum of colors than we can. Kameraflage is a technology that takes advantage of their superior vision by printing or projecting messages and images that can only be seen through a digital camera lens.

" Most computer games today make use of pre-programmed behaviors, and are limited to what their programmers have created. As van Eck puts it "Donkey Kong will never get tired of throwing heavy barrels at you, or strain a muscle, or get hungry and just eat the princess. After playing a computer game for some time, you know what you can expect from it.

The goal of his project was to center the action in a computer game around the unpredictability of an animal. Is it possible to replace code with creatures? Can a person play against an animal in a computer game?

Here's how the animals control the Pac-Man computer game in van Eck's project:

Instead of computer code, I wanted to have animals controlling the ghosts. To enable this, I built a real maze for the animals to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game. This way, the real animals are directly controlling the virtual ghosts."

history of real-life humanoid robots, from toasters to asimo. although asimo is the current last step, it's only the begining i'm afraid, there's a long way to go till t3000 :)

"Do you have trouble visualizing product sizes when shopping online? If so, try this easy comparison tool"

Super-Kamiokande, or Super-K for short, is a neutrino observatory in Japan. The observatory was designed to study solar neutrinos and atmospheric neutrinos, search for proton decay, and detect neutrinos from a supernova anywhere in our galaxy.



Last week, the University of Tokyo's Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) announced the near completion of full-scale reconstruction work on its giant Super-Kamiokande underground neutrino detection facility, which was severely damaged in a 2001 accident. Super-Kamiokande, the world's largest facility of its kind, detects neutrinos as they pass through the 50,000 tons of water held in its cylindrical water tank, which measures 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter and 42 meters (138 feet) in depth and is located 1 km underground.

"Robot moved by a slime mould's fears"



A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot.

"The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself."