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Thursday 21 March 2013

Design and Development: Swiss Lab Builds Modular, Amphibious Robot | Robotics Trends

More Design and Development stories We have seen our fair share of nature-inspired robots, from a water strider bot that walks on water to a faster-than-Usain-Bolt robotic cheetah that runs on land, and we never cease to be amazed by the technological advances we gain from merely mimicking what already exists in nature.

More Service and Healthcare stories This robot vomits so we don't have to. Larry the projectile vomiting robot spews all over the place, and it's for a good cause. Larry was created by microbiologist Catherine Makison-Booth at the United Kingdom's Health and Safety Laboratory in the Occupational Hygiene Unit.

More Security and Defense stories This is an overview of leading manufacturers of military robots compiled in March 2013 by the Global Robotics Brain. The Global Robotics Brain is a product that business intelligence consultant, Wolfgang Heller, started to keep track of the robotsphere.

More Industry and Manufacturing stories The Magnetic Gripper EGM from SCHUNK maintains high holding forces even in confined work spaces. It is light-weight, yet powerful enough to handle difficult applications even in situations which may require an emergency stop. It also promotes energy efficiency because electricity is only needed for magnetization and demagnetization of the unit.

More Consumer and Education stories They look like giant chess pieces - one black pawn, another white, slowly making their way around the museum with dozens of online visitors. The CSIRO-built robots come packed with high definition technology, visiting a selection of exhibits.

More Research and Academics stories Robots are being used more widely than expected in a variety of sectors, and the trend is likely to continue with robotics becoming as ubiquitous as computer technology over the next 15 years.

Web APIs are a new and fast-growing business channel that is helping companies connect with the outside market and deliver services and products efficiently. This article shows you how to create, socialize, and manage your web APIs, by using IBM Cast Iron Live Web API Services.

NASA is expanding its reach to the nation's growing Spanish-speaking population by holding its first-ever Google+ Hangout en Espanol from 6:30 - 7:30 p.m. EDT, Thursday, March 28.

Computers are now sifting through drug libraries to pick out compounds likely to clobber TB with minimal side effects to humans. Programmers have 'taught' the computers to understand which chemical features of a drug are associated with efficacy against TB and which are associated with toxicity to mammalian cells.

ELBOWS up, back straight! Like a personal weightlifting coach, a new workout tracking system can monitor your exercise, making sure that you complete your reps and sets correctly - improving how you pump iron and cutting the risk of injury.

CometChat for SocialEngine Cloud If you're looking to add even more value and engagement to your site, look no further than CometChat. In a very straightforward and unobtrusive way, users can chat with others within your Socialengine Cloud community plus those outside like on Facebook, Google Chat and other social networks for example.

We built Windows Azure Mobile Services in order to make it quick and easy to build engaging mobile apps that scale. This week, Scott Guthrie announced two important updates to Mobile Services. The first enables pure HTML5/JS clients (and PhoneGap apps).

Google Fiber started as a shaming exercise. The company would build an ultra high speed fiber internet network in one lucky city and the rest of the country's providers would be forced to follow suit. But it turned out the country's ISPs are shameless.

Spring Framework is required knowledge for Java developers. Spring 3.2, the latest major version, builds on the core Spring 3 features like SpEL, the Spring Expression Language, new annotations for the IoC container, and much-needed support for REST. Whether you're just discovering Spring or you want to absorb the new features, there's no better way to master Spring than with this book.

Most research focuses on how to treat cancer once it has developed in BRCA carriers. This approach aims to provide a non-invasive way to prevent transmission of the BRCA mutation to offspring, removing the high cancer development risk.

The new Kippt takes that concept, and pushes content forward. The refresh of the service builds on its previous iteration - links remain at its heart, which is necessary as "everything can be referenced by a URL." Links are still how you input data into Kippt, but the service then turns that around to deliver something more.

By Ilya Grigorik, Developer Advocate and Web Performance Engineer At Google we want the whole web to be faster, and there is no better way to achieve this goal than through helping our partners, both commercial and open-source, to deliver web optimization products to their users and clients.

News and Announcements for Apple Developers

Get updates, tips, and how-to information on a range of development, App Store, and Mac App Store topics.

News and Announcements for Apple Developers

Get updates, tips, and how-to information on a range of development, App Store, and Mac App Store topics.

Stripe (YC S09) partners with Parse (YC S11) to let mobile app developers easily accept payments in their apps and write less code to do it - Y Combinator Posthaven

The payment company says since Parse speeds up mobile app development by "eliminating a lot of the server-side boilerplate and providing pre-built libraries for common tasks," letting developers connect their Stripe account directly makes sense. In other words, if you're building an app by using Parse and want to accept payments, the Stripe connection will ensure you won't have to write any server-side code.

Vidyard, a Y Combinator alumnus and enterprise startup that sells a video marketing platform with embedded analytics tools to businesses to help them track and monetise video content, has closed a $6 million Series A led by Canada's OMERS Ventures. Existing investors iNovia Capital and SoftTech VC also participated, along with a personal investment from Eloqua 's Jill Rowley.

Three new crew members are set to launch to the International Space Station on a six-hour flight to travel from the launch pad to their destination.

Planck Mission Brings Universe into Sharp Focus WASHINGTON -- The Planck space mission has released the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe, revealing new information about its age, contents and origins. Planck is a European Space Agency mission.

NASA Invites Media Inside World's Largest Vacuum Chamber HOUSTON -- The world's largest thermal-vacuum chamber will be open to news media at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on Thursday, April 4. Upgrades are being made to the facility to prepare it for testing the agency's James Webb Space Telescope.

First Images Released From Newest Earth Observation Satellite WASHINGTON -- NASA and the Department of the Interior's U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have released the first images from the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite, which was launched Feb. 11.

In our last blog post we provided a walkthrough of the updated HDInsight Service on Windows Azure. Today's post, which focuses on HDInsight and Azure Storage, is the third in our 5-blog series on HDInsight. One of the interesting and differentiating aspects of the HDInsight Service on Windows Azure is the ability to choose where you want to store the data.

Released by the European Space Agency, a new map detailing the oldest light in the Universe focuses on the cosmic microwave background -- what is essentially the dim glow of radiation that is found throughout all of space.

CodePlex - Open Source Project Hosting

Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to find open source software or create new projects to share with the world.

14:00, Electronics/Robotics This is a simulation of a bio-inspired legged robot running on the surface of Mars using c-shaped legs. Georgia Tech researchers are studying how legged robots move on granular materials such as sand.

Grow your online business with the help of Magento's Ecommerce Blog. Find many articles and resources to enhance your online business!

Express Group Handlers (GitHub: tldrio / express-group-handlers, License: MIT, npm: express-group-handlers) by Louis Chatriot provides a little bit of sugar for managing Express middleware. It allows routes to be wrapped with beforeEach and afterEach so middleware can be confined to certain routes.

Y Combinator-backed Posmetrics, a new tool to help brick-and-mortar businesses collect customer feedback via the iPad, is today making its public debut. The company has designed its online surveys to run on the tablet form factor, and be simple and fast enough that a customer could complete a survey while at a business's point-of-sale or checkout.

The ultimate goal is to enable anyone to invest in startups that they find promising. To that end, founders Mike Norman, Nick Tomarrello, and Greg Belote lobbied hard last year to get the JOBS Act passed. That act should help overturn a few rules which, to date, have held back greater adoption of crowdfunding for startups.

Some days ago we launched our new product, the Arduino Gsm Shield, together with an intro video explaining how to make the first steps into the creation of interaction with it.

At the beginning of march Christopher Martin, researcher in applied computer, wrote us an email to tell us that he got involved in an ambitious plan taking place: 100 school pupils, 5 different digital-maker themes in 1 day for 4 subsequent weeks across Scotland.

Ever since I got my first tablet I've been trying to replace my trusty reporter notebooks with a digital alternative. It seems really retro to cover high-tech products at events like Google I/O and CES with a paper notebook.

Node v0.10.1 (Stable)

e213170fe5ec7721b31149fba1a7a691c50b5379 node-v0.10.1-darwin-x64.tar.gz 5526d189fa3180e11731e1aebb0f22c1c2fb3d8d node-v0.10.1-darwin-x86.tar.gz ec0818d8f151d933ec79961374bf74d9855305a5 ...

System-wide networks of proteins are indispensable for organisms. Function and evolution of these networks are among the most fascinating research questions in biology. Researchers have reconstructed ancestral protein networks. The results are of high interest not only for evolutionary research but also for the interpretation of genome sequence data.

Every Thursday is Tech Thursday where we share a random assortment of technical links we found and liked. You can propose links to us on Twitter (@YDN) or try bookmarking them on delicious with the tag "forydntt".

Making WebRTC Simple with conversat.io

The stylish data center operators who brought you the underground bunker from outer space and the modular data center of the future are cooking up a new plan. This one involves a 120-year-old gas plant in the center of Stockholm stacked with five floors of servers and a high-tech theater on top.

INVENTORS in the US have caught up with the rest of the world - but many don't like it. Until last week the US Patent and Trademark Office ran a first-to-invent system. Date-stamped notes proved when a gadget was invented, trouncing any rival who might have filed first.

SUDDENLY, my phone rings. It chirps out a tinny version of what sounds like the Christmas carol Angels We Have Heard on High. I am giddy with amazement. On the fifth floor of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, David Mellis has just plugged in the mobile phone I spent all afternoon soldering together.

Qt Creator 2.7.0 released | Qt Blog

We are happy to announce the Qt Creator 2.7.0 release today, which comes with loads of new features, improvements and bug fixes. C++ support in Qt Creator got even more improvements for C++11, like handling of alignof, alignas and noexcept, brace initializers, and more lambda fixes.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP development team announces the release of PHP 5.5.0alpha6. This release fixes some bugs from alpha5. It also serves as a delay for our next release, beta1, integrating ZendOptimizer+ OPCode cache which is not ready yet to be merged. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

Researchers at HP Labs have built a small, multi-angle, glasses-free 3D display that, one day, could allow for smartphones, tablets, and watches to produce Princess Leia-like holograms. The current prototype devices can produce full-parallax 3D images and videos that are viewable from up to a meter, within a 90-degree arc -- and, like the Star Wars hologram, the 3D image or video varies as you move your head up and down, or around the display.

Willem, from The Secret Batcave in South London, is piqued with irritation by the Shard, which interrupts his view from pretty much everywhere he looks. The Shard, for non-Brits and for those Brits who have been living...in a cave, is 95 storeys of incongruous Qatari-owned phallomorphism designed by the guy behind the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

08:31, Electronics/Robotics Credit: Allegra Boverman, Christine Daniloff/mitWhen a robot is moving one of its limbs through free space, its behavior is well-described by a few simple equations. But as soon as it strikes something solid-when a walking robot's foot hits the ground, or a grasping robot's hand touches an object-those equations break down.

One of the great things about structured content like HTML is that you can manipulate the structure to generate little extras like a list of links or a table of contents.

Inner Workings of Immutable Collections on Channel 9 - BCL Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

After introducing immutable collections three months ago, it's now time to peek behind the curtain. What did we learn from the preview? How do they work? What trade-offs did we make? Are they different from persistent data structures?

NASA Begins New Season of Arctic Ice Science Flights WASHINGTON -- NASA's Operation IceBridge scientists have begun another season of research activity over Arctic ice sheets and sea ice with the first of a series of science flights from Greenland completed on Wednesday.

Facebook SDK 3.2.1 for iOS Today, we're releasing the 3.2.1 version of the Facebook SDK for iOS that you can download here. This update includes bug fixes and adds support for frictionless requests to the SDK's new FBWebDialogs class. This lets your app use frictionless requests without importing the deprecated headers.

35 years after its launch, NASA's Voyager-1 spacecraft has finally left the Solar System -- the first ever man-made object to do so. It will now continue on a course that, in 40,000 years, will take it within 1.7 light years of a star called AC+793888 -- the first man-made object to pass so close to another star, and potentially other planets.

Aiden, who is three and a half years old, has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). NAO (pronounced "now") is the diminutive "front man" for an elaborate system of cameras, sensors and computers designed specifically to help children like Aiden learn how to coordinate their attention with other people and objects in their environment.

I had an interesting emailed question today. Here's a paraphrased one sentence version of the question: Why does an ASP.NET Runtime issue surface in IIS 8.0 Integrated Pool for an application we have run successfully on previous versions of IIS and classic mode in IIS 8.0 ?

Due to popular demand, the Dart team brought back the plus operator for string concatenation. That change has now landed in the Editor. Before this release, using + to concatenate strings produced this error: Now, you can use + for concatenation.

Google Summer of Code Meetups, Episode 2: Chattanooga, TN, USA

When.js is cujojs's lightweight Promises/A+ and when() implementation, and powers the async core of wire.js, cujojs's IOC Container. It also provides several other useful Promise-related concepts, such as joining multiple promises, mapping and reducing collections of promises, and timed promises.

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