Advanced Invention

The team at Terrafugia is about to fulfill the fantasy of every driver pilot: a consumer vehicle that can take to the highways and the skies. All they have to do is finish the first one

The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese researchers say they have developed a rubber that is able to conduct electricity well, paving the way for robots with stretchable “e-skin” that can feel heat and pressure like humans.

The material is the first in the world to solve the problems faced by metals — which are conductive but do not stretch — and rubber, which hardly transmits electricity, according to the team at the University of Tokyo.

The new technology is flexible like ordinary rubber but boasts conductivity some 570 times as high as commercially available rubbers filled with carbon particles, said the team led by Takao Someya at the university’s School of Engineering.

Scientists envision ‘bots working intelligently while exploring distant worlds

EVE, otherwise known as the Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, represents an intelligent probe sent to an abandoned Earth in the film “WALL-E.”

A spaceship descends with a thunderous roar and deposits a futuristic probe before taking off again. The Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE) soon activates and begins flying around, scanning the barren surface for signs of life.

image via

In movies like Ridley Scott’s classic Bladerunner, robots are ultimately portrayed as having feelings and possessing a conscience. A slightly scary, but nonetheless intriguing thought comes to mind: they fight for survival; they appear more human than machine.

Predictably, this may soon no longer be confined to the realms of science fiction. Yep. Scientists say that in about 40 years, a robot could become the perfect lover and sex machine… literally.

David Levy, author of Love + Sex with Robots, said during an international conference at the University of Maastricht in southeastern Netherlands, that by 2050, robots would be able to serve as human-like lovers and not just mechanical sex slaves. Within the next four years, advanced robots will be sold as sex toys, he claims.

Giving emotions to a machine is not an easy task. In order for them to become good lovers, they need to be taught to have human characteristics and certain personality traits. They need consciousness of their own. For example, when they tell their human lovers ‘I love you’, they must really ‘mean’ it or at least be perceived to mean it. Perhaps they’ll also be ‘trained’ to be jealous! However, more important problems need to be resolved first…

According to Levy, one important ability which is particularly difficult to program is conversation, a sustaining pillar of all loving relationships. Additionally to be great in bed, the robots will need to possess sensors and electronic speech abilities to make them seem real, when a human touches their “sensitive zones.”

There are various scenarios as to how this could play out. In fact the possibilities are infinite. Will the robots be more attractive than the real opposite sex? Will that lead to self-imposed sterility for the geeks that fall in love with their super hot robot women? Will less people cheat on each other? Or will copulating with a robot be considered adultery?

All of these questions are yet to be resolved. What do you think?

Via environmentalgraffiti.com