Cool interlude: Human hair tattoo

This isn’t really relevant to much of anything, but I think it’s extremely cool: it’s a “tattoo” — or more of a micro-etching, really — done on the side of a single human hair with a focused ion-beam microscope, by the engineering department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The tattoo would be cool enough […]

Video: My new favourite robot

My most recent favourite robot was the so-called “Big Dog” robot from Boston Dynamics, which has an amazing ability to remain standing, even when walking on ice and being shoved by the foot of its human master — but the Yellow Drum Machine is my new favourite, I think. Its sole purpose in life […]

Video interlude: Big Dog robot

This is very cool, and yet kind of creepy at the same time. If you thought robots still couldn’t do very well at walking like regular people — or even animals — watch how the Big Dog handles walking through the forest, or crossing the slippery ice on a pond (turn down the sound […]

The future of the newspaper?

The Mobile Gadgeteer at ZDNet has some amazing video of the Readius eInk mobile reader, which folds up into something that looks about the same size as a bulky cellphone or first-generation mp3 player. The text appears to be very similar to the Sony e-book reader (although faster, as the video notes), but the amazing […]

Video interlude: Tetris on a building

Some people might say the moon landing, others might choose lasers or the internal combustion engine — I think this just might be the pinnacle of human scientific achievement: playing Tetris using the windows of what appears to be a 20-story apartment building, controlled (they are Finnish, after all) from someone’s mobile phone.

There’s a longer […]