When you have enough money to fund robotic lobsters, you might as well create a simulated city for robots to destroy. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced that its next Grand Challenge competition will take place in a simulated urban environment. Previous DARPA Grand Challenges required participants to create autonomous ground vehicles that would navigate difficult desert routes. This next competition, scheduled to take place on November 3, 2007, moves the challenge into a "mock urban area" where vehicles must obey strict traffic laws while "merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles." How many simulated pedestrians must perish before greedy DARPA has its fill? Only time will tell.
Students at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have successfully constructed and flown a ultralight plane that is powered solely by AA batteries. On Saturday, the manned ultralight managed to fly a "couple hundred meters" using 160 Panasonic Oxyride AA batteries. The glider's length is just over 30 feet and it is constructed out of carbon fiber and styrofoam. In other news, several local community college students managed to create a AA battery-powered beer bong by cramming a handful of batteries down a traditional beer bong.
Levi Strauss & Co. has announced that they are now shipping jeans and pants that are individually tagged with radio frequency identification tags. The company is in a testing phase with the RFID tags, sending the shipment to only one unnamed retail location in the United States. This announcement has generated concern from privacy activists about the implications of item-level RFID tagging. A spokesperson for Levi Strauss claimed that the tags will only contain stock information for the product, such as style, size, and color. As long as pants don't start calling my grandmother whenever I'm at the discount strip club alley, I'll continue to wear them.
The goal of the ENKI project is to induce a state of "extreme relaxation" through communication signals from electric fish. The project is based around "Brainwave Entrainment" in which the senses are presented with rhythmic stimuli that cause the brain to synchronize its electric cycles with the stimuli's rhythm. Instead of using pre-programmed chips like other Brainwave Entrainment systems, the ENKI project uses the electric organ discharge of Electric Fish, creating the "possibility of becoming one with the mind of nature." After the experience, subjects described a deep sense of relaxation and an extreme fondness for "those delicious colorful food flakes."
Eye-Fi is a new product that will add wifi connectivity to most digital cameras. Eye-Fi is a specially designed SD-card that contains both storage and a wifi module built in. The basic idea of wifi in cameras is to create an easier way to transfer pictures from the camera to the computer, eliminating the need for a USB cable or card adapter. The Eye-Fi carries this idea further by enabling the user to upload pictures to a web-base photo website (like Flikr) from any wireless hotspot. This benefits users because they can free up space on their memory card by dumping their pictures to the web anytime the find a hotspot. It should be available by the end of the year for around $100, and greatly increase the chance that one of your friends will "accidentally" upload more personal pictures of himself dressed in his "teddy bear bondage" costume to the Internet.
Scientists are working on a robotic shoe that detects and avoids landmines. The shoe contains six legs that each have a metal detecting base. As the wearer places a foot down, all six of the legs test the ground to determine if a mine is present. If a mine is detected, the leg over the mine will raise, applying no pressure to ground and preventing the wearer from triggering the mine. Since landmines kill tens of thousands of people every year, these shoes are welcome inventions. With this technology, you'll also be able to effortlessly walk over the homeless people that used to remind you just how cruel and unforgiving the world really is. Plus you'll be like a foot taller!