Nov 10 2009 Close Calls: Killer Robot Plane Goes Rogue, Is Shot Down Before It Can Turn On Its Master

An autonomous killer Reaper jet recently went rogue in Northern Afghanistan and had to be shot down before it got the chance to go berserk and blast the shit out of the blue team. Eff that!

The aircraft was flying a combat mission when positive control of the MQ-9 was lost. When the aircraft remained on a course that would depart Afghanistan's airspace, a US Air Force manned aircraft took proactive measures to down the Reaper in a remote area of northern Afghanistan.

It wasn't clear from the US military announcement whether the erratic death-bot had turned on its masters and was planning an attack on critical US logistics bases located north of the Afghan border, or whether it had sickened of reaping hapless fleshies like corn and was hoping merely to escape. Alternatively the machine assassin may merely have succumbed to boredom or - just possibly - a mundane, non-anthropomorphic technical fault of some kind.

Okay, I don't know exactly how this fits into my government/robot conspiracy, but I assure you it does. Importantly. Like the last piece in a very critical puzzle. Provided my dog didn't eat any pieces. Because then I'll have to cut a similar shape out of construction paper and color it with markers. AND IT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. My parents will tell me you can barely tell the difference BUT YOU CAN TELL. You can tell.

Robot Fighter Jet Killed Before It Could Go AWOL [io9]

Thanks to AdmiralN00b, Shawn, Beanbones, Paul, Timothy, Anonymous, Sambob, That Guy and Jason, who are all welcome to stay in my anti-robot shelter, provided they shower. And spoon.

Nov 10 2009 No: Roombas Programmed To Play Pac-Man

Been waiting for someone to hack a bunch of Roombas to play Pac-Man? Me neither, but somebody did AND YOU'RE GOING TO WATCH THEM OR I'M GOING TO TOOTHPICK YOUR EYES OPEN AND MAKE YOU.

The vacuum, long an instrument for chasing cats, has now been turned against its own. What better use for automatic home appliances than to have them chase each other in classic video game style?

Built using our spare time, Roomba Pac-Man is designed to showcase the extensive Unmanned Aerial System software suite that we have developed to support our personal research. It was also a great opportunity to use some of our skills for our own entertainment.

Neat idea, but did you have to use robots? Why not kittens? I mean, you just handed over like $1,500 to the iRobot company. Which, despite the number of emails I've sent, the government still refuses to classify as a terrorist organization. OPEN YOUR EYES YOU BUREAUCRATIC BUTTPLUGS! Unless....OMG the government's in bed with the robots! Initializing expatriation! New Mexico here I come.

Project Site

Thanks to Jonny S, mary, Jackie and Boomer, who vacuum the old fashioned way: with a shaggy dog taped to a broken tree branch.

Oct 30 2009 Russia To Build Nuclear Powered Spaceship

You read correctly: Russia plans to build a nuclear powered spaceship. I smell a new cold cool lukewarm war coming on! ADVANCE THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK!

Roscosmos, Russia's Federal Space Agency has a new design for a manned spacecraft powered by a nuclear engine. Anatoly Perminov, the head of the agency, told reporters yesterday the goal of the Megawatt-class spaceship was "implementing large-scale space exploration programs."

Perminov added that this new spacecraft -- which will have a preliminary design by 2012 -- is supposed to help Russia maintain its edge in space, and possibly allow travel to the Moon or Mars. But Anatoly Koroteyev, president of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics and head of the Keldysh research center, told RIA-Novosti that setting up permanent base on the moon was still out of the question.

Listen, I'm all for atomic energy, but I can't imagine the aliens being too thrilled about the Ruskies launching an atomic missile in their direction. AND YOU WONDER WHY THEY COME TO EARTH AND STICK THINGS IN OUR ASSES.

Поехали! Russia Plans Atomic-Powered Spaceship [wired]

Thanks to Nick, who built a nuclear reactor in his parents' basement but got grounded when they found it.

Oct 15 2009 UPDATE: 6-Year Old (NOT) Floating Around In Homemade UFO Balloon

That's no 'Get Well' balloon, that's a 20' foil aircraft with a 6-year old boy inside, floating aimlessly 8,000 feet above eastern Colorado. Uh-oh.

The helium balloon was tethered to the boy's family home in Fort Collins, the Larimer County Sheriff's Department said. The boy got into the craft Thursday morning and undid the rope anchoring it.

Margie Martinez of the Weld County Sheriff's Office said a sibling saw the boy climb into the basket before the balloon took off. Since the door on the balloon was unlocked, Martinez said it's possible the boy had fallen out.

"The structure at the bottom of the balloon that the boy is in is made of extremely thin plywood and won't withstand any kind of a crash at all," said Erik Nilsson, Larimer County emergency manager, according to CNN affiliate KMGH.

Great, so he either fell out or won't survive the crash. Hooray for positive thinking. Come back down safely, balloon boy.

UPDATE: No boy when balloon landed. Not good.

UPDATE UPDATE: Falcon (the boy's actual name) was found hiding in a box in the garage attic (great search effort). This calls for celebration! (you hold him down, I'll tie on the fireworks)

6-year-old Colorado boy floats away in balloon [cnn]

Thanks to Jimmothy, stacy, jordana, dorothy, NICKSTER, rya, Jake, e.,The Superficial Writer, steven, Nigel, Valhalla, Lizzie, Noah and pepe la PEW PEW, whose parents thankfully never let them play around giant UFO balloons unsupervised.

Oct 15 2009 Uh-Oh: Chinese Scientists Create Black Hole

Two scientists in China have developed an electromagnetic black hole capable of sucking in and trapping microwaves (not my Kid's Cuisine!). Next stop: trapping visible light.

The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.

A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards.

Now Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China, have turned Narimanov and Kildishev's theory into practice, and built a "black hole" for microwave frequencies. It is made of 60 annular strips of so-called "meta-materials", which have previously been used to make invisibility cloaks.

You can hit the link to read how the black hole actually works, but that's not what's important. What's important is that it DOES work, and we're all doomed. And here I thought my stomach was the only black hole on earth. Don't believe me? Somebody toss a cheeseburger in the air. Did you see that? Works for hot dogs too. Haha, nice try buddy -- you keep those pants zipped.

First black hole for light created on Earth [newscientist]

Thanks to Equalizer and Chris, who have both lost spaceships to black holes before.

Oct 14 2009 We're As Good As Dead: Robots Driving Tank

We can only pray this is an elaborate Photoshop hoax or we're all as good as dead. Well, you are, I'm as bad as dead. And twice as bad as that nancy Leroy Brown. That jive-talking mother ain't got nothin' on me!

Picture [pictureisunrelated]

Thanks to Daniel, who actually is meaner than a junkyard dog and once pushed an old lady into traffic.

Oct 8 2009 Well, It's Been Nice Knowing You: NASA Plans To Blow Up The Moon Tomorrow Morning

NOTE: If you're reading this after 7:30AM Eastern you may be dead.

As you may recall from the Pulitzer-winning article I wrote back in June (and an even ooolder article from April '06) , NASA plans to blow up the moon by crashing the $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and its Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) into the Cabeus crater on the moon's south pole.

When the twin crafts hit the lunar surface at around 6,000 mph, NASA expects "plumes of moon dust -- perhaps full of ice -- (to soar) 6.2 miles high above the moon's Cabeus crater."

NASA hopes the explosion and resulting unmooning (see what I did there? Like unearthing!) will finally settle whether there's ice and water under the moon's surface. And, if so, if it's potable. Nice, NASA -- TOO BAD YOU'RE GONNA BLOW THE MOON IN TWO LIKE BUTTCHEEKS! And do you even know what that's gonna do to the ocean's tides? I mean, besides make for the most epic day of bodyboarding EVER. See you at the beach, suckers!

NASA Will Bomb The Moon Tomorrow [io9]
and
NASA Attacks the Moon [yahoonews]

Thanks to JFreezy, Sean, The Superficial Writer, Benjamin and moses, who are gonna finish the moon off with a giant laser if NASA's plan doesn't work.

Sep 30 2009 Video Game Deletes Files Off Your Computer

Lose/Lose is a video game created by Zach Gage that plays like a traditional space shooter, but with a twist!

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player's mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

I didn't actually bother reading all that because oh I dunno, I WAS TOO BUSY WHIPPING SOME ALIEN ASS! Unfortunately, the bug-eyed bastards got me in the end. Now, what happened to Photoshop?

Zach's Porfolio (game is available for download there)

Thanks to Luciano, who managed to kill all the aliens AND save the princess AND see Samus Aran naked because the man is a damn hero.

Sep 25 2009 THERE IS NOTHING OKAY ABOUT THIS

This is a video of the government's latest flying cyborg beetles in action. That's right, ACTUAL LIVE beetles being remotely controlled via implanted electrodes. Just wait till the government gets its hands on you!

"We demonstrated the remote control of insects in free flight via an implantable radioequipped miniature neural stimulating system," the researchers reported in their new paper for Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. " The pronotum mounted system consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller and a microbattery."

The research, supported by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is part of a broader effort, called the HI-MEMS program, which has been looking specifically at different approaches to implanting micro-mechanical systems into insects in order to control their movements.

OH HELLLLLL NO. You show me one person who thinks this is okay and I'll show you a got-damn freedom hating communist. Just sayin', I saw that sickle and hammer tattoo!

Video: Pentagon's Cyborg Beetle Takes Flight [wired]

Thanks to Danny, Mycropht, Bo, Mike, Zach, Jason, Peterman and TobyRaider, who already have government chips implanted in their brains that make them irresistible to women. WHERE WAS I ON THAT, THE MAN?!

Sep 18 2009 Um, No: Tandem Robo-Biker Pedals For You

Joules is a robot designed to KILL! pedal the back of a tandem bicycle. And I can honestly say I have absolutely no interest in biking down the street getting cornholed by a robot names Joules.

He's the creation of a guy called Chris who, challenged by his son to create an electric tandem that worked via pedal power, more than satisfied the brief.

The nuts-and-bolts robot is powered by a PMG-132 electric motor and, unlike most lazy-assed back-end tandem riders, does all the work himself.

Yeah but no but no. As much as I do hate pedaling myself, I'd rather walk my bike up a hill than have this jerk do the work for me. You hear that, Lance Failstrong? YOU WILL NEVER PEDAL ME!

Hit the jump for a video of the beast in action.

Continue Reading " Um, No: Tandem Robo-Biker Pedals For You "

Sep 17 2009 Zombie Shooting Targets Now Available

Tired of shooting at the same boring silhouettes when you're getting your gun on? Well why not prepare for the imminent zombie apocalypse and get your pew on at the same time with these zombie-themed shooting targets?

Full color Zombie Poster Targets. Designed for fun at the range or for your next league's Zombie Shoot. Features shaded scoring lines in both head & brain that cannot be seen at shooting distances.

Prices start at $1.50 a pop and decrease with quantity ordered. I just bought 1,000 so I could get them for $0.69 AND I DON'T EVEN OWN A GUN! Now lasers, lasers are a different story. You will never take them from me! I'm looking at you, future Amendment XXXII. Cold dead hands, just sayin'. *pew pew!*

Product Site

Thanks to Patrick, who once beat a paper zombie target to death with a shovel. You know, for principle.

Sep 16 2009 Uh-Oh: Little Robot Can Jump 25-Foot Fences

Boston Dynamics, a company best known for heralding the apocalypse with their futuristic death machines, is at it again -- this time manufacturing the Precision Urban Hopper.

Most of the time, the shoebox-sized robot - which is being developed for the US military - uses its four wheels to get around.

But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated "leg" to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences.

The semi-autonomous, GPS-guided gadget could be used for surveillance in urban environments.

The robot is allegedly able to clear obstacles up to 25-feet high. Which is exactly why I built a 26-foot fence around my anti-robot compound. And dug a moat. Which, FYI, is filled with deadly water dragons. But not luck dragons -- Falcor doesn't like to get wet! But he does like to get high. You're so soft, Falcor. Plus you have a puppy face.

Military robot 'hops' over walls [bbcnews]
and
Youtube

Thanks to TobyRaider, Bobby, JKirchartz, Kelly, Lomig, Kyle, Laux, Jennaiii, shiny bathtub, shawn, Nikki, Fritz, Gonk Assassin, Mark, Spikey DaPikey, prestone, Matty, 2MechanicalArms and Laurent who can't even jump out of bed in the morning. It's called depression, folks, and I have it too.

Sep 9 2009 Huuuge Robot Statue Coming To South Korea

If you thought the 59-foot Gundam statue in Japan was large, boy were you wrong. Because South Korea is erecting a massive 364-foot statue (twice as large as the Statue of Liberty) of Robot Taekwon V (aka Voltar the Invincible). Scared? It gets worse. You see, the statue is being built for a new amusement park called Robot Land. Geez, talk about scarring your children for life. This is worse than coming downstairs on Christmas hoping for a Nintendo, only to find your mom gangbanging the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny underneath the tree. Nobody even ate the cookies!

giant robot taekwon v statue will be six times as large as giant gundam statue [technabob]

Sep 3 2009 Eeeek, Kill Them!: I-SWARM Robotic Army

Bugs don't scare me. But tiny robots? Tiny robots scare the shit out of me. Just look at those evil bastards ganging up on that defenseless screw. It's sickening.

These tiny (4 millimeters on a side) robots are members of the I-SWARM project, which stands for Intelligent Small-World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation. Each robot is simple, with three legs and a little poker to manipulate stuff with. They're designed to work in large, cheap, mass producible, replaceable groups doing things that insects would be good at... Surveillance, obviously, but they could also do things like clean your house by taking care of one bit of dust each.

No, really, this isn't necessary. If I wanted teeny little robots running around everywhere I would have killed myself and gone to hell. Because that's exactly what it's like. Except they're on fire. And they crawl in your holes.

I-SWARM Micro Robots [botjunkie] (the very thought of which makes me sick)

Thanks to Nick, Michael, MDGrein, Ashley and Skynet (screw you!), who are all cool in my book. Except for Skynet. Skynet should implode.

Sep 3 2009 'Gravity Tractor' May Prevent Us From Going Out Like The Dinosaurs (Read: In Style)

Apparently some people are worried that the earth might get struck by an asteroid at some point in time and screw up humankind's plans to eff this world up on our own. Yeah -- who invited you, asteroid?! So what do we do? Build a Gravity Tractor (suck it, John Deere!) to avert certain death. Bitchin'.

NASA's Near Earth Object program currently has 145 potentially hazardous asteroids on its list out of 1,062 objects larger than one kilometer in diameter, and 6,292 total discovered objects. What's all that mean? Well, that there's a lot of stuff out there that could potentially impact our planet -- some of it pretty big.

So instead of sending shuttle crews up at the last minute to blow an approaching asteroid up, British astronomers at the Astrophysics Research Centre are planning to build a 10-ton "gravity tractor" spacecraft that will influence the object's trajectory. The process would take some time -- a craft would have to be launched 15 years in advance to really have an effect -- but, once the tractor arrives, it'd hover close by an asteroid and gently guide it along a different path.

Listen NASA, I know we've had our differences in the past (I never touched that alien!), but I would like to volunteer to drive the Gravity Tractor. I have every reason to believe I'd be the perfect candidate: I have mowed my parents' yard several times and I only hit the fence twice and ran over a sprinkler. Also, I have a natural passion for heavy machinery, especially after drinking. You think about it.

Britain plans 'gravity tractor' to protect Earth from asteroids [dvice]

Sep 1 2009 Volcano-y: Time Lapse Footage Of LA Wildfires

This is some time lapse footage of the LA wildfires as shot by photographer Brandon Riza. As you will see, they are super smokey. And not smokey like "and the bandit" either. Like fire-smokey. And where there's smoke there's....say -- mind if I hit that? Fun fact: Smokey the Bear secretly gets high BUT WILL ONLY USE A VAPORIZER.

Brandon Riza
via
Amazing, and scary, timelapse footage of the Los Angeles Station fire [agentmlovestacos]

Aug 31 2009 Disney To Acquire Marvel For $4 Billion

Mickey Mouse, in a power move to impress his ratty love interest Minnie, has decided to buy up Marvel Comics for a staggering $4 billion. With the sale come all the right's to Marvel's cache of over 5,000 characters. FIVE THOUSAND!

We believe that adding Marvel to Disney's unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation," Disney president and chief executive Robert Iger said.

"We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney."

"Disney is the perfect home for Marvel's fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses," said Marvel chief executive Ike Perlmutter.

I mean, way to go and all, Disney, but this was a pretty foolish business decision if you ask me. What in the hell are you gonna do with 5,000 Marvel characters? You should have just bought the 30 cool ones.

Disney to buy Marvel in $4bn deal [bbcnews]

Thanks to Reverend Faux, Lomig, Jason, Aaron, Lauren, Cade, A Girl Named Michael, draw and jawn, who have all puked on different Disney rides, including It's A Small World (it was Jason!).

Aug 25 2009 How Not To Private Message On Facebook

This is 41-year old idiot moron Tracy T-something trying to send lover Michael a Facebook message expressing how much she loved him recently railing her but instead posting the note ON HER OWN WALL (admit it, we've been there). Wow, Tracy, what are you doing with this Michael character anyway if you're engaged? And what the hell is a permanent invitation to "the-love-cave-between-my-legs?" Don't get me wrong, I love camping with bears as much as the next guy, BUT I'M NOT MOVING INTO THE CAVE. I would, however, start a fire in there and grill some mammoth.

Picture [buzzfeed]

Thanks to Lee and Lisa, who understand the internet is magic but can still send a message where they mean to.

Aug 21 2009 Uh-Oh: Gamers More Likely To Be Depressed

No that isn't me. That is a sad gamer. You see, a recent study found that gamers are more likely to be depressed than non-gamers. Shocking, I know.

The average gamer is 35, overweight, and more likely to be depressed, says a new study conducted by researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study, which was carried out in the Seattle-Tacoma area, found that gamers reported "lower extraversion, consistent with research on adolescents that linked video-game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status, and to mental-health concerns."

Oh yeah? Well I'm only 28, overweight and depressed. So put that in your study and smoke it like a bong (BLUBLBLUBLBLUBLBLUBLUB)!

Study: Games are depressing...or are they? [yahoo]

Thanks to Matt, who is like a giraffe in a potato sack.

Aug 20 2009 Wonderful News: Robots Learn How To Lie

In an experiment that shouldn't surprise anybody with half a brain that sleeps with a giant robot-burning laser under their pillow, scientists have shown that robots have the ability to evolve and lie. And this is to one another -- imagine what they'd tell a human! Also, this quote is kind of long, but it's interesting and important to read if you want to understand the experiment. However, if you just want to type FIRST! in the comments and not learn anything, you should probably skip it (and then off a building). Did I say skip? I meant dive. Just kidding, I don't care.

In an experiment run at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland*, robots that were designed to cooperate in searching out a beneficial resource and avoiding a poisonous one learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the resource.

The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 different groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code "genome" that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it.

The robots got higher marks for finding and sitting on the good resource, and negative points for hanging around the poisoned resource. The 200 highest-scoring genomes were then randomly "mated" and mutated to produce a new generation of programming. Within nine generations, the robots became excellent at finding the positive resource, and communicating with each other to direct other robots to the good resource.

However, there was a catch. A limited amount of access to the good resource meant that not every robot could benefit when it was found, and overcrowding could drive away the robot that originally found it.

After 500 generations, 60 percent of the robots had evolved to keep their light off when they found the good resource, hogging it all for themselves. Even more telling, a third of the robots evolved to actually look for the liars by developing an aversion to the light; the exact opposite of their original programming!

Notice how I bolded that last line? Reread it. Anybody else see something inherently wrong with that? Now, if you will recall the first law of robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. See where I'm going with this? OUTERSPACE BITCHES, I'M NOT WAITING AROUND FOR THIS SHIT TO GO DOWN.

Evolving Robots Learn To Lie To Each Other [popsci]

Thanks to Sarah, biggity2bit, greg, Phil, John, Pepper, Sven, Shawn, Rossco, Terrance, timpeva, ffffffffffffffffffffffffffff, SharaSue, Sn0zz, SeanJon, billcollider, Tyrogyro and yayinternets, who only lie about their age and marital status.