It’s taken over 10 years for its Canadian inventor, Raymond Li, to realize his dream and see his jetpack go on sale, but judging by the pictures it looks well worth the wait.
The Jetlev has three main components — a lightweight carbon fiber backpack, a 10-meter hose and an engine unit which floats on the water.
The engine sucks water up through the hose and forces it through two adjustable nozzles on the backpack, creating up to 500 pounds of thrust, say Jetlev’s German-based manufacturers, MS Watersports GmbH.
Richard Grayson is a famous composer and pianist who is known for his ability to improvise any melody and play it any style, or tempo. Forgive me music geeks as I may be mistaken so feel free to correct me here, but here are his improvisations on the Imperial March and the Star Wars theme song in a Baroque Gavotte, similar to the style of Beethoven.
While Youtuber Sp0ntanius may have a hairstyle more hip than me, he does have a knack for recreating Zelda songs with style and neat camera tricks that are really entertaining. From playing the Palace theme in stop motion with guitar and tearing paper, to playing crystal glasses for the Song of Healing, you have to give him a nod for impressive creativity and talent.
We already knew that our direct ancestors were by no means a bunch of knuckle-draggers. Now fossil analysis suggests they walked permanently rather than swinging from trees.
The bone came from the same area in Ethiopia where researchers discovered “Lucy” in 1974, a 40%-complete skeleton that helped us discover that in the ancestry development of humans, the ability to walk upright came before an increase in brain size.
The bone is the fourth (one along from the little toe side) metatarsal, which is the long bone that joins a toe to the “body” of a foot. In apes, this area is relatively flat and the foot is designed to be more flexible to allow for easier gripping of trees or branches. In humans, the foot has two arches (one along, one across), which act as a shock absorber, as well as making it easier to walk by pushing off from one foot.
It’s now clear that Australopithecus afarensis also had arched feet, which likely means the creature had evolved to always move via upright walking. This would have meant it was able to move over long distances even when trees weren’t available, which would have increased its range for food gathering.
The discovery follows the unearthing last year of animal bones featuring cut marks made with crude tools rather than teethmarks. Given the location and age of the bones, credit went to Australopithecus afarensis that had previously been assumed to be vegetarians; the new theory is that they fashioned the tools to make it easier for removing meat from carcasses.
At the time, researchers noted that the creatures would have had to travel several miles to the nearest source of rocks suitable for the tools. The new discovery suggests that they were indeed physically equipped for such a journey.
(Picture credit: Kimberly A. Congdon/Carol Ward/Elizabeth Harman/Science)
This week, an episode of NOVA covered Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed to interpret and understand natural human language, with all its ambiguity: wordplay, puns, double-meanings, intuitive differentiations and subtlety. Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is the result of the DeepQA Project, the goal of which is to create a computer system that can “deliver precise, meaningful responses, and synthesize, integrate, and rapidly reason over the breadth of human knowledge as it is most rapidly and naturally produced — in natural language text.” IBM believes (and is exhibiting rather impressively) that this may be achieved through a combination of advancements in natural language processing, information retrieval (from millions of stored documents), machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, processed simultaneously through parallel computations. The ultimate test of IBM’s research? A show-down episode of Jeopardy!, wherein Watson takes on Ken Jennings, the show’s 74-game champion, and Brad Rutter, the all-time monetary winner of the game. It airs Monday, February 14, 2011.
While frequently compared to the chess-playing Deep Blue, a win by Watson on Monday will be a profoundly deeper and more complex advancement for computer science. Rather than thinking in a single-task environment with a well-defined list of rules—as Deep Blue did—Watson’s ability to compute and process information in a way that rivals human intelligence is a step toward building the holy grail of sci-fi technology: real AI. Regardless of the outcome of Monday’s game, Watson’s development signals the beginning of a new era of systems design and analytics, one in which computers learn from mistakes and accurately interpret the amorphous nature of human language. The applications of such systems are seemingly limitless, with improvements in healthcare, education, finance and data management already under development at IBM.
I’m willing to say with 75% confidence that Watson will win against Jennings and Rutter. What do you think, GAS fans?
Four floppy drives plus MIDI-tone Toccata and Fugue equals Castlevania flashback.
YouTube’s spankin’ new innerwebz star, FunToTheHead, has rigged up a system comprising “two 3 1/2″ drives and two 5 1/4″ drives connected to a PIC18f14k50 microcontroller. It interfaces to any MIDI source via MIDI over USB. Straight MIDI would also be possible with an additional small circuit and some minor firmware changes. This initial version can respond to all 128 MIDI notes, and pitch bends +/- 2 semitones.” It works best when compositions are manually arranged, but can read MIDI files with “acceptable results”.
X-MEN FIRST CLASS charts the epic beginning of the X-Men saga, and reveals a secret history of famous global events. Before mutants had revealed themselves to the world, and before Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young friends discovering their powers for the first time.
