2010-04-30

SUPERBIEN 2D/3D Animated Graphic Designs

clipped from www.creativeapplications.net

Envision: Step Into The Sensory Box

An experience-based video mapping designed by the agency and the Department Superbien New Media Agency / Auditorium. The public was invited into a cube and discover an artistic vision of the tagline of the event: Transforming the Mobile Experience.

clipped from vimeo.com

clipped from www.enlightermagazine.com

PATACHROMO™ is a light installation whose animated content is based on the concepts of CHROMOtherapy which is seen through PATAphysics prism. This program is presented through a sequence of 2 minute-long light animation slots. It enables you to tackle the wintry greyness with serenity thanks to the exposure of your chakras to a healing light given out by a 6.65 sq meter LED support.

clipped from vimeo.com

clipped from www.everyoneisanartdirector.com

Street Art

The Cloud by SuperBien

Friends of SuperBien collective send us some pics and a video of "The cloud", a nice atmospheric installation they just did in Paris during the Nuit Blanche 2009.

clipped from vimeo.com

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2010-04-29

Asphalt Volcanoes

FOXNews.com - Massive and Ancient Asphalt Volcanoes Found off California

Hidden in the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, a series of volcanoes rise from the seafloor. The underwater domes are like giant parking lots, teeming with life and belching methane.

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Off the California Coast, Giant Volcanoes Made of Asphalt

Lead author David Valentine and his colleagues first found these asphalt volcanoes in 2007 when they sent submersible robots to explore peculiar formations 700 feet below the surface. Now, in a study in Nature Geoscience, the team has published its findings and its images of the extinct volcanoes. Valentine says the formations are six stories high, and spread out farther than a football field. “If I could convert all the asphalt in the largest volcano to gasoline, it would be enough to fuel my Honda Civic for about half a billion miles” [National Geographic], he says.

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World's Oldest Oil Spills: Asphalt 'Volcanoes'

These undersea mounds of asphalt have been leaking oil for tens of thousands of years.

The "asphalt volcanoes" were found 700 feet down off the shores of southern California.
The asphalt is at least 35,000-years-old and may contain remains of ancient organisms.
Massive and deadly eruptions of methane probably accompanied the asphalt.

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Undersea Volcano Eruptions Caught On Video

DiscoveryNetworks — December 18, 2009 — Underwater volcanic eruptions and magma flows on the sea floor have been seen for the first time ever thanks to video captured by NOAA. James Williams talks to the lead scientist on the project to learn the story behind the explosive images.

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2010-04-28

Gilberto Esparza Nomadic Plants

Robot Nomadic Plant Feeds Off Polluted Water - GreenPacks

It appears plants are turning into cyborgs, well, they do seem to have picked up a thing about movement. The work of Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza, these Nomadic Plants or Planta Nomada has robotic legs to help it move.

This plant-machine hybrid gets energy from a microbial fuel cell. Microbes at work to generate electricity for the robo legs to remain in action do need some nourishment, so when the need arises, the plant simply seeks out water from the polluted Lerma Santiago River in Mexico.

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Nomadic Plants - we make money not art

Vegetation and microorganisms live in symbiosis inside the body of the Nomadic Plants robot. Whenever its bacteria require nourishment, the self-sufficient robot will move towards a contaminated river and 'drink' water from it. Through a process of microbial fuel cell, the elements contained in the water are decomposed and turned into energy that can feed the brain circuits of the robot. The surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to complete their own life cycle. As Eduardo wrote in our email conversation, "The nomadic plant is a portray of our own species. It also deals with the alienated transformation of this new hybrid species that fights for its survival in a deteriorated environment."

Photo Gilberto Esparza

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Nomadic cyborg plants suck up our filthy water to live | DVICE

Espaza's goal is not to actually solve our pollution issues, but more to demonstrate that solving the world's problems can involve thinking outside the box, something he's clearly pretty good at.

The Nomadic Plants are being exhibited at the Laboral Art and Industrial Creation Center in Gijon, Spain, through June 7th.

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2010-04-27

Brain-like Processor on an Organic Molecular Layer

Molecule-Sized Computer Mimics Human Brain At Work

Molecule-Sized Computer Mimics Human Brain A new molecular computer can generate different patterns equivalent to ones and zeroes in a conventional computer. A. Bandyopadhyay et al

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Michigan Tech News

Lessons from the Brain: Toward an Intelligent Molecular Computer

April 26, 2010— A team of researchers from Japan and Michigan Technological University has built a molecular computer using lessons learned from the human brain.

Physicist Ranjit Pati of Michigan Tech provided the theoretical underpinnings for this tiny computer composed not of silicon but of organic molecules on a gold substrate. “This molecular computer is the brainchild of my colleague Anirban Bandyopadhyay from the National Institute for Materials Science,” says Pati. Their work is detailed in “Massively Parallel Computing on an Organic Molecule Layer,” published April 25 online in Nature Physics.
[...]
The researchers made their different kind of computer with DDQ, a hexagonal molecule made of nitrogen, oxygen, chlorine and carbon that self-assembles in two layers on a gold substrate.

The DDQ molecule can switch among four conducting states—0, 1, 2 and 3—unlike the binary switches—0 and 1—used by digital computers.

“The neat part is, approximately 300 molecules talk with each other at a time during information processing,” Pati says. “We have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain.”

“The evolving neuron-like circuit network allows us to address many problems on the same grid, which gives the device intelligence," Pati says.

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Nature Physics
Published online: 25 April 2010 | doi:10.1038/nphys1636

Access : Massively parallel computing on an organic molecular layer : Nature Physics

Massively parallel computing on an organic molecular layer

Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Ranjit Pati, Satyajit Sahu, Ferdinand Peper & Daisuke Fujita

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Quantum Modeling of Nanoscale Materials for Electronics

Computational Molecular Electronics

Nanoscience is an emerging research area in the 21st century and holds the key to the various physical phenomena that occur in nature as well as in our day to day life. Our motto has been to understand and learn this very basic science and improve upon it whatever we can for the betterment of the mankind.

Ranjit Pati

Associate Professor
Department of Physics
Michigan Technological University

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Lifeboat Foundation Bios: Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay

Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay

Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Ph.D. is Senior Researcher at the Japan National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS). NIMS is Japan's sole Independent Administrative Institution (IAI) specializing in materials science and is charged with basic research and development of materials science, and to advance the level of expertise in the field. Anirban is affiliated with the NIMS Advanced Nano Characterisation Center (ANCC).

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A tree never goes to school but performs particularly advanced supercomputing in its leaves, so does our brain without a single logic gate. Ants in the soil, birds in the sky do not have brain but still develop intelligence. Therefore lots of idiots can develop massive intelligence working together, or massive parallel operations can generate intelligence in a single control unit.
[...]
Our objective is to demonstrate that these concepts are not merely theoretical formulation, rather practically realisable at nano-scale using simple molecules in simple experiments.

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2010-04-26

New Software Processor Can Detect and Transcribe Musical Notes

New Software Processor Can Transcribe Music From Any Performance

Music to Your Eyes A new computer system can convert sound files into sheet music by creating a harmonic dictionary. It could conceivably convert this Global Symphony Orchestra production of "Star Wars" back into written notes.

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Method developed to identify musical notes at any venue

The researchers start with a 'wav' file, a common format for audio recordings, and after applying the method they obtain a 'midi' file, a musical instrument communication protocol that makes it possible to visualise the sheet music and listen to the result.
A team of telecommunications engineers from the University of Jaen (UJA) has created a new method to automatically detect and identify the musical notes in an audio file and generate sheet music. The system identifies the notes even when the type of instrument, musician, type of music or recording studio conditions vary.

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Music Scene-Adaptive Harmonic Dictionary for Unsupervised Note-Event Detection

Carabias-Orti, J.J.; Vera-Candeas, P.; Caadas-Quesada, F.J.; Ruiz-Reyes, N.;
Telecommun. Eng. Dept., Univ. of Jaen, Jaen, Spain

Abstract

Harmonic decompositions are a powerful tool dealing with polyphonic music signals in some potential applications such as music visualization, music transcription and instrument recognition. The usefulness of a harmonic decomposition relies on the design of a proper harmonic dictionary. Music scene-adaptive harmonic atoms have been used with this purpose. These atoms are adapted to the musical instruments and to the music scene, including aspects related with the venue, musician, and other relevant acoustic properties. In this paper, an unsupervised process to obtain music scene-adaptive spectral patterns for each MIDI-note is proposed. Furthermore, the obtained harmonic dictionary is applied to note-event detection with matching pursuits. In the case of a music database that only consists of one-instrument signals, promising results (high accuracy and low error rate) have been achieved for note-event detection.

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2010-04-25

The X-37B Mystery Space Plane

USAF Launches X-37B Mystery Space Plane
April 24, 2010

The United States Air Force (USAF) has launched a secret space plane into orbit, carried in the nose of an Atlas 5 rocket.

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X-37B OTV-1

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

X-37B OTV-1 (Orbital Test Vehicle 1) or USA-212^[3] is the first flight of the Boeing X-37B, an American unmanned spacecraft. It was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on 22 April 2010, and is currently operating in low Earth orbit.
The spacecraft is operated by the United States Air Force, which has not revealed what the spaceship's specific payload is, stating only that it will "demonstrate various experiments and allow satellite sensors, subsystems, components, and associated technology to be transported into space and back."^[4]

X-37B during encapsulation ahead of the OTV-1 launch
Organization	U.S. Air Force/DARPA
Major contractors	Boeing (spacecraft) United Launch Alliance (LSP)

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Star Wars 2010? U.S. military launch space plane on maiden voyage... but its mission is top secret

A top secret space plane developed by the US military has blasted off from Cape Canaveral on its maiden voyage.

Ready for launch: The X-37B rocket in Florida before it blasted off into space

A computer graphic shows what the X-37B will look like in space. It took a decade to develop and will spend up to nine months in orbit

This computer image shows the space plane re-entering Earth. Although it resembles a small space shuttle it is not designed to carry humans. It's wingspan is a mere 4.5m with a length of 8.9m. It is powered by batteries and solar cells

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Air Force Launches Secretive Space Plane; ‘We Don’t Know When It’s Coming Back’

The Air Force launched a secretive space plane into orbit Thursday night from Cape Canaveral, Florida. And they’re not sure when it’s returning to Earth.

Perched atop an Atlas V rocket, the Air Force’s unmanned and reusable X-37B made its first flight after a decade in development shrouded in mystery; most of the mission goals remain unknown to the public.

The Air Force has fended off statements calling the X-37B a space weapon, or a space-based drone to be used for spying or delivering weapons from orbit. In a conference call with reporters, deputy undersecretary for the Air Force for space programs Gary Payton acknowledged much of the current mission is classified. But perhaps the most intriguing answer came when he was asked by a reporter wanting to cover the landing as to when the X-37B would be making its way back to the planet.

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2010-04-23

Lund and Company Invention, L.L.C's Less Lethal LVVWS Weapon

Inventors Design Less-Lethal ‘Taser Me Elmo’ Rifle

Lund Technologies dreams up prototypes for just about everything, from hydrogen-powered toy rockets and light-up footballs to the top-selling Honey My Baby Pony and T.M.X. Tickle Me Elmo dolls. But with a little financing from the Pentagon, the company has also devised a new type of less-lethal rifle.

According to the company, the Lund Variable Velocity Weapons System (LVVWS) is an all-in-one weapon: lethal when used at high velocity, or less-lethal at low-velocity. The gun uses pump action, shoots two rounds a second and weighs a little over six pounds. It also substitutes a uses a hydrogen-powered combustion chamber for a standard cartridge, and doesn’t produce any smoke or powder residue.

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Hydrogen Fuel Rocket

World’s first hydrogen powered toy and the first new rocket technology in almost 50 years.

Keeping The Good Guys Safe

The only problem was the Army didn’t want to use Hydrogen to fuel this less-lethal weapon system. So we went on a search for fuel alternatives, finally settling on a commercially available MAPP gas canister - the kind used in nail guns and such.

Based on work we had done a year earlier developing a Hydrogen-powered nail gun, we reconfigured many of the tool's components to create the world’s first variable velocity non-lethal weapons system, known now as the LVVWS, or Lund Variable Velocity Weapon System.

Media Buzz

There has been a lot of media buzz lately about our work with the Department of Defense creating a non-lethal weapon system, the LVVWS (Lund Variable Velocity Weapon System). Wired, Gizmodo, Popular Science, and others have picked up the story and run with it, some stories more accurate than others.

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Tickle Me Elmo Creator Invents a Sometimes-Lethal Weapon

There is plenty of interest in future developments of the combustion technology. Lund is talking to the law enforcement community about a handgun version that will provide the sort of nonlethal stopping power currently available only from shotguns. The Department of Homeland Security

officials have been talking about a combustion-powered 40-mm grenade launcher to launch sensors that can detect toxic gas or place wireless listening devices. Lund has even been looking into making gas-fired mortars. An adapted VVWS might even have sports applications for skeet or trap shooting, and could be considered a green technology since it needs no cartridge cases and uses no powder.

The award-winning maker of Tickle Me Elmo dips his hand into weapons innovations with a unique gun that kills only when the shooter wants it to.

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2010-04-21

HP Memristor Technology Mimics Brain Synapse

Clipped from: Memristor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Memristor

Clipped from: Computer chip breakthrough mimics brain synapse | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Computer chip breakthrough mimics brain synapse

HP unveils a breakthrough in powerful computer chip technology that can process data, store memory and stack 3-dimensionally ... just like a brain synapse.

Clipped from: H.P. Says New Device Could Transform Chip-Making - NYTimes.com

H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip

Published: April 7, 2010

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday are to report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the atomic scale.
[...]

Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said.

“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”

In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes.

Clipped from: An HP Labs discovery demonstrates the viability and versatility of memristor technology: HP Labs News Article (April 2010)

From Lab to Fab – An HP Labs discovery demonstrates the viability – and versatility – of memristor technology

The HP Labs team that built the world’s first memristor this week announced another significant advance in memristor research.

In an article published in the current issue of Nature, the HP researchers demonstrate that memristors – a fourth basic element in integrated circuits which only existed in theory until 2008 – are capable of performing logic functions. It’s further evidence that memristors have the potential to make an impact on real world computing, says Stanley Williams, director of HP’s Information & Quantum Systems Lab and lead researcher on the project.

Clipped from: HP Labs Discovery Holds Potential to Fundamentally Change Computer System Design

HP Labs Discovery Holds Potential to Fundamentally Change Computer System Design

“Memristor” could enable computation on memory chips

[...]

“Since our brains are made of memristors, the flood gate is now open for commercialization of computers that would compute like human brains, which is totally different from the von Neumann architecture underpinning all digital computers.”

– Leon Chua, professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Chua initially theorized about and named the memristor in an academic paper published 39 years ago.

Clipped from: YouTube - 6-Minute Memristor Guide

6-Minute Memristor Guide

Clipped from: YouTube - THE MEMRISTOR - INCREDIBLE!

THE MEMRISTOR - INCREDIBLE!

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2010-04-20

LEGO DIGITAL BOX -- Augmented Reality Kiosk System

clipped from www.ubergizmo.com

Lego Boxes Get Augmented Reality Too

clipped from www.gisuser.com

LEGO Group Brings its Augmented Reality Boxes to All Its Stores Worldwide

19 April 2010

After a very successful evaluation phase of the "DIGITAL BOX" in selected stores, the Danish toy manufacturer is working with metaio to roll out the AR boxes to all LEGOr brand stores worldwide.

MUNICH, GERMANY April 19th, 2010 - The LEGO Group is currently rolling out its augmented reality DIGITAL BOXES to all LEGOr Brand Retail Stores worldwide after a successful evaluation phase that started in November 2008. The innovative augmented reality technology inside the DIGITAL BOX was developed and constantly improved over the last months in a partnership with metaio.

clipped from www.youtube.com

This augmented reality kiosk called "DIGITAL BOX" has been developed by LEGO Digital Systems and metaio.

clipped from www.metaio.com

Stand-alone AR software for 3D professionals

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2010-04-18

Inspired by Nature -- Festo - Bionic Learning Network

Clipped from: festo.com

Bionic Learning Network

Inspired by nature

Nature never ceases to amaze us with its aesthetic beauty. It is no surprise therefore that nature’s fascinating creatures also served as inspiration for the new projects of Festo’s Bionic Learning Network.
[...]
The Bionic Learning Network is part of Festo’s commitment to technical education and training. In cooperation with students, major-name universities, institutes and development companies, Festo supports projects and prototypes which extend beyond its core segments of Automation and Didactic and which may produce interesting application fields of the future. The aim is to make automated movements even more efficient and productive with the aid of bionics. The Bionic Learning Network demonstrates fascinating solutions to complex problems.

Clipped from: YouTube - Festo - Bionic Learning Network 2010 (version en)