9 Feb
Researchers at Aberdeen University have created a robot that learns and semi-sentiently manages its own evolution.
As this article notes as it reports, this is very much asking for it. You can just picture a couple of Scottish scientists peeling out of the lab parking lot, chased by their Scottish robot fiend with an icy stare and karate chop hands sprinting towards the rear bumper, who just realized that he should turn his limbs into spinning buzzsaw lasers in order to better compost you and drink your oil.
Imagine you’re playing piano and you think “fuck, chicks love piano - I could use a few more fingers” and then you bloody make it happen. The robot social scene’s shaping up to be cooler than ours.
24 Dec
Ok - there’s good news and bad news. I always start with bad news.
The bad news is that the presence of large amounts of solar particles near the Earth’s magnetic field show that the shield that normally keeps these particles out isn’t in good shape. We’re in the low point of the solar cycle at this point, but when it picks up around 2012, we can expect this solar issue to “interfere with satellites’ power sources, endanger spacewalkers, and even knock out power grids on Earth.”
The good news is, the cool ass colors in the aurora found at the Earth’s poles will be magnified and intensified as solar activity increases.
Full story here.
29 Jan
150,000,000 crabs swarm slowly onto Christmas Island. When their eggs hatch simultaneously, there could be as many as 75,000,000,000,000 of them. They walk slowly, but… man…
Ya gotta wonder if they have enough sentience to know, even close to ballpark, how many of them there actually are. My hope is that they don’t.
Christmas Island Red Crabs - Amazing videos are here
