MacBooks, netbooks, schmbooks. Nothing can beat a laptop that lets you nap on top of it without getting keyboard marks on your face—like the ones I get with my current one. [Likecool]
Named for a medical doctor, the Ibn Sina Robot (pictured, scowling at a meat-bag) wants to shed his scholarly ways and you know, hang out, make friends, have a bit of fun. The prototype robot is based on a PeopleBot machine from ActivRobots. It features face recognition and language modules that allow it to carry on real-time conversations with its database of friends. The plan is to put the bot on Facebook where according to the BBC:
The page will be populated with interactions the robot has with people as well as photos of the time it spends in human company. Its creators hope that embedding it in a social web will give rise to a sustainable friendship can grow up between man and machine.
See, Dr. Nikolaus Mavridis and his co-researchers are hoping that they’ll learn to overcome people’s reluctance to interact with robots. Hey doctor, here’s a hint: try giving your robot a less menacing expression — perhaps make it female even, with big doeful eyes and a taste for short mini-skirts. Then your robot will have more “friends” looking to interact than she’ll know what to do with.
Love your netbook but wish it had more varied storage options, like maybe an optical drive and another hard disk? Wait until you see what NU can do for you. The company is advertising a universal docking station packing both a Super-Multi DVD writer and a removable enclosure for a 2.5-inch hard disk (action photograph below), along with a two-port USB hub and an integrated fan. No mention of price or availability, but with a blessing by the FCC already on the books it shouldn’t be too long before this two-tone wedge gets re-badged and retailed domestically.
MacBooks, netbooks, schmbooks. Nothing can beat a laptop that lets you nap on top of it without getting keyboard marks on your face—like the ones I get with my current one. [Likecool]
History’s worst rocket tragedy actually occurred on the ground, in 1960, when the Soviets were experimenting with a dangerous new fuel. Piers Bizony chronicles it in his upcoming book, How To Build Your Own Spaceship:
On August 3, 1957, the Soviet Russian R-7 Semyorka missile, called “Little Seven” by the men who worked around it, flew a simulated nuclear strike trajectory, then became a space launcher just two months later, on October 4, by launching Sputnik. A great international triumph, then, but in missile terms, not necessarily the military advantage that Russia wanted.
The Semyorka used kerosene and LOX. Who in their right mind wants a nuclear missile that takes three or four hours to prime with LOX before you can launch it? Not the Soviet Red Army, for sure. So they commissioned an even more secret missile, the R-16, which, in theory, could be fueled and primed several days, or even weeks, before it was needed, with no loss of oxidizer, because its engineers had abandoned super-cold LOX and kerosene in favor of nitric acid and hydrazine: hypergolic fuels… a fuel and oxidizer combination that can be stored indefinitely at normal pressures and temperatures.
Hypergolic chemicals are efficient too. They ignite spontaneously on contact with each other and deliver a pretty good bang for your buck. Of course there’s a downside. Hypergolics are among the nastiest and most toxic substances in the rocket business. Did we mention that they can be stored? Well, sort of. They are so corrosive they will play havoc with any part of your rocket (or your people) that they come into contact with that they shouldn’t….
In October 1960, the R-16 was hoisted upright for launch at Baikonur, Russia’s ultrasecret equivalent of Cape Kennedy, based deep in the deserts of Kazakhstan. And so began the single greatest rocket disaster in history.
The R-16’s “storable” fuels wouldn’t store. They were viciously corrosive and leaky as hell, oozing from dozens of pipe joints and tank seams. On October 23, the surrounding launch gantries were crowded with young technicians trying to fix a dozen different problems. As zero hour approached, the rocket began to drip nitric acid from its base. At this point, launch director Mitrofan Nedelin should have ordered the entire gantry to be evacuated, but he didn’t seem to care about the risks. He sent yet more ground staff into the pad area straightaway, to see if they could tighten up some valves and stop the leaks and get the rocket up in the air.
Suddenly, the rocket exploded, instantly killing everyone on the gantry. With nothing to support it, the upper stage crashed to the ground, spilling fuel and flame. The new tarmac aprons and roadways around the gantry melted in the heat, then caught fire. Ground staff fleeing for their lives were trapped in the viscous tar as it burned all around them. The conflagration spread for thousands of yards, a wave of fire engulfing everything and everyone in its path. More than 190 people were killed, including Nedelin, perched on his chair near the gantry as a surge of blazing chemicals swept toward him.
From Piers Bizony’s How To Build Your Own Spaceship, due out this August for $15. Excerpted with permission of Plume, an imprint of the Penguin Group.
MORE RESOURCES
Video of the disaster:
Haunting details and quotes from the event, curated by Jacqueline Sly in a space history project
While making a point to assert it’s looking into LTE as well, Dell has for now jumped on the WiMAX bandwagon by announcing it’ll offer the technology as an option on its Studio 15, Studio 17, and Studio XPS 16 laptops. US customers can pick the Intel 5150 WiMAX / Wireless-N combo card for $60 under the wireless card tab when customizing. Right now, we’d wager a few people living in Portland, Atlanta, or pockets of Baltimore just got mighty happy.
It may not compare to the io-Drive, but DDrdrive’s X1 still packs a punch in terms of speed and price.
Unlike other SSDs, the X1 utilizes two types of memory—4GB DRAM and 4GB NAND aligned on a PCIe card. Because RAM can be volatile, the NAND kicks in and safely backs up the information. According to a PC Perspective review, the drive features “single sector IOPS (input/output operations per second) unmatched by any other device available” and has the benefit of a IOPS cost that is about 1/5 of the io-Drive.
So, essentially you are getting a lot of bang for your buck here—but at the end of the day you are still talking $1495 for a drive with 4GB capacity. Obviously, that means the majority of us will have to wait a while longer to experience this kind of performance. [DDRdrive and CNET and PC Perspective]
The torpedo can swim after potential terrorist or enemy soldiers trying to get into coast bases or near ships. For now, it’s not lethal: It will only track its target, slowing down when it is near and then circling its objective sending its exact position using GPS.
Jim Pollock—project manager for the Integrated Swimmer Defense Program at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center—says that the Moray Eel torpedo is just “a candidate technology for a solution to deterring swimmers. It’s not necessarily a solution that the Navy has picked at this point.”
Defense Tech, however, speculates that while this may become a water surveillance drone, it may only be a matter of time before it is armed to kill. I’m sure the military are not thinking about that at all. [Defense Tech]
The answer may be that it is not the actual QuickPwn software, but an iPhone-specific version of a web site called QuickPwn. However, the site’s tag line is:
Download QuickPWN, jailbreak iPhone and iPod Touch, games and more!
It doesn’t seem like the thing Apple would like to advertise openly. [Apple via TechCrunch]
MacBooks, netbooks, schmbooks. Nothing can beat a laptop that lets you nap on top of it without getting keyboard marks on your face—like the ones I get with my current one. [Likecool]
History’s worst rocket tragedy actually occurred on the ground, in 1960, when the Soviets were experimenting with a dangerous new fuel. 
It may not compare to the 
QuickPwn allows you to bypass Apple’s protection and 
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