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Man spends life savings and gets banana with dreadlocks (Video Report)

Featured Image: banana. SOURCE: clker.com (Public-Domain).

From Boston CBS April 29, 2013 5:17 PM

Racing Car With Electric Drive (W/Video)

Featured Image: FOR ILLUSTRATION ONLY. Canada Grande Prix 2008. Lap1 Turn 1. Lewis, Robert, Kimi, Fernando, Nico, and Felipe all hold their positions. Nick goes wide behind Barrichello. CREDIT: Mark McArdle SOURCE: Wikipedia (Public Domain) 

From Science Daily

Apr. 26, 2013 — Drive technology has an electric future — of this Fraunhofer research scientists are in no doubt. At the Sensor + Test measurement fair in Nuremberg from May 14 -16, they will use an electric racing car to present novel solutions for battery management and electronic sensor systems together with an industry partner. The scientists are following a new trend, as even FIA, the governing body for world motor sport, federation of the world’s leading motoring organizations and organizer of Formula 1, is planning a racing series for electric vehicles. . . . Read Complete Report

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And while on the subject of Electric Race Cars. . . take a ride in one! 

From youtube uploaded by 3312cdfp5674

EV West Electric BMW M3 E36 Pikes Peak Race Car Drifts and Burnouts

Published on Oct 7, 2012

The Electric BMW M3 E36 from Pikes Peak built by EV West at Oceanside Motorsports for a BMW CCA event with Bill Caswell as a guest speaker. The M3 does some drifts and i catch a ride on it. Credit to Neil for the awesome driving. . . Description published w/video.

Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population)

Illustration: New 50 Electoral States SOURCE: http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/

From Fake is the New Real

Neil Freeman, 2012

The electoral college is a time-honored, logical system for picking the chief executive of the United States. However, the American body politic has also grown accustomed to paying close attention to the popular vote. This is only rarely a problem, since the electoral college and the popular vote have only disagreed three times in 200 years. However, it’s obvious that reforms are needed.

The fundamental problem of the electoral college is that the states of the United States are too disparate in size and influence. The largest state is 66 times as populous as the smallest and has 18 times as many electoral votes. This allows for Electoral College results that don’t match the popular vote. To remedy this issue, the Electoral Reform Map redivides the fifty United States into 50 states of equal population. The 2010 Census records a population of 308,745,538 for the United States, which this map divides into 50 states, each with a population of about 6,175,000.1 . . . Read Complete Report w/large map

DARPA Wants to Seed the Ocean Depths With Upward Falling UAV Pods

from IEEE Spectrum
POSTED BY: EVAN ACKERMAN
TUE, JANUARY 22, 2013

The ocean is a big place, and DARPA wants to fill it with robots. All of it. Because rather than having tosend robots to whatever part of the ocean you want to have robots in, wouldn’t it just be much easier of robots were there already? Sure it would! Yes, it’s impractical, and maybe even borderline impossible, but hey, it’s DARPA, and this is what they do.

DARPA’s Upward Falling Payloads program would seed the world’s oceans with remotely deployable robot pods. The pods, or nodes, would stay hidden at the bottom of the sea until activated by a secret signal, whereupon they’d rise to the surface (“falling upward”) and do… Well… They’d do whatever you’d want them to do: passive sensing, active sensing, communications, or even launching UAVs. As with most of their programs, DARPA has no idea how to go about doing this, but they’re hoping that a pile o’ cash will tempt someone else to make it all work. . . . Read Complete Report

Big NSF grant funds research into training robots to work with humans (W/Vidoe)

From Phys.org

December 18, 2012 by Carol Ness

What if robots and humans, working together, were able to perform tasks in surgery and manufacturing that neither can do alone?

That’s the question driving new research by UC Berkeley robotics experts Ken Goldberg and Pieter Abbeel and colleagues from four other universities, who were awarded a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Their work is part of the first $50 million in funding for the National Robotics Initiative, announced in 2011 with the goal of exploring how robots can enhance the work of humans rather than replacing them, “The emerging generation of robots are more aware than oblivious, more social than solitary, and more like companions that tools,” . . .”Read Complete Report

from youtube

(50X) Autonomously folding a pile of 5 previously-unseen towels

Uploaded by RLLberkeley

Uploaded on Mar 17, 2010