Fast Flip is s new addition to google labs. “Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles” says google. In short, its all the news at one place and you dont have to wait for a long time for the pages to load, as the name suggests its FAST. Like any print magazine or news paper, Fast Flip lets you flip through the pages of many different news articles, headlines and popular news on that day. Not only that, it provides aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community using your existing google account. It also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content that you seem to like and brings up those news items at the top. You can check out Fast Flip here.

Fast Flip (click to enlarge)

To build Google Fast Flip, Google has partnered with top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads. Google theorizes that if the web news content can be browsed faster, then it will attract more readers. Whatever it might be, it does seem to be more easy and economic to read the entire world’s news in a single webpage. Mobile users need not worry as there is mobile version of the same too. Check out the mobile version of Fast Flip here. Of course, this is still under testing (labs). Whatever it might be, it gives the news publishers a powerful tool. The thing about personalized news reader is that it will condition us to some news and ignore some other important news that falls in the category that we rarely visit. This can be used to manipulate the readers and it doesnt hurt to be a bit cautious about it. Anyways, do check it out. Its really an amazing reading experience.

With the world going open source in more than one ways, its time for an open source Super-Robot. RobotCub is a 5 years long project funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 “Cognitive Systems, Interaction & Robotics”. The project had been started back in 2004 and recently the research team unnveiled a prototype that they had  developed. The “iCub” is the most complex humanoid robot capable of learning by copying complex human actions. Right now, the scientists report, the iCub is capable of playing drums, crawl, grab and handle objects in its dextrous hands, it can see and recognize objects using its camera eyes in the head. Due to its cognitive design, it is capable of learning by mimicing the humans and hence the scientists are positive that soon the iCub will be able to negotiate obstacles, walking and other more complex tasks.

iCub handling a ball

The complete details of the hardware and software are made public under GPL so that anyone interested can work on it and help and improve the capabilities of the robots. The complete details on how to build one yourself is given on their website. Meaning, you could actually build it in your garage once you get hold of the equipments needed. The hardware, middleware and software details are given on their site under GPL. This is to bring everyone interested in this research together and improve the design. The research on cognition has always been dominitated by psychologists. But, a research has shown that manipulation plays a fundamental role in the development of cognitive capability. As many of these basic skills are not ready-made at birth, but
developed during the growing period. This has led the way to creating an open hardware/software humanoid robotic platform for research in embodied cognition, and advancing our understanding of natural and artificial cognitive systems by exploiting this platform in the study of the development of cognitive capabilities.

iCub sitting on a chair

As cool as it may sound, there is a down side for this. This is not for a hobbyist to build over a weekend. The requirement to understand the complete working is probably a phd in the respective field or you need to spend a lot of time studying all the blueprints and the material. As a part of the project, a few prototypes of iCub were given to some research groups, free-of-charge, so that the interested people could make their own contribution to the system. Also, there will be atleast 3 working prototypes at any given time so that anyone interested can ruin tests on it before going for their own iCub.

Reva is a Bangalore-based Indian company known for its electric cars. Recently they have announced to be unveiling two new M1 classified electric cars and new charging system at the 63rd Frankfurt International Motor Show (IAA). The first of the new models is the NXR, and is a four seat hatchback “family car” that will be launched in various markets across the world in 2010. The second model is a two-seat, removable roof sportster called the NXG which should arrive in 2011. Not only this, but for the first time in the world, REVA at The IAA, is to launch REVive, a technology unique to REVA that addresses ‘range anxiety’ and acts like an invisible reserve fuel tank. The customer just has to telephone or SMS REVA for an instant remote recharge should they run out of charge. Both the REVA NXR and the REVA NXG will feature the REVive telematics technology. Further technology and pricing announcements will be made at the IAA.

REVA’s new website, Revaglobal.com, will go live at the time of the vehicle launches in Frankfurt and customers can register on the priority list for the new cars on-line. The company is also building a new ultra low carbon vehicle assembly plant in Bangalore, with a capacity of 30,000 units per annum, to accommodate increased production and is planning to introduce even more measures to ensue that it has the cleanest and greenest production. Now, the entire market is sckeptical about the “REVive” technology. Atuoblog says “We’re not sure how this will work, but given the trouble that AT&T has had just sending picture messages to iPhones, we’ll be curious to see how Reva manages to send enough electrons to keep a car going without a plug.” They are right to say that, I just hope its more complicated than the backup power in the Nokia phones

After a Music Powered Lab-on-chip, its time for a chip that runs on thin air. The microprocessor makes use on the complex network of channels and valves shown in first image to process binary signals. These were developed by Minsounng Rhee and Mark Burns at the university of Michigan and it processes binary “0″ by sucking air out of the tubes and a binary “1″ by letting the air back into the tubes. A chain of such 1s and 0s flows through the processor’s channels, with pneumatic valves controlling the flow of the signals between channels.

Each pneumatic valve is operated by changing the air pressure in a small chamber below the air channel, separated from the circuit by a flexible impermeable membrane. When the lower chamber is filled with air the membrane pushes upwards and closes the valve, preventing the binary signal flowing across one of the processor’s junctions. Sucking out the air from the chamber reopens the valve by forcing the membrane downwards, letting the signal move across the junction. The two researchers used the valve-controlled channels to produce a variety of logic gates, flip-flops and shift registers, which they linked together to create a working 8-bit microprocessor. That means that the longest discrete pieces of data it can handle are eight binary digits long, like the processors used in 1980s consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s even possible to watch the pneumatic components in action, because the valve membranes reflect light strongly whenever they are forced downwards.

But the air processor is far from just being a computational curiosity, say Rhee and Burns: it has the potential to improve the “lab-on-a-chip” devices tipped to automate complex chemistry tasks and improve disease testing, DNA profiling and other lab jobs. These pocket-scale microfluidic devices are yet to be much practical use, say the Michigan team, perhaps because they typically require a large number of bulky and expensive off-chip components to control their operation.Using logic circuits is one way to bring most of those controls onto the lab-on-a-chip itself and reduce running costs. But because many microfluidic systems have no electronic components, adding standard electronic valves to the device would require a new fabrication process, says Burns. “Many microfluidic systems use pneumatic valves to control liquid flow, so adding the pneumatic control circuits should be relatively simple and inexpensive,” he says. Although the device still requires an off-chip vacuum source to operate, the volume of the microprocessor is so small that the required vacuum can be generated by a hand pump.

Andrew de Mello, a microfluidics expert at Imperial College London, UK, thinks that the simplified method of operation could lead to useful microfluidic devices for developing countries. However, the device is unlikely to have applications beyond its use in microfluidics – the “air” or “vacuum” signals are very sluggish compared with the lightning-quick flow of electrons through a standard circuit. “Shrinking the device would mean that the signals would travel shorter distances and thus operate at higher ‘clock speeds’,” says Burns.

Journal reference: Lab on a Chip, DOI: 10.1039/b904354c

Researchers from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland have  vision. They envision a swarm of ant-sized microbots could one day be mass produced and deployed for various purposes such as data aggregation and surveliance. To reach this goal, they have recently manufactured such a bot entirely in a single circuit board. This is in an effort to develop a novel technique whereby swarms of such bots can be produced in cheaper ways. These researchers have used conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit board is then folded to create a three-dimensional robot. The resulting robots are very small, with their length, width, and height each measuring less than 4 mm.

Images of the robots showing their size proportional to various objects. Image credit: Edqvist, et al.

The robots are powered by a solar cell on top, and move by three vibrating legs. A fourth vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor. As the researchers explain, a single microrobot by itself is a physically simple individual. But many robots communicating with each other using infrared sensors and interacting with their environment can form a group that is capable of establishing swarm intelligence to generate more complex behavior. The framework for this project, called I-SWARM (intelligent small-world autonomous robots for micro-manipulation) is inspired by the behavior of biological insects.

As this was the first test of this fabrication technique, the researchers noted that they encountered some fabrication problems. The single largest problem was to connect the naked integrated circuit to the flexible printed circuit board by the conductive adhesive. Also, some solar cells did not stick due to weak adhesion. At this stage in the production process, the robots were folded manually, but the researchers hope to design a tool to enable a faster and more accurate alignment when folding. Many of these complications could likely be corrected, with the important result being that the microrobots can be assembled using a surface mounting machine, whereas prior robots have usually been manually assembled with a soldering iron. With new techniques being devised, the future of these robotic bugs looks promising.

Since the day the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo was signed, everyone has been wondering what Google will is upto. Well, they have been developing the next version of Google search. Not an upgrade, no. This is supposed be the next level of Google search aimed to be faster and to generate more accurate results than the existing search algorithms. This is still under construction yet, they have released the development version for public to check it out and provide feedback. If you are a normal searcher, then you might not notice much difference with the new version. Except that you will notice that the results are returned almost twice as fast than the normal google search. But researchers and power searchers will definitely notice some difference from the previous version. Google states that “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

The developers have nicknamed it caffeine and will replace the current google’s engine once it is completed. It is not only fast but also provides comprehensive and real time results. Caffeine is designed to pick up news items and put recent stories on the top so that the results are what you wanted to see. As always, this is presented in a very simple fashion and you wont notice any changes at all. You can try it out over here.

A result that generated. Just a search term called “subatomic physics” returned 154,000 results in 0.18 second while caffeine returned 175,000 results inn 0.13 second. Also, in the images below you can see that the top results are a bit different and more recent.

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. They have an upcoming graphics technology called WebGL that will provide a JavaScript binding for OpenGL ES 2.0, allowing 3D-accelerated graphics within a variety of web browsers. All this is made available without the use of any plugin of any sorts. The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs. WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010. The WebGL specification will leverage recent developments in Web technology including the Canvas element defined as part of the HTML 5 specification and the marked increases in JavaScript performance across all major browsers. Accelerated OpenGL ES functionality that is directly accessible from JavaScript is expected to encourage a wide variety of 3D-enhanced Web applications including those using rich user interfaces for enhanced navigation and functionality as explained by Khronos.

It will be really interesting to see how this will enfold. There have been previous attempts of the same type that didnt got that well yet, WebGL is more promising than others. But, it has to face a strict competition from Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. They both have penetrated a long way into the web and Flash has become an integral part of most of the website. Moreover, these flash banners are designed by graphics designers and cannot be easily duplicated. WebGL on the other hand will include javascript that can always be copied. Not to mention that Flash and silverlight are also slowly moving towards GPU acceleration and they will eventually catch up. All the same, we can expect WebGL integrated in Firefox and Chrome, but for IE may not include it until it becomes more of a mainstream thing.

You can find the press release here. Khronos has started the official feedback thread which can be found here

A company called Interorbital Systems (IOS) has announced that it will begin the sale of TubeSat Personal Sattellite (PS) kits in late 2010 for a price of $8000. The price of the TubeSat kit actually includes the price of a launch into Low-Earth-Orbit on an IOS NEPTUNE 30 launch vehicle. Since the TubeSats are placed into self-decaying orbits 310 kilometers (192 miles) above the Earth’s surface, they do not contribute to any long-term build-up of orbital debris. After a few weeks of operation, they will safely re-enter the atmosphere and burn-up. TubeSats are designed to be orbit-friendly.

The company says that a  TubeSat is designed to function as a Basic Satellite Bus or as a simple stand-alone satellite. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite’s structural components, safety hardware for protection from various factors in space. Solar panels and  batteries along with the power management hardware and software to keep the satellite working. Transceiver, antennas and microcomputers to that are programmable so that we can implement whatever function we want. The signals from this satellite can then be picked up using a hand-held HAM radio receiver. There can be a lot of potential applications for such a device. The company also allows the builder to add his or her own experiment or function to the basic TubeSat kit. Some examples of add-on experiments or functions quoted by them are the following:

• Earth-from-space video imaging

• Earth magnetic field measurement
• Satellite orientation detection (horizon sensor, gyros, accelerometers, etc.)
• Orbital environment measurements (temperature, pressure, radiation, etc.)

• On-orbit hardware and software component testing (microprocessors, etc.)

• Tracking migratory animals from orbit

• Testing satellite stabilization methods

• Biological experiments

• On-orbit advertising
• Private e-mail

As long as the experiment or function satisfies the volume and mass restrictions, it can be integrated into the TubeSat. These restrictions provide a unique intellectual challenge for the experiment or function designer. TubeSats are also available as Double TubeSats, Triple TubeSats, or Quadruple TubeSats. The length, volume, and mass of these expanded TubeSats are based on the multiplying factor.

The brochure can be downloaded from here. The payment details are listed on their site here. The potential applications to this are many and also this is a boon to all those hobbyists who wished they had a satellite on their command. Well, now you have it, use your imagination and do all those stuff you wished you could do! 

What is the first major step towards complete autonomy of a robot? It is providing the robot with the capability to re-fuel itself. Robotic Technology Inc is already working on such a robot that can re-fuel itself. Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) is the ongoing project sponsored by Department of Defense of USA. As the name sounds, this robot re-fuels itself by “eating” biomass from its environment. Inspired by the living organisms, EATR can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable. Though it is still on paper and the prototype is yet to be built. The proposed system looks somewhat like the one shown in the figure below

(Credit: Robotic Technology)

The basic functioning can be explained as follows

An array of sensors will act as its sense organs to identify the “edible” materials and lets it handle them so that these material can be broken down into proper sizes using its manipulator system consisting of robotic arms and end effectors and then fit into its “stomach” which is a hybrid external combustion engine system provided by Cyclone Power Technology Inc. This engine, which is a steam engine, can virtually take any fuel to run. Hence, the biomass that is “ingested” can be used as fuel. The steam engine then generates electric power using the energy from fuel and will recharge the battery pack which supplies energy to its electronic and mechanical parts.

This definitely is a very complex interface and is expected to yield commercialization of EATR for military and civil application as well as the development of the Hybrid engine for civil and military automotive applications. The potential “food” for this robot is termed bio-mass. Speculations fly high that in a battle field, corpse would be attractive biomass and it is being viewed as a threat more than a marvel. Safety precautions must be taken in order to protect humans and animals that may come under its “favourites” list. None-the-less, this is one more step further into the future of autonomous, self sufficient Robots. More details of the Project can be found here

Mozilla has already released the Firefox 3.5 and got richer. And now it seems that Mozilla has released pre-release mock-ups of Mozilla Firefox 4. There are 2 versions released. So I took a look through the pictures. Both design have done away with the “Menu Bar” as first done by Microsoft Internet Explorer. The second one is VERY similar to Google Chrome with it’s tabs above the address bar.

The button on the right of the address bar changes as per need. It shows  a green “Go” button marked with a “play sign”. It turns into a red cross while a page is loading. In rest state, it is a “refresh” button blending with the address bar which turns blue on hover. The “Page” and “Tools” buttons are shoved into the top right corner just like Chrome and IE.

Missing is the bookmarks bar which has been replaced by a bookmarks button in version A. Blogs all over are not much happy this new look.

Here are the mock-up images. They are with the negatives and positives too.

These mockups are with the notice “These are NOT FINAL! THEY ARE ONLY FOR BRAINSTORMING/EXPLORATION!”. This means the final design could be completely different. Let’s just wait and watch.