Cursor Kite

Cursor Kite brings the desktop of your computer outdoors. Nerdy? Yep, but the youtube video of the mouse pointer exploring the beach is fun to watch.

Related: Boomeranged Metaphors, Digital trashcan brought to physical office, When Facebook gets physical.

Organic Condom

While out in the wilderness, I was in need for a condom. This is what I found. It doesn’t look very comfortable, but having an organic lifestyle has it’s price I guess? Peculiar object of the week.

Related post: Natural Condoms, Organic Coca-cola.

Let the robots do the teaching

“Upon returning to class after the Golden Week holidays, students at a Tokyo elementary school were delighted to find their teacher had been replaced by a robot. The talking humanoid, named “Saya,” was originally developed as a receptionist robot in 2004 by professor Hiroshi Kobayashi of the Tokyo University of Science, but has recently begun taking on work as a substitute teacher. ”

“The robot, which can speak multiple languages, uses facial expressions to facilitate communication. With an array of motors in her head that stretch the soft synthetic skin into various positions, Saya can display emotions ranging from happiness and surprise to sadness and anger.”

“However, Saya needs to work on improving her classroom management skills. At present, she can’t do much more than call out names and shout orders like “Be quiet.” But that does not make her any less popular with the kids.”

Source: Sankei. Via Pinktentacle. See also: Child Care Robot, The Professors Doppelgänger Robot.

Mapping the human desire to be touched

Fleshmap touch investigates the collective perception of erogenous zones. Hundreds of people ranked how good it would feel to touch or be touched by a lover in different points of the body. The resulting images reveal a map of sensual desire with multiple focal points and islands of excitement.

This human-body-interface project was created by data visualization artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. The data was gathered via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – a marketplace where paid workers perform simple tasks.

Brain scan replaces job interview in 5 years?

Forget about palmistry! MRI scans for candidates in top jobs such as bank directors could soon become part of the job-application package, says Erasmus University researcher Prof Willem Verbeke of Rotterdam, He’s confident brain scans will replace job interviews within 5 years.

Prof. Verbeke heads the department of neuro-economics, (NSIM), at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He predicts in an interview with Good Morning Netherlands radio station that employers demanding compulsory brain scans from their job applicants will soon become the most normal thing in the world – in fact within five years’ time’, he believes.

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Excuse me, I am lost

So, if you don’t have a clue what is going on here, imagine how that horned cow on the electricity pole must feel. Extrapeculiar image of the week.

USB condom

As soon as the USB Condom detects a virus, built-in software shuts off USB access, verifies the problem, removes the nasty bug, then reopens the communication bridge to your computer.

Gross? Be glad the metaphor isn’t boomeranging in the other direction: before you know it, you’ll be installing anti-virus software on your penis.

Oil Price Threatens Biofuel Firms

Economy is ecology? Technology Review writes the price of oil has dipped to levels that could be far too low for many advanced-biofuel startups to succeed, especially those that attracted investment this summer, while oil was well above $100 a barrel. Tight credit markets will also make it difficult for advanced biofuel companies to move ahead with plans for scaling up technologies and building commercial-scale production plants.

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Voyage of the Bacteria Bots

The 1966 science-fiction movie Fantastic Voyage famously imagined using a tiny ship to combat disease inside the body. With the advent of nanotechnology, researchers are inching closer to creating something almost as fantastic. A microscopic device that could swim through the bloodstream and directly target the site of disease, such as a tumor, could offer radical new treatments. To get to a tumor, however, such a device would have to be small and agile enough to navigate through a labyrinth of tiny blood vessels, some far thinner than a human hair.

At the IEEE biorobotic conference 2008, researchers of the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in Canada, led by professor of computer engineering Sylvain Martel, showed to have coupled live, swimming bacteria to microscopic beads to develop a self-propelling device, dubbed a nanobot. While other scientists have previously attached bacteria to microscopic particles to take advantage of their natural propelling motion, Martel’s team is the first to show that such hybrids can be steered through the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). To do this, Martel used bacteria that naturally contain magnetic particles.

Read the whole story at Techreview. See also: Bacteria that eat waste and shit petrol.

More realistic airplane safety instructions

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iWater

Somehow I feel there is some deeper meaning in this cheesy video. No?

See also: Water in my Phone.

iDog

Or you could get an iDog. Read more »