James Cameron’s Terminator

Robot Uprising? Completely autonomous military vehicles are dangerously close to becoming a reality.

The U.S. Military’s X47B is designed to refuel itself and land by itself on an aircraft carrier. What comes next is the problem.

A fifty page joint report by the Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic warns that the next step is for these unmanned machines to be able to make life and death decisions, firing on particular targets deemed to be threats, without the need for a human go-ahead.

Image courtesy of Konstantin Yolshin/Alamy

Scientists have discovered a new smell that is “fragrant, chemical, perfumery, aromatic, floral, soapy, sweet, fruity and medicinal” yet indistinguishable all at the same time.

Via CVG

New Xbox to include Kinect 2.0, Augmented Reality, 3D Sound, Blu-Ray and HD Touch Screen Controllers. Release expected by late 2013.

We’re days away from the seven year anniversary of the launch of the phenomenally successful Xbox 360 and Xbox World Magazine has unleashed some incredible information about Microsoft’s new Xbox console, nicknamed Durango during development, and widely referred to as Xbox 720.

It’s been a while since a new console has been released, and Microsoft is aiming to make up for lost time. The console is rumored to just be called the “Xbox”, and feature a plethora of mouth-watering perks.

Measure your brainwaves. Send them to your computer, smartphone or tablet. Strengthen your mind.

That’s what the new brain-sensing headband ‘Muse’ promises to bring to the world by mid-2013. Muse is the literal brainchild of Canadian company Interaxon, who sports over a decades worth of research in the realm of brain to computer interfaces. The team firmly believes that brainwave recognition technology will soon reshape the way we interact with our gadgets, and each other.

The Biblio-Mat is a random book dispenser built by Craig Small for The Monkey’s Paw, an idiosyncratic antiquarian bookshop in Toronto. Biblio-Mat books, which vary widely in size and subject matter, cost two dollars.

While we’re still not quite living in a world where NFC chips allow us to swipe our phones at convenience stores, and we don’t yet have microchips with all of our ID data implanted in us, many people will soon be experiencing an upgrade in the way their credit cards function.

Astounde covered some amazing robotic animals earlier this year. This definitely evokes some similar memories.

From Trossen Robotics and Interbotix Labs, here’s an assembled Phantom X Hexapod robot kit in action. I just wanted to showcase how truly amazing our technological capabilities have become. While the below video looks to be doctored, I can assure you it’s not. 

As the great Dave Chappelle once said, everything is better in slow motion.

Via UWR.org

How close are we to breaking down global language barriers? Microsoft researchers demonstrate that we’re closer than anyone could’ve imagined.

For the last 60 years, computer scientists have been working tirelessly to build systems that can genuinely understand what a person says when they talk. The most primitive of techniques involved simple pattern matching, which was flawed by the fact that various people said the same things differently, and even one particular individual could enunciate or speak the same phrase in a multitude of ways.

We saw modest improvements over the years, but nothing truly significant until two years ago, when Microsoft engineers working with the University of Toronto implemented a technique called Deep Neural Networks that more dramatically mimicked the speech recognition and translation process the human brain goes through.

The first ever live, HD video of the Earth from space, coming in 2013.

Canadian startup UrtheCast (pronounced EarthCast) intends to fly two separate HD cameras into orbit and build them onto the Russian module of the International Space Station. Here the cameras will rest, nearly 220 miles above the Earth’s surface, and transmit (nearly) live images and video footage for the world to enjoy.