Flying, swimming robot jellyfish

The robot jellyfish swimming and flying in the videos below are being shown off at the Hannover Trade Fair this week by industrial automation company Festo. We wrote before about their robotic manta ray which also moves very gracefully.

Both jellyfish designs are really just for show. But if the swimming ones could achieve the simple efficiency of real jellyfish they could provide great platforms for cheap ocean sensors. Even if they don't, they'd be a great addition to any aquarium. - NewScientist

Modular robot reassembles when kicked apart

A robot developed by roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania is made of modules that can recognise each other. - NewScientist

Luminous wallpaper on the way?

What if you could have an entire room wallpapered in flexible, paper-thin light? Maybe you could even control that light’s color and intensity in different areas. That's the goal of General Electric researchers, who just achieved a breakthrough toward making that possible. The key to making this affordable is roll-to-roll processing, a method of manufacturing organic LEDs (OLEDs) that works a whole lot like a printing press. - DVICE

Toward a Quantum Internet

Researchers have built a quantum logic gate in an optical fiber, laying the foundation for a quantum computer network.

The promise of quantum computers is tantalizingly great: near-instantaneous problem solving, and perfectly secure data transmission. For the most part, however, small-scale demonstrations of quantum computation remain isolated in labs throughout the world. Now, Prem Kumar, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, has taken a step toward making quantum computing more practical. Kumar and his team have shown that they can build a quantum logic gate--a fundamental component of a quantum computer--within an optical fiber. The gate could be part of a circuit that relays information securely, over hundreds of kilometers of fiber, from one quantum computer to another. It could also be used on its own to find solutions to complicated mathematical problems. - Technology Review

Google Earth 4.3

The Google Earth team is proud to announce the latest version of Google Earth is available today at http://earth.google.com. The release of Google Earth 4.3 (beta) greatly advances our vision of offering a realistic, 3D model of the world by giving users a higher quality, more immersive experience. - Google Lat Long Blog



Website: earth.google.com

Viewfinder: How to Seamlessly "Flickrize" Google Earth

“Viewfinder” is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. - Viewfinder





Google Tech Talk: youtube.com/watch?v=LRAj21y23r8

Super thin flexible displays

The Grid: 10,000 times faster than internet

The birthplace of the Web, Cern, which is based near Geneva, is now busy working on "the grid" that boasts speeds nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical Broadband connection, and that may soon render the Web obsolete. [..]

Doyle explained that that network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe, and around the world. From each center, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions that use existing high-speed academic networks. Which means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the Internet from this autumn. - techtree.com

3D LED Cube

This LED cube, consisting of a 16 x 16 x 16 grid of interconnected color LEDs, is capable of displaying animations at up to 30 frames per second and each dot can be individually addressed for both color and intensity. - Seekway

inviDESK

inviDESK-interactive virtual desk-is an innovative system that transforms your meeting table or any other working surface into a dynamic multimedia environment. inviDESK's innovative functionality makes it a powerful tool for interaction, collaboration and promotion. - inviDESK

Sensisphere

Sensisphere is a hemispherical screen with an innovative user interface. It is integrated into the surrounding architecture. On this "porthole" with a diameter of about one meter many different interactive, multimedia-based contents can be experienced. - Lab Binaer