The Bielefeld Anthropomorphic Robot Head "Flobi"

Scientists from Bielefeld University have come up with a plastic-head robot called Flobi that can express a number of different emotions, and can have it’s appearance reassembled from male to female (or vice-versa) in a couple of minutes.

Since previous robotic heads have often been a bit too realistic for their own good, the design for Flobi is meant to give him/her a rather cartoonish exterior with exaggerated features, but still be recognizable as a human face. That is why they also used instead of latex, as the latter often looks too similar to real skin. Plastic also makes the above noted “sex operation” possible, where the user can manually remove Flobi’s face (revealing a mesh of wires underneath) and replace the parts with ones from the opposite gender. I’m sure that alone would be enough to freak out a few kids, but basically Flobi is supposed to look like a robot, not an android. The bot is built with 18 actuators, and has gyroscopes, high-resolution cameras and a microphone installed in its frame. It even has LEDs in its cheeks, which can turn red to simulate blushing.

Flobi can go through pretty much the entire range of human emotions, and does so with smooth transitions. Happy, sad, angry, surprised, embarrassed, confused – you name it. It achieves this by moving its highly expressive mouth, eyes (with eyelids) and eyebrows. Only the nose and ears are stationary, but you don’t need them much anyway. Tests will show how people perceive the robot and how they engage with it, which is information that will be used in further human-robot interaction developments.

The video outlines the basic concepts behind Flobi, and shows how to do one of those live sex changes.

Chimpanzees ... just pick one ...

Just identify yourself ...

Sintel - Third Open Movie by Blender Foundation

Nvidia releases the Kal-El quad-core mobile chip

Nvidia has announced their brand new quad-core mobile processor at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new processor was given the interestingly superheroic name Kal-El. Just in case you did not read a lot of comic books as a kid, this is the name that Superman was given by his parents on his home planet of Krypton.

During a live demonstration at the Mobile World Congress Nvidia showed off the speed that Kal-El can give to web browsing, with speeds that are two times faster than other dual-core processors currently on the market. Of course, you really cannot simply take the companies word for it. A lot of factors can effect the speed of browsing.

It is time for us to bring in an objective measure. When tested, Kal-El received a CoreMark score of 11,352. That score is, as promised, roughly twice the performance rating score of Nvidia's Tegra 2. The Tegra 2 received a CoreMark score of 5,840.

The Kal-El processor is expected to ship in as-yet-unnamed tablets by August of 2011 and be featured in smartphones by Christmas 2011. Though a few lucky customers are already getting samples of the products made with the new Nvidia chip currently. The names of the devices that are sporting these enhanced chips were not released.

Coremark performance on Kal-ElAs it turns out Kal-El is only the beginning of these super hero themed chips. A whole line of heroic processors are expected to come to the market between now and 2014, with increasing speeds. Future chips will sport names such as Wayne, Logan, and Stark. Stark is expected to be the most advanced of the planned chips in this line with an improvement in performance of up to 75x, when compared to the Tegra 2.

Portable solar device creates potable water

By harnessing the power of the sun, a Monash University graduate has designed a simple, sustainable and affordable water-purification device, which has the potential to help eradicate disease and save lives.

The Solarball, developed as Mr Jonathan Liow’s final year project during his Bachelor of Industrial Design, can produce up to three litres of clean water every day. The spherical unit absorbs sunlight and causes dirty water contained inside to evaporate. As evaporation occurs, contaminants are separated from the water, generating drinkable condensation. The condensation is collected and stored, ready for drinking.

Liow’s design was driven by a need to help the 900 million people around the world who lack access to safe drinking water. Over two million children die annually from preventable causes, triggered largely by contaminated water. It is an increasing problem in developing nations due to rapid urbanisation and population growth.

‘After visiting Cambodia in 2008, and seeing the immense lack of everyday products we take for granted, I was inspired to use my design skills to help others,’ Mr Liow said.

Mr Liow’s simple but effective design is user-friendly and durable, with a weather-resistant construction, making it well suited to people in hot, wet, tropical climates with limited access to resources.

‘The challenge was coming up with a way to make the device more efficient than other products available, without making it too complicated, expensive, or technical,’ Mr Liow said.

Mr Liow, and a working prototype of his Solarball, was featured on ABC1’s ‘The New Inventors’. The product has been named as a finalist in the 2011 Australian Design Awards - James Dyson Award. It will also be exhibited at the Milan International Design Fair (Salone Internazionale del Mobile) in April 2011.

Source: web

Estonia sees rock as future of global energy

For the small Baltic state of Estonia, rock is the future of energy.

The European Union nation of 1.3 million generates 97 percent of its electricity thanks to oil shale -- sediment formed 400-450 million years ago, containing hydrocarbons. Its industry forecasts that shale's use can only expand."Estonia has 1.1 percent of global oil shale reserves, but what makes us unique is that we have used it and developed the technology for a hundred years," Sandor Liive, chief executive of state-run power firm Enefit, told AFP.

Enefit is betting on shale beyond the nation's borders, from the Middle East to the United States.After already having signed a development deal with Jordan, this month Enefit announced the acquisition of a 100 percent stake in the US-based Oil Shale Exploration Company for an undisclosed sum.

Enefit said the firm had the largest tracts of privately-owned oil shale reserves in the United States, with over 3.1 billion tonnes of oil shale containing almost 2.1 billion barrels of oil. The United States is home to 72 percent of global oil shale reserves. Besides Jordan, it is also found in Australia, Brazil, China and Morocco.

Asked why Enefit thinks shale makes economic sense, Liive said it hinges on the high prices for conventional oil. "If you believe that oil will be more than $60 a barrel, then the answer's yes. Yes, it's profitable to produce oil from oil shale," he said.Estonia has long used shale without actually extracting oil, however.

The Estonian word for it is "polevkivi" -- "burning rock". It is mined and then burned in the country's power stations. Shale is the main mineral resource in the former Soviet-ruled republic, which won independence from Moscow in 1991 after five decades of communist rule and joined the EU in 2004.

Estonia's shale hub is Narva, in the northeast near the Russian border. Two underground mines and two open-cast pits in the area feed a duo of power stations -- the world's biggest oil shale-fired electricity plants.

Ninety-seven percent of the electricity produced in Estonia comes from oil shale, Estonia's own national mineral resource. Each year about 15 million tonnes of oil shale are used to produce energy.Two underground mines and two open-cast pits in the area feed a duo of power stations -- the world's biggest oil shale-fired electricity plants. 

"To get one tonne of oil shale we first need to extract 10,000 cubic metres of water," production manager Pavel Onuchak told AFP at an open-cast pit.After blasting the surface rock, the miners dig down to the shale, which lies 20-30 metres below ground."We replant 90 percent of the land. That's why you see so many young trees around here," Onuchak added. Out of Enefit's 7,400 employees, 3,000 work at the mines.

In recent years, Enefit has mined an annual 15 million tonnes of shale. It uses some 90 percent to fire the power plants.

"From one tonne of oil shale we produce 850 kWh of electricity," the power plants' risk manager Andres Kurling told AFP. The process generates 870 kilos of C02, however. Alternatively, the same quantity of oil shale can produce 125 kilos of oil for 180 kilos of C02 -- similar to emission levels from regular oil-refining or the chemicals sector, says Enefit. "We're currently working on technology to enable the use in cars of fuel made from oil shale," Igor Kond, head of Enefit's oil operations, told AFP. "It is going to be a very big step for the whole world." By 2016, Enefit aims to produce high-quality liquid fuels in Estonia, with a production target of 20,000 barrels per day.

"Global shale reserves are at least 400 billion tonnes. The amount of oil in the world's shale deposits is considered to be three to nine times greater than proven conventional oil reserves," Liive said. "There's been a boom in oil sands and shale gas, and we believe the oil shale boom is coming next," he added. Not everyone in Estonia is onside, however.

"Mining and using oil shale is not environmentally friendly," Green lawmaker Toomas Trapido told AFP. "It causes high CO2 emission, pollutes water and creates a lot of ash. We should work more on better solutions like solar energy."

(c) 2011 AFP

New technique enables much faster production of inexpensive solar cells

Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has demonstrated that the speed at which inexpensive solar cells are produced can be increased by a factor of ten – and that this can be achieved without any detriment to the energy yield of the cells. This will almost certainly result in a further reduction in the price of the cells, which are made of amorphous silicon.

On Monday 14 March, Michael Wank defended his thesis on this subject at TU Delft.

The production of electricity from solar cells is potentially a very attractive and sustainable technology. However, the problem is that the cost of electricity generated using solar cells is still considerably greater than is the case for conventional fossil sources. The higher cost is partly owing to the characteristics of the most widely used material in solar cells: crystalline silicon.

'An interesting alternative to crystalline silicon is amorphous silicon,' says Professor Miro Zeman of TU Delft, Michael Wank's PhD supervisor. 'Although this material has a lower energy yield than crystalline silicon, these solar cells can be produced far more cheaply. The nature of the material means that much thinner layers can be used - around 250 nanometres thick, compared with the 200-micrometre thickness in the case of crystalline silicon.'

Amorphous silicon solar cells are already being produced for this reason. 'One significant problem for the industry, however, is that the usual production technique (vaporising layers of silane gas) is too slow. It takes about one second to apply a 0.1-nanometre layer, so to apply a complete 250-nanometre layer requires about 40 minutes,' explains Professor Zeman. 'That is really too long, and is reflected in too high a cost-price.'

It was for this reason that PhD student Michael Wank concentrated on the new ETP-CVD (expanding thermal plasma chemical vapour deposition) production technique, with which he achieved remarkable success. The production technique was developed by Eindhoven University of Technology; Michael Wank's project, which was subsided by Agentschap NL, was carried out in collaboration with the Plasma and Material Processing group of Professor Richard van de Sanden. The speed of production was eventually increased by a factor of ten, to one nanometre per second, while maintaining a good energy yield (for amorphous silicon) of around 7 per cent.

There was one remaining obstacle Wank had to overcome, though – the fact that the ETP-CVD technique requires a temperature of around 350 degree Celsius in order to make amorphous silicon of the required quality. However, a production temperature of that level causes damage to the solar cells, which affects their energy yield.

In order to circumvent this, Wank applied an ion bombardment (charged particles) during the production process. The ions provide the developing surface with sufficient energy, so that production can take place at a much lower and therefore non-harmful temperature of around 200 degrees Celsius.

'The results of the research are of great interest to industry, which can use the method to make solar cells quickly and inexpensively,' says Professor Zeman. 'As well as the greater speed, another benefit is that the machines needed for this technology are smaller. All in all, this technique promises to cut the production costs of this type of solar cell considerably.'

Provided by Delft University of Technology (news : web)

Rusian underwater cave

Perm Region, Russia, near the Orda village, the Ordynskaya Cave is the greatest gypsum cave in the world, it’s also the most extended underwater cave in Russia and in length it’s the second longest cave in Eurasia. It’s a fantastic and impressive experience to explore this awesome underwater cave.

Get  some impressions from below:

Source: fantastic-underwater-cave-in-russia