Posts Tagged ‘Video’
Video: DARPA’s AlphaDog Gets Up, Scrambles Over Rocks and Runs
It runs along a guide rail, keeps its balance after two guys try to tip it over, and rights itself after lying on its side, not unlike your pet getting up from its nap.
As we heard , AlphaDog is designed to carry 400 pounds, last 24 hours and carry enough fuel for a 20-mile trip. It is also significantly quieter than its predecessor, BigDog, which further solidifies AD’s position as leader of the pack.
This video shows a lab prototype undergoing early tests, according to Boston Dynamics. It's being developed under DARPA's Legged Squad Support System (LS3) project. DARPA and the Marines are expected to take this beast for a walk sometime in 2012.
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Bats Have Unique Superfast Squeak Muscles to Make Superfast Echolocation Calls
Bats start out with shorter-rate chirps, increasing their frequency as they approach their quarry and culminating in a superfast pulse called the terminal buzz. Watch the video below to see what this sounds like. Coen Elemans and John Ratcliffe at the University of Southern Denmark set out to study how bats produce this buzz. They also wanted to determine whether the upper buzz limit is a function of how quickly the bats can hear the return signals that bounce off their prey, or whether it’s because of the bats’ own call-producing abilities.
They set up a chamber with 12 microphones and recorded the activities of five different free-flying Daubenton’s bats, little bats found in woodland areas from Britain to Japan. The bats hunted mealworms that were suspended in the chamber. The animals’ chirp rate was so rapid that the researchers knew they couldn’t be using normal skeletal muscle.
They attached the bats’ vocal muscles to a motor and a force monitor, and stimulated the muscles to flex. The researchers monitored how long it took a muscle to twitch, and determined the muscles were able to contract and relax at frequencies up to 180 Hz and, in one case, up to 200 Hz.
They also noticed that echoes from individual calls ended before the start of the next call, so the bats don’t confuse themselves. But a bat could theoretically produce calls at a greater frequency than 200 Hz — up to 400 Hz before echo interference would become a problem. The reason they don’t? The superfast muscles are only so fast.
Andrew Mead, a biology graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Science, said the muscle performance could be equated to a car engine: “It can be tuned to be efficient, or tuned to be powerful depending on what you want it to do.”
Bats trade off some force to achieve the rapid oscillations, he said . “In a way it's like an engine that's been tuned for extremely high RPM.”
These laryngeal muscles contract at a rate 20 times that of the fastest human eye muscles, and about 100 times faster than typical skeletal muscles, the researchers say.
Previously, scientists thought these ridiculously quick muscle contractions were only found in the sound-producing organs of rattlesnakes and some types of fish. In 2008, Elemans , too, and now he’s found them in the first mammal. It suggests that these special muscles are more common than previously thought.
The research is published in today’s issue of the journal Science.
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Video: Plucky Fish Swims Far Away to Find Proper Tool For Eating Dinner
The orange-dotted tuskfish, a species of wrasse, is the second type of wrasse documented using tools in the past few months. A blackspot tuskfish was caught on camera earlier this year; now the first video has been .
The fish digs around in the sand to find a choice clam, picks it up, then swims for a while until it finds a good rock. It proceeds to throw the clam against said rock to open it. This is a fish, remember — not the type of creature you might expect to see using tools. , elephants, , sure — but a fish?
“It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it's a pretty big deal,” said , professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who shot the video.
The fact that this behavior has been seen in other fish indicates it may not be a , but a deep-seated behavioral trait in wrasses — and maybe other fishes, too.
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Tune In Here at 7:30PM EST for the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Live
You can read more about the 2011 Ig Nobel awards .
Inside the Factory: How a Chef’s Knife Is Made
PopSci goes to Germany to witness the cutting edge of manufacturing
The raw material comes into the factory on huge spools of sheet steel, each sheet the thickness of a knife. The steel is cut into individual blanks, destined to become individual knives. About three weeks elapse between when a blank comes off the spool and when it emerges, a finished knife, at the other end.
In my breathless tour of the factory, I watched as a giant press cut and stacked the blanks, which are made of the company's secret blend of stainless "special formula steel." The blank is transported to another building, where the first of the factory's 90-odd industrial robot arms takes it in hand.
In the classic design, the knife has a thickening where the blade meets the handle (aka the bolster). This is formed first, by heating the middle of the blank, and then pressing the metal's two ends together so the molten middle bulges and widens, in a process that my contact specifies is called upset forging. Next, a drop forge shapes the bolster, before the blank is quickly cropped into the rough shape of the knife it's going to be.
After that, it proceeds through a series of cooling, supercooling, and heat-tempering steps that give it its corrosion resistance and toughness. This is one of the benefits of the special steel, I'm told -- it heats and cools in very predictable ways, allowing the factory to use more precise temperatures rather than temperature ranges.
After the tempering, any distortions or warpings that the heat has created in the blade are hammered out by a highly skilled human, who picks up and eyes each knife, one at a time, and flattens any that need flattening with precise strokes of a little hammer.
The knife passes into the hands of another series of robots, which use grinding wheels to narrow down the thickish blank into the tapered contour of a blade. Only roughly, though -- the fine grinding and sharpening, as well as putting on the handles, is left to the factory's humans, who wear puffy gray overalls and exude the confidence that comes with being extremely good at your job, and quite possibly coming from a line of knifemakers generations old. Wooden handles are glued onto the tang of the knife and then riveted in place; plastic handles are simply melted on by heating the tang and inserting it in a ready handle. The edges of the handles are smoothed by robots.
Finally the knife is cleaned and passes onward to the scrutiny of the quality assurance women. If it has no flaws -- there's a big photo-book of possible flaws -- it gets packed up and winds up in someone's kitchen.
Check out the of pictures from the knifemaking process.
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Creepiest Video Software Ever Substitutes Other People’s Faces For Your Face, In Real Time
Kyle MacDonald and Arturo Castro, a pair of programmer/artists, have created a real-time video face tracking and modifying application, which can overlay a famous face from a photo onto a moving face in a video, dynamically, in creepy, creepy real time. Just watch.
The software is built on open-source tools, so we're hoping to compile a copy to run here in the office and distort ourselves at least as horribly as Kyle MacDonald does here, but until then, can't stop staring at the videos.
Here's another one, inspired by A Scanner Darkly.
Video: Watch the JSF’s New Cruise Missile Acquire and Engage a Naval Target
The Naval Strike Missile is a fire-and-forget cruise missile--that is, you preprogram the missile with a target, and it finds its own way there. The 900-pound NSM is super-nimble and equipped with GPS and other inertial and terrain-based systems that allow it to hug the contours of a coastline, cruise just above the surface of the ocean, or negotiate terrestrial terrain at very low radar-evading altitudes.
The NSM is expected to be a regular payload aboard the F-35 Lightning II when it finally enters service, and if the video below is any indication it will be a formidable adversary. Watch as the missile is launched from a California test range, “sea-skims” low across the Pacific, flies low over an island, and then acquires its target on the far side. Not to give the ending away, but this naval vessel doesn’t stand a chance.
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