ForcaTech Blog

As if society wasn’t lazy enough Hasbro has announced that they will be releasing new varieties of classic board games with an electronic tower that is going to run the game.

The tower will manage aspects of the game such as dice rolls, rent, cash flow, etc. The tower “bathes the board in infrared light, and a camera can see reflectors placed on each game piece.”  The days of dealing out paper money and a banker are gone apparently. Paper money is being replaced by a plastic money card that is automatically reloaded by the tower when you pass go, collect rent from another player, etc.

Monopoly Live will be available this fall for around $50. You can still pick up the classic for around $15 if you are terrified about Sauron’s tower being able to watch your every move don’t want to drop the cash for the electronic version. But just think of all you will be missing. As one of the games designers, Leif Askeland said “The tower never makes a mistake”.

A cheetah can run faster than any other animal. A gecko’s feet can stick to almost any surface without using liquids or surface tension. And some roaches scurry at nearly 50 times their body length in one second, which, scaled up to human levels, can be around 200 miles per hour.

MIT professor and robotic designer Sangbae Kim has looked at members of the animal kingdom in the past and successfully replicated their impressive abilities–two of which being the Stickybot,which can climb walls similar to a gecko and the iSprawl, a robot which mimics a cockroaches movement.

Kim’s next animal that he and his students are going to attempt to imitate is the cheetah. Current robots can be very efficient on flat terrain but in rough areas speed and mobility is very limited. The PackBot, for instance, which is used by the U.S. Military is barely able to go 5MPH.

Kim hopes that over the next 18 months he and his students are able to create a prototype that will have enough power to reach 70 MPH quickly.

The first step will be to create a computer model to calculate the optimal limb length, weight, gait and torque of the hip and knee joints.

The biggest challenge in this project won’t be the structure, but getting enough power from a motor to get to the desired speed quickly, says Kim.

If successful this could be a huge break through in the fight to bring functional sci-fi-esque robots to the world we live in. We will still be leagues away from an I,Robot or Star Wars world but imagine the uses of a robot capable of covering terrain quickly and efficiently! As long as it can handle stairs better than the Honda Asimo and can take control of our hands forcing us to learn an instrument by endless repetition then we will be impressed.

Then again, this could also be a huge break through in a robot uprising leading to the eventual destruction of the human race. One way or another, this is cool. [wired]

You thought I was kidding!? Well, I was–kinda. Activelink’s ‘Power Loader’ is constructed of 500lbs of aluminum alloy and 18 electromagnetic motors. The Power Loader also has force feedback so you can in a sense feel what the arms feel as far as if you have something in your hand or not.

The suit right now is limited to being able to pick up 220lbs but that is still pretty cool since it requires  literally no work on your side.

They hope to have a version that is more fluid and capable of lifting more commercially available by 2015–not official but we believe they will have jet packs as well.

On Sunday a MQ-9 Reaper drone became self-aware and attempted to wipe out the human race suffered a system malfunction that ended in its swift demise. As the UAV sped towards Afganistan’s airspace the pilots of the heavily armed, un-maned vehicle lost  control.

Almost immediately there was a maned airplane on its six that successfully took out the UAV before it crossed over into Afganistan’s airspace.

These UAVs are programmed to–in the event that they lose contact with the pilots–return to their home base. This is usually what happens but apparently this isn’t the first time that robots have over-ruled their creators a UAV has been intentionally shot down by friendly-fire. How many times does it need to happen before there is cause for concern? [PopSci]

Not much more to say. The Gmail servers have been down for almost 10 minutes now. The internet giant who has an endless supply of microwave corn dogs money, servers, satellites, and ideas has had a server error.

What this really means we are unsure but there are very few possibilities.

[UPDATE]: Well after over an hour of being down it looks like things are back up and running. Looks like we are all going to be ok this time.

It had to happen eventually, someone has managed to create the only thing that could possibly be creepier than a robot that latches onto your hands and forces you to play the piano. This children’s ride in a mall in the Philippines lets your kids sit in a carriage and ride other kids.

The kids sit in the seat and have reins to control the mindless robot child around the pen–which seems to be a little too confusing for the boy in the video.

I am skeptical, but this may be the future of transportation. One thing I do know, when the day comes that robots begin to think for themselves and attempt to peacefully coexist with humans, one of their friends will show them this video on youtube, which will eventually lead to the destruction of the human race.

Have you ever sat and thought to yourself: “I wish there was a robot that could take control of my body and teach me to play the piano”? Yep, me neither, but one company has developed a device that will make this dream come true for some out there. Concert Hands is a robotic device that is attached to your piano or electric keyboard. There is a rod that goes the length of the piano that sits in between you and the keys. You sit down in front of the piano and the Concert Hands latch onto you like a leech you lock your wrists into the slides that move your hands to the spot on the piano where they need to be and then slide your fingers into the finger sleeves that make your fingers press the correct keys.

If you aren’t sold on this great idea press play on the video above and let the mind controlling hypnotist Concert Hands advertiser convince you. I–personally–am creeped out.

The idea is that repetition will force your body to memorize how to play a song–muscle memory–just like anything you have done so much that you can do it without looking, like changing chords on a guitar or typing on a keyboard.

I am not saying this won’t work; in theory it sounds like it very possibly could. All I want to know is who thought of this? And one way or another you aren’t really learning to play the piano. A robot is training another robot your brain to play one song at a time through grinding repetition.

For more information I would tell you to go visit the Concert Hands website but at the time of this post it is down due to them exceeding their monthly bandwidth limits…

That is probably what this fellow in The-Middle-Of-No-Where, Chad, Africa thought as he looked up to the sky just as the Google Satellites took a snap shot of him. And with good reason apparently. This is one of the areas of the world that allow you to super zoom in with Google Maps. To see this location for yourself visit Google Maps here.

Why this location is candidate for being super zoom-in-able I have no idea. Not very interesting if you ask me.

This reminds me of a video I saw of a picture taken by satellite. It started as a picture of the whole globe and slowly zoomed in to the US, then to a State, then to a City, then to a street, then to a bus and then into the bus so close that you could read the heading of the newspaper a man was reading.

Does anyone know where I can find this video? If I ever find it then it will be up here.

You remember the doomsday device giant laser machine we posted about last month. Well, after a series of unfortunate events the guys at CERN have decided that it would be best to run it at half power–only 3.5 trillion electron volts–per beam when they start it up again late this fall. If things go well and we are all still here then they are going to step it up to 5 TeV per beam and then by the end of 2010 hope to be back at full power–7 TeV per beam. So, keep an eye on the news… while you still can.

The BedBunker Gun Safe is now available. If the name alone didn’t sell you then let their Billy Mays impersonator moderately enthused spokesman in the video above do the job.

With a BedBunker you can keep your money, guns and other important items right under the bed in a secure and incredibly convenient hidden location. The safe is rated to be able to withstand 2 hours of fire and can hold 30 rifles and 70 handguns but will that be enough?

You can pick one of these puppies up from BedBunker for $2k to $4k depending on the size of your bed.

I am not going to comment one way or another.

I am trying to keep this blog strictly tech related but we here at Forca may have enjoyed this video a little too much not to share.

In May of this year the National Ignition Facility officially dedicated the world’s largest and highest-energy laser facility. This monster, housed in a 10 story 3 football field sized building, contains a cluster of 192 laser beams that, NIF hopes, when all focused on one BB sized ball of frozen hydrogen gas will achieve nuclear fusion, in essence creating a star on Earth.

The good? If–being the key word–they are successfully able to achieve this it will be one of the biggest discoveries of our life times. This would be one of the first effective ways to create more energy than what was used to create it and could possibly solve global power issues in the future.

The bad? Maybe they haven’t seen Spider Man 2. The ‘star’ would have the same mass, gravitational pull and temperature-over 100 million Kelvin- as a star its same size. As you can see from the pictures below they have a special chamber to perform their experiments in which is an improvement to a bionic man with octopus arms and definitely a step in the right direction.

They will begin testing next year with an estimated live date of 2040 unless things go well from the start.

Worst case scenario we find out how black holes are made–just a little too late.