I want to spotlight this TED video, not for what the speaker is talking about, but because of the methodology he's using to arrive at his conclusions. This man is Deb Roy, an MIT researcher who wanted to study how his newborn son learned language. So, he placed near-constant video cameras all throughout his home. As a result, he was able to extract in incredible detail the evolution of words that his son learned to speak.

That's definitely a fascinating subject and I highly recommend this video for learning about that.

However, what I really want to highlight is simply the amazing power of the methodology he's using. We live in a society where our lives are increasingly recorded. I can think of probably 100 different applications for his technology, both good and bad. It kind of blows your mind how much insight can be pulled from ...

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Check out the picture down below. See the guy on the right? He's not a guy. His name is Geminoid DK, the third of a series of androids created by professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University and his team at Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute.

Geminoid DK was constructed to resemble Henrik Scharfe, an associate professor of Aalborg University in Denmark.

Ishiguro maintains that the group's purpose for the Geminoid is to further understand the "emotional affordances" in human-robot interaction.

Oh Japan, is there no end to the robotic awesome you produce?

The folks at National Geographic, inspired by Pixar's movie UP, have built a house that can actually fly thanks to the help of 300 weather balloons.

The project is part of a new National Geographic series called How Hard Can it Be?

Pure awesome.

Here's some more science news, Kids. An international research effort involving UC Santa Barbara professors Andrew Cleland and John Martinis, along with scientists from Zhejiang University in China and NEC Corporation in Japan, has resulted in a crucial breakthrough towards the construction of a quantum computer.

Quantum computers are the holy grail of computing technology. A mature one can theoretically perform more calculations per second than there are atoms in the universe, as well as outstripping human intelligence by many, many orders of magnitude.

My understanding of quantum physics is quite limited to explain this article, but what they seem to have done is create a logic circuit, an ability to produce a 1 or 0, which is the fundamental requisite for all computing functions. However, since we're dealing in quantum physics, there exists a little twist. The teams had set up two areas and manipulated them in ...

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This is a question that new experiments and business ventures seek to answer. A group of journalists and computer scientists are using Amazon's Mechanical Turk outsourcing engine to see if, in essence, a robot can produce a human-quality piece of journalism. You can read about their efforts at My Boss is a Robot.

Meanwhile, a new startup CrowdCloud seeks to create a commercial version throug Servio which would allow companies to buy freshly-written blog posts and other creative content.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing internet marketplace that allows computer programmers to request the performance of certain tasks by a large community of potential human workers. Participant workers can have an an address anywhere in the world and are paid through Amazon store credit which can later be transferred to a U.S. bank account.

You gotta admire the determination for some people to break a world record. A British web animator named Joel Veitsch, who runs a group called Project Space Planes, successfully launched 200 paper planes from above Earth's atmosphere, capturing the record for longest paper plane flight.

Each plane was fitted with a small Samsung microchip that could be used to identify them as they eventually landed. Joel's planes have been reported in Canada, India, Australia and South Africa.  

Carried out in Germany, the project used a helium balloon to carry the planes up 23 miles in altitude in 2.6 hours.  After the balloon popped, the planes glided back to Earth in 40 minutes.

Looks fun!  Premieres TOMORROW on PBS. Check your local listings.

Well, this is much cooler.  I'm gonna have to get myself one.

This is cool.  We've all seen videos of time-lapsed sunrises and sunsets.   However, this video shows what the sun looks like when it's in the sky for an entire week.

Science-customized animals seem to be proliferating.   This Pop Sci article summarizes the chief animals the human race is currently trying to Frankenstein.    They range from glow-in-the-dark puppies, goats that produce spider silk, mouse milk for human consumption, beef cows that feel no pain and giant dragonflies.

Sadly, as the article notes, the giant dragonflies aren't the size of eagles, just 15% bigger than your normal dragonfly. 

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-11/ten-ways-scientists-are-customizing-animals

That's what these "Directly Down Wind Faster Than the Wind" enthusiasts have claimed to have built.   Otherwise known as DDWFTTW (in the hipper circles of geekdom) the video below displays their vehicle in action.    The video has been making rounds in tech blogs, so I figured I might as well weigh in also.   The claim goes something like this:

1) Wind pushes the vehicle forward, spinning the wheels, which...

2) Sends energy to the propeller, pushing the vehicle forward faster, which...

3) Spins the wheels faster, which...

4) Repeat #2

While some might assume they're trying to build a perpetual motion machine (i.e. develop free energy) the explanation is probably fairly simple.   The weathervane in the video indicates the vehicle isn't traveling exactly down wind all the time, but is instead meeting gusts of wind that tack at an angle.   Sailing boats and landsail cars use ...

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Haha...here's a video of two rednecky guys deciding to find out which one would win in a battle.   Pretty high-end camera for this kind of stuff.