In the wake of Tropical Storm Sandy, the Pentagon has requested that a team of “rescue robots” be engineered in time for the next “natural disaster”.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge
is putting out the call for a synthetic force that can be designed for
autonomous thought; yet mitigate the risk to human life when preforming a
rescue mission.
Robots probably won’t completely take over or destroy humans anytime soon, but this latest development in robotics is a little frightening.
In the video below, DARPA’s Cheetah can be seen moving
at seemingly superhuman speeds. The Pentagon-sponsored prototype,
already the fastest legged robot around, can run 28.3 mph, better than Usain Bolt‘s
top speed of 27.78 mph. However, Cheetah had a slight advantage over
the 26-year-old Jamaican sprinter as it ran on a treadmill. But still…
Nobody ever said anything about singing, though. A NASA spacecraft
has just beamed back a beautiful song sung by our own planet. "It's called chorus"
NASA/Video screen capture
This latest amazing offering is what NASA is calling "Earthsong." The
agency's twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes have sent back a recording of
the sounds that our planet makes, or more specifically, the
electromagnetic radiation made by plasma waves in the radiation belts --
a phenomenon called chorus.
The probes have delivered the clearest
example of these sounds ever recorded since they're traveling right
through that region and because the data is sampled in 16 bit, or the
same as an audio CD.
