2011: The Year of the Personal Robot?

I only posted ONE page of the article so to complete the and read the SECOND page just click on the "original article" link :) it was FAR too long to post.

What does 2011 hold for the field of robotics? Plenty, if 2010 is any indication. This will not be the year that mobile, artificially intelligent robot nurses assume the responsibility of caring for the world's growing elderly population, but it does promise to be a pivotal time for the development of the underlying technology that will enable safe and reliable automated elder care, not to mention other services that robots are expected to perform in the coming decade.

Thanks to a standardized platform introduced in 2010, roboticists can now collaborate as never before. Last May, Willow Garage, a Menlo Park, Calif., maker of robot hardware and software, released a test version of its personal robot platform. The PR2 includes a mobile base, two arms for manipulation, a suite of sensors and two computers, each with eight processing cores, 24 gigabytes of RAM and two terabytes of hard-disk space. The out-of-the-box robot, which costs $400,000, also features an operating system that handles the robot's computation and hardware manipulation functions.

"There are a lot of innovations in the PR2, but the most significant thing from my perspective is that it is a standardized, well-designed, well-tested platform that has a whole bunch of software that works right out of the box," says Charles Kemp, an assistant biomedical engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "You never had that situation before."

Kemp and his team at Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab, which he formed in 2007, are focused on creating robots that can safely and effectively help care for senior citizens. The machines would go beyond current efforts to create bots able to follow the elderly around their homes to provide them with Internet access and remind them to take their medicine. For starters, the Healthcare Robotics Lab researchers want their robots to be able to open doors and drawers to retrieve objects such as pill bottles while being guided by a laser pointer, radio signals or touch.

Kemp's lab is one of 16 institutions that experimented with the PR2 during the latter half of 2010. South Korea's Samsung Electronics is using the PR2 to enhance the company's existing robotics research in a country that hopes to put a robot in every home by 2020. The Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif., part of electronics and appliances maker The Bosch Group, has begun a two-year project to integrate its advanced sensor technology—including microelectromechanical system (MEMS), accelerometers, gyroscopes, force sensors, and air-pressure sensors—to improve the PR2's performance and reliability. Other beta-testing sites include Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the French National Center for Scientific Research's (CNRS) Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems.

Great GATSBII*
Kemp sees the combination of his PR2, named GATSBII, and a free and open-source robot operating system as a way to accelerate his lab's work with the help of a standardized platform and a budding community of roboticists working with the same tools who can now offer more practical advice to one another. "We're actually releasing things that other people can use, and we're using other people's things," Kemp says.

Prior to GATSBII, Kemp and his team used parts from a variety of suppliers to build three different mobile manipulators. The first EL-E, built in 2007 to perform assistive tasks for sufferers of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which impairs physical motor functions. The researchers have since built two more robots: Dusty, which has a lift tray designed to pick objects up off the floor; and Cody, whose two arms and omnidirectional mobile base resemble those of GATSBII. Unlike GATSBII, Cody is the product of many different manufacturers, including Meka Robotics, which supplied the arms, and Segway, which delivered the omnidirectional mobile base. In the cases of EL-E, Dusty and Cody, Kemp and his team designed the robots and then found the parts they needed to actually build them.

Original Article.

Cancer Testing? There's an App for That

It wouldnt surprise me, if this was the next step. there is basically an app for everything! whats next online grocery shopping through your iphone!

Many people already use their smart­phones as far more than mere telephones—as gadgets for Web surfing, e-mailing or listening to music. Some scientists are now turning them into handheld tools to diagnose cancer or infectious disease, track treatment progress or check water safety. Given that the handsets are so common, they could bring cutting-edge health care technology to the developing world.

Diagnosing cancer is a challenge because it requires expensive, time-consuming assays. But in a recent study published in Science Translational Medicine, Ralph Weissleder and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School used a cell phone and a lunch box–size machine to diagnose cancer from tiny pieces of tissue, taken via needle from the abdomens of patients with suspected metastatic cancers. Researchers mixed the samples with antibodies that bound to four known cancer-related proteins. The machine analyzed the samples using nuclear magnetic resonance—measuring levels of the antibody-bound proteins based on their magnetic properties. It then sent the results to the smart­­phone, which, using an app that the researchers designed, displayed the data. Because doctors don’t need a laptop or desktop, it would be easier for them to assess patients outside the clinic. In comparison, results from more traditional diagnostic methods are typically not available for three days and require more invasive tissue sampling.

By using different antibodies, doctors could use the device to diagnose any form of cancer, says Har­vard systems biologist and co-author Hakho Lee. They could also track treatment progress. “If there is a decrease in either the number of cancer cells or the expression levels of certain disease markers, then that means the treatment might be working,” he says. He expects a product within five years.

Other researchers are taking advantage of smart­phone cameras to create diagnostic microscopes. Electrical engineer Aydogan Ozcan and his colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a 4.5-centimeter-long phone attachment that shines LED light on biological samples, producing holograms of each cell based on how the light scatters. The phone’s camera then snaps a photograph, compresses the image and sends it to a clinic for evaluation. With the ability to decipher details as small as 1/1,000th of a meter, the microscope could identify sickle-cell disease or malaria from blood samples and perform blood cell counts. The devices could bring an elegant simplicity to nations that struggle with infectious diseases.

Original article.

Zuckerberg Somehow Qualifies for Mortage, buys house!

I like mark Zuckerberg, i don't know what it is.. i don't know if the social network helped and i just grew to admire his hard work, and all the slack he takes for his action, but i don't know there is something about him that i like. anyways he finally bought a house apparently he has been renting.. which is cute haha but yeah if you click on the real article it will show more pictures of the house he just purchased.

Must be nice! Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has the financial wherewithal to get a home mortgage, as evidenced by his recent purchase of a $7 million spread in Palo Alto, California. Zuck had apparently been renting a house up until now, which is adorable.

Let's take a look at his new digs, shall we?


Article.

Oil steadies after 10 percent drop

Currently right now in my city gas is 4.30 a gallon. RIDICULOUS!! honestly i remember when gas was 236 and i thought that was bad it just keep rising every week it seems like. poor middle class America, soon it will only consist of two classes.

Reuters) - Oil prices steadied on Friday following a torrid 10 percent slide the previous session, as shellshocked traders mulled market fundamentals and the frenzy this week that wiped out half the year's gains.

Upbeat U.S. jobs data aided crude's early rise from Thursday's shock-inducing collapse, when Brent fell by as much as $12, a record, in a furious, high volume session that saw waves of selling as key techinical levels were broken.

Crude eased off the early gains on Friday as the dollar rose.

"I think it's just a little reaction to the way oversold conditions we got into yesterday, it was quite a bloodbath," Mike Zarembski, senior commodities analyst for optionsXpress in Chicago.

"Traders are still a bit shellshocked from yesterday."

Selling pressure on oil and other commodities came on several fronts this week, with investors weighing factors from the death of Osama bin Laden to the impact of higher fuel and commodity costs on the economies of consumer nations to monetary policy in major economies.

Brent crude traded up 30 cents to $111.10 a barrel at 1:50 p.m. EDT in heavy trade, with volumes already 83 percent over the 30-day moving average.

U.S. crude futures fell 57 cents to $99.23 a barrel. U.S. crude was off earlier highs of $102.38, pressured by the dollar's gains against the euro, which can support prices for dollar-denominated economies.

A German news report, later denied, suggested Greece had raised the possibility of leaving the euro zone. The euro fell to its lowest in more than two weeks and headed for its biggest weekly decline against the dollar since January.

Data from the Labor Department showed U.S. private employers added jobs at the fastest pace in five years in April, pointing to underlying strength in the economy, even as the jobless rate rose to 9.0 percent.

"The jobs data wasn't so out of kilter that it justified the sell-off or a huge bounce, but investors will want to lighten their load ahead of the weekend if they are on the short side," said Richard Ilczyszyn senior market strategist at Lind-Waldock in Chicago.

"The market got ahead of itself on the way up and now is bouncing after the sell-off."

Thursday's sell off saw U.S. crude oil futures set a record high for open interest, while open positions also rose for Brent crude, and volatility surged as traders rushing to load up on $95 to $100 put options fearing further losses ahead.

Chicago Board Option Exchange's oil volatility index fell nearly 5 percent on Friday, after briefly spiking to the highest levels in almost a year in the previous session.

Oil prices have rocketed this year to levels not seen since the record spike in 2008, driven by supply disruptions in Libya and ongoing loose U.S. monetary policy, with Brent hitting a high of $127 a barrel and U.S. crude over $114.

Goldman Sachs, which in April predicted this week's major correction in oil prices, on Friday said that oil could surpass its recent highs by 2012 as global oil supplies continue to tighten.

"It is important to emphasize that even as oil prices are pulling back from their recent highs, we expect them to return to or surpass the recent highs by next year," Goldman Sachs' analysts said in a research note.

"We continue to believe that the oil supply-demand fundamentals will tighten further over the course of this year, and likely reach critically tight levels by early next year should Libyan oil supplies remain off the market."

(Reporting by Gene Ramos, Robert Gibbons, Matthew Robinson in New York; Jessica Donati-Bourne in London and Francis Kan in Singapore; Editing by David Gregorio)

Article.