Big Dog rules
Caution: weird sound in the video
This robot, dubbed BigDog, was developed by Boston Dynamics. It’s main feature is the ability to walk through rough terrain the way animals and humans walk (controlled freefall i’d call it), as opposed to moving limbs simply at preprogrammed trajectories. DARPA invested $10M in its development for military use »»»
Betagel
Japanese guys at Geltec invented betagel. On the video, they throw an egg from the roof of a 22 meter building (that would be about 7 floors) on a 0.02-meter thick layer of betagel (that’s less than an inch — thiner than MacBooks!) (Update Feb 2008 — OK, Macbook Air wins here). As you’ve probably guessed, the egg does not break (although it is likely to have been internally damaged). Remember that famous MBA problem?
Technology is for solving problems.
Content-aware image resizing
Brady Forrest points us to a video demonstrating content-aware image resizing. Basically, it allows you to resize an image without scaling or cropping it, beautifully cutting out unimportant stuff (automatically!) without usual scaling distortions or dumb cropping. Just watch the video — 4.5 minutes and it’s stunning.
