This Robot Toots Its Own Flute

Atsuo Takanishi, a professor of engineering at Waseda University, Tokyo, has completed building the first member of his robotic orchestra, a flute-playing robot. Takanishi hopes to eventually create a humanoid robot orchestra. The next robot, currently in development, is a saxophone-playing robot, though Takanishi believes the process will go much faster because he started with one of the most difficult instruments. Read More

Set Top Boxes to Revolutionise Internet Architecture

National ICT Australia (NICTA) has earned a spot in a European Commission project that aims to revolutionise the way information is delivered over the Internet. Read More

'Nanonet' circuits closer to making flexible electronics reality

Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have overcome a major obstacle in producing transistors from networks of carbon nanotubes, which could lead to the printing of circuits on plastic sheets for applications such as flexible displays or electronic skins to cover structures such as aircraft to monitor for cracks. The "nanonet" technology, circuits made of numerous carbon nanotubes that randomly overlap in a fishnet-like structure, has been hindered by metallic nanotubes that cause short circuits. Read More

Secret Messages Could Be Hidden in Net Phone Calls

Polish information scientists are developing a system for hiding messages in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone calls. Read More

American Military Supercomputer Sets Speed Record

An American military supercomputer created from components originally designed for video-game machines has passed the petaflop threshold by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. "This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing," says University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. The Roadrunner is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest computer, the IBM BlueGene/L based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Read More

Microsoft’s CAPTCHA successfully broken

Jeff Yan and Ahmad Salah El Ahmad, at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, England recently published a research paper entitled “A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA“, demonstrating how they’ve managed to attack the Microsoft’s CAPTCHA used on several of their online services such as Hotmail and Windows Live, with over 92% recognition rate. Read More

Method uses 'Bluetooth' to track travel time for vehicles, pedestrians

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Engineers have created a method that uses pervasive Bluetooth signals from cell phones and other wireless devices to constantly update how long it takes vehicles and pedestrians to travel from one point to another. Read More