darwin

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On this episode of Crave, we check out the Burrito Bomber engineered by Darwin Aerospace that literally bombs burritos into geo-tagged locations. We also get some NASA reassurance that the world may not end this month, which means we may actually get the chance to wear Lacoste's awesome polo shirts of the future. Also, dogs that drive? Yep. … Read more

We all wanted so badly for the Tacocopter to be real, but the supposed Silicon Valley quadrocopter taco delivery service was just a clever fake, designed to appeal to our most basic desires for Mexican food delivery by airborne gadget.

Just because we've had our hopes dashed once doesn't mean we shouldn't come back for more. A new hope has arisen. It's called the Burrito Bomber. As its name might suggest, the Burrito Bomber is a flying drone capable of dropping a burrito payload from the sky.… Read more

In certain corners of America, there is a mood of relief and joy. In others, rampant despair.

This partly stems from the rather limited number of candidates at the voters' disposal.

Unless, that is, you choose your own. In that searing home of live-and-let-live that is Georgia, almost 4,000 people knew exactly who was the right man to lead its state into the future.… Read more

Here in Canada, you make the best of the long cold winters by getting out there and skiing, skating, testing solar bulbs, and launching Lego men into the stratosphere. Or you build hockey-playing robots.

Jennifer is a DARwin-OP robot from the University of Manitoba's Autonomous Agents Laboratory that can shimmy around on a rink and even stick-handle a bit. She's billed as the first of her kind.

Named after Canadian hockey Olympic medalist Jennifer Botterill, the bot has mini skates, a stick, a Team Canada jersey, and a ball and puck to play with. In the vid below, she shuffles around to the old theme from "Hockey Night in Canada" and you can't beat that.

The piece was put together as a submission to the DARwin-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at IEEE ICRA in May. The robots are open-platform humanoids developed by U.S. universities and sold by Korean firm Robotis.

The challenges facing Chris Iverach-Brereton and colleagues on the University of Manitoba team include getting the robot to hit the puck from a sideways orientation and improving her skating skills. She's not ready to join the Winnipeg Jets just yet.

"We want to improve a great deal and have proper skating and really precise stickhandling," Iverach-Brereton told Postmedia News. "By May, my personal goal is to have the skating down and have (Jennifer) be able to push off one foot and glide." … Read more

To continue a week of absences, Wilson is on leave, so MTI once again picks up the mantle and joins us for today's episode. Dan the Mantern kindly filled in the board with stories about magical baked goods, lightbulb-powered Wi-Fi, 11 TRILLION dollar shots at evolution, and a bunch of '80s movies that should not, but will be, remade.

Wow, I can't believe it's been 201 episodes already, it seems like just yesterday that the guys invited me into the studio for my first guest appearance on the show, and now I'm a permanent host! To support our efforts to keep our heads barely above water, I'd like to personally invite you to join The 404 for drinks this Friday, October 10 at Gstaad Bar on West 26th St. and 6th Avenue @ 6:30PM. Jeff, Wilson, MTI, Natali, and I will all be there in the flesh to meet all four of you guys that listen to the show and live in New York. So come out, we'll buy you a drink (scratch that, reverse it) and we'll all have a great time. Don't forget, because we definitely won't if you miss it!

The works of one of the most towering figures of modern science are now available to anyone on the Web.

The Darwin Online Project is releasing on Thursday more than 90,000 online pages of Charles Darwin's photographs, sketches, and manuscripts, including the first draft of his theory of evolution.

Transcripts of many of the documents have been published in the past, but this is the first time that the original manuscripts have been made available to the general public--and seeing these works in Darwin's original scrawl somehow adds to the weightiness of what you are reading.

"… Read more

Whether Nintendo likes it or not, the Wii may be in the midst of a forced evolution of both the commercial and DIY variety.

The latter was seen recently when the console's Wiimote system was the subject of a high-profile hack by a Carnegie Mellon researcher that yielded some impressive results. Now a company called Motus has created a controller that works like the Wiimote on PCs and non-Wii consoles.

Dubbed "Darwin," the controller uses gyroscopes and accelerometers for tracking motion and is said to be more accurate than the infrared system used by the Wii, according … Read more

I've been attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference for years and have watched an interesting thing happen. A rising number of attendees have come with Mac OS X-based laptops. In fact, throughout the tech world, you see a dramatic increase in the number of people toting Macs. Why?

The Mac, after all, is a closed platform, just as Windows is. In fact, arguably, Apple is a more proprietary company than Microsoft has ever thought of being, controlling hardware and software alike. Just look at how Apple has managed its iPhone product: developers were initially shunned, and then they were allowed to crawl onto the device through the browser (and not a community-based browser like Firefox, but rather through its own Safari).

As a die-hard Mac addict and open-source advocate myself, I was thinking this morning about why the two increasingly converge, despite all the ironies and conflicting approaches. Here's my best guess.… Read more

Boing Boing has alerted us to a public-domain audio recording of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection that you can download and plunk onto your iPod. Now, I did a bit of the History of Science thing in college, and I must have taken at least four seminars in which Origin of Species was on the syllabus. I can consequently tell you that this is the most boring book ever written.

Yes, it's difficult to express just how influential a work of research and literature it was, and it's still obviously … Read more