Giant Freakin Robot

No, they didn’t teleport a person dressed as Spock.

Using a complex new steering mechanism, scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai have shattered the previous record for teleporting a photon. Set by the same team but different researchers in 2010, the old record of 16 kilometers (or 10 miles) was beaten when Juan Yin and his colleagues sent a photon across a lake in China for the incredible distance of 97 kilometers (60 miles).

You’re probably thinking “60 miles, big deal. If I had to go somewhere 60 miles away I’d just drive there and save myself the hassle and the possibility of splinching.” While this technology won’t be used to transfer physical objects any time soon, the information could revolutionize communications.

If I were to use the term “robo-butt”, your mind almost immediately thinks two things; sex toy, and Japan. In the case of SHIRI, a robotic buttocks simulator (for lack of a better term), it’s no sex toy at all, but does find its way here from the land of the rising sun.

The device is said to express emotions based on input from the “user”, and as you can see from the following video, said user is a veritable musician of the butt. Check it out and then maybe go take a shower so you don’t feel so creepy.

Looks like the Philip K. Dick-bot won’t be retiring (or retired) anytime soon. After the original got misplaced a few years ago on a plane trip to California (Rick Deckard, was that you?), Hanson Robotics decided to build a bigger, better version:

It’s what scientists have long suspected: like your circadian rhythm in which you go through a sleep-wake cycle, your brain also operates in a similar cyclic manner, but faster. The world you think you see isn’t as it seems.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow wanted to find out whether recurrent neural activities in our brains, or brain oscillations, affect brain function by studying brain rhythms associated with the visual cortex showed that the cyclic pattern of the brain oscillations correspond to the underlying brainwaves. Therefore, there is rhythmicity in both your brain activity and function, which supports the hypothesis that we experience the world in “discrete snapshots determined by the cycles of brain rhythms.”

So, moving past all of the fancy schmancy scientific vocabulary, it pretty much means that your brain activity is switching on and off in intervals faster than an over excited tourist in the middle of Times Square.