Lifeboat Foundation

Virtual reality headsets can trick our eyes and ears into believing we’re someplace else. Fooling the rest of the body is a little trickier though. Companies have tried spinning chairs and omnidirectional treadmills, but nothing comes close to the “Cable Robot Simulator” developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The player wears a wireless VR headset inside a carbon fibre cage, which is then suspended in mid-air and thrown around the room using eight steel cables. The exposed pod is able to tilt, bank and move with an acceleration of up to 1.5g in response to the VR experience. Researchers have shown off some basic flight and racing simulations, but we’re already imagining how it could be used in our favorite video games. A dogfight in Star Wars: Battlefront Tearing around corners in F-Zero GX The possibilities are endless. It’s still very much a prototype, and hardly suitable for home use, but we’re desperate to have a go ourselves.

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Turing Test-style competitions in writing stories, music & poetry.

HT: @Grady_Booch

DigiLit is a competition that encourages the creation of algorithms able to produce a “human-level” short story of the kind that might be intended for a short story collection produced in a well-regarded MfA program or a piece for The New Yorker. The prize seeks to reward algorithms that could, for example, write stories for a creative writing class in which students are asked to submit a new short story each day. (Artwork by Annelise Capo http://www.annelisecapossela.com)

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Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the importance of internet access in combating extreme poverty at the United Nations’ 70th annual general assembly session.

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A new type of battery could provide better storage for renewable energy than Tesla’s Powerwall. Here’s how it works.

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Scientists believe they have found a better pair of molecular scissors to use with the genome-editing technique that is revolutionizing biology.

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Transparent solar panels!

Imagine a city that’s actually a vast solar energy harvesting system. A team of Michigan State University researchers has developed a technology that can turn transparent surfaces, from building windows to cell phones, into solar collecting surfaces – without obstructing the view.

Robots might be able to take to the Martian skies in just a few years.

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VIDEO: The evolution of the most famous gaming character over some 20 years.

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CRISPR-Cpf1 offers simpler approach to editing DNA; technology could disrupt scientific and commercial landscape.

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