The rise of the machines is happening already: Three people were killed in Japan by an evil foot massage machine. Or maybe the machine wasn’t that evil and the people were just thick.
Father de Carli, the flying priest who got lost last April, has been found deceased in the middle of the Atlantic. In an effort to raise funds for a local charity organisation, De Carli planned to stay for more than 19 hours up in the air using a thousand party balloons, taking a GPS with him to communicate his position in case emergency. Unfortunately for the generous man, the trip ended in disaster.
LawnBott, the US$2,750 robot which announced itself as your loyal automated lawn mower—capable of cutting 33,000 square feet of grass in a single charge—has revealed its true face: it wants to cut humans to pieces. Actually, just stupid humans, but the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Kyodo America have decided to “recall them immediately.”
I’m pretty sure when I was young, kids this dumb were sent out into the wild and only allowed back into society after they’d done battle with rabid wolves and survived, to ensure accordance with Darwin’s law. Anyways, look kid, the crappy, Chinese-made stuffed toys inside, they’re not actually worth it—not the quarter you conned out of your parents to play, and not the years of therapy you’re going to have undergo to get over this. If it had been one of the ones where you can win like a Wii, okay, ’cause they can still be kind of hard to come by. But it totally wasn’t. [YouTube via Geekologie]
The manuscripts that later became On The Origin of Species are going online for the first time. The good guys at the Cambridge University library, who were the only people with access beforehand, have put Charles Darwin’s notes on his book and another 20,000 archive items online, turning it into one vast educational/scientific resource. Apparently it’s actually so vast that if you downloaded one image a minute, it’d take you two months to view it all.
Motus Corporation is working on a motion-based controller for PCs and current-gen consoles not named Wii. The Darwin controller promises to offer more realistic control than the Wiimote due to its more involved use of gyroscopes and accelerometers.
If you’re in Sydney and looking for something to do this weekend, why not go see some freaky flora at the Tropical Centre of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens. The Star of Bethlehem is currently in flower, showing off its unique 30 centimetre spur that Darwin predicted must have an appropriately capable pollinator animal for it to have survived. That was in 1862. In 1903 (21 years after his death) the hawk moth was discovered, with a probiscis long enough to reach the bottom of the orchid’s nectar tube.
The argument for evolution is that the two evolved side by side, forming an evolutionary bond that meant the survival of both species – the moth with reduced competition for its food source, and the orchid with a faithful pollination partner.
Science in action is fun! And to all those who believe the Earth is just 5,000 years old and this is all part of His great design / test of our faith? Well, there’s no telling fooling you, huh? Go look on its majesty and praise Him some more. Either way, full press release from the Gardens after the jump.
