German Engineers Develop Real Doctor Octopus Arms

The Germans have robotic tentacle technology.  Yeah, this will end well...

Longtime Spider-Man fans know that one of the Marvel Comics character's most dangerous enemies is one Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius, a.k.a. Doctor Octopus, a mad scientist with four powerful mechanical appendages fused to his spine after an accidental raditional leak resulted in an explosion.  Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in The Amazing Spider-Man (vol.1) #3 in 1963, Doc Ock quickly became a popular supervillain for Marvel and was portrayed later on by Alfred Molina in the 2004 film Spider-Man 2.

According to an article from New Scientist, German engineering firm Festo has developed actual real-life versions of Doc Ock's robotic tentacle arms.  Of course, the arm is described as a "bionic elephant trunk" instead, but the principle's the same.  The device was created to allow expanded dexterity and range of movement to industrial robots and was formed of 3D-printed segments that can be controlled by an array of pneumatic artificial muscles.

"They used a process called 'goal babbling'," stated the article, "thought to mimic the way a baby learns to grab things by continually reaching – a process of trial and error that lets them work out which muscles they need to move.  Similarly, the robot remembers what happens to the trunk's position when tiny changes are made to the pressure in the thin pneumatic tubes feeding the artificial muscles.  This creates a map that relates the trunk's precise position to the pressures in each tube."

It seems the bionic tentacle trunk "can now be trained to repeat actions and pluck anything from light bulbs to hazelnuts."  I'm guessing carrying large sacks of money with dollar signs on them out of opened bank vault doors is somewhere in the ballpark as well.

And the mind boggles at the thought of what Japanese tentacle porn fetishists will think of this.

Here's a YouTube from New Scientist showing Doc Ock's arms the bionic elephant trunk in action...

Humans Will Become Cybermen and Borg by 2045?

Well, to be fair, Doctor Who, Star Trek: The Next Generation and The X-Files did try and warn us about this sort of thing.

The featured article in the February 24, 2011 edition of Time magazine is "2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal" by Lev Grossman, which examines the evolution of technology to the point where it merges with humanity and becomes impossible to predict, an event commonly dubbed the Singularity.  Grossman focuses the article on inventor and futurist Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil, author of such books as The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, who sees all kinds of potential implications from such exponential growth.

"In Kurzweil's future," writes Grossman, "biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life."

Definitely some intriguing and disturbing stuff that you could easily shrug off as wishful science-fiction, whose fans are already used to such concepts.  The world's longest-running science-fiction series, Doctor Who, introduced the villainous Cybermen in 1966, cyborgs from the planet Mondas who gradually replaced their humanoid forms with artificial parts as a means of self-preservation and became emotionless and devoid of morality in the process.  They add to their numbers by forcing others to undergo a conversion process that replaces their bodies with Cybermen parts, claiming "You will become like us."

Star Trek: The Next Generation took the Cybermen and gave them an upgrade in 1989 with the creation of the Borg.  Another group of cyborgs, the Borg are made up of multiple species augmented with cybernetic enhancements and organized into a collective hive mind.  Their sole purpose is to travel from world to world, assimilating others in order to "add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to (their) own" in the pursuit of perfection.

Another classic science-fiction series, The X-Files, explored the idea in 1998 in an episode titled "Kill Switch," written by science-fiction authors William Gibson and Tom Maddox.  Involving a murderous artificial intelligence, the episode focused on such themes as the evolution of artifical intelligence, virtual reality and transferring one's consciousness into cyberspace.

So there it is, Humanity.  You've got about 34 years left, so you'd better enjoy your remaining Fleshtime while you still can.

Should the U.S. Government Subsidize Time Travel Research?

Okay, the way you hear many politicians going on about the United States budget on various news shows and whatnot, we really shouldn't be spending federal tax dollars on...well...anything.  But as we all know, no matter who's in executive or legislative power, we're still going to find a way to keep on spending no matter what.  We're Americans...We love to buy stuff. 

So presuming America finds another way to get its credit card limits raised again or cuts out something obviously useless like Medicare coverage or Social Security payments, should that new source of funds go toward time-travel research?  Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution ponders that very question, in an article titled Should we subsidize or tax research into time travel?  His reasoning:

I believe no one understands the underlying science much at all.  But there is some chance that the old science fiction movies are correct and that by time-traveling you alter the course of history, thereby obliterating the universe we used to have.  I'll count that as a net negative, while noting there is some chance we end up with a better universe.

On the plus side, the human race will die out anyway.  Time travel seems to yield a fairly safe haven.  As disaster approaches, keep going back in time a few days, or decades, and that asteroid will never hit you.  This is especially appealing if you are transporting back a body (upload?) which is programmed to be more or less immortal and you can take the technology with you, so as to keep on going back as time progresses.

On one side: immortal life for many of the last humans and thus immortality for the human race.  And with time they may learn how to thwart the asteriod.(sic)  On the other side: some probability of swapping universes.

There are certainly those issues of national security to consider.  After all, if time travel was possible, we could go back in time and prevent things like JFK's assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, or the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center.  Not to mention it would be an effective deterrent against future aggressive actions against our country, which could be rewritten and erased in some sort of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey fashion.  If you thought that bombing someone with a nuclear weapon was effective at keeping them from invading you, imagine what preventing their leaders from being born could do.

Oh, and don't forget the economic advantages as well.  That 777-point drop of the Dow Jones market in September of 2008?  Prevented with a stock trading software patch.  Bernie Madoff's investment scandal?  Can't happen in Madoff gets hit by that car that missed him when he was sixteen.  Hell, funding time travel research will pay for itself in no time.

Okay, sure, there may some questions we need to answer.  Do we really want to give our government the ability to erase people from history?  Or change the historical outcomes of other nations?  Or alter the results of our own elections?  Or tell Sarah Palin not to do that interview with Katie Couric?  Definitely things that need proper consideration.

But think about one thing...If we don't start funding time travel research, what will happen to America if other countries start funding it themselves...?

(Cue the Doctor Who cliffhanger sting music)

Real-Life Iron Man Suit Gets Upgraded

Yes, it sure looks cool...but how well can it handle itself in a dogfight with F-22 Raptor fighter jets and fighting Russians armed with whip-like energy weapons?

Samantha Murphy at TechNewsDaily provides details about a new second-generation robotic suit developed for the military called Exoskeleton (XOS 2)
that is lighter, faster and stronger than the XOS 1, but uses fifty percent less power.

The suit was unveiled yesterday during a demonstration with Paramount Home Entertainment, presumably as part of the promotion for today's release of Iron Man 2 on Blu-Ray and DVD.  I don't suppose there's any chance of Best Buy offering one of these bad boys as an incentive for picking up the 2-Disc Blu-Ray...?