… and much more!

2007 Urban Challenge Winner
There may not have been a winner to this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge, but Carnegie Mellon’s Tartan Racing Team won the 2007 Urban Challenge with its self-driving sport utility vehicle “Boss.”

According to Popular Mechanics:

Tartan Racing, the joint effort from Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors, beat out arch-rival Stanford University for the $2 million first prize. Stanford took second place, and Virginia Tech’s Victor Tango team took third, winning $1 million and $500,000 respectively.

Credit: kwc

Safety and speed were the two criteria used to determine the unmanned vehicles’ performance, separating the first-prize winner from the rest. The 11 unmanned vehicles had to follow California road rules and laws as well as maneuver among manned vehicles.

Back to Basics
Dealing with massive financial losses and a steadily declining customer base, the Ford Motor Company announced in September its plans to invest its entire third- and fourth-quarter manufacturing and advertising budgets into reintroducing the Model T.

The Onion (satirically) reports:

While [Ford President and CEO] Alan Mulally admits that the initial cost of producing the so-called “Tin Lizzies” will be an enormous investment, the company will save millions of dollars by paying workers on the man-powered assembly lines — once considered a revolutionary breakthrough — wages at 1911 rates. Working in back-to-back 10-hour shifts, employees should be capable of producing 20-25 units per week, meaning the 32,000 Model Ts that Mulally believes will lift the company out of near bankruptcy will be on the road within six years.

Credit: State Library of Victoria

Mulally expects the first line of Model Ts to be “available for sale by mid-December and safe for driving as soon as it is neither snowing nor raining.”

Giggly Kiddy Bot
“A new study shows that a giggling robot is sophisticated enough to get toddlers to treat it as a peer,” reports New Scientist in a special report this month:

An experiment led by Javier Movellan at the University of California San Diego is the first long-term study of interaction between toddlers and robots. The researchers stationed a 2-foot-tall robot called QRIO (pronounced “curio”), and developed by Sony, in a classroom of a dozen toddlers aged between 18 months and two years.

QRIO stayed in the middle of the room using its sensors to avoid bumping the kids or the walls. Initially, it was programmed to giggle when the kids touched its head, to occasionally sit down, and to lie down when its batteries died.

The children treated QRIO with more care and attention than a similar-looking but inanimate robot that acted as a control in the experiment. Eventually, the children seemed to care about QRIO’s well being: They helped it up when it fell and even, and when the robot’s batteries ran out of juice and it lay down, the toddlers approached the robot, covered it with a blanket and said “night, night.”

Everyone together now: Awwww…

Bible Bot
A Kuka Roboter industrial robot has been given an unusual production task: Write out the complete (Martin) Luther Bible “by hand.”

Credit: Marc Wathieu, via Boing Boing

According to Technovelgy, Kuka has been reprogrammed to inscribe the entire Martin Luther bible onto an endless roll of paper. It uses a calligraphic style translated by its creators RobotLab from an early font called “Schwabacher.”

Some pretty unusual things have been done with Kuka robots in the past — including a sword-wielding, tennis-playing, Nintendo WiiMote-controlled robot:

Punch-Me Bot
According to the “Three Laws of Robotics,” introduced by renowned author Isaac Asimov as early as the 1940s and since used often in works of science fiction by other authors:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Nonetheless, German engineer Sami Haddadin has built a robot that he regularly allows to punch him in the head.

Haddadin, of the German Aerospace Centre Space Agency, is part of a research team in Oberpfaffenhofen aiming to transform industrial robots from insensitive drones into smart machines that can work alongside humans. And, according to New Scientist, he has programmed the robot so that it knows when it has hit a person as a way to reduce industrial accidents.

Male Whale Pick-up Lines
Finding Lucas Wolenczak’s dolphin vocorder insufficient (That’s right, I just dropped a seaQuest DSV reference on ‘ya.), Australian scientists studying humpback whales sounds say they have begun to decode the whale’s mysterious communication system, identifying male pick-up lines and motherly warnings.

Reuters reports:

Wops, thwops, grumbles and squeaks are part of the extensive whale repertoire recorded by scientists from the University of Queensland working on the Humpback Whale Acoustic Research Collaboration (HARC) project.

Over three years, researchers identified at least 34 recurring sounds — some lasting less than one second and others stretching for more than 10 — that can be linked to specific, different social settings. A purr by males, for instance, appeared to signify the male was trying his luck to mate a desirable female.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America has published the scientists’ data.

Sporks and Knorks
The spork’s origins trace back further than Taco Bell and the golden arches: The thing was patented in August 1970 by the Van Brode Milling Company, Inc., but the Oxford English Dictionary cites a supply catalog from 1909, according to Straight Dope.

As with this hybrid form of cutlery, however, the ante has been upped by the British.

“A new tool that combines knife and fork collapses cutlery hierarchies and erodes social distinctions,” writes Kathryn Hughes at UK’s The Guardian, who goes on:

We should greet with joy the arrival of something called the knork. A hybrid of the knife and fork, it is apparently the only piece of cutlery we’ll be using in the near future. With its wide and bevelled outer tines, the side of the knork acts like a knife, while its inner prongs deliver food safely to your mouth without any fear of cutting.

Credit: Kitchen Kitchen

Could you completely abandon the utensil trinity of the knife, fork and spoon?

Cheers.