You’ve been imprisoned by a shadowy government project and your identity has been erased; the only question is why. Welcome Home.
In a dystopian society where severe laws are in place to regulate the media you’re allowed to view, anyone and anything can be erased. Most people get their information and entertainment from the Knowledgebase -- a computer network dubbed the “sum total of human knowledge.” But forces are at work to edit and shape the Knowledgebase as they see fit -- suppressing dissident thoughts and behaviors. Their clear target: a group of rebels who hide in plain sight and call themselves the Transhumans -- people who remote into androids illegally, and whose goal is to eventually transplant a human consciousness into an android.
In the middle of this stands 77, a prisoner who’s been asked to repair a broken android for his captors. Once he solves the mystery of this android, he may find the truth behind the Transhumans, the elusive Knowledgebase architects, and the erased.
The Erased presents a near-future parable for the media age, where the march toward merging with technology comes at a terrible price.
Nexi Social Robot by MIT’s Personal Robotics Lab with Xitome Design and UMASS Amherst
Discovered this one, which helps the people at MIT understand human/android relations, over on Flavorwire. The article is of interest — it’s about 12 robots that could possibly change your life.
Image Credit: Artfutura
“The team, from the University of Arizona, were able to replicate the central pattern generator (CPG) - a nerve cell (neuronal) network in the lumbar region of the spinal cord that generates rhythmic muscle signals.
The CPG produces, and then controls, these signals by gathering information from different parts of the body involved in walking, responding to the environment.
This is what allows people to walk without thinking about it.”
ETH Zurich researchers present a self-reconfigurable robot capable of changing its body structures using hot melt adhesives. Part of the paper “Robotic Body Extension Based on Hot Melt Adhesives,” by L. Brodbeck, L. Wang, and F. Iida, presented at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
“Using only her thoughts, a Massachusetts woman paralyzed for 15 years directed a robotic arm to pick up a bottle of coffee and bring it to her lips, researchers report in the latest advance in harnessing brain waves to help disabled people.”
295 notes
Reblogged from 
