I love living in the world of the future. Dubbed Project Green Brain, the engineering teams at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are writing computer models of the brains of bees, specifically the systems in the brain that interpret a bee’s vision and sense of smell. They intend to link this to robotic sensors designed to perceive the same stimulus and install it into a flying robot. The purpose of the project is to advance understanding of simple non-human brain structures and artificial intelligence, but they already have a number of practical applications in mind, from search and rescue in dangerous environments such as mines or nuclear power plants, to finding the source of gas leaks, to actually pollinating crops in areas where hive collapse has eradicated real bees. As long as they don’t include stingers I think this will be a project worth following, particularly since this is the first Artificial Intelligence project I know of that is being designed to run on desktop PCs rather than supercomputers.
Terrestrial Human
The best Bond theme song in quite a while, Adeles official version of Skyfall is quite amazing. It does hark back to the days of Goldfinger and finally gives that classic a run for its money. No other Bond song has come close, and it will be a few years before we know how this one will hold up, but I for one am impressed. Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for the heads up on this one.
Coming up next year, The Prototype is a film about a dying man who uploads himself into the combat drone he is developing for the military. It seemed like a good idea at the time; he needed a way to escape death, and the drone needed a core intelligence around which to coalesce. Now, it is not so much fun. This one looks very interesting, if you are waiting for the Singularity this is another option to explore.
The folks at Noitamina TV (Midnight TV, a branch of Fuji TV), has a new show coming out called Robotics: Notes. It begins airing on October 11th or 12th depending on which time zone you live in, and is the 3rd in a series of scientific anime’s from Production IG. It takes place in the same world as Chaos; Head and Steins; Gate, two excellent sci-fi anime series. I am hoping Crunchyroll carries it so I can watch it here. Thanks to Danny Choo for the heads up on this one.
From Digital Rebel Studio and posted as part of the Mad Artist Publishing collection, Pluton Robotics is a very short Sci Fi animation that is just silly fun. Mad Artist Publishing specializes in independent animations and art reels from around the world, and helps artists get established and distributed online.
This week it is more Tim Burton animated silliness with Frankenweenie, an all star retelling of the classic Frankenstein tail. This is a great one to take your kids to, because afterwards you can have a meaningful discussion with them on the dangers of wild experiments using their high school genetic engineering labs for a little recreational recombinant DNA monster building.