CleanSpace One could start grabbing and de-orbiting junk in five years.

(Credit:
EPFL)

Swiss scientists believe they have a solution to help tidy up the junkyard of satellites over our heads.

It’s called CleanSpace One and it’s designed to tackle the 17,000-mph mess we’ve made around our planet.

The $11 million “janitor satellite” is under development at the Swiss Space Center in the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL). Its target: derelict satellites 430 miles up that threaten our communications and information networks.

There are some 16,000 bits of debris in the near heavens that are larger than 4 inches across. They’re mostly satellite and rocket components hurtling around like hornets in a bag, and they can also endanger the lives of astronauts. The International Space Station has to adjust its orbit to get out of the traffic.

When space junk collides, it only compounds the problem. Three years ago, U.S. and Russian satellites collided over Siberia, generating an estimated 1,000 pieces of new debris at least 4 inches across.

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Not bad, for a humanoid: Jennifer practices her slapshot.

(Credit:
Video screenshot by Tim Hornyak/CNET)

Here in Canada, you make the best of the long cold winters by getting out there and skiing, skating, testing solar bulbs, and launching Lego men into the stratosphere. Or you build hockey-playing robots.

Jennifer is a DARwin-OP robot from the University of Manitoba’s Autonomous Agents Laboratory that can shimmy around on a rink and even stick-handle a bit. She’s billed as the first of her kind.

Named after Canadian hockey Olympic medalist Jennifer Botterill, the bot has mini skates, a stick, a Team Canada jersey, and a ball and puck to play with. In the vid below, she shuffles around to the old theme from “Hockey Night in Canada” and you can’t beat that.

The piece was put together as a submission to the DARwin-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at IEEE ICRA in May. The robots are open-platform humanoids developed by U.S. universities and sold by Korean firm … [Read more]

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String theory: Hair has vexed scientists and artists for centuries.

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Tim Hornyak/CNET)

Does your coif suffer from orientational disorder? Have you checked the gravitational effects on your locks lately? Can you solve the differential equation in your beehive?

Well, scientists now can. Pioneering British researchers have succeeded in formulating an equation that unravels the deep physics mysteries of that great frontier of science, human ponytails.

In a study that screams Ig Nobel Prize, the researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Warwick, and Unilever published a hirsute equation that for the first time describes how hairs hang together and predicts the form of a ponytail.

“We identify the balance of forces in various regions of the ponytail, extract a remarkably simple equation of state from laboratory measurements of human ponytails, and relate the pressure to the measured random curvatures of individual hairs,” Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball, and Patrick Warren write in Physical Review Letters.

You’d think these boffins went a-hunting for ponytails in the wild and examined specimens back in the lab. That was probably too hairy a prospect.

Instead, they obtained commercial human hairpie… [Read more]

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(Credit:
Video screenshot by Bonnie Cha/CNET)

When I was younger, I used to love the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. Deciding the fate of a story based on the decisions you made was quite thrilling, and now you can have that kind of fun again…on YouTube.

Australian comedian John Robertson created an interactive game called The Dark Room for the video-sharing site. The clip begins with Robertson exclaiming, “You awake to find yourself in a dark room!” You are then presented with four different options as seen in the photo above, and each one leads to another chapter of the story.

Though the game’s initially creepy, I quickly got sucked into it and even had a laugh or two along the way. It’s silly, for sure, but it makes for a nice afternoon break (warning: use headphones, as there is some NSFW language). Robertson notes on his YouTube page that there are even some Easter eggs thrown in there, so get in there and give it a whirl!

(Via Laughing Squid) [Read more]

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(Credit:
Video screenshot by Bonnie Cha/CNET)

What the hell is an ultrabook?

That’s an excellent question that’s been raised by CNET editor Scott Stein, among others, and one Intel is trying to answer, in part, by going out and performing some flash mob-style theatrics.

The Pop-up Theater is an Intel ad campaign where a team of 60 individuals descend upon various spots around Los Angeles to wow passersby and unassuming individuals with messages splayed across a digital wall of ultrabooks.

Such stunts include standing in front of the Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd. to spell out “I heart Ultrabooks.” In another example, the team brings a virtual crowd to a game of 3-on-3 basketball by displaying shots of cheering fans whenever someone scores.

Each clip ends with the message “Transform your everyday,” and though admittedly fun and creative, it still doesn’t answer the question of what an ultrabook is exactly. Also, there appears to be a little astroturf campaigning going on, as these ads found their way to the in-boxes of numerous CNET editors today through a Bangalore, India-based company hired by an anonymous supplier to poll technology experts on their sentiments about ultrabooks.

In the past, … [Read more]

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How you feeling today? (^_^)/ or (T_T)? Perhaps somewhat (=_=)?

If the above leaves you a tad (?_?), you’re not up on your Japanese emoticons. But you can soon get up to snuff with Twikao, an app that automatically converts your mugshot into expressive symbols.

Twikao: If you’re in the know, just (^_-)

(Credit:
iTunes)

Japanese kaomoji (literally, “face letters”) differ from Western smileys in several ways. For one, they’re read vertically instead of horizontally, so that the brackets in the kaomoji above represent the sides of a face, and the symbols within are eyes and a mouth. For instance, a “T” is a watering eye, and (T_T) is crying.

Another feature of kaomoji is their wild expressiveness. The vertical form lends itself to a myriad of cartoonish little faces and combinations like \(^_^)/, a kind of mini-ode to joy.

Japanese consists of Chinese characters and two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), and when these are combined with standard QWERTY keyboard symbols, the expressive possibilities are endless. The most elaborate approach works of art, but won’t display properly here unless you have the right character encoding.

Kids are always coming up with new kaomoji, and sites like Kaomojiya have thousands of obscure smileys like this smoker: (-i-)y-~~~~…. [Read more]

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(Credit:
ToyArk.com)

The year 2015 will be here before we know it, and we’re still a long way from flying cars, skyways, and auto-drying jackets as imagined by “Back to the Future II.” It’s depressing, but there is one futuristic piece of tech from the movie that will be available soon: hoverboards.

Mattel announced at Toy Fair 2012 in New York that it will finally release a 1:1 replica of the hoverboard from “Back to the Future II” and “Back to the Future III,” and it’s set to arrive just in time for the holidays.

The “movie accurate” replica includes such details as a hole at the front of the deck where Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, ripped out the handlebar and pole and features the same neon-rrific coloring. According to Mattel’s press release, it also makes multiple whooshing noises and “glides” over most surfaces. The company didn’t provide much detail on how it glides, but one thing’s for sure: It does not work on water. Dangit!

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The blogosphere, as you know, is a giant echo chamber. Someone posts something and other sites parrot it like ventriloquist dummies, verbatim or nearly so. But does it matter if the original post is wrong?

Case in point: The pic below surfaced on MIC Gadget recently. It suggests this fellow in a very awesome robot costume, seemingly fashioned out of old iMac parts, appeared in Chongqing, China, along with his mutton-chopped Steve Jobs sidekick striking a Moses pose.

Apple fans in Japan, not China.

(Credit:
MIC Gadget)

It’s been making the rounds recently, with Gizmodo, io9, Cult of Mac, Geekosystem, and Geekologie, among others, hailing the Macbot in China.

The thing is the photo was taken in Tokyo, Japan, not China. If you’ve ever been to the Tokyo Big Sight convention center, you’ll remember its unmistakable inverted pyramids in the background of… [Read more]

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It could be because you lined up early to catch the opening of “Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace” in 3D (ha ha, we didn’t either) that you missed some of Crave’s top stories this week. Fear not, young Jedi, for we have rounded up some of our favorite posts here, along with some geeky gift ideas for Valentine’s Day.

Hello, love. I want to eat your brains!

(Credit:
ThinkGeek)

• Impress your No. 1 geek or geekette with a lightsaber-lit dinner and USB flowers this Valentine’s Day. Ohhhh, yeah.

• Is there anything more romantic than sucking on some delicious, chocolatey braaaaaains?

• Bummed that you won’t be with your loved one on February 14? You can still have a remote makeout session, thanks to Kissinger.

• Ready to have your mind blown? Then check out how Corning envisions the future.

• Fin… [Read more]

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(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

I like to think I’m pretty young at heart, but even I forget sometimes how fun it was to be a kid, when being entertained took something as simple as a cardboard box and a lot of imagination. Thankfully, littleBits reminded me.

littleBits is a set of circuit boards that can be snapped together to form whatever you want. Created by engineer and interactive artist Ayah Bdeir, littleBits was designed in part to help kids (and adults) understand how electronics work and get them interested in building their own devices, instead of just consuming them.

Each littleBits module has a specific function, such as power, motor, light, or switch, and they attach to one another via magnets, so there’s no need to solder or program anything. To create a working circuit board, all you need is a power source and some kind of output, and each part is color-coded (blue, green, pink, or orange) depending on its function (power, output, input, or wire).

Getting creative with littleBits (photos)

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