Tag: EXPERIMENT

Most video games offer some sort of escape from reality, but researchers at Stanford University are now working to inject actual life back into the gaming ecosystem -- one single-celled organism at a time. As NBC Bay Area reports, the scientists recently developed a series of games involving microscopic organisms, which players must move around various obstacle courses. Thus far, the team has ...

A metal robot may not look like a human being, but as long as it acts like one, babies won't be able to tell the difference. That's the conclusion that researchers at University of Washington reached, after studying the ways 18 -month-year-old babies interact with humanoid bots. To observe the baby-bot dynamic, scientists placed each child in a room with a remote-controlled robot along with ...

Share Tragic news from Facebook, yesterday: a plant has died. The flora, named 'Meet Eater,' was originally planted in Australia by Queensland University student Bashkim Isai, who wanted to find out whether or not random online strangers would care enough about a plant to collectively "water" it. To test his theory, Isaid created a Facebook page for his Eater; whenever someone became a fan of the ...

If you were meandering around Facebook or LinkedIn, and happened to stumble across the profile of a woman named Robin Sage, you'd probably be impressed. She attended a prestigious New England prep school, got a degree from MIT and, judging from her profile picture, was pretty easy on the eyes, too. All in all, she's an over-achieving geek's dream date. So, what's the catch? She's not real. ...

Imagine a life in which your every single action is controlled by someone else -- where you're nothing more than a Pinocchio to someone else's Geppetto. Now, imagine a life in which the puppetmaster dictating your every move is the entire Internet. For seven days, that life will belong to one David Perez. Beginning on June 21st, the online population can log on to Perez's Twitter account to ...

Those French journalists who locked themselves in a farmhouse, with only Facebook and Twitter as links to the outside world, have emerged from their self-imposed exile. What did they learn from their social networking experiment? Janic Tremblay, a reporter with Radio Canada, talked with NPR about the experience. "You are - if I may say - who you follow," Tremblay told NPR. In other words, ...

We've all heard stories about how social networking sites are the newest and most reliable way to break news. But just how true is this claim? That's the question that a group of five European journalists hope to answer. According to AFP, these journalists will lock themselves in a French farmhouse for five days, beginning February 1st, and limit their communications with the outside world to ...

If you grew up with a few brothers and sisters, you know there are certain unspoken rules when it comes to food. You have to move fast without being noticed to get the last fish stick. According to a new study, it's not just humans who can learn these survival rules; robots can, too. Technology Review reports that a team of scientists at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de ...

In another step towards self-awareness, researchers at University of California, San Diego have developed a robot that teaches itself facial expressions. The realistic Einstein bot formerly required individually programmed facial movements, but through a trial-and-error technique UCSD has dubbed 'body babble,' the AI experiments with its mug until it achieves a real expression. Linked to facial ...