Using two hook-like claws, a motor and a tail that swings like a pendulum from a cuckoo clock, the ROCR Oscillating Climbing Robot is the first robot designed to climb efficiently and move like a human rock climbers or an ape swinging through trees. The video below explains how it works.Read more

Most materials melt when heated, on other words, they change from a solid to a liquid state. But a few nonconformist materials do the opposite, they melt as they get cooler. A team of MIT researchers has now discovered that silicon, which is the most widely used material in computer chips and solar cells, can display this bizarre property of retrograde melting if it contains high concentrations of certain metals dissolved in it. The finding could lead to applications in solar cells and other devicesRead more

Lonely Planet, the big travel publisher with the great little books, has released their first five ebook titles to the iBooks store that lets you read ebooks on your iPad. Lonely Planet Discover guides are for Great Britain, Italy, Spain, France and Ireland are the ones available, and odds are there will be many more, since this is a great use of the iPad. You could download and store all 5 guides on your device and throw all the paper copies away, saving a lot of room in your backpack. Plus they are interactive, containing over 300 hyperlinks to websites of hotels, restaurants and other local attractions.Read more

An optional mode has been added on YouTube which allows users to filter out any objectionable content or user comments. Dubbed Safety Mode, the filter is activated by navigating to the bottom of any YouTube page, then clicking the “safety mode is off” link, turning the mode on and hitting the save button takes away the objectionable content and comments while you view the site.

"While no filter is 100 percent perfect, Safety Mode is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site," a post on the YouTube blog said. So it would seem.Read more

Sirius XM Radio has launched a new BlackBerry website page on its website, with several BlackBerry smartphone applications available. Each app is designed for a specific BB model, including the BlackBerry Curve 8500 and 8900, Bold 9000, Bold 9700, Storm, Storm 2 9500 and the Blackberry Tour.

All Internet lineup programming is available, exception for the Howard Stern show, since he owns all the rights to his content and apparently nixed the idea. You still get Sirius XM’s 120 channels of commercial free music in just about any genre you can think of, plus news, comedy, talk shows and sports programming. Sirius favorites like Oprah, Doctor Radio, Opie and Anthony and Martha Stewart are all on the menu.Read more

STOIK Imaging, a software company headquatered in Moscow, today announced the release of their STOIK PanoramaMaker for Mac, a Mac OS version of their Windows panorama image making tool. Creating a wide angle image by stitching together several smaller digital images is a common feature of photo editing software. But most of them have a problem rendering moving objects in the shots, introducing misshapen or blurry images and marring your painstaking work.Read more