Continuing with the life imitating science fiction trend, hologram messaging is close to becoming reality. If you happen to have a Nature subscription, you can probably read more about it.
A University of Arizona team says it has devised a system that can make a holographic display appear in another place and update it in near real-time.
In other news, Princess Leia illustration used as infographic for serious article about scientific research.
Paul Meier, a theatre professor at the University of Kansas, has been researching the original pronunciation of Shakespeare, enabling audiences to hear what the plays would have sounded like in the Bard’s time.
“The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.â€
The clip above features an interview with Meier, and some examples from an OP production at the university. For a longer scene, check out this video for a longer scene.
A team of researchers from Cornell, University of Chicago and iRobot, have created a robot gripper that can pick up almost any small object. It uses the jamming of particulate material inside an elastic bag to hold on to things, as opposed to traditional designs modelled around the human hand.
The gripper consists of a rubber membrane around a granular material that can form around objects, then grab them when a vacuum pump is used to harden the material. The gripper was designed to allow robots to pick up various objects without a lot of computational overhead.
MIT backs free access to scientific papers. It’s a step in the right direction. Even if it’s a year or two after publication, it beats some of the exorbitant fees that you have to pay now.
The daily struggles of writing. I went through this last year.
Eightface is a weblog by Dave Kellam. It's largely just a collection of links to things I find interesting, with some attempts at pithy commentary interspersed.