Eh-Wire writes “Roborior, a house-sitting robot armed with a digital camera, infrared sensors and a videophone is on sale in select Japanese department stores. The house-sitting robot can detect break-ins with it’s infrared sensors and then call the owners cell phone and stream video to the tiny screen. At $2600 each the Roborior is not cheap. For those that require something a little more substantial, Tmusk, the manufacturer of Roborior, has produced a four legged version called Banryu. This one is the size of a large dog and sells for around $18,000. It’s not supposed to shed hair or sleep on the furniture which could make it quite popular.”

Slashdot | House-Sitting Robot Hits Store Shelves in Japan

Yahoo recently wrote on the Yahoo! Search blog, that their index now provides access to over 20 billion items (Compared to Googles 8.1 billion). A couple of days after Professor John Battelle responded with a post where he mentioned the fact that Google Scientists did not seem to fully agree on Yahoo claims. Well to make a long story shorter Matthew Cheney and Mike Perry, researchers at the NCSA under the supervision of Dr. Orville Vernon Burton, decided to make a brief study of the two rival indexes, and see just who’s got the biggest and most mighty index..

A Comparision of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices

A short controversial article that focus on using Google or other search engines to harvest chinese, russian and similar countries pirate sites. Since it’s pretty obvious that the software companies will have a harder time fighting those websites compared to those in EU or US and the like.

Learn a few token-strings from the language (download, cracked, english version, pro etc..) and you’re basically ready to go warez hunting across the borders.

(Of course this should not be attempted, ever – since it’s illegal, but it’s pretty interesting to surf on foreign sites and attempt to make sense of it all..)

Finding warez using Google

Google China

Google Russia

Pretty cool video clips of a robotic hand grabbing balls shot directly towards it.

shpoffo writes “Engineers at the University of Tokyo in Japan have created a robot that can catch a ball moving faster than 186 miles per hour (300 kph) – more than 270 feet per second. It uses an array of photodetectors to directly control the three finger actuators – which can rotate 180 degrees in 0.1 seconds. It’s only catching softballs at the moment, but operators are optimistic for it to soon catch other objects and grasp moving things. A video with odd sci-fi TV-series (coral cache) accents is available.”

Slashdot | Robot Catches High Speed Objects

Martian Ice Lake

The HRSC on ESA’s Mars Express obtained this perspective view on 2 February 2005 during orbit 1343 with a ground resolution of approximately 15 metres per pixel.

It shows an unnamed impact crater located on Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of Mars’s far northern latitudes, at approximately 70.5° North and 103° East.

The crater is 35 kilometres wide and has a maximum depth of approximately 2 kilometres beneath the crater rim. The circular patch of bright material located at the centre of the crater is residual water ice.

The colours are very close to natural, but the vertical relief is exaggerated three times. The view is looking east.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Source: ESA | Water ice in crater at Martian north pole