Amazing. The team over at the University of Reading, fronted by Kevin Warwick, a professor who is an expert in the field of robotics, and who brought us the excellent Real Robots series have done it again. This time, it is in the form of a biorobot called “Gordon”, who has a tiny biological brain made from cultured rat neurons. Why is it so special? Warwick’s team are experts in their field, especially regarding artificial intelligence, and this could open up many doorways into how brains work which could help progress the research and development of AI in the future.

But it also opens up to a whole different possibility for research into medical conditions, such as Alzheimer’s Disease. If they can discover how the brain works in the robot, they could develop ways of curing diseases like this which are currently devastating to those who suffer from them.

Interestingly enough, the robot uses a Bluetooth connection to communicate with it’s own “body”, with no control from humans or computers. It does however, require external stimulation for it to function.

Professor Warwick noted some interesting things about the robot while explaining the project

“Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,” said Warwick.

“Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity” similar to what happens in a normal rat — or human — brain, he added.

“Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways,” explained Warwick.

The great thing about this robot is that it learns from it’s sensors, like if it collides with something, it will learn from this and will help it prevent the same thing happening again. The great thing again is the robots they have developed before also exhibited the same behaviour, using ultra-sound and light sensors to detect where it was and prevent it from driving into things.

My favourite quote from Warwick, which makes “Gordon” eerily “real” in the sense, is this.

Gordon, in fact, has multiple personalities — several MEA “brains” that the scientists can dock into the robot.

“It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains,” said Warwick. “This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”

Kevin Warwick is know for having a couple of silicone chip implants in his arm, which allow computers in buildings to track where he is at any time. Creepy, but he is man enough to go through with it. Keep up the great work, Kevin.

While checking out some of my feeds I noticed this nifty little gadget over at Yanko Design (via CrunchGear) which is a camera designed for those who are visually impaired. What’s nifty about it is that you hold the camera against your head which takes a photo and then converts it to braille, which you can actually feel on your head. If that wasn’t enough, a 3 second clip of sound is recorded so that you can identify each photograph later.

This camera is the brainchild of designer Chueh Lee, who works for Samsung China, and has obviously created a very cool and very helpful product. Chueh further explains the product in more detail:

“Touch Sight is a revolutionary digital camera designed for visually impaired people. Simple features make it easy to use, including a unique feature which records sound for three seconds after pressing the shutter button. The user can then use the sound as reference when reviewing and managing the photos. Touch Sight does not have an LCD but instead has a lightweight, flexible Braille display sheet which displays a 3D image by embossing the surface, allowing the user to touch their photo. The sound file and picture document combine to become a touchable photo that is saved in the device and can be uploaded to share with others–and downloaded to other Touch Sight cameras.”

If I don’t see this out there something in the future, then the world is definately damned. The fact that it can be shared to other Touch Sight cameras is also a great idea.

Here is a gallery of the Touch Sight camera, thanks to the images from Yanko Design.

RIM will be bringing the BlackBerry Bold to the UK later this August, fueling the ever increasing CrackBerry habits of businessmen and addicted emailers alike. The Bold (or BlackBerry 9000) will be the best BlackBerry in the range, with a sexy frontend to the OS, a sleek black styling as well as WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and EDGE, and a standby time of 13 days (which is a long time for a smartphone, to say the least). When launched, the Bold will be available in T-Mobile and Carphone Warehouse stores, with no word on any expansions to other carriers as of yet.

Also included is a 2 megapixel (same as the iPhone) and flash (one up on the iPhone), as well as 1 GB of memory and support for more with an additional memory card.

Whether or not this will take off and be an “iPhone killer” is yet to be seen, but I predict that missing things such as the full featured experience of the iPhone’s iPod, the App Store and multi-touch may leave this to the hungry business types, always out to get the latest device to keep them connected. However, that is not to say that this is not a nice phone, and it certainly (for now, anyway :D) beats the iPhone hands down in the enterprise market, with better push email support and things such as the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents, whereas iPhone users can only view them. And even though there is no App Store, the ability to install any application made for the BlackBerry without having to submit officially to RIM is a big one up on the iPhone, and this is certainly a valid arguement that BlackBerry supporters use when arguing over the best phone.

I have to say, even though I am an iPhone user, my limited use of a BlackBerry Pearl has proven to me that they are very nice mobile devices and I can certainly see why they are better for business applications than the iPhone is. However, you can see where the iPhone is a breath of fresh air on the OS side, as the BlackBerry OS feels a little old, as well as no HTML support in email and other niggles which certainly make it a little annoying. The keyboard was definitely something I was not to sure of, but the Pearl has a QWERTY keyboard that doubles up each key to save space, so I am sure something like the Bold might suit me more, with each key to itself.

If I had the choice between this and an iPhone, I would choose the iPhone, but it certainly is a nice phone that I would certainly consider if the iPhone wasn’t an option. I can see this being a hit for sure.

Here are some specifications provided by CrackBerry.com.

• Size - Length: 114mm, Width: 66mm, Thickness: 14mm
• Weight (with battery) - 133g (same as the 88xx series. I can attest to it!)
• Memory - 1GB on-board (storage) and 128 MB Flash (applications)
• Battery - 1500mAhr lithium cell
• Est. Battery Life - Standby: 13 days, Talk Time: 5 hours
• Network Support - UMTS: 2100 / 1900 / 850MHz, GSM: 1900 / 1800 / 900 / 850 MHz, GPRS, EDGE and HDSPA networks
• Wi-Fi - 803.11a/b/g enabled
• Display - HVGA, 480 x 320 pixels, Transmissive TFT LCD, supports over 65k colors
• Media Player, Video Support - DivX 4, Div X 5 & 6 are partially supported, XviD is partially supported, H.263, H.264 and WMV3
• Media Player, Audio Support - .3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
• Media Player, Audio - BlackBerry Media Sync allows you to transfer your desktop iTunes music to your BlackBerry!!!
• Camera - 2.0MP, 5 x digital zoom (with flash of course)
• GPS - internal GPS with extended ephemeris, BB Maps is standard
• Bluetooth - Bluetooth v2.0, all the normal stuff and Bluetooth Stereo Audio via A2DP and AVCRP
• USB Port - Enables charging and high-speed data synchronizations via USB “A” to mini-USB “B” cable (I can personally say moving files back and forth is now lightning quick!)
• Browser - HTML browsing, View Movies/Clips from websites built for mobile streaming, RSS feed support

It seems the UK’s attempts at getting people to switch to digital service and TV’s is working, as new research reveals that Britain has more digital TV homes than the rest of Western Europe. How many? 22,268,000 households, according to Informa Telecons and Media’s Research (via TechRadar.com).

Second came France, with 18,017,000 households with digital gear, while Germany trail third with 15,300,000. Italy come in at 11 million, whilst Spain fall in 3 million under that, with 8 million. The rest of Western Europe combined amount to 14 million, around 6 million than the total of the UK alone.

It seem nowadays, remaining on basic analogue TV is incomprehensible, at least to me anyway. With the wide choice we have in the UK, such as the BBC channels, ITV’s selection, great free comedy channels such as Dave and a list of radio channels, Freeview is a no-brainer, and with set-top boxes as a low as £20, there is no reason (except for poor coverage) to not have one. Pricier options such as Sky+ are also thriving, with the added number of channels for your viewing pleasure.

Informa reckon that by the end of 2008, over an amazing 100 million Western European households will be watching their TV through digital rather than analogue.

For me, I have switched to a USB Freeview stick attached to my computer so I can watch and record while doing other things. We did have a Sky+ subscription before, but I have found that most of the best TV programs out there are on the Freeview channels anyway, and then you realise that most of the channels on Sky are complete rubbish anyway. Also, if there is nothing to watch on Freeview, I tend to go and do something else anyway. It is interesting to see how Freesat will come along. I haven’t really done much research on it, but I assume that it is like Freeview but coming through a satellite instead. This might entice people who already have sat subscriptions to switch if the service is desirable. I still think that Digital Terrestrial will be ahead as is it more easy to connect up to your existing aerial, or connect up to your computer and use Windows Media Center or EyeTV on a Mac.

Anyway, I’m going now to watch some hilarious comedy on Dave (which is a great name for a channel, by the way).

Despite its supposed pronunciation, the one thing Cuil definitely isn’t, is cool. After the tremendous splash the newly released search engine made on Monday following spectacular media coverage its rating in the online community has dropped to absolute rock bottom. It was heralded as a true ‘Google killer’ and indeed is run by several former Google employees, however, there can be no doubt that Sergey and Larry can sleep soundly in their multi-coloured ball covered beds for quite a while longer.

Billing itself as “the world’s biggest search engine”, Cuil promised to bring a viable alternative to Google, both in terms of how it presented and indexed results and how it protected your privacy. While we cannot yet dispute its claims about privacy, there is no doubt that it has failed to present any kind of alternative to the more conventional, as it would call them, search engines already in place.

One way of looking at it is to say that Cuil’s Monday launch and their subsequent ‘whale tail’ scenario started off rather well for them. We all know how media outlets love to push news of any challenge to Google’s dominance, and also that we as consumers lap them up- this was exactly what happened for Cuil. Scores of users were driven to the search engine resulting in a similar message across the board: “Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.”- a tantalizing message, serving only to drive even more visitors. Unfortunately for Cuil, they added that ‘more capacity’ in just a few hours and the general public got their chance to size up the search engine. This led to the now universal consensus that, while Cuil may look slightly nicer than some of its competitors, its results are in many cases utterly irrelevant and completely jumbled in its ‘magazine style’ results window.

For example, a search on Cuil for ‘Cuil’ itself yielded results for French breads and Irish cottages- not a whiff of the search engine or, incidentally, any of the bad press it’s been getting. Furthermore, not only does Cuil bestow the reader with irrelevant results, it accompanies these with equally irrelevant images from completely different web pages, take a search for ‘MobileMe’ for instance. The first result actually linking to a page from Apple was alongside this bizarre image of some kind of archaic filing system, sat on what looks to be blue, crushed velvet.

For now, and for the foreseeable future, Cuil will remain a ridiculed and outcast search engine, bettered on almost every front by either Google or other, new and emerging search engines, such as SearchMe. It can be assumed that Cuil will at some point try to branch out into other areas, perhaps attempting to rival Google’s dominance of online mapping, however, it seems some internet users are already predicting dire results for such a venture.

Credit to http://resnet.ucsc.edu/besmart/filesharing/

As has been rumoured for a number of weeks in online and print media a group of the biggest Internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK have signed up to a ’Memorandum of Understanding’ drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR). This treaty of sorts between ISPs, the Government and the British Phonographic Industry (which acts to serve the interests of the ‘big 4′ music labels in Britain) comes after Virgin Media admitted that it had sent several hundred ‘warning letters’ to customers whom, it had been deemed, had obtained songs illegally on their internet connection.

Unsurprisingly many customers who had received these letters from Virgin, such as this man, began claiming that they hadn’t illegally downloaded the songs Virgin Media said they had and furthermore that they were extremely taken aback by being accused of such an infringement of copyright.

This first attempt at a ‘warning letter’ scheme clearly shows the faults the system would have on a wide scale. Sending a letter of this nature to customers will obviously cause them considerable discontent with the ISP, whether they did perpetrate the crime and are annoyed that their ISP has effectively been ’snooping’ upon their internet usage or whether they didn’t download the songs in the first place, ultimately this looks set to contribute to the ISP losing subscribers (this being the main reason most ISPs have been reluctant to join such a scheme). Another incredibly obvious yet key problem is that in the age of WiFi networks and Foneros it is always a possibility that someone is piggybacking on an unwitting customers network and maintaining illegal activities without their knowledge.

This week, despite numerous causes for concern from all sides, the ‘understanding’ which certifies that ISPs will not only commit to a “significant reduction” in music file-sharing in the UK but also help develop legal music services was signed by BT, TalkTalk, BSkyB, Orange, Tiscali and Virgin Media.It has also been announced that regulation and future amendments to the ‘memorandum’ will be overseen by Ofcom.

To me, the idea of British internet providers attempting their own content delivery services on a large scale when giants like Universal have failed to make a significant mark upon iTunes gargantuan market share seems preposterous, it also veers on being monopolistic. However, there are intriguing whispers of a different method of collecting royalties from users who download music illegally. The Times reports that Ofcom may introduce an annual download tax, similar to TV licensing. This move however would beg the questions: ‘what do those of us who buy content perfectly legally online do?’ and ‘how would this system be policed?’.

Thankfully, there is one glimmer of hope coming from this ongoing crusade against internet users. Several ISPs have made it clear that there was “absolutely no possibility” of them disconnecting alleged pirates from the Internet.

You may ask why I think this a good thing and from it you may assume that I ‘obtain’ my music, but as something of a very small-time artist myself I appreciate the value of music and do pay for all I download. Having said this I wouldn’t be too surprised if I ended up getting my very own warning letter from my ISP, despite zealous protection of my network, and I, like everyone else, wouldn’t want to be disconnected and blacklisted for something I simply didn’t do (or indeed because the ISP or the BPI made a mistake).

We have created a poll on the right in the sidebar too see how many people fileshare and how many steer clear. Take your vote now or leave a comment.