May I take your order?

Robot No 1 and No 2 are displayed at a restaurant called Robot Kitchen in Hong Kong. Robot No 1 is designed to take orders from customers while Robot No 2 is designed as a female robot and is supposed to deliver dishes. The owners say that this is the first such restaurant in the world

Full-faced prototype Toshiba headgear

A model wears a full-faced prototype Toshiba headgear that enables the wearer to get a 360-degree view across a 40-centimetres dome-shaped screen at Toshiba Corporate Research and Development Centre in Kawasaki, west of Tokyo. The omni-directional image of which a two-dimensional version is displayed on the flat panel screen will be projected to the three-kilogram helmet in accordance with the wearers head position, which is detected by infrared sensors. Toshiba plans to have the gadget ready within the next 2 to 3 years.

Sandisk Sansa C200

SanDisk recently launched another MP3 player, the Sansa c200. The player can support playback of MP3, WMA, and protected WMA. It also incorporates an FM tuner, integrated voice recorder, a microSD memory card slot for adding up to 2GB of additional storage capacity, a 1.4-inch, 128 x 98-pixel colour LCD screen, and a battery life of about 15 hours. The c200 is available in 1GB and 2GB models. It will retail internationally in October at $80 for 1GB and $100 for a 2GB. For more information, visit http://www.sandisk.com/

FMV-Lifebook FMV-Q8230

A Fujitsu employee displays the company’s new notebook ‘FMV-Lifebook FMV-Q8230’, equipped with Intel’s 1.2GHz Core Solo processor and 32GB flash memory drive (instead of a hard-disk drive). The flash memory drive offers faster data access, longer battery life and improved shock resistance because of zero moving parts. Fujitsu will put the notebook on the market next month at a price of 3,94,000 yen (Rs 1,50,000 approx)

F229D glasses have bone-conduction speakers

An employee of the Japanese subsidiary of US hearing instruments giant Starkey’s displays a pair of glasses equipped with a new digital ‘acouphone’ on its bows. The F229D glasses have bone-conduction speakers that enables the user to listen to clear sounds vibrated through his or her skull. Starkey Japan started selling the new device with a price of 4,20,000 yen (Rs 1,60,000 approx) for a pair of dual ‘acouphone’ glasses and 2,20,000 yen (Rs 84,000 approx) for the one side ‘acouphone’ model

Sony’s new digital Walkman NW-S700F

A close-up of Sony’s new digital Walkman NW-S700F. The 88.1x27.4x17.0 mm, 47 gram Walkman features Sony’s clear audio technology with a built-in noise cancelling device. With a high-speed recharging function, a 3-minutes charge can provide 3 hours of play back. By connecting to another new Sony product HDD component ‘NetJuke,’ the Walkman can store music without a computer

www.cloudappreciationsociety.org

Get sucked into the tranquil almost meditation-like hobby of watching and appreciating clouds. The Web site, appropriately named http://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org/ helps users to get into “cloud watching” and encourages its members to post pictures of them. Needless to say the site has almost 2,000 pictures of clouds in shapes ranging from angel wings to animals to some that are too spectacular to explain. The site lets you rate the pictures and even chat with other cloud enthusiasts.

The Genesis

Launched just three years ago in 2003 to take advantage of high-speed Internet connections, Second Life has already grown to the size of a virtual full-fledged city with its varied geography and cultural life. Rosedale says he wouldn’t have predicted many things about the direction users have taken the world. “I thought that when you came into Second Life, you’d see, like, ‘space port Alpha’… a wild mishmash of future visions,” he says. But despite the futuristic landscapes and cyber-punk characters, much of the Second Life’s residential property looks like a reflection of people’s earthly desires. “They want oceanfront property… and they want palm trees, up a little bit from a beach at a pier with a little power boat… And then they watch the sun set on the deck,” he says.To play, visit http://www.secondlife.com/

A second life

Online game Second Life has more than 8 lakh denizens, where many earn a real-world, full-time living, selling things like virtual land, clothes, jewellery and weaponry or by offering virtual services, notably sex

In the beginning, Philip Rosedale created a virtual heaven and a digital earth, and then he said “let there be Second Life.” Whether it’s good or not , the 38-year-old entrepreneur’s 3-D virtual world is certainly fruitful and multiplying.Second Life now has more than 8,00,000 denizens, of whom more than a hundred are earning a real-world, full-time living there.Yes, people pay real money for things they can only use in Rosedale’s world, which can only be accessed through the Internet. Millions of real dollars change hands in Second Life regularly, and it presently has an annual gross domestic product of around $150 million.Already, organisations like Harvard University have opened operations in Second Life, while musicians like Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega have broadcast virtual concerts there using the world’s lifelike animated characters.As chief executive of Linden Research Inc, which owns Second Life, Rosedale is akin to the world’s god, with the software code he approves determining its fundamental laws.

Film festival for movies made on cellphones

Paris: Film-makers aren’t usually known for having pint-sized ambitions. But, in an unusual Paris film festival taking place this weekend, that’s exactly what they are proudly exhibiting.The second ‘Pocket Films Festival’, which began on Friday and will run till Sunday, is to showcase what up-and-coming cineastes can do with the newest breed of cellphone digital cameras. The event will screen 80 works filmed on handsets loaned to directors, artists, film students and even amateurs.While the movies may have been made with miniature equipment, the finished products – fortunately for the public – may be seen on the big screen. That in itself is a feat, one made possible by the rapid advances in video technology incorporated into the newer phones, the Forum’s artistic director, Benoit Labourdette said.“This year, we’ve seen huge progress in terms of telephones. The resulting images are four times bigger” than the ones in last year’s festival, in which some films were heavily pixellated or took up only part of the screen, he said.That, for example, was the case for Jean-Claude Taki, a French director who made a 24-minute film in Kazakhstan with his mobile. “Now he’s made the (mobile) format his trademark style,” Labourdette said. The French festival broke new ground when it first came into being last year. It is still the only festival to show only phone-camera films, but many of the French entries have gone to feature as sideline attractions at general film fests.The top four winners at the festival this year will each receive a 3G camera phone.First place will also get Euros 2,000 (Rs 1,15,629 approx), while second place will get half that sum.

Remains of giant camel discovered in Syria

Damascus: Swiss researchers have discovered the 1,00,000-year-old remains of a previously unknown giant camel species in central Syria. “This is a big discovery, a revolution in science,” Professor Jean-Marie Le Tensorer of the University of Basel said. “It was not known that the dromedary was present in the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago.”“Can you imagine? The camel’s shoulders stood three metres high and it was around four metres tall, as big as a giraffe or an elephant. Nobody knew that such a species had existed.”Tensorer, who has been excavating at the desert site in Kowm since 1999, said the first large bones were found some years ago but were only confirmed as belonging to a camel after more bones from several parts of the same animal were recently discovered.“We found the first traces of a big animal in 2003, but we were not sure it was a giant camel,” he said.A group of humans apparently killed the camel while it was drinking from a spring at the once water-rich site in the desert steppe, said Tensorer.The site was first surveyed in the 1960s.“It was a savannah more or less,” Tensorer said. “The camels then ate probably what they eat today.”

Nokia 5300 XpressMusic

This latest slider phone from Nokia specialises in music playback and comes with support for MP3, MIDI, AAC, AAC+, enhanced AAC+, and WMA music formats. The device also boasts of a hot-swappable mini SD slot with support for up to a 2GB card – and best of all dedicated music buttons. The quad-band 5300 also features a 2-inch colour screen, 1.3-megapixel camera, FM radio, HSCSD, GPRS, EGPRS, voice recorder, infrared, Bluetooth and USB PC connectivity. The phone gives up to 3.2 hours of talk-time, 223 hours of standby time, or up to 12 hours of music playback on a single charge. For more on the 5300 that will retail for euro 400 (Rs 23,000 approximately), visit http://www.nokia.com/.

Japan’s robot venture

Left: Japan’s robot venture Squse President Mikio Shimizu displays an artificial muscle and a soft robot hand which has 21 artificial muscles, powered by pneumatic actuators to vent and stretch each joints of all fingers in Tokyo. Squse and Kyoto’s Doshisha University developed the robot hand to pinch or grasp objects like human for use as an artificial hand for the disabled. Right: The soft robot hand demonstrates its ability to handle small objects by piling up blocks.

Zero Gravity Operation (A Success)

French Surgeon, Dominique Martin, removed a fatty cyst from the arm of a volunteer patient in what is the first surgery to be carried out in zero gravity. The 11 minute operation – aboard a plane – was performed in 32 sequences, during which the aircraft flew in arcs putting it into free fall and creating weightless conditions for 22 seconds each time.The surgical instruments were held in place by powerful magnets and the surgeons by harnesses. The absence of gravity made the surgeons work harder: “Cardiac output is reduced as blood doesn’t pump in the same way. Above all it flows out of a wound in spheres, so we had to create a special vacuum to contain it,” Martin said.Future operations in space could be performed using special robots: “Today, a robot can’t operate in weightless conditions. We’re learning and then we’ll program it to work in our place,” Martin said.

South Korea unveils gun-toting sentry robot

Seoul: South Korea has unveiled a high-tech, machine-gun toting sentry robot that could support its troops in detecting and suppressing intruders along the heavily fortified border with North Korea. “The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot has surveillance, tracking, firing and voice recognition systems built into a single unit,” said Lee Jae-Hoon, Korean deputy minister of commerce, industry and energy.Lee said hundreds of the robots could be deployed along the 155-mile-long border bisecting the two Koreas as well as along the country’s coastline and at military airfields.With modifications, they could also be used to guard civilian installations such as airports, power stations and oil pipelines.Equipped with visual and infra-red detection capabilities, the sentry robot can spot moving objects up to four kilometres away during the day and half that distance at night.Via “pattern recognition,” it can distinguish between humans, cars or trees at two kilometres in daytime and one kilometre at night.Suppressive fire can be provided by a machine gun on top.The robot was developed by a group of four institutions including Samsung and Korea University over three years at a cost of some $10 million. Each robot reportedly costs 190 million won (Rs 92 lakhs approx).

Grammar Software

Houston: One small word for astronaut Neil Armstrong, one giant revision for grammar sticklers everywhere. An Australian computer programmer says he found the missing ‘a’ from Armstrong’s famous first words from the moon in 1969, when the world heard the phrase, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”Historians and critics have dogged Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, “One small step for a man ...” in the version he transmitted to NASA’s Mission Control. Without the missing ‘a’, Armstrong essentially said, “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”The famous astronaut has maintained he intended to say it properly and believes he did. Thanks to some high-tech sound-editing software, computer programmer Peter Shann Ford might have proved Armstrong right.Ford said he downloaded the audio recording of Armstrong’s words from a NASA Web site and analysed the statement with software that allows disabled people to communicate through computers using their nerve impulses.In a graphical representation of the famous phrase, Ford said he found evidence that the missing ‘a’ was spoken and transmitted to NASA.“I have reviewed the data and Peter Ford’s analysis of it, and I find the technology interesting and useful,” Armstrong said in a statement. “I also find his conclusion persuasive. Persuasive is the appropriate word.”

A cordless telephone handset, ‘TEL-KU2’,

Japan’s electronics manufacturer Sanyo employee displays a cordless telephone handset, ‘TEL-KU2’, that’s equipped with a bone-conduction speaker. Bone conduction is the conduction of sound to the inner ear through the bones of the skull. The headset which converts electric signals into mechanical vibrations is ergonomically positioned on the temple and cheek and accordingly sends sound to the internal ear through the cranial bones. The telephone, developed for elderly people of poor hearing retails at 40,000 yen (Rs 15,600 approx)A cordless telephone handset, ‘TEL-KU2’,