A Friendly Robot Barista


Our morning cup of coffee is not a luxury, but an essential barrier to the rest of the brutal world that is rushing towards us like a cavalry charge when our alarm clock sounds the advance as the sun comes up on a less than ready foot soldier in the battle for the new day.

As we’re never likely, nor should we expect, to have some faithful retainer perspiring over a hot espresso machine before we emerge from our pile of uncoordinated bedclothes to the new world order, wouldn’t it be nice to have a friendly robot barista hard at work?

A prototype is out there in the great city of Seattle, but it is plowing a lone furrow, just waiting to be cloned for the benefit of humanity. Zipwhip, a company that provides a web-texting portal, has manufactured a friendly robot barista that can be urged into activity by punching out a text message from a mobile phone (1,2). Unfortunately, it’s not mine.

Zipwhip say that they are not planning to flood the world with this very desirable robot, but to keep it sequestered away from the light of day in the depths of their Seattle boardroom. They have made the control code open source though, so some engineer can start to do the cloning job.

The prototype makes beautiful coffee whenever it is sent an appropriate text. It’s rumored that it is very even tempered and doesn’t require a smiley face at the end of a text, but will battle phlegmatically on regardless of the sentiment expressed about your espresso.

There is a bonus which is a must have for those living in busy households. It has the ability to write messages (with your name of course) on the foam with a printer loaded with food dye. Perhaps we can get little patriotic flags on appropriate holidays.

  1. http://blog.zipwhip.com/category/geeky-stuff/
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18166907


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Flies Flying-By


Flying about in a crowded airspace is difficult enough, but the biggest problem is landing. Not just anywhere mark you, but on a precise spot that is coming up fast and is often moving. Of course, birds do it and bees do it, but so do fruit flies.

Fruit flies aren’t very large and have to rely on their in-built guidance systems to reliably work on the fly.  Van Breugel and Dickinson, in the current edition of the Journal Of Experimental Biology have been scrutinizing the success and failure of fruit fly landing sequences with a combination of high-speed photographs and 3-D tracking software (1).

The touchdown sequence commences with a sharp turn towards the target and a deceleration that the authors explain is governed by the growth of the image size on the fly’s retina. The go/no-go decision is made at the point that the target image takes up an include angle of about 33 degrees of the fly’s vision field.

If the decision is go – the deceleration sequence continues until the target image angle has increased to about 60 degrees and then the landing gear is deployed. On touch down the feet grasp the target. From gear deployment to touchdown was about 50 ms – pretty fast reactions are a must.

If the no-go decision is called for, the fly’s fly-by procedure is a sharp turn away and off to another target. This occurred in 1065 attempts out of 1242-recorded measurements.

Flies flying-by may have been due to too fast an approach or maybe just the fickleness of the fly. They did record some crash landings when flies came in too fast and failed to abort, but none included any fatalities.

  1. http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/11/1783


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Does Your Cell Phone Disrupt Your Sleep Or Is It Just The Messages?


More and more we are using our cell phones. We may call them “smart,” but they rarely are with the effort we put into our tweets and Facebook updates. Some years ago the idea that they were the cause of cancer was bandied about and studies were done, but no smoking gun was found.

Not that it would have made much difference, as our phones are as addictive as cigarettes. Personally I feel that it’s a pity that manners don’t demand that we go outside to use them in the same manner as we demand of smokers. I find second-hand cell phone listening as irritating as second-hand smoking.

However, a new concern has surfaced and that is does you cell phone disrupt your sleep? This question was in danger perturbing the sleep of Mohler et al so they decided to sort things out with a longitudinal study, which they published last week in the Public Library of Science (1).

After a rigorous exclusion of people with a strong reason to fall asleep such as shift workers or people taking sleeping pills, they settled on a group of 955 participants who had similar exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic radiation and checked their sleep patterns at the start and end of a year. From this group, they picked out 120 individuals for close scrutiny.

The results? Well, they could find no effect of the exposure to radio frequency radiation from cell phones and cell phone towers on the disruption of sleep patterns.


There is always a caveat though. Leaving your cell phone on when you have a large cohort of texters and twitterers might well result in a different experience, but for now we can all rest easy and get a good night’s rest.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037455

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Camilla, The Space Chicken


After her successful 90-minute flight up into the stratosphere last March, Camilla is looking to spruce up her wardrobe. Feathers, intelligently designed or not – whichever is your preference, weren’t designed for space flight.

She has a penchant for matching knitted hats and suits, and has a handy sized wardrobe knitted by fans in the US. However, her fashion sense is changing and she has stretched out the wing of friendship to Europe in its time of economic turbulence.

Mrs. Sue Drage from middle-England has been commissioned by NASA to turn out a new outfit in short order. She has been working hard for a year to get that perfect tailored fit. The BBC quotes her as saying that “-they thought it was a good way of putting Britain on the map” (1), but although, admittedly, Britain isn’t one of the larger countries, she is on all the world maps that I have. Perhaps, I should send them one of mine.

The real breakthrough, though, is that the new outfit will be knitted out of old plastic bags. If this new fashion statement catches on, the world may just have solved its plastic bag problem, but that may just be Camilla’s flight of fancy.

She will be wearing it today as she has her current mission on now. She is up, up and away to study the non-annual annular eclipse and we wait with baited breath for her pictures.

The cost of a knitted to measure outfit of plastic bags? Well, that hasn’t been revealed, but we may speculate that it was chickenfeed compared to NASA’s overall budget. We wish all success to Camilla, the space chicken, on her current mission and to Mrs. Drage with her knitting program.

If it turns out that Camilla is well protected from the vagaries of space flight, perhaps she can knit one for Mr. Cameron to protect him from the vagaries of a difficult Parliament – after all, he did start his premiership as a very green prime minister, with bicycling to work and a windmill on his roof.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-18102288



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