New video of Boston Dynamics BigDog robot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dog

Upside-Down-Ternet

How one geek gave his thieving neighbors a whole new Internet experience with the Upside-Down-Ternet.

Upwardly mobile trailer park

Empire Strikes Backyard: Legos Imperial Walker

Via Wired:

In geek heaven, everything will be made of Legos, and George Lucas will be forced to remake episodes 1 through 3 until he gets them right. Here on Earth, you can come pretty close to paradise with the new Motorized Walking AT-AT. Powered by six AA batteries, the brick-bodied Imperial Walker strides forward and backward and moves its head up and down just like in the movies. Its rotating laser canons are capable of destroying entire rebel bases, while the massive feet stomp on Alliance soldiers and Stormtroopers alike with a cold, unyielding robot logic that knows neither pity nor malice. The Walker comes with an AT-AT pilot, a Snowtrooper, the hated General Maximilian Veers, and a wee Luke Skywalker — a tiny grappling line lets him dangle from the giant’s belly and storm the cockpit with his lightsaber. It’s the closest thing to nerdvana this side of the planet Hoth.

50% of people on Earth are now connected via mobile

From Treo Today:

What’s the difference between yesterday and today? Nothing much, if you consider it on a day by day basis. Just 26 years after the first cellular (mobile) network was launched, we have reached 3.3 billion mobile subscriptions. That’s half the population of the world, many of whom never had any form of telecommunications just ten years ago. Today there are mobile networks in 224 countries.

The first mobile network was launched way back in August 1981 in Sweden and Norway. The network was based on the NMT-450 (Nordic Mobile Telephony) standard, and the first mobile phone was the Mobira Senator 450 by Nokia. The Mobira Senator 450 weighed 10 kilos! Think about that the next time you say a Nokia phone is “heavy”.

O.K.? Okay!

Okay/O.K. has an unexpectedly colorful history for such a simple word, springing so often from my lips and fingertips. It first appears in the northeast U.S. in the early-middle 19th century. Mostly the fault of journalists and politicians (surprise, surprise), and their wordplay antics, this word spread through our culture to eventually infect me and everyone I know.

According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, okay comes from “oll korrect,” a conscious misspelling of “all correct,” coined by Boston journalists in the late 19th century.

Termites aren’t ants after all – they’re roaches

Weird, weird and strange. That’s what I say to this.

Insect experts at the [London] Natural History Museum reveal that termites, the creatures famous for building enormous mounds and eating houses, are in fact cockroaches.

Termites have long baffled scientists as to their place in the natural world and their relationship with other insects. Although they are part of a large ’superorder’ that includes cockroaches, they were classified separately in a group called Isoptera .

This new research puts termites into the same group as cockroaches, (Blattodea). Termites are now classed as a new family of cockroaches called Termitidae . Isoptera is no longer valid.

Social insects

Termite diet, social behaviour and ecology are very different from their kitchen infesting cockroach counterparts. Confusingly also known as ‘white ants’, termites show many behavioural similarities with ants, wasps and bees as they are ’social’ insects. They produce offspring to carry out specialised tasks such as foraging, mound building, defence or reproduction.

DNA analysis

Dr Paul Eggleton, Daegan Inward and George Beccaloni carried out the most comprehensive DNA study to date . They studied 107 different species of termites, cockroaches and mantids, another group of animals thought to be closely related.

‘The key change in the termites’ evolution from their cockroach ancestors seems to be when they developed the ability to eat wood ,’ said Paul, Museum termite expert, ‘they gradually lost their characteristic egg case, and some of their offspring became sterile workers and soldiers’.

Changing appearance and behaviour

‘It may seem surprising that termites are actually social cockroaches since they look so different, but it is not unusual for animals to change in appearance as their behaviour evolves over time. Perhaps the most famous social insects, ants, evolved from solitary predatory wasps.’

Dr George Beccaloni, the Museum’s cockroach expert adds, ‘It is very rare that such a major change is proposed to how a group of animals is classified by biologists. If our findings are correct the textbooks will need to be rewritten.’

The paper Death of an order: a comprehensive molecular phylogenetic study confirms that termites are eusocial cockroaches is published online in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.