berkeley

Here's another offering from Boston Dynamics' zoomorphic line: the RiSE V3, a multi-legged, beaver-tailed robot that can skitter along the ground, shimmy up a pole, and then quietly cling there and stare at you.

The legs are powered by a pair of electric motors and equipped with small surgical needle micro-claws, which allow the unit to dig into and climb up textured, convex, cylindrical structures at a rate of 21 centimeters per second, or just under a half a mile an hour (PDF).

"RiSE V3 is the first general-purpose legged machine to achieve this vertical climbing speed," … Read more

Intel announced two new board members Thursday as Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, resigned from the board.

The chipmaker said Thursday that John J. Donahoe, CEO of eBay, and Frank D. Yeary, vice chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, have been elected to serve on Intel's board of directors.

Concurrently, Intel announced that Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo, is retiring from the board.

Intel issued the following information about the two newly elected board members:

Donahoe, 48, has served as eBay president and CEO since 2008. He joined eBay in 2005 and oversaw the company'… Read more

The University of California at Berkeley's RAD Lab, short for Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems, has been studying the technologies and logistics of on-demand computing at high scale for about three years.

According to a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, the lab is focused on studying large-scale utility-computing infrastructures. With the backing of many of the largest companies in enterprise computing, many have been waiting anxiously to see what advances they contribute to cloud computing.

On February 12, the lab published a paper titled "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing" (PDF), authored by Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia. Intended as a broad road map for the future of cloud computing, the paper makes recommendations about everything from business models to hardware design to required software infrastructure.

The paper begins by setting a definition of cloud computing that will be considered controversial by many, as it is firmly in the "there is no cloud computing inside enterprise data centers" camp:… Read more

What is a Macintosh?

After 25 years on the market, it's a good question, since someone with no knowledge of computers looking at, say, today's MacBook Pro, would not necessarily know that it evolved from 1984's original 128K Mac.

But evolve it did, and on the 25th anniversary of the release of that original machine (which is this Saturday), one might indeed wonder what hereditary DNA, if any, today's Macs retain from their much more humble ancestors.

The answer is some, but not that much, at least not when it comes to specific identifiable hardware features, … Read more

When consulting online traffic maps to form your plan of attack for hitting the streets, how often do you suspect that the red, yellow, and green colors indicating the various speeds of traffic flow are inaccurate, show outdated data, or that they'll change by the time you get there?

The concept of online traffic maps makes a lot of sense, but until they're foolproof, users will always be skeptical. A new collaborative project between UC Berkeley and Nokia is trying to provide mapped traffic data with more accuracy than ever before. How? By tapping into the ubiquity of … Read more

Today, your eyes might not deceive you. But soon, they very well might.

Some extremely clever people at Cal (the one at Berkeley) have created a material that can control the direction in which visible light travels.

Apparently, this mystery material, some details of which might be revealed in Science and Nature magazines this week (People and OK weren't interested), deflects light around an object as perceived by an insouciant eye.

"In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock," the leader of the Cal researchers, Xiang Zhang, told London's Times newspaper.

In essence, you are looking at, say, the Empire State Building or a John Malkovich-piloted Boeing 747 full of nasty missiles. If these objects are coated with the material, your eyes will see light from behind them, hence creating the illusion that the object in question simply isn't there. I know that there are terrible consequences that may leap to mind in these examples.

For the more technically-minded amongst you, I can tell you that the material the scientists created had to have elements engineered to within 0.00000066 of a meter. This appears to be in a realm that might make wafers suddenly feel ridiculously overweight.… Read more

If you reel in a small sub instead of a rainbow trout from the Sacramento River this summer, don't call Homeland Security.

It belongs to a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley trying to learn more about the river currents in the delta.

The researchers are working with propelled 4-foot-long submarines and floating drifters equipped with GPS-receivers for positioning, GSM-modules for communication, and sensors inside for recording temperature, salinity, and currents.

"We are prototyping an infrastructure and testing it in the delta," said Professor Alexander Bayen, who leads the team at UC Berkeley'… Read more

It was a search for the essence of things that lead to the memristor, says UC Berkeley professor Leon Chua.

This week, HP Labs announced it had made a memristor, or memory resistor, a fundamental circuit element first theorized by Chua decades ago. If they become commercially practical to make, memristors could lead to very dense, energy-efficient memory chips that don't cost much because they don't need much silicon. A memristor has a variable resistance; as a result, memristors can "remember" how much charge was applied to it. (See here for more on HP's memristor.) … Read more

Update July 19, 2008: Escape from Berkeley is now scheduled for Oct. 10-13, 2008.

If you're a regular reader of Geek Gestalt, but not of its sister blog, Green Tech, I thought I'd point you to an entry I just posted there about what sounds like one heck of a cool event scheduled for this summer.

The so-called Escape from Berkeley race will task contestants with getting their non-petroleum-based fuel vehicles from the famously liberal Bay Area city to the famously outrageous Sin City, Las Vegas, over the July 4 weekend.

Part Burning Man, part Power Tool Drag Races, … Read more