Technology

Kanye West performs at Kanye West Lollapalooza in Chile, on April 3, 2011. Credit: Rodrigo Ferrari/Super 45 Música Independiente/Flickr On a bet from peers in his high school programming club, a teenager in West Virginia taught himself to build an artificial intelligence program that can rap like Kanye West, according to news reports. Seventeen-year-old Robbie Barrat thought that artificial intelligence (AI) could accomplish tasks better than humans, and his high school programming club told him to prove it, reported Quartz . Using open-source code and 6,000 Kanye West lines, Barrat built a neural network that could mimic the superstar rapper. Barrat completed the project in a week and showed the program to his peers at their next club meeting, according to Quartz. It took one afternoon to write most of the code, Barrat said, but a few more days to optimize the AI's results. The program can now write original material a...

An artificial Venus flytrap can open and then close on cue, just like its namesake in nature, according to a new study. Scientists said this flexible gripping device could give soft robots a way to grasp and release objects autonomously, without the need for programming or computer-controlled parts. "If you want to make something intelligent, oftentimes it's made using computers and some control circuitry that incorporates sensors and detectors. You have a system with many different pieces that have to be integrated to make the device work," said the study’s lead researcher Arri Priimagi, an associate professor of chemistry and bioengineering at Tampere University of Technology in Finland. Priimagi and his colleagues described their device in a study published online today (May 23) in the journal Nature Communications . Although the device could serve in a range of applications, from biomedical manipulators to microchip-assembly lines to wareho...

A material with random irregularities scatters an incident light wave into all directions. Credit: TU Wien Once thought of as the province of only "Star Trek" or "Harry Potter," cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a "beam of invisibility," according to a new study. Theoretically, most "invisibility cloaks" would work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to obstruct them. Previous work found that cloaking devices that redirect other kinds of waves, such as sound waves, are possible as well. But the new study's  researchers, from at the Technical University of Vienna, have developed a different strategy to render an object invisible — using a beam of invisibility. [Now You See It: 6 Tales of ...