Word: humanoids
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years old. (Another set was found later.) Among the findings: a nearly intact skeleton that the anthropologists said belonged to an adult female who lived as recently as 18,000 years ago yet was only the size of a modern-day 6-year-old. Because the female skeleton looked humanoid rather than human and the brain size was small, the researchers concluded she was not a Pygmy?a short but otherwise normal version of Homo sapiens you still find in equatorial Africa and pockets of Southeast Asia?but a member of an entirely new species whom its discoverers named Homo...
...London's bustling South Bank, the WEEE Man has risen. The creation of designer Paul Bonomini, the 7-m-tall humanoid figure - which looks like a menacing mechanical skeleton escaped from some Tim Burton movie - weighs 3 tons and is made of 553 pieces of electrical and electronic waste, including 95 small household appliances (such as vacuum cleaners, toasters and irons), 55 larger consumer items (TVs, video and DVD players, camcorders), 35 pieces of computer and mobile-phone equipment, 12 washing machines, 10 refrigerators and six microwave ovens...
...hardest things to get a robot to do is walk on two legs, but nowadays bipedal is practically banal. The real trick is to give your humanoid a smooth, natural gait. The J4, above, JVC's 8-in. showpiece at a recent Tokyo trade show, proved it could walk a nice walk and kick a soccer ball to boot. It's controlled via Bluetooth. The Chroino, right--if we didn't know any better, we'd think it was Playmobil's tribute to Marvin the Martian--also boasts a more graceful stride, thanks to new SHIN-Walk technology that allows...
Mitsuo Kawato is fascinated with the brain--so he helped build one. The biophysics engineer and computer researcher led a team at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan, that spent five years constructing a humanoid equipped with artificial intelligence. Completed in 2001, the 6-ft. 2-in., 175-lb. robot was named Dynamic Brain, or DB for short. Says Kawato: "We built an artificial brain hoping that it'll help us understand the real one." DB doesn't have the friendly exterior of its cute entertainment-robot cousins. Its face is composed of just "eyes," made...
...took a robot to breathe life into a state dinner. In Prague, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi charmed guests with assistant envoy ASIMO, a Honda humanoid. Asimo paid tribute to Czech writer Karel Capek, who coined the term robot in his 1921 play R.U.R. The mechanical sidekick also danced and made a toast--in Czech--but revealed that he was too young to drink...