Word: robots
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boast such extravagant features as an aquarium containing a giant stingray, artwork on the walls that can be changed electronically, and heat-detecting switches that turn on lights when a person walks into the room. The 2,500-sq.- ft. silver-and-white suite even comes equipped with a robot named Ursula who acts as a servant...
...what they looked like. Pynchon, by contrast, somehow had the foresight to hide from the beginning; the only photographs of him in circulation date from his late adolescence. As a result, he resembles, in his freedom, an apparition he includes in Vineland, namely " 'Chuck,' the world's most invisible robot," an android that operates on an erratic airline between Los Angeles and Honolulu. "How invisible," the plane's p.a. system announces, "you might wonder, is 'Chuck'? Well, he's been walking around among you, all through this whole flight! Yes, and now he could be right next...
...coffee break when you have a request? Not the proprietor of a compact-disc outlet that opened last week in Minneapolis. The clerk behind the counter boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of the 5,400-item inventory, and never leaves the store. The attendant can't, because it is a robot -- the first to run its own shop...
Invented by Robert Cahlander and David Carroll of the Robot Aided Manufacturing Center in Red Wing, Minn., the robot has a 400-lb. arm that dispenses discs, makes change and processes credit-card purchases. Its computer brain also tracks inventory and cues up tunes for customers who punch their requests on a keyboard. The designers may franchise an army of the devices. Behind every great robot, of course, there is a human -- in this case a worker who drops by once a week to replenish the stock and collect the receipts. And maybe, says Carroll, "clean the glass with...
...ultimate fantasy of the miniaturists is tiny robot "assemblers" that could operate at the atomic level, building finished goods one molecule at a time. This is the far-reaching goal of an embryonic discipline called nanotechnology, so named because it would require manipulating objects , measured in billionths of a meter (nanometers). In Engines of Creation, the nanotechnologist's bible, K. Eric Drexler envisions a world in which everything from locomotives to cheeseburgers is assembled from molecular raw materials, much as proteins are created from their amino-acid building blocks by the machinery of a living cell...