ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from julienorvaisas] Robonaut 2 to meddle in Super Bowl pregame [CNET] – [Before they throw it into outer space, they'll test this bot first, to see how it does in the challenging atmosphere of a FOX Sports studio. The description of the thing sounds like it could fit any one of a number of the Packers' offensive line!] NASA's experimental humanoid bot took a break from training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston earlier this week to tape a segment with Fox Sports analyst Howie Long. The 330-pound R2 has a torso with a head, two arms, two dexterous humanlike hands complete with four fingers and one thumb each, and its own Twitter account. When it's not sending tweets or pondering football stats, it's learning skills that eventually will be uploaded to its twin, which is already packed in special casing aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Once inside the ISS' Destiny orbiting laboratory, the robot will be tested by engineers to see how it operates in microgravity and the station's radiation and electromagnetic interference environments.

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