Space Station Sunday: B.E.A.M. Me Up!

Good afternoon, space fans!  It's been another amazing week outside the atmosphere.  Here's what was up!

Well, we know which module we want to record a space-rock album in.
(Image courtesy NASA.gov.)

Hear Hear! Army's New In-Ear Device Augments Soft Sounds; Levels Out Loud Ones

It's a hard thing to say that warfare has "improved" over the years, but at least the technology that keeps our soldiers safer and more prone to survival has certainly made leaps and bounds.  From 3-D printing new limbs for amputation patients to sending in drones for tough tasks, we're able to keep more soldiers alive to fight another day.  Now, we can offer something of a superpower to help solve a major sensory issue of wartime...

When you need all of your senses sharp, this makes perfect sense.
(Image courtesy soldiersystems.com.)

Halal Yeah: New Web Browser For Muslims Filters Out Impure Content

Sometimes it's tough to get old ideas to make sense alongside new ones.  In fact, many long-held views - particularly involving religion vs. modern computers - match up with the future about as well as trying to play a vinyl record on a cassette deck.  However, sometimes the past and the future can be reconciled for a greater ideal, where both mentalities can meet in the middle...

Why tempt the mighty wrath of Allah,
when you can browse in spiritual safety with Salam?
(Image courtesy themalaymailonline.com.)

Notes From The Brainframe: Scientists Work On "Mind-Reading Machine" To Sense Speech

Like time travel and the ability to vacation on the moon, mind reading has always been one hallmark of a most fascinating future.  Now, technology may be on its way to taking us there, at least as far as having our thoughts manifest into verbalized words, sans standard speech...

Huh.  That's fucking crazy.  I need another beer before I write this story.
Oops, sorry.  That was the internal monologue talking.
(Image courtesy dosmosis.blogspot.com.)

Space Station Sunday: 100,000 Laps And Still Lofty

Good afternoon, space fans!  It's been another stellar week in space.

Satellites Lite:  two little Cubesats head out to work in the atmosphere.
(Image courtesy NASA.gov.)

Tutorial: Introduction to SpriteKit in Swift

(Image courtesy developer.apple.com)

This is an introduction to a series of SpriteKit tutorials written in the Swift programming language. (We will release the entire series over the course of several weeks). At the top level, this tutorial will be broken up into seven sections. Each section will be comprised of several lessons. For our first section we will focus on the fundamental techniques for working with SpriteKit content. Since sprites are the fundamental building blocks used to create the majority of a games scene’s content we will look at that next. We will then learn how to apply actions to sprites to be able to move around in a game scene. In section four we will expand on the basic concepts just learned by delving deeper into the concept of a node tree and ways to build our game scenes. We will then look at advanced scene processing techniques. In the sixth section we will learn how to simulate physics on the bodies within our scenes. And lastly we will discuss SpriteKit best practices.

Ultra-Modern Art: World's First Software-Generated Art Competition Produces Striking Results

Yesterday we talked about how robots are coming for your menial-labor jobs.  But what about artistry?  Surely, even with robot poets, robot "dreams", and robot literary aids, there's no way that a computer could become autonomous enough to actually paint something that we'd recognize, right?

Wrong, puny human.  They can out-art us, too.

Could a robo-Banksy be tagging the cities of the future?
Or will they be more refined, such as a Van Gogh-bot?
(Artwork by Banksy.  Image courtesy businessinsider.com.)