Researchers Create Walking, Muscle-Powered Biobots

In today’s mildly squiggy but kind of cool news, we learn that researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created tiny robots that walk when current is applied to their bio-based muscular engines. The tiny robots can twitch their way across a surface or through a liquid.

“Biological actuation driven by cells is a fundamental need for any kind of biological machine you want to build,” said study leader Rashid Bashir in a release. “We’re trying to integrate these principles of engineering with biology in a way that can be used to design and develop biological machines and systems for environmental and medical applications. Biology is tremendously powerful, and if we can somehow learn to harness its advantages for useful applications, it could bring about a lot of great things.”

These machines use muscle cells to move. In 2012 researchers used rat heart cells to create a primitive version of this system but the cells kept firing, allowing little control. Now they are attempting to use real muscle cells that can be fired at will and they are also planning to at neurons that can control the rate of firing and direction of the robot. The centimeter-sized bots are made of soft hydrogels onto which the muscle has been stretched.

The researchers see many uses for the robots – besides the obvious one of scaring your friends with a weird muscular roboslug – including toxin neutralization and the improvement of biological control systems.

“Our goal is for these devices to be used as autonomous sensors. We want it to sense a specific chemical and move towards it, then release agents to neutralize the toxin, for example. Being in control of the actuation is a big step forward toward that goal,” said Bashir.

Source: Rackspace Wants To Take Itself Private

Rackspace — the publicly-listed enterprise cloud services company that competes against the likes of Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft and Google — has been in the spotlight after announcing in May that it has hired bankers to help consider offers to parter with or be acquired by another company. However, it could choose a third option: taking itself private.
Following the likes of Dell in turning away from public market accountability while it focuses on developing its business in a fast-changing tech world, we have heard from a source that Rackspace has been negotiating with a private equity firm to borrow capital for the deal, with a plan to make an official announcement as soon as this week (keep in mind that we’re hurtling to a public holiday in the U.S.).
“The pressures of being a public company are too much,” another source within the company noted.
A Rackspace spokesperson says the company does not comment on rumor or speculation. In other words, we have not been able to confirm what the source has told us.

NSA Was Authorised to Carry Out Surveillance on BJP in 2010: Report

America's top spy agency was authorised by a US court in 2010 to carry out surveillance on the BJP along with five other political organisations across the globe, including Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan Peoples Party, according to a classified document.
BJP figures in the list of foreign political parties along with Lebanon's Amal, the Bolivarian Continental Coordinator of Venezuela, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian National Salvation Front and the Pakistan Peoples Party for whom the National Security Agency (NSA) had sought permission to carry out surveillance, says the document made public by The Washington Post on Monday.
The document lists the 193 foreign governments as well as foreign factions and other entities that were part of a 2010 certification approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The list includes India.

Apple Reportedly Upgrading Siri In-House to Smarter Neural Network Design

Apple might be looking ahead to upgrade its Siri, the voice-based virtual-assistant, to a completely new level with its own home-brewed search engine based on the neural network architecture.
The Cupertino firm over the past few years is said to have hired a number of engineers and executives from Nuance, the speech recognition technology-developing firm that is confirmed to have developed Siri for Apple.
According to Wired, Larry Gillick, former VP of Research at Nuance, and Gunnar Evermann, former Chief Mobile Technology at Nuance have been hired by Apple, indicating that the firm might be planning something big for Siri.
Also, Alex Acero, who was previously associated with Microsoft's Cortana voice-based virtual-assistant, now also works for Apple.

HP Settles Shareholder Suit on Autonomy Takeover

Computer giant Hewlett-Packard said it has reached a settlement in a shareholder lawsuit over its 2011 acquisition of British software firm Autonomy.
The $10-billion deal led to the ouster of Leo Apotheker as chief executive of the US tech giant, and HP subsequently said it had discovered massive accounting irregularities which overvalued the British firm.
HP said in a statement late Monday it had settled the case with law firms representing shareholders, without disclosing any amounts to be paid. The settlement is subject to court approval.
Under the terms of the deal, HP said the plaintiffs "will assist HP in bringing claims" against Michael Lynch, Autonomy's former chief executive officer, and other former executives at the British company.
HP in 2012 asked US and British authorities to probe accounting issues at Autonomy as it reported a $5.5 billion writeoff in the value of the unit.