Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, The Pleo robotic camosaur has reemerged, though without the help of dino-DNA. In a lengthy interview on Robotsrule, Ugobe founder and now COO of Innvo Labs Derek Dotson said Pleo is for sale again at Innvo's web site. What's more surprising is that Innvo's Pleo is not simply an inventory clear-out item. Dotson told Robotsrule that there are actually a number of improvements, including better paint, more durable skin, biodegradable packaging and better battery chargers. Innvo is also planning on improving future Pleos, making better use of its camera and opening up a processing bottleneck so the robot companion can do more with its existing sensors.

One thing that hasn't change, yet, is the pricing. The adorable bot is still $349. Innvo will want to get to work on lowering that price if they don't want to Pleo to fade into extinction.

Stanford University has teamed up with Volkswagen to build two driverless cars--an Audi TTS and a VW Passat Wagon--and hopes to break a few records along the way.

So far the Audi TTS has already achieved an unofficial speed record for an autonomous car at 130 miles per hour, as Engadget reports. Stanford is hoping that the car will soon complete the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, a nine mile race with 156 turns--all by itself.

Meanwhile, Stanford's Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory has developed a Volkswagen Passat "valet system" that handles tough parallel parking, as the report said. Videos of each after the break.

Dean Kamen may be best known for the Segway personal mobility device, but the prolific genius actually holds 440 U.S. and International patents, ranging from the iBOT wheelchair that can climb stairs to the Luke robotic prosthetic arm to a water purification system.

Last night at its annual Breakthrough Awards, Popular Mechanics presented Kamen with a leadership award. I was in attendance, and many of Kamen's major inventions were on display, including the Segway, the Luke Prosthetic Arm, and a new Coke machine that mixes over 100 different drinks on the fly. I also saw Kamen's water purification system, the Slingshot.

The Slingshot was actually a working model, so in Kamen's honor, I decided to drink some of the purified water. According to one report, "Slingshot will work with all kinds of unclean water, even water crawling with microorganisms and parasites, even ocean water, even water that doesn't come from your tap." Mmm, yummy.

Please note the color of the original source water, and that I did not fall over dead after drinking the resulting cleaned-up water. More photos from the PM event after the jump.

It's getting cold outside, and soon your nimble fingers will be covered in warm, snuggly gloves that keep your digits warm but make it virtually impossible to navigate your iPhone. In fact, any capacitive touch-screen is pretty much beyond your reach (resistive works fine, thank you very much).

So you take off a glove and live with the cold, so you can touch your iPhone and virtually any one of the other 400 million capacitive touch screen devices you encounter--ATMs, gas stations, checkout counters, and the like.

On the other hand, you could simply use TouchTec's new nano-technology-impregnated gloves and never remove them for a touch screen again (unless you want to). Check out my "hands-in" report in the video; more details after the jump.

There's nothing quite like having a meal with geniuses. And Popular Mechanics gave me that opportunity today, at a lunch held in honor of its Breakthrough Awards 2009 winners.

In a panel during the lunch, PM's Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs (far right) introduced three of the honorees, each of who gave us a précis of his or her winning project. 

William Borucki (far left) is the science principal investigator of NASA's Kepler mission, whose aim is to find habitable planets.  As he explained it, there are a series of steps humanity needs to take in order to expand into the galaxy; first, we have to determine whether other "earths" are frequent or rare. If they are common, we need to determine more closely their habitability. Then, Borucki said, "our children decide what happens."

Mobile phone and game device owners could soon be enjoying 3D images with no glasses required, according to an announcement from 3M. The Scotch Tape giant has created a sequential 3D optical film that allows for true auto stereoscopic 3D images on mobile phones, gaming products, and other handheld devices.

The film is integrated into the backlight module and requires only one LCD at a 120-Hz refresh rate. Integration is simple for device makers, with the standard optical film stack being replaced by reflective film, a custom light guide, and 3D film. The result is that left and right images are focused sequentially into the viewer's eyes, enabling a full-resolution display.

This 3D technology will be on display at the Korea Electronics show, October 13 to 16.

Microsoft's hardware research team today unveiled what it has deemed "Mouse 2.0": five mouse prototypes aimed at taking advantage of the push toward multi-touch computing, jumpstarted with the introduction of Windows 7. The five mice are still in early concept stages. Each takes a different approach to multi-touch through a complete rehaul of the standard desktop mouse.

All five designs were demoed in a video released online today by the research team. The first mouse highlighted was the FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection), a curved multi-touch design. Microsoft explains: "[The mouse] applies the principle of Frustrated Total Internal Reflection to illuminate a user's fingers, and uses a camera to track multiple points of touch on its curved translucent surface."

The Orb Mouse, meanwhile, is aimed largely at gamers. The demo in the video showcased the way it interacts with a first-person shooter. Says Microsoft: "Equipped with an internal camera and a source of diffused infrared illumination, it can track the user's hand across the [entirety] of its hemispherical surface."

The Cap Mouse is designed for augmenting GUI features. "[The mouse] uses a matrix of capacitive touch-sensing electrodes to track the position of the user's fingertips along its surface."

Arguably the coolest of the bunch, the Side Mouse requires minimal contact with the user's hand. Rather it uses the company's proprietary SideSight technology to detect finger and hand movements around the device.

The final mouse, the Arty Mouse, is a bizarre little peripheral aimed at 3D manipulation. Says Microsoft: "[The mouse is] equipped with three optical mouse sensors to track the individual movements of the wrist, thumb, and index finger."

You can watch the full low-budget video over at the Microsoft Research site.

One thing no one's ever said about CableCard: how easy it is to install the darn thing. In fact, only a tiny fraction of the millions of CableCards currently in use are plugged into computers. That's because CableCards can only be used in "cable-ready PCs," meaning a certain class of new systems sold by manufacturers and blessed by Cable Labs. Enthusiasts couldn't build their own, nor could they add the tuners to existing computers. At least, not until yesterday, when Microsoft announced that the regulators of CableCard will decrease the severity of digital rights management from the television tuner and widen the pool of PCs that can take advantage of them.

Great news, but how will you, an enthusiast, ever get your hands on the darn things? According to Ken Plotkin, CEO of leading tuner manufacturer Hauppauge Computer Works, his company will sell a TV tuner at retail by the end of the year. This probably means that other manufacturers will be quick to join; watch for CableCard tuners from AVerMedia and DViCo, and the crazy multichannel CableCard from Ceton Corp, which Engadget recently spent some quality hands-on time with.

Until then, keep in mind that you can always install one of the OEM units yourself, provided you can track one down on eBay.
Image © Ben Drawbaugh/Engadget.

So, watcha' running there on your desktop? Quad core? Octo core? Got that liquid cooler pumping away? Please. You are so behind the curve. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (they're what sits between the US Department of Commerce and the Weather Service) has just announced their latest big iron supercomputer. Mere mortals will quiver!

The new supercomputers, based on IBM Power 575 Systems, are four times faster than the previous system, with the ability to make 69.7 trillion calculations per second. Higher computation speed allows meteorologists to rapidly refine and update severe weather forecasts as dangerous weather develops and threatens U.S. communities. Billions of bytes of weather observations are fed into the system each day, including temperature, wind, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, and other oceanographic and satellite information taken from the ground, air, sea and space.

Samsung has announced that it has developed the first commercial LTE modem for cell phones, according to Engadget. The company said that the device is the "first LTE modem that complies with the latest standards of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)."

The modem, referred to as the Kalmia for now, will support download speeds approaching 100Mbps and upload speeds in the range of 50Mbps, all within the 20MHz frequency band, according to the report--good enough for everything from Web surfing to gaming or even HD movie streaming.

We're still a ways out from LTE network deployment in the U.S., but it's good to know that when the time comes, Samsung will be ready.

Considering the big fight to get augmented reality apps onto the iPhone, the concept of "Terminator-style" AR contact lenses seems little more than a pipedream, but that's exactly the technology laid out by Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnology expert at the University of Washington, in Seattle--references to killer robots from the future and all.

"These lenses don't give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet," writes Parviz. "But we have built a lens with one LED, which we've powered wirelessly with RF. What we've done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology."

Parviz goes on to detail the possibilities of such a technology, which, he points out, even in a simple state could be rather useful,

Even a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing or be incorporated as an indicator into computer games. With more colors and resolution, the repertoire could be expanded to include displaying text, translating speech into captions in real time, or offering visual cues from a navigation system. With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.

Killer robots from the future rejoice.

Disney smash! Entertainment's most lovable media conglomerate has added yet another brand to its portfolio. During an investment call today, the company announced plans to purchase Marvel, the comic book publisher turned entertainment powerhouse that has brought the world such cherished pop cultural icons as Spider-man, the X-Men, and the Hulk.

The deal values Marvel at $50 a share, for a whopping sum of $4 billion. Said Disney CEO Robert Iger:

This transaction combines Marvel's strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney's creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories. Ike Perlmutter and his team have done an impressive job of nurturing these properties and have created significant value. We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney.

Disney will become the owner of Marvel's 5,000 plus characters under the deal. Perlmutter, Marvel's CEO, will continue to oversee the Marvel properties and will "work directly with Disney's global lines of business to build and further integrate Marvel's properties," according to Market Watch.

Both Disney and Marvel's boards have approved the deal.

The £30 million supercomputer in Exeter, Devon was designed to predict the weather. It turns out it the massive machine may also be able to change the climate. The UK-based Met Office, which owns the machine revealed recently that it may be one of the biggest sources of pollution in the country.

The machine requires 1.2 megawatts to run. That, as The Daily Mail points out, is enough energy to power a whopping 1,000 homes. The Met Office outputs a mind-boggling 12,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, 75-percent of which can be attributed to the supercomputer.

A spokesman for the company called the machine "vital" to British meteorology, adding, "We recognize that it is big, but it is also necessary. We couldn't do what we do without it. We would be throwing ourselves back into the dark ages of weather forecasting if we withdrew our reliance on supercomputing, it's as simple as that."

Nearly three years after its first appearance, at CES 2007, the Powermat Wireless Charging Mat ($99.99 list) is finally set to hit stores on October 4th. The mat, available in both a Portable and a more elegant Home model, will include a universal Powercube in the box, including 8 power tips for compatibility with popular handheld devices. Unlike other "wireless" charging devices, such as the Wildcharge TouchCharge, which requires direct contact with a conductive surface, the Powermat uses inductive technology, which does not require a physical connection.

"Star Trek" had one of the largest franchise presences on the Comic Con showroom floor, thanks in no small part to the recent cinematic reboot of the perennial favorite sci-fi series. It's a resurgence that Roddenberry Productions is more than happy to capitalize on.

Run by "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry's son, Rod, the company has a number of projects aimed at prolonging "the Roddenberry vision." The company was largely present to promote its new sci-fi comic "Days Missing," and, interestingly, the Roddenberry Dive Team, which explore a largely undiscovered frontier.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Rod for a few minutes to discuss the company and learned, among other interesting things, that Gene's son didn't really watch "Star Trek" growing up, and was instead more interested in action series like "Starsky and Hutch." "I think it was over my head," he admitted.

Rod enjoys the series now, of course, having recognized that, ultimately, the show was more an examination of contemporary social issues than just regular old sci-fi. And now the company that he's taken over from his parents is focused on attempting to maintain that legacy.