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Watch a Boston Dynamics robot herd sheep in New Zealand
New Zealand-based robotics company Rocos shared a video of Boston Dynamics' Spot herding sheep across grassy pastures.
Facial recognition software can sense when a sheep is in pain
Animals can't tell us when they're in pain, so owners and veterinarians have to rely on other cues to help treat animals in discomfort. But determining that amount of pain might have just gotten easier: Researchers at the University of Cambridge used facial recognition software to figure out the amount of pain a sheep is in simply by looking at it. When a sheep is hurting, it makes certain predictable facial expressions. It's so reliable, in fact, that scientists recently introduced the Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale (SPFES) to easily determine the amount of pain a sheep feels. However, training humans to read these facial expressions and tics is time consuming; that's where the computer comes in.
Dolly the sheep's clones are healthy, thank you
When Dolly the cloned sheep fell victim to premature aging, lung disease and osteoarthritis, that triggered many fears. Is cloning safe? Would her fellow clones also meet an early end? Apparently, you can relax. A University of Nottingham study shows that four of Dolly's genomic clones (Daisy, Debbie, Denise and Dianna) are healthy, with no conditions that suggest they're aging too quickly. Some showed early signs of osteoarthritis, but that's normal for their advanced age. In short: cloning, if all goes well, is safe.
Research spat turns a GM lamb with jellyfish DNA into lunch
There's a scandale playing out at a genetic research facility that caused a valuable lab sheep to end up as someone's gigot d'agneau dinner. France's National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) has been breeding sheep that are genetically modified with a florescent jellyfish gene to aid heart researchers. Unfortunately, a lamb called "Ruby" ended up at the slaughterhouse and on someone's assiette, possibly with a different, more minty jelly. Worse yet, it appears that the incident happened not by accident, but because of some kind of professional feud that escalated way out of control.
Goat MMO Simulator boasts one level more than World of Warcraft
Few moments in MMO history have been as pivotal and groundbreaking as what we are witness to today. For we, the humble gamers of the year 2014, are about to embark on an adventure that makes every online effort to date look like E.T. for the Atari 2600. As of later this week, Goat Simulator will become an MMO (simulator). The inexplicably bizarre sandbox hit is preparing to roll out a free DLC patch that will have one more level than that "other" MMO. With 101 levels, dozens of quests, five classes (including Microwave), and "factional warfare between goats and sheep," the newly christened Goat MMO Simulator will take the zany gameplay to the nth degree. Don't believe us? We have the video proof after the jump as well as 500 incredulous comments down below (commenters, please don't let us down on this after we vouched for you here).
Sony recruits sheep to film the Tour de France
When watching a gang of cyclists chase someone in a yellow jersey (aka, the Tour de France) we're used to seeing the action from bike- or car-mounted cameras. But we've all come away disappointed, never truly knowing the tournament from the ovine point of view (some say, the only point of view for cycling). To tackle this, Sony has kitted out a flock of five from Harewell Hall, Harrogate with Action Cams so they can grab grass-roots scenes of the race. The publicity stunt might not result in world-class footage, but it does mean we get to tick "gallery of camera-wearing sheep" off the Engadget bucket list.
Prototype heart monitor collar could let sheep text their shepherd, tattle on creeping wolves
It's easy to imagine the lonely Swiss shepherd casually texting his pals during a long day in the field, but reading an SMS from his flock? More possible then you might think. A recent trial in Switzerland outfitted 10 sheep with heart monitoring collars and submitted them to a simulated wolf attack, causing their heart rate to jump from 60 / 80 BPM to 225. The team behind the experiment hope to pair the significant change in heart rate with a future device that releases a predator deterrent while simultaneously sending a text message to the local shepherd. Complete prototypes are being prepped for a 2013 trial in Switzerland and France, where wolf attacks are on the rise. The devices hopes to offer owners of smaller flocks an affordable alternative to keeping a sheepdog. [Image credit: Shutterstock]
Alt-week 7.14.2012: Bleeping sheep and ATLAS art
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. While there might not quite have been the epic science news that we had last week, that doesn't mean that there isn't plenty going on in the world of Alt. In this installment we get to see how CERN tricks out its offices, how one farmer tries to keep his flock, and learn about how the military will be high-tailing around the planet in just a few years. This is alt-week.
Minecraft 1.1 update adds languages, eggs and regenerative sheep
While Minecraft Pocket Edition players are still waiting for their very first update, the gravy train of newness for Minecraft classic players continues to plow mercilessly into the future. Version 1.1, which should already be live by the time you're reading this, includes bug fixes, new language options and eggs that allow you to grow pigs (and presumably other creatures). In addition, sheep now have the ability to regrow their wool by eating grass, greatly decreasing the amount of sheep you'll need to grow in those eggs. Man, that's a sentence I never thought I'd have to write again. You can see everything in action in the video above, produced by H.A.T. Films.
Flameseeker Chronicles: PAX 2011 travel diary
Welcome to my own version of post-holiday letdown. Just like last year, PAX is over and I'm a little sad. I'm dead tired, my feet are killing me, and I'm dreading trying to organize and pack the chaos of my hotel room, but I wish it were last Friday morning again. I had meetings that took me all over the show floor during the three days of PAX, but of course my downtime was all about Guild Wars 2: standing in line for demo time, checking out what panels I could, and chatting with the development team. Today's Flameseeker Chronicles is what I can now call my annual PAX travel diary, so hit the jump and I'll catch you all up on PAX, ArenaNet style!
The Daily Grind: How important is uniqueness to you?
When it comes to clinging to one's uniqueness, I'm reminded of that classic line from Monty Python's Life of Brian in which huge crowd shouts in unison "We are all different!" and a tiny voice follows that up with "I'm not... ." The truth is that while we as people are unique, there are more similarities between us than we'd often like to admit. This is even more true when you get into MMOs, where character creation options are usually limited to a handful of races, classes and faces, and where everyone is a hero just like you doing all the same quests and activities and world-saving. Because of this, there's a tendency to rebel and forge a unique voice in the crowd, even if it's just a different look, a bizarre name, an odd personality or a piece of loot that's so extraordinarily rare that you're most likely the only one possessing it. We want to be known and remembered for something other than "being the same as everyone else," a feeling that manifests itself in a variety of ways. So how important is in-game uniqueness to you -- and how do you go about demonstrating it? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Arcane Brilliance: A friendly introduction to mage crowd control
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, a public service announcement: An open letter to the guy who keeps breaking my sheep: Please stop. Sincerely, Christian P.S. -- Listen. I know it's Christmas and I should probably be doing a puff piece on things I want for my mage for Christmas or something like that. But I Simply can't stay quiet. We wiped 20 times in that heroic Grim Batol run last night, and though I know not everybody who plays this game reads this column, I have to do what I can. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, or something like that. I know The Burning Crusade happened like two years ago. I'm well aware that there's a distinct possibility you started playing the game during Wrath. Perhaps you either don't remember or don't have any idea what a "Polymorph" is or why it's not in your best interests to immediately begin whacking whatever I just cast it on as hard as you possibly can. I'm willing to allow for ignorance. Mages, I can even understand it when you don't sheep things. Polymorph doesn't do any damage; in fact it heals its target! Why would you want to use a spell that doesn't blow things up when there are so many other delightful spells in your spellbook that do? It seems counter to everything we got into magecraft for. Wrath was a long expansion. For the better part of two years, we spent the majority of our time chain pulling and AoE-farming our way through every instance in sight, concentrating on one thing and one thing only: DPS. Recount gave us a number at the end of every boss fight, and if that number was higher than the warlock's number, we had done a good job. Sure, the fights sometimes had mechanics we needed to pay attention to, but they mostly involved moving from one place to stand and shoot to another place to stand and shoot. We forgot a very important part of our jobs as mages. We forgot how to sheep.
Arcane Brilliance: Things I'm thankful for
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, Arcane Brilliance is feeling especially festive. Pyroblasting a turkey will do that. So apparently it's the holiday season. I'm still burping up cranberries and stuffing, my wife has started forcing Christmas music upon me (and frankly, if it's not Mannheim Steamroller, I don't want to hear it), and I've reached the point in the year when -- for my own mental well-being -- I refuse to look at a bank statement until February. To those of you who survived yesterday's annual gladiatorial bloodletting and emerged victorious from the front doors of Walmart or Old Navy, hoisting your hard-won set of hand towels above your head like a trophy: I salute you. To those of you who, like me, stayed home and bought stuff on Steam and Xbox Live: I also salute you, only I do so from my chair, by typing in an emote. Because, really, we're all pretty lazy. But damned if I don't feel well rested. In deference to the spirit of the season, we here at Arcane Brilliance thought it might be nice to spend a column thinking about the things we're grateful right now. You'll find the mage-related stuff behind the jump, but here's my non-mage-related short list of awesome things: flatbread chicken sandwiches getting randomly tagged on Dragon Quest IX while walking through the airport Tuesday night troll druid cat form The Walking Dead Mumford and Sons discovering the brilliance of Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights on Netflix Taco Bell, Netflix, Square Enix, etc. ... feel free to make any and all endorsement checks out to Christian Belt, care of WoW Insider. Also, screw you, AMC, for canceling Rubicon. I was just starting to enjoy that one. And screw you double, FOX, for putting Fringe on Fridays, where all good FOX shows go to die.
Arcane Brilliance: Things I've learned while dying in Cataclysm heroics, mage edition
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, weekly mage column of choice for dress-wearing, warlock-hating Frostbolt slingers the world over. Also, fans of the short musical films of Journey, Short Imagined Monologues, and the sublime, video game-based synth and fretwork amalgams of Sixto Sounds. Seriously, listen to this one. Holy crap. So over the past few days, I've found myself a broken corpse lying in a spreading puddle of my own bodily fluids a bit more frequently than I'm used to. The reason for this is simple: heroics. No, not the ones on the live servers -- where you can throw together a random group consisting of a ret pally tank, a six-year-old playing a hunter his mom bought him on eBay the day before, a feral druid healer who for some reason came into the instance suffering from nine more minutes of resurrection sickness, a mouth-breathing rogue who may or may not be a serial killer, and an AFK shaman farming badges while auto-following the healer -- and still blast through the place. I'm talking about heroics in the Cataclysm beta. They're absolutely brutal, guys. Now, granted -- it's still early. The testing process for these beauties is still in its infancy. We're tackling them using premade characters with talent builds we threw together by looking at the talents and thinking, "This looks nice." We're wearing gear that's barely entry-level for heroics (if we're lucky) and using spell rotations that we're basically making up on the fly. We're going into instances we've never seen before, doing boss fights nobody knows the mechanics for, and dealing with crippling, often game-breaking bugs. These places simply aren't finished, not by a long shot. But then again, that's why we have a beta. We go in, throw our soft, cloth-clad bodies against the long claws of some horrifying beast or another, use the final droplets of our blood to scrawl feedback for the developers ("Landmines ... everywhere ... can't feel ... legs ... fading to black ... tell warlocks ... hate them ... so ... much ... "), and then come back for another round. Blizzard takes the data it gathers from our gruesome deaths and uses it to construct a better game. Still, there is much we can learn -- even in this unfinished state -- from the first incarnations of these heroics. Join me after the jump, won't you?
Arcane Brilliance: Things I'm going to miss
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, weekly mage column extraordinaire, and source of 99% of your daily recommended allowance of warlock hate. It's also rich in vitamin D. If you're wondering where you can get the other 1%, the answer is inside-out cheeseburgers. Very tasty, and warlock-hate is the secret ingredient. There comes a time in everyone's life when they must say goodbye to something. My first major loss came in the summer of 1986. I wept like a little girl when the rubber band holding Snake Eyes' pelvis to his legs and torso finally snapped on that day, after a hard day of battle in which he and Storm Shadow had faced each other in mortal combat no less than twenty times. Even his ensuing career as the first, incredibly violent casualty in every firefight didn't dull the pain of that initial loss. I loved Snake Eyes! Why couldn't it have been Snow Job's stupid pelvis that snapped? For the love of God, why? Incidentally, I asked that same question when I redboxed the recent movie bearing sullying the venerable toy-line/cartoon series' good name. And though I've spent the last few weeks laying out palm fronds and rose petals in preparation for Cataclysm's triumphant entry into the World of Warcraft, perhaps all is not as wondrous as I've made it out to be. Even in my optimism, I am becoming painfully cognizant of several aspects of the current game that I'll be missing to varying degrees once Deathwing arrives and brings with him all of his fancy new talent trees, masteries, guild perks, and approximately 11 million level 1 worgen hunters. Yes, despite all the awesomeness in store, we mages will also be losing a few things. Follow me past the jump to gaze wistfully one last time at a few of these soon-to-be-gone relics of a bygone age.
Comedy Central mutes "eyePhone" Futurama parody
If you saw Thursday night's new episode of Matt Groening's Futurama on Comedy Central (and let's take a moment to relish those beautiful words, 'new episode of Futurama' -- mmm, yes), you got an earful of biting satire focused on the enthusiasm of a certain company's customers and their appetite for new, shiny things. As Engadget reported, the episode was unsparing in its portrayal of a world where underpaid laborers dealt with the toxic leavings of other planets' consumerist tendencies. Ouch. Apparently, not everyone found it amusing. As Mac|Life's Roberto Baldwin noted, one of the clips from the show on the Comedy Central website has been selectively muted; when the Mom character says "Introducing the all-new eyePhone 2.0" in the original episode, now there is silence. Wouldn't you have liked to have been an eavesdropper on that phone call. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
Arcane Brilliance: The services we provide
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that come rain or shine, snow, sleet, hail, netherstorm or cataclysmic event is always delivered to your electronic doorstep by a mysterious robed man with a strange affinity for sheep. Perhaps you have wondered why Blink is distanced at exactly 20 yards? Because that's the exact number of digital yards between your internet yard and your neighbor's internet yard. This strange wizardly paperboy blinks onto your e-porch, unfurls this week's Arcane Brilliance, magicks it under your internet door, turns your internet yard gnome into an internet yard sheep, then poofs his way next door and repeats the process. He does this whether you've actually subscribed to Arcane Brilliance or not. It's all a bit creepy, but at least it's free. Let's take a moment and talk about utility, shall we? This week, I'm going to present the case for mages as the single best utility class in the game. Sure, druids bring their gifts of the wild, death knights bring their horns of winter, shaman bring their bloodlust/heroism, warlocks bring their evil little cookies and their obscene body odor, and rogues bring ... a tendency to stab things in the back ... but mages -- I think you'll agree after I pound it into your heads for the next thousand words or so -- are the kings of utility. You may think of us (and many of us may think of ourselves) as simple purveyors of arcane destruction. We trade in damage, humble merchants of death, standing behind someone wearing more substantial attire, churning out our fireballbolts and frostmadoodads and whatnot until the boss keels over, like any good ranged DPS class should. While this is our essential function, I'd like to spend this week's column shining a spotlight of sorts on the other things we bring to the proverbial table. Protip: one of the things we bring is a literal table.
Arcane Brilliance: Love letters
It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column of choice for largely hairless bipedal primates with opposable thumbs everywhere. And also for you, whatever you are. Seriously, what the crap are you, anyway? And what's with all the back hair? You look like Ron Perlman back when he used to make out with the chick from Terminator in the sewers. Which is to say, you look dead sexy. Not that I'm into that kind of thing, but rowr. As many of you are no doubt aware, I've been forced of late to do something against my very nature -- something so vile and abhorrent that I can scarcely keep the bile down as I partake in it. No, it isn't wearing pants. It's far, far worse. You see, I decided to participate in our Choose My Adventure series, and as is customary for those who do so, I left the decision-making to you, dear readers. In your vast, collective wisdom (and keen sense of irony), you decided I should be shackled to that thing I hate most. Again, not wearing pants. But, as longtime (or even first-time) readers of this column may have guessed, there remains one thing I hate more than having my lower half clad in fabric, and that thing is warlocks. "Har har," you said to yourselves (in my imagination, you are all pirates), "Belt should play a warlock! That'd be hilarious." Well it isn't hilarious. It isn't hilarious at all. Did you know that warlocks have a scent? It's the sulfurous stench of disappointment. Playing one has thus far been an exercise in humility. I am constantly reminded that there are those out there who select one of these godless avatars from the character selection screen on purpose, and do so on a daily basis. I feel there ought to be some sort of fund to which I can, for the price of a cup of coffee per day, sponsor these poor wayward souls and somehow elevate them to a better life. Still, I feel I have been able to glean at least one thing of value from this experience thus far: Mages are awesome.
Spiritual Guidance: Macros for priests
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. /target reader /wave /use The Mischief Maker There. I love a captive audience. This week I'll be writing about macros for priests. I will touch on why and how to use them, then provide a few useful ones that readers sent in during the past week. This article will not be an introductory guide for the use of macros because... WoW.com already had one of those. Hit the jump for the link.
Arcane Brilliance: The Mage of 2009
The internet's magiest weekly mage column, Arcane Brilliance would like to wish you and yours a very magetastic holiday season. Unless you and yours are warlocks. In which case Arcane Brilliance hopes the holiday season comes to your Christmas party and punches you in the face. Every year, as the end of that twelve-month block draws near, Arcane Brilliance likes to take an unbiased look back at the events that captured our collective imagination. Heh. Get it? "I-MAGE-ination?" Holy crap Arcane Brilliance is clever. And indefensibly fond of bad puns. So what did the year of our lord 2009 hold for those of us who prefer the scent of barbecued sheep to pretty much any odor ever and think strudel is a perfectly acceptable meal choice for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a meal I like to call the "Evocation's-on-cooldown-snack?" Join me after the break for all the highlights, presented in vaguely chronological order.
