A new study being carried out at the University of Leicester traces the erosion of the traditional concept of Maasai manhood and the emergence of new role for Maasais- reliving their warrior dreams in paid employment, business or trading in livestock.
The romantic notion of the ‘noble savage’ Maasai warrior, replete with traditional ponytails and weapons- a key image for tourism in Kenya – masks a crisis of cultures that has blighted this once proud tribal race, according to a study
When earthquakes strike, people often get trapped in buildings. Search and rescue teams can pinpoint some victims using sniffer dogs and sensors. But a new European system that takes pictures during or after a building collapse promises to save many more lives.
The ‘low-cost catastrophic event capturing system’ is the fruit of the IST Loccatec project. It comprises capturing devices (small, autonomous infrared cameras) and a portable central unit for the rescue teams. The cameras – p
It started with tennis balls. As a former collegiate tennis player, Daniela Rus habitually rolls two tennis balls around in her hand as she paces her office. As a robotics researcher at Dartmouth College, she wondered why the tennis balls shouldn’t be able to roll themselves around.
She soon determined that electromagnets didn’t have enough lifting power to solve the tennis-ball problem. However, her question led to a decade-long research program into the challenges of designing robot
Males pirate and fertilize egg clutches
One of Europes most common backyard frogs has been keeping a secret that, despite centuries of study and thousands of published papers, has only now been discovered in ponds in the Pyrenees. The European common frog, Rana temporaria, has long been thought to have a straightforward breeding strategy — one lucky male grabs the female and fertilizes her eggs as soon as she releases them into the water. End of story.
But that&#
Applied Search Technology Ltd (AST) of Aston University in Birmingham, UK has announced the launch of its new software CADFind Sketch and Search – the first commercial design retrieval system in the world that can find 2D engineering drawings from a sketch.
The new software could save manufacturing companies thousands of pounds in part design by allowing the user to search, retrieve and use geometrically similar parts from their database, based on a customer drawing or a simple ske
British astronomers are celebrating a world first that could revolutionise the future of astronomy. They have just begun a project to operate a global network of the world’s biggest robotic telescopes, dubbed ’RoboNet-1.0’ which will be controlled by intelligent software to provide rapid observations of sudden changes in astronomical objects, such as violent Gamma Ray Bursts, or 24-hour surveillance of interesting phenomena. RoboNet is also looking for Earth-like planets, as yet unseen elsewhere