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Deathlok and Lorelei joining ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’

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Jan. 24 (UPI) -- ABC's Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is bringing on two more signature characters.

Fictional cyborg Deathlok, and Lorelei, a villain from Thors home of Asgard, will join the superhero series when it returns to the small screen in February. S.H.I.E.L.D. executive producer Jeph Loeb made the announcement Thursday on the set of the show.

Weve been leaving breadcrumbs along the way, Loeb said regarding Deathlok. This is a major Marvel character appearing on TV, on film for the first time.

Before the season went on its winter hiatus, J. August Richards's character Mike Peterson lost a leg and was given a high-tech eye, both actions were signs the he would soon transform into the infamous cyborg Deathlok.

"There's an awful lot of enhancements that he'll have. His speed, his strength and he's well-known for his cybernetic eye," Loeb said.

As for Thor's Lorelei, who will be played by Elena Satine, Loeb revealed that she'd be coming to "hunt down another Marvel character."

"Lorelei is from Asgard. She's a beautiful redhead who has the ability to sway men's minds. She has this in her own unique way of speaking," he added.

Deathlok will make his first appearance on S.H.I.E.L.D. during the show's Feb. 4 episode.

[TV Guide] [Deadline]

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Deathlok and Lorelei joining 'Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'

Part Man, Part Machine, "Spermbots" Swim Wild and Free

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Twin-tailed version is eight times as fast

If it looks like a sperm and swims like a sperm, it must be a .... cyborg? I. Part Man, Part Machine, Pure Spermlike Terror That's true, if you're talking about the "tiny swimming bio-bots" designed by the lab of University of Illinois mechanical science and engineering Professor Taher Saif. Professor Saif and his student research team took a thin filament of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) -- a silicone plastic commonly used in The Wendy's Comp. (WEN) fries and McDonald's Corp. (MCD) nuggets and fries -- and mounted cultured human heart cells (cardiomyocytes) to it. They hail their "spermbot" "the first synthetic structures that can traverse the viscous fluids of biological environments on their own."

Professor Saif brags:

Micro-organisms have a whole world that we only glimpse through the microscope. This is the first time that an engineered system has reached this underworld. It's the minimal amount of engineering -- just a head and a wire. Then the cells come in, interact with the structure, and make it functional.

The swimmer doesn't find it hard at all to thrust its way into foreign environments, plunging through the dark, wet depths of its test environments.

The little squirt can swim at a frisky pace of 5 to 10m per second. Researchers found that they could improve on nature's design, though, if they equipped the cyborg with twin tails.

The most intriguing aspect of this work is that it demonstrates the capability to use computational modeling in conjunction with biological design to optimize performance, or design entirely different types of swimming bio-bots. This opens the field up to a tremendous diversity of possibilities. Truly an exciting advance.

Professor Saif remarks:

The long-term vision is simple. Could we make elementary structures and seed them with stem cells that would differentiate into smart structures to deliver drugs, perform minimally invasive surgery or target cancer?

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Part Man, Part Machine, "Spermbots" Swim Wild and Free

Shock-O-Rama: Evolver

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By Chuck Francisco January 22, 2014 Source: Mania.com

Movies centered around the dangers of technology run amuck focused on two primary flavors, in the cyber drunk decade known as the 1990's: angsty cyborg killers with the will to fight their evil corporate programming, and operatic cyberspace dreamscapes populated by "hackers". Sure, every flick didn't fit into this flock, but with the swift tap of my fingers on Apple glass I've just described dozens of films. From among their number rolls Evolver, off the John de Lancie assembly line. Yes fellow nerds, the man who would be Q is the fictional brains behind the Evolver home game, having crafted a prototype robot to engage the imagination and children of consumers at Christmas season. But how should its bugs be tested and kinks worked out?

Perhaps in a nod to The Last Star Fighter, the company decides to bestow that beta tester status upon the highest scoring player of their virtual reality version of the Evolver game (I want to be involved in one of these board meetings at some point in my life. "Yes, give our multimillion dollar prototype to a twitch kid, high on energy drinks and ADD!"). Onto the scene, spinning like a top, rotates Ethan Embry (who I will shameless admit to loving in both Empire Records and Can't Hardly Wait). The spinning analogies are apropo as we are introduced to him engaged in a 90's VR booth, which includes a surrounding, waist high rail, VR helmet, and blaster gun. These earliest games had very rudimentary directional tracking and, while they had their own specific games, were mostly used to play ports of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D (I spent a good chunk of time working at a laser tag and virtually reality place on the Jersey shore in the 90's). So I'm familiar enough with the tech to know the game represented on screen, while cutting edge CGI of the time, was just not possible outside of the fanciest of screen savers.

Embry is one of those actors that is delightful in pretty much whatever he pops up in, including his recent stint on Once Upon a Time. As our protagonist in Evolver, he is moments from claiming the high score when into the game spawns Cassidy Rae as "the love interest". Her appearance womps Embry over the head, leaving him enshrined at second place by a mere fifty-five points. With a quick bit of Hollywood Hacking (TM), he quickly adjusts the score and is awarded with a home visit from John de Lancie's robot install service. I should quickly point out that the hacking itself has a bit more credibility than most films (for the time or at all), which is probably a result of budgetary constraints, but since it actually works, we won't begrudge it.

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Shock-O-Rama: Evolver

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance review: An exhilarating blast of dumb

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Imagine a giant, roughly 200 ft. tall robot shoots a barrage of missiles at you. Do you:

a) Try to run away, but fail and die in a blazing inferno?

b) Wet your pants and cry?

c) Run towards the robot, using the missiles as platforms as you parkour your way through the air and chop the menacing machine in half with your sword?

If the prospect of Option C makes half of you want to bust out in incredulous laughter while the other half explodes in raucous applause, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance will be your type of gameif you can figure out how to control all the action, that is.

To be clear: the above situation isn't some hard-earned, climactic encounter that caps off a dozen hours of middling third-person action. This is Revengeance's opening sequenceliterally the first real encounter you have in the entire game.

Yeah, that happens.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is so sillyso downrightinsaneIcan almost forgive its absurd title.Revengeance is capital-Ffun, an exhilarating ride from start to finish.

The combat is really tight andwith the exception of some annoying boss encounterswell-balanced. Once you dig into Raiden's moves a bit more, there's a really rewarding game to be found.There's a surprising amount of depth in Revengeanceperhaps not as much as Devil May Cry, with its seamless weapon-swapping combat, but enough to keep things interesting. You just have to discover the depth for yourself. (Much more on that later.)

Parrying is especially satisfying, and there's a real sense of progress when you go from "Blade Wolf as boss fight" at the beginning of the game to effortlessly fighting multiple Blade Wolves at the same time later on. The addictive, combo-based swordplay oozes ridiculous style and insane violence in equal amounts.

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Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance review: An exhilarating blast of dumb

‘Cyborg plants’ to help watch out for environmental damage

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21 January 2014

Engineers in Italy are attempting to develop cyborg plant sensors that harness natures ability to detect environmental changes.

The team from the University of Rome plans is building electronic devices that can read the electrical signals generated by living plants as they react to changes in their environment, as part of Plants Employed As Sensing Devices (PLEASED) project funded by the EUs FP7 programme.

Although these plant-borg sensors are unlikely to be as accurate as artificial ones, they could be better at monitoring multiple changes such as humidity and temperature at the same time with a simple, cheap and robust device, the researchers claim.

They could be used for monitoring pollution of the environment, for example, or acid rain, said project coordinator Prof Andrea Vitaletti in a statement from the European Research Media Centre.

A very practical application we have in mind is to use plants as certification devices of organic farming. By observing the signals generated by the plants, it should be possible to determine whether or not the farmer has used adequate chemicals.

If you want to find out the same thing with artificial devices, you would need quite a number of them.

Source: PLEASED

The researchers have connected signal-harvesting devices to sample plants using needle electrodes.

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'Cyborg plants' to help watch out for environmental damage


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