Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Nasa's new humanoid will travel robot-class into space, the Facebook fakes that keep popping up and why the secret to looking for love is all in the lens.
• Nasa's latest humanoid robot is due to join a space mission on 1 November, writes Andrea Petrou at Tech Eye:
"The humanoid Robotnaut 2 (or R2 for short) resembles you and me a bit and is specifically designed to operate like you and me, a bit. It consists of a head and torso with two arms and two five-fingered hands. Advanced control and sensor technologies allow R2 to operate as an assistant to the station astronauts."
R2 is also a sociable chap - he has his own Twitter account with over 12,800 followers.
• Meanwhile blogger Sean over at web security firm F-Secure wants a few fewer friends. He's been keeping a close eye on Facebook's "people you may know" generator and found that quite a few of his recommended profiles were serial spammers:
"Searching for the name 'Elma Fewell' yielded a few doppelgangers. Checking incremental Facebook IDs yielded even more... I also found five Sueann Dehart accounts and a Janiece Duval. All of the profile pictures are of attractive young woman (and one of Kim Kardashian). Several of the photos appear to be of Ukrainian models, based on a reverse image search."
All the profiles contained links to spam websites.
• There were five men in a boat: not the start of a bad gag but a scientific experiment into how access to technology affects the mind. New York Times reporter Matt Richtel went along for the ride:
"Behavioral studies have shown that performance suffers when people multitask. These researchers are wondering whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation."
Sorry, where were we?
• Finally, if you're a dating disaster, it might just be your handset rather than your halitosis that's the problem.
Dating website OKCupid asked its 11.4m users to rate profile pictures taken at different times, using various cameras and mobile phones.
Those rated the least attractive were taken by mobile phones, writes Christian Rudder at the website's blog UKTrend:
"[T]he general pattern is that more complex cameras take better pictures. Interchangable lens cameras (like digital SLRs) make you look more attractive than your basic point and shoot cameras, and those in turn make you look better than your camera phone. "
The light-hearted survey also concluded that iPhone users had the most sexual partners by the age of 30, and Android owners the fewest. Is there an app for that yet?
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