NEWS
By MICHAEL SRAGOW | June 27, 2008
The great Sam Peckinpah once said, "It's not just blowing up a bridge, it's the way you blow up a bridge." That's how I feel about apocalyptic or dystopian movies. It's not just blowing up the world, it's the way you blow up the world. Pundits are questioning Pixar's decision to base WALL-E on a trash-strewn Earth, a robot hero and humans who've evolved into pudding pops. The last laugh should be on the naysayers as audiences discover the inventiveness, wit, emotion - and, yes, hope - that director Andrew Stanton and his team have invested in every inch of their sometimes bleak and barbed design.
NEWS
By Bradley Olson | July 6, 2007
Imagine building a robot so small that it looks like a fire ant, even when magnified by a factor of 50. Now picture the nano-sized David Beckham bot playing "soccer" on a field about one sixteenth the size of a quarter. Sound like a feat? For a handful of midshipmen and one recent graduate of the Naval Academy, it certainly was - given that there are no existing tiny robot parts, not to mention screwdrivers or hinges. The students spent much of the past year looking into microscopes and using chemistry and light to shape the tiny bots.
NEWS
By Bradley Olson | July 6, 2007
Imagine building a robot so small that it looks like a fire ant, even when magnified by a factor of 50. Now picture the nano-sized David Beckham bot playing "soccer" on a field about one sixteenth the size of a quarter. Sound like a feat? For a handful of midshipmen and one recent graduate of the Naval Academy, it certainly was - given that there are no existing tiny robot parts, not to mention screwdrivers or hinges. The students spent much of the past year looking into microscopes and using chemistry and light to shape the tiny bots.
NEWS
By Cassandra A. Fortin | January 19, 2007
Brik Wisniewski hit a button on top of a homemade robot and it began gliding across a table, pushing a small box. He wanted the contraption to release a load of "dirt" from a dumper into the box, but the robot steered off course. "Almost!" the Deep Creek Magnet Middle School sixth-grader said, as he picked up the robot. "I think it needs some pieces replaced." The robot, the box and the dumper were all made of LEGO bricks. They are the work of the Deep Creek Nano Eagles, a team set to compete in the Maryland FIRST LEGO League competition scheduled for tomorrow at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
NEWS
By LIZ F. KAY | April 1, 2006
Within six weeks, Woodlawn High School's Technowarriors tested prototypes, selected a design and constructed their 5-foot-tall robot. Now they're working the phones to overcome the last obstacle to participating in the FIRST Robotics Championship: finding the money to get there. "It's the biggest reward we can have for all the time we've put into building the robot," said sophomore team member Kwami Williams. The team lost a sponsor two weeks ago. As a result, they're struggling to raise at least $7,000 by Thursday to travel to Atlanta and prove themselves among more than 340 teams from the United States and other countries.
NEWS
By CASSANDRA A. FORTIN | March 12, 2006
Though the purpose of the robot-building competition is to solve problems, a group of Aberdeen High School students had a tough one to tackle before they could even participate: They didn't have a team. The students from Aberdeen's Science and Math Academy magnet program brought plenty of technological skill to the table. But they lacked a suitable location and the resources to make a run at the Chesapeake FIRST Regional Robotic Competition. Enter the Park School in Baltimore County. Likeminded students at Park, a private school in Brooklandville, invited the Aberdeen students to join their team.
NEWS
By Michael Stroh | March 4, 2005
You don't often find scientists staging arm-wrestling tournaments - let alone competing in them. But then the match scheduled Monday at the International Society for Optical Engineering conference in San Diego is no ordinary bout. For the first time, researchers plan to pit man-made muscle against living tissue - in this case the sinewy limb of a San Diego high-school senior. The purpose of this unusual test of strength: to spur scientific interest in a little-known but promising class of plastics that expand and contract when jolted by an electrical charge.
NEWS
By Caren M. Penland | August 5, 2004
Filmmakers have long had a fascination with robots. Robby in Forbidden Planet. B-9 in Lost in Space. C-3PO in Star Wars. And now, Sonny in I, Robot. Futurists have not ignored the pop-culture obsession and the race to produce the first - and this is key, affordable - humanoid unit. The few robots on the market are out of this world, pricewise. Neiman Marcus, for example, offered his-and-her robots in its 2003 Christmas catalog. Produced by Robotics International, they retailed for $400,000.
NEWS
By Deborah Hornblow | August 2, 2004
Over the years, American cinema has played host to a variety of bad guys. From tomahawk-wielding Indians to goose-stepping Nazis, Cold War communists, Italian mobsters and Japanese fighters, celluloid public enemies have tended to reflect and define chapters of our nation's history. In recent times, a climate of political correctness has made movie enemies harder to come by. Communists no longer generate much fear. Japanese fighters have become the heroes of martial-arts pictures. Nazis are still reliably evil, as they were most recently in Hellboy, but stereotypical images of Native Americans, Asians, Italians, Arabs, Muslims and other ethnic, religious or political groups open filmmakers to charges of cultural insensitivity.
NEWS
By Chris Kaltenbach | July 16, 2004
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot was a cautionary tale and a rumination, a warning about intellect without soul and an exploration of what it means to be human. The movie I, Robot, based on Asimov's ideas but not directly on his work, is an action thriller that touches on those themes, but is mostly an excuse for Will Smith to show off his pecs and for CGI guys to strut their stuff. That's not necessarily a bad thing; the movie moves along with great speed and verve, and it's got just enough of a sci-fi sheen to make things interesting, if not provocative.