Kraft's Adult Only Dessert Vending Machine - Jell-0-Temptations

A dessert machine strictly for adults uses facial recognition to detect the age of potential customers.

If the customer is too young for the dessert the machine will alert them with a message saying they aren't old enough and will shut down immediately - asking the child to move away from the area. 

The machine has been designed by Kraft and Intel in order to launch the new Jell-o Temptations premium dessert range.

Picture: Kraft/Rex Features

Sam Blackburn: The voice behind Stephen Hawking at 70

Sam Blackburn has been Hawking’s technician since 2006. And for these 5 years, he’s the one responsible for the technology that has allowed Hawking to communicate through a computer and a voice synthesizer by twitching his cheek.

When he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (or ALS) at 21, physicist Stephen Hawking was only expected to live a few years. He turns 70 this week.

Since about 1986, he’s had to use a menu controlled by a computer system to speak. A computer highlights cells in a big grid of letters or words, and when the correct one is highlighted, he presses a switch.

But when he became unable to move his hands sufficiently, he moved to an infrared system mounted on his glasses, which detects movement in his cheek muscle. His facial muscles are the only ones he can control reasonably well.

When Blackburn first started, the system was breaking all the time. “I’d get calls at 1 o’clock in the morning saying ‘Stephen can’t speak, what do we do?’” he says. “So I needed to modernize the system.”

He did so incrementally, so the learning wouldn’t be too steep. “Stephen wouldn’t be able to ask for help because the very thing he wouldn’t be able to use would be the speech system,” he says. “Understandably that has made him very reluctant to upgrade.”

The only copy of Hawking’s hardware voice synthesizer is contained in a little gray box in Blackburn’s office. The card inside dates back to the 80s, and this particular one contains Hawking’s voice. There’s a processor on it that has a unique program that turns text into speech that sounds like Hawking’s, and they have only two of these cards.

The company that made them went bankrupt and nobody knows how it works any more. Blackburn is trying to reverse engineer it since they can’t just update the system with a new synthesizer.

“The voice is one of the unique things that defines Stephen in my opinion,” he explains. “He could easily change to a voice that was clearer, perhaps more soothing to listen to – less robotic sounding – but it wouldn’t be Stephen’s voice any more.”

However, Hawking’s progressive nerve decay means that his ability to control his cheek muscle is fading.

His rate of speech is down to about one word per minute. And while Blackburn’s been making slight advances in the current technology, they’re gonna have to move on to something new – like eye-tracking or brain scanning systems.

The challenge for Blackburn’s successor: to keep that well-known voice in working order.

Drone mission control hit by self-cloning computer virus

How did a persistent computer virus come to haunt the pilots of the Predator drones attacking Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Yemen?

No-one yet knows, and most likely we will never be told.

What we do know is that the top military technology of the age has proven vulnerable to a persistent keylogger, a virus that stores every keystroke made on a computer and which resists deletion.

It was found two weeks ago on the systems that ground pilots use to fly the Reaper and Predator drones at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, and deleting the virus reportedly has no effect: it simply clones itself if deleted. "It keeps coming back," a Creech AFB operative complained to Wired.

It is most likely that the recent use of removable hard drives to update mission maps was the source of the malware, which appears to be hiding somewhere within the network at Creech. But since that network is not on the internet, the keylogged data should not be reaching any malefactor.

It is possible that top brass at the Pentagon, National Security Agency or the CIA are monitoring their own drone control staff using logging software - but given the mild panic its discovery has caused, that is unlikely.

Experts have also been warning for some time that counterfeit electronics could lead to such problems - and that will doubtless be investigated.

This episode shouldn't affect drone missions, however. They will still be as accurate or inaccurate as intelligence allows.

General Atomics, maker of the Predator, claims on its website that the aircraft has "a fault tolerant flight control system" that allows the plane to continue in safe flight even when contact with the remote control pilot is lost.

Robotic Assisted Limbs for Rent or Hire

Steampunked Damnation!

Jake Hildebrandt's Steampunked Damnation

Commissioned to kick off the debut of the western-style shooter game Damnation by Blue Omega Entertainment and Codemasters, this steampunk case mod was built by Jake Hildebrandt. The mod packs an impressive Intel Core i7 processor, 12GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 1TB hard drive.

I'll bet you wish you could take this mod home. Well, guess what: The PC is being given away in a contest open to residents of the United States and Canada. The entry deadline is June 19, 2009. Destructoid has the contest details.And if you're not familiar with this Western subgenre, you can read a full explanation of steampunk.

Photo: Jake Hildebrandt, via Flickr

Early Dial-Up PC

This telephone may look like it escaped from Alexander Graham Bell's living room, but under the hood the DialupPC is an all-digital, VoiP-ready special, circa 2004. Built by modder Dean Liou of Envador.com for an Intel-sponsored event in Dallas.

This PC rocks a 3.4GHz Intel Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 9800 graphics processor, an 80GB hard drive, and a DVD-ROM drive.

Photo: Dean Liou

Need a Lift? Try HAL - Hybrid Assistive Limb

Does your body need an upgrade? Then the robot suit HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb), will do the job in a single, step-motored reboot.

Japanese manufacturer Cyberdyne Inc plans to make 500 this year. HAL’s inventor Yoshiyuki Sankai reckons the suit can, “multiply human strength by a factor of two to ten”. It also makes you look like a gladiator from Tron.

(HAL should not to be confused with the homicidal computer company in The Terminator)