Today,IEEE Spectrum reportedthat the PR2 robot is now capable of gripping items off a grocery belt and extracting the shape information from one simple 3D scan thanks to researchers at Stanford University. After the robot picks up an object, it scans for the barcode, adds it to your bill and bags the item for you. While it’s a slow process for now, this robot that was recently presented at ICRA 2011 in Shanghai is dangerously close to snagging your job at Shop Rite....

Founded in June 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, Reddit — known as the front page of the Internet — has climbed its way from zero to hero with over 1.6 billion page views each month. It is now one of the largest websites in the world with one of the most loyal communities online today. Sortable, a startup focused on helping consumers make better decisions quickly, has patched together the following info graphic illustrating the growth of Reddit over time....

TLDR:Enjoy warehouse store savings with a 1-year membership to Sam’s Club at a Black Friday price that you definitely won’t see every day. With the holiday season here, it’s a good idea to take any opportunity available to save a few dollars. It’s even more imperative when a deal is so good that it essentially pays you to do it rather than the other way around. So if you’ve held off on getting a Sam’s Club membership for some reason…well, this deal may be the offer that you’ve actually been waiting for all along....

In the middle of last week, the science fiction and fantasy author Jay Lakepublishedseveral pictures of himself on his blog. In them, he succumbs to the will of a hair stylist whose only directive was to “go crazy.” The stylist began by shearing the sides of Lake’s head so all that remained was a fine, gray mohawk. His hair was then dyed green on the sides and blue on top, with red branches weaving their way toward the back....

A researcher at Wageningen University & Research recently published a pre-print article detailing a system by which facial recognition AI could be used to identify and measure the emotional state of farm animals. If you’re imagining a machine that tells you if your pigs are joyous or your cows are grumpy… you’re spot on. Up front:There’s little evidence to believe thatso-called ’emotion recognition’ systemsactually work. In the sense that humans and other creatures can often accurately recognize (as in: guess) other people’s emotions, an AI can be trained on a human-labeled data set to recognize emotion with similar accuracy to humans....