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Red Sox’s 6-Year Veteran, 2-Time World Series Champ, Cut By New Team After Short Stint
A former fan favorite who reinvented his career with the Boston Red Sox has been released by his new AL home in a surprising move.
🇺🇸 미국 · "INVENTED" · 총 14건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.0
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 10,505건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.0(균형)입니다. 긍정 1건(0.0%)·중립 10,503건(100.0%)·부정 1건(0.0%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 19.3(중도 균형)입니다.
A former fan favorite who reinvented his career with the Boston Red Sox has been released by his new AL home in a surprising move.
In 'My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein,' the narrator, a writer, actually spends one month trying to understand Stein's genius, how she invented herself, and her relationship with Alice B. Toklas.
The U.S. government invented mosaic warfare—then forgot to use it.
Every American high schooler enrolled in a U.S. history course should be able to tell you that when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, the value of cotton grew exponentially. What made Whitney’s invention so innovative was how it made cotton processing more efficient, thus increasing the demand for labor. Students should also be able […]
In the 1990s, I asked Milton Friedman how I should approach charitable giving. His answer was to invest in school choice, a concept he had invented decades earlier. At the time, school choice barely existed. Now, it’s exploding. Friedman’s advice was right on — my bet has paid off. Now, it is time for all of […]
Erin Vlack moved to Spain in mid-life after losing 300 pounds. She wanted to quit the rat race to enjoy time with her son. She has never been happier.
In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he couldn’t convince anyone there to build such a machine, so he set about building one himself, in his attic. To help with his project, he organized a weekly get-together of a dozen or so like-minded folks. Every Wednesday night, his wife, Sally, would make a big pot of spaghetti, and the group would tinker with components scavenged from old printers and picked up from junkyards. They called themselves the Shadow Group. They eventually constructed several different robots, but their main project was the two-legged Shadow Walker. In 1987, photographer Richard Greenhill organized a weekly gathering of DIY enthusiasts to work on projects in his attic, including the Shadow Walker. Richard Greenhill and David Buckley Greenhill’s friend David Buckley, a robotics and animatronics expert he’d met at Intergalactic, sketched out a rough design based on medical textbooks of human bone structure and muscle movement. The robot’s skeleton, made of maple, was greatly simplified—only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot. The ankle’s double-axis design allowed for two degrees of movement. The knee had no complicating kneecap. Greenhill didn’t want the robot to use motors, so its movement was controlled using compressed air to extend and contract 28 “air-muscles”—his version of a McKibben muscle, invented in the 1950s to mimic musculature with pneumatics. The muscles were connected to the bones across eight joints (hips, knees, ankles, toes), which provided 12 degrees of freedom. RELATED: The Short, Strange Life of the First Friendly Robot The robot’s headless torso held the control valves, electronics, and computer interfaces. It stood 168 centimeters tall and 46 cm wide and weighed about 38 kilograms. The group managed to get the robot to stand up reliably and balance itself; it could even regain its center if pushed a little. But walking turned out to be more of a challenge. Rich Walker joined the group as a teenager and began writing software to get the robot to stand. He was particularly interested in using neural networks to solve balancing problems, although he ran into a number of hardware obstacles, including the unreliability of the sensors and the valves, and the robot’s overall fragility. Over time, Walker and the team developed a standard library of routines to control the robot. Walker wrote a detailed description of the Shadow Walker in 1999, which is available on David Buckley’s website. The 1st International Robot Olympics By the time the Shadow Group began developing Shadow Walker, engineers in academia and industry had been working on robotics for several decades. The world’s first industrial robot, the Unimate, debuted in 1961, and in 1967 Donald Michie and others began building a series of Freddy robots to investigate machine intelligence. The IEEE created its first dedicated robotics organization in 1984 when it established the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, which became the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 1987. Also in 1987, the nonprofit International Federation of Robotics was established to promote research, development, use, and cooperation in the field of robotics. As Shadow Walker pushed the limits for a DIY humanoid robot, industrial humanoids were also gaining ground. In 1986, Honda began working on its experimental (E-series) and later the prototype (P-series) humanoid robots, finally unveiling the P2 in 1996. The P2 stood 183 cm tall and weighed 210 kg. It was the first humanoid capable of stable, autonomous walking. This work eventually led to the development of the groundbreaking ASIMO. Greenhill’s friend, roboticist David Buckley, consulted medical textbooks to create Shadow Walker’s humanoid design.Richard Greenhill and David Buckley In the late 1980s, the public was both fascinated and horrified by the potential of robots. Businesses saw robots as a way to increase productivity, while workers worried they would take their jobs. Children viewed them as wondrous toys, while people with disabilities embraced them as tools of liberation. Military experts hoped robots would fight wars without endangering human soldiers, while politicians pondered if robots might eventually get to vote. Philosophers thought robots could challenge our notions of intelligence (and stupidity), while the religious struggled with concerns about the human race in a robot-dominated future. Shadow Walker’s simplified anatomy included only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot.Science Museum Group Peter Mowforth, cofounder of the Turing Institute in Glasgow, noted these disparate visions for robots when he announced the 1st International Robot Olympics, to be held in 27 and 28 September 1990 and hosted by the Turing Institute and the University of Strathclyde. The Olympics would round up the world’s best robots and showcase them head-to-head. Mowforth himself thought all of the competing visions of robots were overblown. Steeped in machine learning research and robotics development, he knew firsthand the limitations of the state of the art: Robots rarely worked as intended, easily broke down, and glitched over seemingly trivial problems. He envisioned the Robot Olympics as a testbed to assess what the latest generation of robots could and could not do. At the 1990 Robot Olympics, held in Glasgow, Shadow Walker wore pants to conceal its pneumatic “air-muscles” from competitors.Adam Hart-Davis/Science Source The call for participation was wide open. Instead of having predetermined categories of competition, the organizers opted to see who applied to compete and then group them based on their claimed capabilities. In addition to picking the winners of individual events, the judges would select an overall Olympic champion based on the quality of the hardware, the sophistication of behavior, and novelty. Other prizes were given for young competitors, technologies that showed commercial potential, and design. In the end, more than 50 robots were entered, from a mix of universities, industry, and hobbyist groups from Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. There were plenty of disappointments. Trolleyman, a golf-cart-like wheeled robot, suffered a power failure while carrying the opening Olympic torch through the streets of Glasgow. The pile rug in the arena tripped up many robots that had been trained only on flat, smooth floors. David Buckley later concluded that the events were too difficult, and that the Olympics didn’t push development forward. Of course, there were winners. In a surprise triumph for vintage technology, the fully mechanical 19th-century Japanese Archer from the Museum of Automata in York, England, won gold in javelin, beating out competitors more than 100 years its junior. The overall Olympic Champion was Yamabico, Shoji Suzuki’s entry from the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, which won bronze in obstacle avoidance and gold in wall following, but was disqualified in the talking category for not speaking English. The Shadow Group had high hopes for Shadow Walker. Unfortunately, though, it failed to take a step, and the biped race was won by the Cardiff University Biped. Shadow Walker now resides in the collections of the Science Museum in London. The Legacy of Shadow Walker In 1997, a paying customer in search of a robotic leg compelled the Shadow Group to get serious and become a registered company. Shadow Robot is now Britain’s oldest robotics company. Rich Walker, who had left the Shadow Group to earn a B.A. in mathematics and a diploma in computer science at the University of Cambridge, joined Shadow Robot in 1999 as technical director. Today he’s the director of the company. Shadow Robot specializes in durable robot hands rather than walking robots. But the focus on hands is also a legacy of the Shadow Group. Walker remembers that the Shadow Group’s first humanoid hand in the late 1990s was impressive simply for being able to pick up a pint of beer (a smooth-sided, thin-walled glass). Today, Shadow Robot’s hands are testbeds for dexterity. Gone are the pneumatic muscles, replaced by actuators that move each finger with precision. The classic model contains 20 motors, allowing for abductive and adductive movement with 24 degrees of freedom. Shadow Walker’s operator wore a data suit that captured his movements and allowed the robot to copy them.Richard Greenhill In a recent blog post, Sejal Parsotomo, senior marketing executive at Shadow Robot, wrote that while humanoid robots are great for public relations, specialized dexterity is key for success: A robot that can walk into your factory may be impressive, but a robot that can reliably manipulate objects is transformative. In its struggles to take more than a few steps, the Shadow Walker showed the inherent difficulty that robots had in mastering even low-level skills. In August 2025, Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games. Competing in sports such as gymnastics, soccer, and track events, as well as more “useful” tasks like hotel cleaning and sorting medicine, these robots could literally have run circles around the competitors in the first Robot Olympics 35 years earlier. And yet, there is still so much work needed in order for robots to navigate the human-built environment. Despite the astonishing progress, we’re still not all that close to actually useful humanoid robots. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2026 print issue as “Learning to Walk.” References Richard Greenhill gives an overview of his life and the founding of the Shadow Group in a post on Shadow Robot’s corporate website. David Buckley has a compilation of resources on the Shadow Biped Walker, including specifications from the 1999 iteration and a brochure from the 1st International Robot Olympics. There is coverage of the Robot Olympics worthy of a gossip sheet in La Repubblica and lovely footage of the competition in this TV-am interview of Peter Mowforth by Lorraine Kelly.
Inside the juiced-up, techno-billionaire-invented steroid Olympics fever dream.
President Donald Trump formally endorsed Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, ahead of the most important election in Armenia’s history. Pashinyan has completely reinvented the small nation’s foreign policy, drifting away from its long-lasting alliance with Russia and towards friendly relations with the United States, the West, and its longtime rivals, Turkey and Azerbaijan. On Wednesday, […]
Ukraine's drone innovations reinvented modern warfare and redefined superpower influence. Drones could replace the need for ground troops in Iran, a lesson for the US.
From the assembly line to the smartphone, these are the companies whose inventions became so embedded in daily life that the world before them is almost impossible to picture
Elon Musk's creation has essentially re-invented itself from a commercial space pioneer facing little competition, to an AI-centric player battling all the hyperscalers.
In the late 1940s—when computer engineers were grappling with unreliable hardware and noisy transmission environments—a team of engineers inside a modest lab at the University of Manchester, England, confronted a problem so fundamental that it threatened the viability of digital computing itself. Machines could generate bits, but they could not reliably read them back. The inconsistent reading back of memory data did not initially present itself as a grand theoretical challenge. It showed up as something more mundane: inconsistent computing results. Engineers including Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and G. E. (Tommy) Thomas traced the failures not to logic errors but to the physical behavior of the machines themselves. The team devised a technique for keeping a transmitter and a receiver synchronized without relying on a separate clock signal. Their innovation, known as Manchester code or phase encoding, encoded each bit with a transition in the middle of the bit period, effectively embedding timing information directly into the data stream to be a self-clocking signal. So, even if the signal degraded or the timing drifted slightly, the receiver could continually keep time based on those regular transitions. By eliminating the need for separate clocks and reducing synchronization errors, Manchester code made data transfer more robust across cables and circuits. Those qualities later made it a natural fit for technologies such as Ethernet and early data storage systems. Its self-clocking nature helped standardize how machines communicate, and it laid the groundwork for modern networking and digital communication protocols. On 13 April 2026, this breakthrough was honored with an IEEE Milestone plaque during a ceremony at the University of Manchester. Dignitaries from IEEE and the university attended the ceremony. Embedding timing in signals Those 1940s Manchester University engineers were working on systems that fed into the Manchester Mark I, one of the first practical stored-program machines. When troubles arose, they used oscilloscopes to probe signals. They found that electrical pulses did not arrive with consistent timing. Memory signals also blurred over time, making them harder to read, and when long runs of identical bits occurred, the waveform flattened into stretches with no transitions. That led to a crucial insight: The problem was not just detecting whether a signal was high or low; the system also lost track of when to sample the signal. Without reliable timing markers, even correctly formed signals were misread. Bits could effectively be lost or miscounted because the system fell out of sync. At first, the engineers tried to tame the hardware. They experimented with stabilizing circuits and more consistent pulse generation, attempting to impose a regular rhythm on an inherently unstable system. But the fixes proved fragile, and the electronics of the day could not maintain the required precision. So the Manchester group took a different approach. If the hardware could not provide a dependable clock, the signal itself would have to carry one. Instead of representing data as static levels, each bit changed state, with a guaranteed transition in the middle. Embedding timing in the signal reduced erratic behavior. Machines were suddenly able to reliably transmit, store, and read back data—an essential step toward practical stored-program computing. Making signals unmistakable The Manchester code addressed several issues at once. Regular transitions allowed continuous timing recovery. Transitions proved easier to detect than static levels, and long runs of identical bits no longer produced flat, ambiguous waveforms. Rather than fighting the imperfections of early electronics, the design worked with them. From lab curiosity to a global standard What began as a local solution in Manchester shaped digital communication systems for decades, including early Ethernet technology, for which timing and shared-medium communication were central challenges. According to Robert Metcalfe, a member of the team that built the first Ethernet system at Xerox PARC in 1973, he and his colleagues relied on Manchester code. “Manchester code solved a fundamental problem for us: timing,” Metcalfe says, explaining that each bit carried its own clock and removed the need for a global synchronized signal. That self-clocking property wasn’t the only benefit provided by the encoding scheme. On a shared coaxial cable, Manchester encoding did more than provide timing. Each transceiver left the medium undriven—effectively “off”—most of the time, allowing packets from other machines to pass without interference. Even during transmission, a station drove the signal only about half the time, leaving the line undriven during the other half of each bit cycle. This distinction—between a driven signal and an undriven line, rather than simple 1s and 0s—allowed receivers to recover both data and clock timing while also monitoring the cable for other activity. If a transceiver detected a signal when it expected the line to be undriven, the signal indicated that another station was transmitting at the same time. In other words, the system could detect collisions in real time and respond accordingly. The idea has proven durable far beyond local networks. Manchester code is being used aboard the Voyager spacecraft, which are now cruising through interstellar space—underscoring its reliability in extreme environments. The code also has found its way into everyday consumer electronics. Infrared remote controls for televisions and audio equipment commonly rely on Manchester code through protocols such as RC-5, developed by Philips in the early 1980s. The protocol encodes commands as timed infrared signals transmitted by a handset’s integrated circuit and LED, allowing devices to reliably interpret button presses even through noise and signal distortion. Manufacturers across Europe—and many in the United States—adopted the approach, extending Manchester code into the home. Why the Milestone matters An IEEE Milestone designation recognizes technologies with enduring impact. Manchester code qualifies because it solved a foundational timing problem at a critical moment in computing history. Without a way to embed timing in the data itself, early digital systems would have remained fragile and unreliable. Manchester code helped transform them into dependable machines, and it enabled much of today’s digital communication. “Manchester code solved a fundamental problem for us: timing,” —Robert Metcalfe, an Ethernet inventor Key participants at the plaque dedication ceremony included Tom Coughlin, 2024 IEEE president; Duncan Ivison, University of Manchester president and vice chancellor, and Nagham Saeed, chair of the IEEE U.K. and Ireland Section. Talks by Kees Schouhamer Immink (the 2017 IEEE Medal of Honor laureate probably best known for his work that made compact discs and other high-density digital media practical) and Peter Green (Manchester’s deputy dean for the engineering faculty) highlighted the code’s lasting impact on digital data storage and communications. The IEEE Milestone plaque for the Manchester code reads: “At this site in 1948–1949, Manchester code was invented for reliably encoding digital data stored on the Manchester Mark I computer’s magnetic drum. It became a standard for computer magnetic tapes and floppy disks and was used in digital communications, including the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and early Ethernet networks. It found wide use in domestic remote controllers, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and many control network standards.” Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments worldwide. The IEEE U.K. and Ireland Section sponsored the nomination.
Anthony Bourdain loved haggis. But even the late, great American chef, writer and television host recognized that Scotland's national dish, with its "sinister sheep parts" wrapped in a shroud of mystery and half-invented history, could be a hard sell.