When robots play football, it looks like a game played by five-year-olds: they swarm around the ball, kick haphazardly and fall down a lot.

But robot teams have made strides in recent years, and some researchers believe the humanoids could challenge the world's best players in a decade or two.

"Maybe in 20 years we could develop a team of robots to play against the best World Cup teams," said Daniel Lee, who heads the University of Pennsylvania robotics lab, which is seeking a fourth consecutive RoboCup in Brazil next month, the premiere event for robotic football.

Robotic football, says Lee, is more than fun and games. It involves artificial intelligence and complex algorithms that help provide a better understanding of human vision, cognition and mobility.

Similar technology can be used for robots that perform household tasks or search and rescue, and for self-driving cars, said Lee, who led a demonstration of his robot football team Wednesday at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Lee said robots have improved their game from a decade ago, having moved from four-legged doglike machines to two-legged humanoid forms.

But he said there is still a lot to be learned before robotic football can be competitive with humans. The robots in Wednesday's demo still moved awkwardly, sometimes failed to locate the ball, and often ended up in collisions or fell over on their own.

"We have machines that can beat us in chess," he said. "But we (humans) can still kick their butts in soccer."

Because the robots are autonomous, they need to be able to handle all kinds of tasks humans take for granted: finding the ball, responding to different light conditions and terrain, and determining the best strategy.

"Our robots are calculating everything terms of probability," he said, which means a human can outsmart a machine.

"In creativity, humans have an advantage."

The Penn student team took home the RoboCup in the Netherlands in 2013 for the third year running, after victories in Mexico City in 2012 and Istanbul in 2011.

Lee said the research draws from a variety of disciplines, from engineering to anatomy to knowledge of sports.

The biggest challenge is to develop the type of awareness and intelligence that athletes have.

"What is difficult is to understand the intent of the other team, that is what prevents us from being more sophisticated," Lee said.

And in addition to developing technology for individual robots, the researchers need to find better ways for the machines to communicate with each other to coordinate strategy.

Lee said all this requires "a deep understanding of intelligence," and added that "we are still many years away."

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People with severe sight loss may soon be able to see again. Scientists at Oxford University have made a breakthrough in developing smart glasses that enhance images of nearby people and objects on to the lenses, providing a much clearer sense of surroundings. 

The glasses are being tested at Oxford and allowed some people to see their guide dogs for the first time. 

Oxford University researchers are testing the glasses in public areas to measure how they can help people with limited vision navigate and avoid walking into obstacles. 

"The idea of the smart glasses is to give people with poor vision an aid that boosts their awareness of what's around them - allowing greater freedom, independence and confidence to get about, and a much improved quality of life," said Stephen Hicks from the University of Oxford who is leading the project. 



The smart glasses consist of a video camera mounted on the frame of the glasses; a computer processing unit that is small enough to fit in a pocket; and software that provides images of objects close-by to the see-through displays in the eyepieces of the glasses. 

The transparent electronic displays where the glass' lens would be give a simple image of nearby people and obstacles. The camera with specially designed software interprets the nearby surroundings allowing people to see important things much more distinctly than before. 

The glasses don't replace lost vision but assist with spatial awareness. Anyone using the glasses looks through them to make the most of their existing sight with additional images appearing in their line of sight to give extra information about who or what is in front of them. 

The research and development of the glasses is funded by the National Institute for Health Research. The trials are being carried out with the support of the Royal National Institute of Blind People. 

"We eventually want to have a product that will look like a regular pair of glasses and cost no more than a few hundred pounds — about the same as a smartphone," Hicks said.

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Ooho!

Ooho, a biodegradable, water balloon-like blob, could soon be a cheap, environmentally friendly alternative to the ubiquitous plastic bottle.

Up to nearly 50% of 2.4 million tons of discarded plastic comes from plastic water bottles, according to the Clean Air Council if eventually mass produced, Ooho could go a long way toward reducing this waste.
"The reality is that every day more, when we drink water we throw away a plastic bottle, "Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, one of three London-based industrial design students behind the project, told Mashable. "This act of consumerism reflects the society in which we live. Ooho proposes an alternative."

Trapped inside two layers of membrane made of brown algae and calcium chloride, water is released from the glob of liquid when its casting is punctured. The membrane can either be eaten or thrown away, similar to the skin of an apple.

Though it's not as sturdy as a water bottle, Garcia Gonzalez said a collection of smaller Oohos could be kept in a bigger one with a thicker membrane to prevent unwanted spills (and so that not all of the water has to be consumed in one fell swoop) and its double-membrane design would keep the product hygienic (you could peel back the first one and sip from the second). It may not be the neatest way to hydrate, but according to Gracia, smaller Oohos will be easier to sip without getting wet.

The container has a creative commons license to encourage innovation and, with the right materials and know-how anyone could, in theory, create one in their own home.

Ooho was inspired by similar cases of membranes found in nature such as egg yolks. The container is assembled using spherification - a technique that shapes liquid into spheres and roots going back to the 1940s. In an effort to keep the final product as large as possible and to keep the components of the membrane separate, the water is frozen during this process.

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Researchers have developed a data-driven smart dress that becomes transparent in response to the digital data the wearer is producing.

The wearable sculpture called 'x.pose' was created by Xuedi Chen and Pedro GC Oliveira at New York University.

The clothing changes opacity to expose the wearer's skin as a real-time reflection of the data they are producing.
The dress reacts to the information and causes the wearer to become more transparent and exposed in certain areas.

According to its creators, x.pose is an exploration and commentary on the current internet culture of our generation and the relationship we share with our data.

"Individuals carrying smartphones and connecting with services such as Google or Facebook have agreed, often without conscious consideration, to policies that grant these service providers explicit rights to harvest and utilize personal data on a massive scale," they said.

"Based on account activity logs, Google clearly knows where their users are, have been, and possibly even where they're going," they added.

The sculpture also broadcasts the wearer's digital data for all to see.

A server and mobile app were built to automatically collect Chen's geolocation data over time to use as the basis for a personalized 3D printed flexible mesh.

Using arduino and Bluetooth, the app communicates with a layer of reactive displays that reflects the trails of information that she produces. These displays are divided up into patches that represent neighbourhoods and change in opacity depending on the wearer's current location.

If the wearer is in the NYU neighbourhood, that area will be the most active, pulsing, revealing her current location, showing that her data is being collected and at the same time exposing her skin.

As the data emissions are collected, the more transparent and exposed the wearer will become.

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Wandering from one beach to another and having lunch in between without changing the swimwear all along is now a possibility. A Toronto-based entrepreneur has come up with a range of swim trunks made from hydrophobic material - a fabric that repels water.

"We were tired of having to change shorts every time you leave the beach, having car seats soaked and not being able to go from the beach to a restaurant," Franky Shaw, who created  the swim suits, was quoted as saying. The researchers came up with a polyester-blend hydrophobic nanomaterial technology that could keep the swim wears dry.

The technology works by bonding billions of nanoparticles to individual fibres on a microscopic level. When water-based liquids hit the surface of this material they form a 150-degree sphere and roll off.

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