Mobile social networking evolves

When Steve Jobs strides onstage at Apple's annual developers conference on 9 June, many will be expecting fireworks, says Technology Review.

One rising company that's hoping for a mention during the Steve Jobs Show is Pelago, a start-up that recently garnered $15 million from funders, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

Pelago will soon offer a version of its software, called Whrrl, for the iPhone. The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

To assist humans around the house, robots will need to be able to deal with the unfamiliar. But while researchers can preprogram robots to do increasingly sophisticated tasks, they face a much bigger challenge in teaching them to adapt to unstructured environments, reports Technology Review.

A robot developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, however, is able to learn to use objects that it has never encountered before.

The robot - called the UMass Mobile Manipulator, or UMan - pushes objects around on a table to see how they move. Once it identifies an object's moving parts, it begins to experiment with it, manipulating it to perform tasks.

A new membrane absorbs oil and solvents and is superhydrophobic, which means it strongly repels water, states xyvy.wordpress.com.

"If you were to put it in water for a month and take it out it would still be dry," says Francesco Stellacci, the MIT Materials science and engineering professor who led the work, published online in Nature Nanotechnology.

Stellaci says the material should not be too expensive to make in large quantities and can easily be reused many times, although the researchers haven't measured how many times yet.