Light Start – A Dragon, a Cheetah, some Osmosis and a lack of PlayStation Vita
Brett Venter
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SpaceX’s Crew Dragon docks with the ISS for the first (but not the last) time
Right, someone new will be going to space soon. Private space company SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule launched into orbit this weekend, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule successfully docked with the ISS, which it kinda had to do in order to fulfil its purpose. Crew Dragon has been designed to take astronauts to and from the ISS, and this current procedure (which will see the capsule camping at the space station for the rest of the week). What’s remarkable about the operation is that it was performed automatically by the capsule. Usually, an astronaut on board the ISS does most of the work, capturing the (non-crew) Dragon capsule and guiding it into place. Here, the capsule did most of the work. Nice one.
Source: via The Verge Main image: SpaceX (Twitter)[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Now we’ve got a Cheetah robot capable of doing backflips… Cool, we guess?
First we had Boston Dynamics doing interesting things with robots, now MIT’s getting into the act with surprisingly agile ‘bots. The Mini Cheetah has been taught to do many things — trot, run, react to being kicked. But the folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have also turned this robot into a gymnast — Mini Cheetah has a penchant for backflips, among other activities. You want to check out the short video at the link below. Not only will you see the Mini Cheetah performing a few flips but it’ll also run through its greatest skills to date. And lest your ‘robot apocalypse’ sense starts tingling, there’s also a compilation of bloopers and crashes. Even so, they’ve taught their robot to get up from those… rather quickly, too. Happy Monday.
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Looking for more Black Mirror? Let Netflix Original Osmosis keep you company in the meantime
On the hunt for more Black Mirror-like dystopian sci-fi? You might want to make friends with this subtitled Netflix Original called Osmosis, a new series set in Paris concerning the future of dating. It asks whether you would be willing to let science decide who your soulmate really is, and it asks a few other questions as well. Based on the art trailer (which you can see at the link below), the answers to those questions are often painful and unexpected. That… sounds pretty Black Mirror-ish to us, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for it when it drops at the end of this month.
Sony has called it a day with the PlayStation Vita
Are you one of the die-hard South African PlayStation Vita owners? Were you holding out hope that Sony’s handheld console would eventually take off? We’re sorry to report that this is not the case, as Sony has announced that it will be ceasing production of the admittedly-powerful handheld device. The last two SKUs, according to the Vita’s product page (and according to Polygon, whose Japanese is far better than ours), have been discontinued. Sony stopped making games for the console in 2015, with external developers keeping the Vita populated in the meantime. Physical game production stopped last year and Sony’s no longer offering Vita games as part of PlayStation Plus, so this final cancellation looks pretty final to us. Rest in peace, you odd piece of gaming history.
