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In addition to slithering, crawling, and flying just about anywhere, what if robots could camouflage themselves? This tentacled prototype can be made to look like -- or stand out from -- its background with a simple injection of dyes.

Developed by engineers at Harvard University's Whitesides Research Group, the "soft machine" silicone quadruped crawls along on pressurized gases fed through an umbilical cord.

Users can send different dyes through channels in the robot's body, allowing it to blend in or stand out in startling fashion, such as glowing in the dark. Color changes take about 30 seconds, but don't require further power to sustain the disguise. … Read more

Scientists from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University's School of Computer Engineering have unveiled "Social Cloud TV," which is essentially a multiscreen mobile TV experience.

Developed by a research team headed by assistant professor Wen Yonggang, "Social Cloud TV" lets users chat -- using video, voice, or text -- with their friends on the platform, as well as share their content on social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

They can access content that's stored locally, in the cloud, delivered via over-the-top (OTT) services (click here for more information on the technology) or shared using a Web browser on a smart TV or mobile device. Wen and his team developed the back-end processes -- such as a compression algorithm and media transcoding -- so that content is optimized for each device and screen size. … Read more

Happy Monday! OK, Mondays aren't typically a happy time, especially if yours involves waking before the sun, fighting commuter traffic, and/or long lines at Starbucks. (First-world problems, am I right?)

Hopefully I can make your day a little brighter by offering not one, not two, but four sweet buys. That's right: it's a multi-deal Monday. You're feeling better already, I bet.

1. First up, Daily Steals has the refurbished Logitech Harmony 650 universal remote for $29.99, plus $4.99 for shipping. The Harmony series is quite popular around these parts, offering a user-friendly replacement … Read more

From snakes to fish to cheetahs, we've seen a veritable Noah's Ark of biomimetic robots in recent years, and now researchers have turned to the lowly earthworm for inspiration.

Meshworm is a squishy, sluglike droid that stretches and squeezes its artificial muscles to move forward. This peristalsis is similar to how worms travel and how your guts move food around. … Read more

What makes Paris look like Paris? Hint: it ain't the Eiffel Tower.

It is instead the details woven into the urban fabric that form a pattern, according to a machine learning system that's part of a U.S.-French visual data mining project. Yes, computers are learning to ID your city just by looking at random photos.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris had the system look at 40,000 Google Street View images of Paris, London, New York, and Barcelona, as well as eight other cities to find frequent and unique elements. … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

On this day in 1992, "Jeremy" premiered on MTV.

Great collection of what Olympic divers look like mid-jump.

NASA to air Mars landing in Times Square.

Digg unveils revamped home page.

FCC to Verizon: You don't have a right to block tethering apps.

Direction of Justin Bieber documentary to reboot He-Man movie.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Olympics fans told to stop tweeting if they want TV.

- NBC's No. 1 tweeting critic suspended from Twitter.

- NBC defends its use of tape delay for London Summer Games.

- The FBI wants a database of your tattoos.

- How Twitter can tell when you're going to get sick.… Read more

Never fear, a fix is supposedly near. Samsung confirmed today that the recent "stability update" on the Galaxy S3 that rendered the on-device search function useless was going to be repaired immediately, according to the BBC.

"The most recent software upgrade for the Galaxy S3 in the UK included the inadvertent removal of the universal search function," the company said in a statement, according to the BBC. "Samsung will provide the correct software upgrade within the next few days."

Reports of the bunk update surfaced earlier this month when S3 owners found out that … Read more

With each passing year, it seems robots evolve faster than humans do. Last week, a group of students at the University of Freiburg's humanoid robots lab in Germany detailed how they gave robots the ability to maneuver extremely difficult obstacles, such as stairs and ramps, without assistance.

To achieve this relatively new level of robotic maneuverability, the researchers implemented a "2D laser scanner, a monocular camera, an inertial measurement unit, and joint encoders" into a Nao robot, according to a research document (PDF). … Read more