News from the Future: How your clothes will give you a flatter stomach

Turn your beer gut into shredded abs, all with science

Let’s get one thing out of the way: the technology we're about to unroll is no Harry Potter-style cloak, so there's no tossing it over your head and wandering around, invisible to the naked eye. This is something better -- a cloak that makes it look like you do crunches.

The “invisibility cloak” created by Xiang Zhang from the University of California, Berkeley can “can make an object appear flat, or another shape, when viewed from the front, and over a limited range of optical wavelengths.” It basically manipulates how light is reflected on an object. So while the “invisibility cloak” won’t really give you a six-pack, it can make you look like you have one, which really is the next best thing.

Shotguns in space

We now have a space shotgun courtesy of Honeybee Robotics and NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission. What can it do?

Motherboard reports: 

The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) aims to chip off a massive boulder from an asteroid and shift it into the Moon’s orbit, so we can hopefully send manned spacecraft between the boulder and the moon, collecting samples and advancing the spaceflight experience to prepare us for Mars missions.

Deploying shotguns in space! What could possibly go wrong?

Barbie: the New Frontier of Artificial Intelligence

Do you remember when your daughter was telling you about a conversation that she had with her Barbies and you started to think: a) is she too old for this? b) wow my daughter has an incredible imagination! c) I think my daughter needs help.

Well, Barbie can talk y’all! This time, for real.

According to Popular Science, here’s how the latest Barbara Millicent Roberts works:

When a child speaks to Barbie (and holds down her belt button), the doll records the audio and transmits it back to the ToyTalk server. According to Jacob, the server runs a decision engine that uses natural language processing to choose an appropriate response.

Apparently Barbie has 8,000 responses so your daughter can help refine the Barbie Servers' natural language algorithms, perhaps by asking the question, "Do I need any human friends?"