If your job involves tasks such as sorting springs and screws or unloading dishwashers, a robot replacement may soon be on the way.

For now, the granular-gripper robot demonstrated in the video above is perhaps best suited as a sidekick for bar games you might play while trying to grab the attention of a potential flesh-and-bone soul mate.

That is, assuming the potential mate doesn't fall for the robot instead. After all, its barroom athleticism is tough to beat — able to sink mini-basketball shots with uncanny accuracy and hit the bull's eye on the dartboard time and time again.

The tossing ability of jamming robot gripper is a new trick from roboticists working on the grasping technology at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. 

The gripper itself is essentially a balloon filled with granular material, in this case coffee grounds. This squishy balloon hand conforms to whatever object it touches. When the air is sucked out of the balloon, a tight grip is created. To toss the object, the gripper is rapidly re-inflated with air. 

While this all seems simple, anyone who's tried to consistently sink baskets on the court or in a bar knows that picking up balls and tossing them repeatedly through the hoop isn't nearly as easy as it seems.

From the roboticists' perspective, the technology is an improvement over other throwing robots.

"Certainly throwing has been demonstrated with robot arms before, but the momentum for throwing is typically provided by the arm motion while the gripper simply releases the object at the optimum time," the researchers write in a FAQ accompanying their paper to appear in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

"Here, the entirety of the shooting function is provided by the gripper."

While the shooting skill of the robot isn't good enough for it to go to work tossing together electronic components, which requires higher precision, it is good enough to pick up trash after a good house party.

Other potential applications, the team notes, include picking up and quickly disposing of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). After all, the research is supported by DARPA.

— Via IEEE

More on throwing robots and the robotic workforce:

• Robot to throw first pitch at Phillies game
• Robot folds, throws paper plane
• Tosser bot: Dog's best friend?
• Duke grad builds beer-tossing fridge
• More work for robots in China
• Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots
• Underwater robots at work in Japan

A woman fixes red heart-shaped balloons on a fence on Februray 14, 2012 in Berlin.

Think the love in your heart is unique? You might be right. It turns out that everyone's heart beats to its own rhythm. Scientists think they can take that uniqueness to protect your data. Isn't that lovely?

To prove the point, researchers led by Ching-Kun Chen, an electrical engineer at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, have developed an algorithm that turns an electrocardiograph (ECG) reading from your palm into an encryption key.

"He says the goal is to build the system into external hard drives and other devices that can be decrypted and encrypted simply by touching them," reports New Scientist magazine.

Findings were published online January 14 in Information Sciences. 

More on encryption technology:

• Apple would use voice, facial recognition as part of iPhone 'kill switch'
• Goal of the cloud: Keeping encrypted data safe
• FBI software cracks encryption wall
• Simple passwords no longer suffice

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Liquid batteries that can store excess energy generated by sources such as wind turbines could accelerate adoption of the green technology.

Banks of scorching hot batteries filled with molten metals may be the long-sought silver bullet to make large-scale adoption of wind and solar energy a practical, purely green reality.

Such a storage solution is needed because, as we know, the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine where and when it's needed.

"Right now, if you run a solar farm or a wind farm and you want to deliver electricity when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn’t shining, the cheapest way is to get a gas-fired peaking unit," Donald Sadoway, a materials chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me Monday.

Gas-fired peaking units are mini power plants that can be turned on and off quickly to meet demand for electricity when other sources are unavailable or maxed out.

"Those things are cheap to buy, they are cheap to run, and the price of natural gas has been falling recently in the United States. So the way people have been looking at (shoring up) renewables is to turn to natural gas," Sadoway explained.

"And that's fine. It's not illegal. There's nothing immoral about it," he added, "but it is not 100 percent green at this point."

For the industry to adopt the greener battery technology, the cost of the battery has to be as cheap, efficient, and reliable as state-of-the art natural gas-fired peaking plants. 

Sadoway and his colleagues are hard at work on a liquid battery they believe will meet these criteria. On Monday, they described their progress in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Metal cocktail
The battery is a cocktail of metals that naturally settle into distinct layers because of their different densities, similar to a "black and tan" pint served at British pubs, where dark stout rests on top of denser pale ale.

Batteries need three layers — positive and negative poles and a membrane between the charges. In the case of the liquid battery, molten metals on the top and bottom serve as the positive and negative poles and a layer of molten salt serves as the membrane.

"The principle of the battery is an alloying reaction," Sadoway explained. 

Alloys are metals made via the combination of two or more metallic elements. In the liquid battery, the top layer is magnesium and the bottom layer is antimony.

"The driving force for current is the desire of magnesium to enter the antimony and form an alloy," Sadoway said. "In order to alloy, the magnesium has to first get across the molten salt and in order to do so, the magnesium has to lose two electrons and become a magnesium ion."

Those two electrons are what escape to the wires to power our gadgets and appliances. 

"When the magnesium ions get to the interface with the antimony, they acquire two electrons which have been pulled out of the external circuit and then that makes neutral magnesium which then alloys with the antimony," said Sadoway.

To charge the battery, the process is reversed. 

Sadoway and his colleagues have tweaked the recipe of this liquid cocktail for several years and gradually scaled up the size of the batteries. 

The initial tests consisted of a battery about the size of a shot glass; then they went to a battery the size of a hockey puck and, now, the team reports a six-inch-wide version that has 200 times the storage capacity of the original.

Keeping them hot
To keep the metals in a liquid state requires a battery operating temperature of 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 degrees Fahrenheit).

This heat comes at an energy cost — "we have to lose some of the energy we are storing in order to keep the battery at temperature," Sadoway explained.

Tests show about 75 percent efficiency — that is, for every 100 units of electricity put in the battery, 75 units come out. The rest is spent keeping the battery hot and lost due to inefficiencies in power electronics and converting back and forth between AC and DC.

A loss of 25 percent is actually quite reasonable, according to Sadoway. As long as more than a 25 percent spread between the price of electricity when the battery is charged and discharged, a utility can recoup its investment cost and make a buck.

For example, a utility could charge up its battery in the middle of the night when the wind is blowing and rates are low and then sell it back to the grid in the afternoon when rates are high. 

"In certain markets like California, there can be day-night price swings that can be not so many percent, but so many X," Sadoway noted. "In a market like that, this thing would do just fine."

Battery vs battery
According to Sadoway, who has started a company, Liquid Metal Battery Corp. to scale up and sell these batteries, the liquid approach is potentially better than competing technologies such as lithium ion batteries, which require the expansion and contraction of solid parts in order to work.

All this swelling and contracting amounts to wear and tear, which is often why the lithium ion batteries in laptops, for example, go kaput after a few years.

"Those kinds of failure mode are absent in this battery because it is all liquid and liquid can accommodate volume changes," Sadoway noted. 

Lab tests, he said, show that the lifetime of the battery isn't limited by its capacity to hold a charge so much as by the lifetime of materials used to encase and insulate it.

Current materials, he said, may begin to corrode after 10 to 15 years sufficiently to change the chemistry of the battery or permit the battery "to eat its way out of the case."

Another advantage to the liquid technology, he added, is the abundance of the raw materials used to build it. Magnesium and antimony are abundant in the United States and low cost.

As well, assembly of the battery is straightforward. Due to density differences, for example, the layers self assemble. "No clean rooms, no fancy nano-tech, nothing like that," Sadoway said.

Daniel Kammen directs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. He said the biggest challenge for the liquid battery is the high operating temperature.

"Even if the waste heat can be harvested for an added benefit, systems operating at over 1,000 degrees are going to be a challenge for long-term maintenance," he told me in an email exchange on Tuesday. 

Shipping-container-sized battery
Sadoway's startup up is focused on scaling up the battery technology with the best chemistry that comes out of his lab at MIT. While the lab has reached a six-inch diameter cell, the company has cells that are 16-inches in diameter, he said.

The idea is to take these cells, stack them about 20 high, and link the stacks together in rows about 20 deep that that fit inside a 40-foot shipping container. This shipping-container-sized battery would provide about 2 megawatt hours of juice.

By the end of 2014, the goal is "to have something that can be readily shipped to a potential customer for testing," Sadoway said.

While the utility companies may be interested in the batteries as an alternative to gas-fired peaker plants to make their solar and wind farms viable, the batteries also could ease transmission line congestion.

This could be particularly useful in tech-heavy regions such as the Bay Area, where the energy demands of server farms are steadily climbing, noted Sadoway.

On certain days of the year, for example during a heat wave in the middle of the summer, "you can't get enough electricity through the lines. The transmission lines are running at full capacity," he said.

Instead of building additional transmission capacity — bringing more wires into the city, which is usually controversial and requires a drawn-out permitting process — companies could plop a battery in the basement of their buildings.

"From midnight to 5 a.m., when the lines aren't congested [and rates are low] you could be shipping electricity into the center of the city and storing it in the basement of these buildings," Sadoway explained. 

"Then, in the middle of the day, you just take it right out of the basement into the servers."

Kammen, the University of California energy professor, said this is "exciting stuff and a welcome area of long-overdue innovation."

Updated at 1:40 pm PT to reflect comments from Daniel Kammen.

More on battery and storage technology:

• Energy storage breakthroughs on the horizon
• Pourable batteries could store green power
• Building a better battery
• Battery tech improving as demand soars
• Electric battery gets you gooing, gooing, gone!
• Can EVs solve wind power puzzle

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Ford.com

A screenshot from a Ford video shows how Active Park Assist works in the Flex model. Drivers just need to target a spot, and the car uses ultrasonic range finders to park itself.

Do you want a future where C-3P0 and his robotic pals do the driving as you text your friends the 411 on the next stop in a crosstown pub crawl? Minds capable of making this dream come true want your opinion.

Students with Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research have prepared on online survey to find out your robotic car desires. After providing a few generic personal details, you can weigh in on questions such as:

• How much control you're willing to give up to an automated self-driving technology? All? Some, like an airplane pilot? None at all?
• Would you take a cab driven by a robot? Choices range from "Definitely not" to "Definitely would. There is no way a computer can drive worse than current human cab drivers :)".
• What are your feelings about a car that could drive you without any input? Choices include: "Excitement – where can I get one," "Party time – I can go out partying without having to worry about drinking and driving," and "Fear – That's it. Run for the hills. The robots are taking over."

To take the survey, click here. When the results are out this spring, we'll share the details.

More on robotic cars:

• Road rage at driverless cars? It's possible
• GM researching driverless cars
• With these autonomous cars, who needs to drive?
• Cars are approaching 'auto' pilot mode
• Audi to climb Pikes Peak without a driver 
• Google tests cars that steer without drivers
• Google self-driving car crash caused by human

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

NASA

NASA technology developed to land the Phoenix Lander on Mars, shown here in an artist's rendering, has led to crash avoidance technology that may find its way into our cars within a decade.

Amid the storm brewing over cuts to NASA's budget for the coming year, the space agency has published its annual reminder that the things it builds to explore the universe also lead to amazing "spinoffs" — innovative technologies and products used here on Earth.

The reminder is a booklet, itself called Spinoff, that reveals NASA's ties to everything from more efficient solar cells to software that makes data crunching a much speedier process to an online video game that's inspiring future engineers.

Among the technologies with NASA smarts highlighted in this year's report include:

• A firefighting system that was influenced by a NASA-derived rocket design that extinguishes fires more quickly than traditional systems, saving lives and property.
• Software employing NASA-invented tools to help commercial airlines fly shorter routes and help save millions of gallons of fuel each year, reducing costs to airlines while benefiting the environment.
• A fitness monitoring technology developed with NASA expertise that, when fitted in a strap or shirt, can be used to measure and record vital signs. The technology is now in use to monitor the health of professional athletes and members of the armed services.

A central piece in the brewing budget battle for NASA concerns cuts that would end the space agency's involvement in two upcoming missions to Mars with the European Space Agency. 

"To me, it's totally irrational and unjustified," Edward Weiler, who until September was NASA's associate administrator for science, told the Associated Press. "We are the only country on this planet that has the demonstrated ability to land on another planet, namely Mars. It is a national prestige issue."

As pointed out in the Spinoff publication, the experience of landing on Mars has led, for example, to a so-called 3-D flash LIDAR camera technology sold by Advanced Scientific Concepts that is making for improved crash avoidance, navigation and object tracking for all kinds of vehicles, including cars and trucks.

"When mounted on an automobile, the technology can show a driver how close or far away things are to assist in avoiding collisions," NASA explains in Spinoff. "A monitor on the car would distinguish how far away other cars, bicyclists or pedestrians are, as well as how fast they are moving."

Within six to eight years, such technology could be standard on cars and trucks.

You can learn about these technologies and many more by reading Spinoff 2011.

Fun fact: Contary to popular belief, NASA does not claim to be the brains behind Tang. General Foods began to test market the the powdery drink mix in 1957, a year before the space agency was born. Tang did fly on all Gemini and Apollo missions, however, which boosted sales. 

More on NASA spinoffs:

• The truth about NASA's space tech spinoffs
• How NASA could get its groove back
• NASA space inventions benefit all our lives on Earth
• How spaceflight sparks spinoffs/
• Space washing machine could microwave laundry

A competition that aims to harness the world's most creative engineering minds for building next-generation military drones is heating up with proof-of-flight videos of the contraptions posted online.

There are plenty of quadcopters that will make kids stuck with off-the-shelf RC choppers drool. Top judging in the first round went to a Death Star-like ball on wheels called the GremLion. It's neat trick? A mid-section that pops open to reveal a pair of rotors.

The GremLion was designed by a team at the National University of Singapore and is shown off in the awesomely narrated video above.

However, the video most liked by viewers, as of this writing, demonstrates a tablet-controlled quadcopter called SwiftFlight. The video's production includes Hollywood-esque on-screen pop-up explanations of the action.

Another crowd pleaser is a video describing icarusLabs's entry, a winged aircraft that hovers inside an office before taking to the skies. It buzzes a park with sustained winds of 10 miles per hour, something we know thanks to the detailed reportage.

The next phase of the competition will be live demonstration of the concepts later this month. A fly-off of the 10 top designs will be held this spring. The winner will receive a $100,000 prize, a subcontract with a manufacturer to develop the concept, and an opportunity to demonstrate it to the military. 

For more videos and information on the competition, head on over to UAVforge.net.

— via IEEE

More on drones:

• Future drones may fly like butterflies
• Can drones fly as well as Luke Skywalker?
• U.S. Army orders first suicide drones
• Navy flying drone to launch from submarine's trash chute
• On the wings of technology: Hummingbird drones

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

As Twitter becomes a dominant news source for millions of people, a new formula can predict a news story's popularity on the microblogging service.

This is a blog post about the sexy social media technology Twitter. It mentions Justin Bieber. You'll want to tweet it. At least, my editors hope you do. My job might depend on it. 

The Internet and social media have altered the face of journalism. Few media companies can survive selling ads in traditional newspapers and magazines that readers will see as they flip pages in search of content that tickles their fancy. 

Online, which is where most of us get our news today, millions of readers click links on Twitter to go straight to the content they want. That means the specific article must sell the ad. In turn, the dollar (or cent) value of a story is measured in the eyeballs it attracts.

Thus, in order for a media outlet to make a buck in this new world of journalism, editors and journalists must fine tune their story selection and writing style to maximize its spread on Twitter. Social media researchers at Hewlett Packard have developed an algorithm that does just that.

"In principle, there is a formula, an algorithm, that you can apply to any news story you write [to maximize your exposure] on social media," Bernardo Huberman, a senior fellow and director of the social computing lab at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., told me Wednesday.

The formula is a mixture of three main characteristics: its source, subject matter and the popularity of the people mentioned. It predicts how many tweets a story will get with 84 percent accuracy.

Huberman and his team created the formula after examining data on story content from the news aggregator Feedzilla during a week in August 2011 and studying how these stories spread on Twitter. Interestingly, they note, the level of subjectivity in an article isn't a big factor in its popularity.

The most popular stories are those published by technology news sites, about gadgets and social media, and include gossip about well-known celebrities. By this reasoning, a scandal involving an iPhone and Justin Bieber posted on Mashable would do exceptionally well.

The bias toward technology-related stories and sources, Huberman notes, may be because people who use Twitter "are very, very keen on technology."

Overall, the formula matches what editors and journalists already intuitively know: Sex and scandals sell, especially scandals that involve somebody with name recognition. What surprised Huberman was the degree to which all of this is predictable by a computer.

This predictability could lead to a software program loaded on journalists' computers that examines every story they write and tells them how well it will perform on Twitter. It could also recommend ways to improve a story's Twitter score.

One of the concerns is that "if everyone starts using this algorithm, all news stories will start looking the same," Huberman said. Even more troubling is "stories that might be important but don't have these characteristics will drown. No one will notice them. That's sad."

But it is also possible that journalists can use the formula to jazz up a story that would likely drown by highlighting or incorporating elements known to make it a Twitter success. 

An argument can be made that the role of journalism isn't about success on social media. Huberman, for one, agrees with that sentiment. But he is interested in what he calls social attention — how to get people to pay attention to whatever you want them to pay attention to.

"The success of a story, whatever the story is, depends on being attended to by people to read it and pass it on," he said. "You can have the most incredible thing in life, a story, or something to buy or sell, but if nobody notices it, you might not be able to do anything with it."

Findings are to be published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. A pre-print is available from arXiv.org.

More stories on Twitter:

• Activists and blogger fear Twitter censorship
• Super Bowl breaks Twitter record (Sorry, Tebow!)
• The Pope explains the power — and danger — of Twitter
• Ashton Kutcher, friends key to Twitter success
• Human brain limits Twitter friends

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter.

For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Vijay Kumar / Purdue University

Researchers have learned how to improve the performance of sensors that use tiny vibrating "microcantilevers," like the one pictured here, to detect chemical and biological agents for applications from national security to food processing.

Anyone who watched the recent X-Games coverage heard commentators obsess about "amplitude" — how high snowboarders such as Shaun White soar above the lip of the superpipe to perform aerial tricks.

Scientists more concerned with using vibrating sensors to detect harmful chemicals in the air we breathe and food we eat than White's frontside double cork 1260 share the love for amplitude.

In their case, they've found that a change in the amplitude of a tiny sensor's vibration is a reliable indication that a chemical of interest has glommed onto it. 

Sensors that measure shifts in frequency — how often a vibrating motion repeats itself — when a chemical of interest sticks to it have been around for a while, noted Jeffrey Rhoads, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

"But when the devices get smaller, that can be harder to do due to noise," he explained to me Tuesday. That is, at small scales, scientists have a hard time detecting changes in frequency that are due to the chemical of interest from changes because of other factors.

To get around this, Rhoads and colleagues found that they can measure changes in amplitude instead. The breakthrough, he said, could lead to applications everywhere from food safety and national security to, eventually, biomedical research.

Proof-of-concept experiments showed that change in amplitude was a more reliable way to detect the presence of small quantities of methanol gas than the frequency approach.

Applied to other gases this could be useful, for example, when attempting to determine the safety of food, Rhoads said. "If there's a little bit of something bad, the whole thing is shot."

Looking to the future, the team hopes to apply these sensors to things like detecting the concentration of certain cells in a person's blood, for example.

To get there will require improvements to measure not just the presence of a chemical, but also its concentration. Doing so will require better understanding of the chemistry of the chemicals of interest.

Findings are detailed a paper appearing online this week in the Journal of Microelectromechancial Systems.

More on sensor technology:

• Tiny solar powered sensor runs almost forever
• Technologist wins 'genius' award for sensor tech
• Sensor could bring human touch to robots
• Printable sensors detect bombs

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

A customized artificial jawbone built with a 3-D printer has allowed an 83-year-old woman to continue breathing, chewing, and chatting away, a team of European scientists announced.

The first-of-a-kind jaw reconstruction was accomplished with a printing technique called laser melting where layers of a metallic powder are built up and fused together with a laser.

In this case, the powder is titanium. Once built, the entire artificial jawbone was coated with a type of ceramic that made it compatible with body tissue.

University of Hasselt

A researcher holds up a replica of a lower jawbone that was created with 3-D printer that was implanted in an 83-year-old woman.

The design, production and processing of the implant was done digitally in just two hours. Other implant building methods can take up to two days, the University of Hasselt in Belgium noted. 

The rapid construction technique allowed the team to address a rapidly progressing infection in the woman's lower jaw that required complete removal of the bone in order to retain an open airway.

They decided to go with the 3-D printed jawbone for the sake of speed and functionality. Other options would have led to either a non-functional lower jaw or required a lengthy surgery and recovery time.

During surgery, the patient's deteriorating jawbone was removed and replaced with the custom implant. One day after the operation, she had normal function and was able to talk and swallow.

The completed implant weighs about 107 grams, which is around 30 grams heavier than a natural bone, the team reported. The difference, they said, is manageable for the patient.

In a statement, team member Jules Pouken from the University of Hasselt  likened the feat to man's first step on the moon: "A cautious, but firm step."

The team explained the procedure during a press conference in Belgium on Feb. 3. More images and details are available from the University of Hasselt.

Only time will tell whether 3-D printing will revolutionize the medical profession, but this feat marks rapid advancement in a field that seemed futuristic just a few months ago.

More on 3-D printing technology:

• 3-D printers may soon fix broken bones
• Robot spider crawls out of 3-D printer
• The wild possibilities of printing food
• Chocolate printer crafts sculptures from cocoa

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Corning, the company known for its innovation in glass, has just put out another mesmerizing video exploring how its interactive display technology could mate with the computers and gadgets of the tomorrow.

The video envisions interactive displays that do everything from help us get dressed in the morning to make life-saving decisions in the operating room and share the wonder of nature with schoolchildren.

The video, "A Day Made of Glass 2," is an extension of a video released last yearthat went viral on YouTube. It's possible the new one too will leave many of us eager for the future it presents. 

For even more about the future of glass, check out our Stronger than Steel video below.

Johns Hopkins University / YouTube

Information on the mechanics of a painted lady butterfly's flight patterns gleaned from high-speed video may be used to construct better designs for military drones.

High-speed video cameras are allowing university researchers to document how butterflies gracefully flutter through the air. The U.S. military funded findings may lead to more agile insect-sized drones sent to spy on enemies.

A key finding is that butterflies appear to use their bodies and wings to twist and turn in the air in a way similar to how ice skaters use their arms to control the speed of their spins, explains Johns Hopkins University undergraduate Tiras Lin, who is working on the high-speed video research.

"Ice skaters who want to spin faster bring their arms in close to their bodies and extend their arms out when they want to slow down," he explains in the video news release below.

"These positions change the spatial distribution of a skater's mass and modify their moment of inertia; this in turn affects the rotation of the skater's body. An insect may be able to do the same thing."

To capture the images of butterflies in flight, Lin used video cameras that record 3,000 one-megapixel images per second. To put that in perspective, a standard video camera shoots 24, 30 or 60 frames per second. "Butterflies flap their wings about 25 times per second," Lin notes.

Most of his analysis zeroed in on 1/5th of a second of flight, or about 600 frames.

Lin recently presented his findings at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics. While they haven't yet been adopted by next-generation drones, he said they ought to be. To see how else drones could get buggier in the future, check out the stories below.

More stories on insect-inspired drone technology:

• Biofuel cells may turn cockroaches into cyborgs
• Military developing robot-insect cyborgs
• On wings of technology: Humming bird drones
• Ant-like robots poised to invade the marketplace