January 2012
163 posts
Happy New Year!
Here’s to a happy closing out of 2011 and to the future of 2012 and BEYOND!
December 2011
132 posts
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US Army unveils 1.8 gigapixel camera helicopter... →
New helicopter-style drones with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras are being developed by the US Army.
The army said the technology promised “an unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground”.
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Researchers hope to use bugged bugs for search and... →
While search and rescue dogs are currently used to help locate survivors of earthquakes or other disasters, new research hopes to make this job easier by turning to bugs. Insects have the ability to get into the smallest of places and could make locating people that much easier.
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1,325 MPG Hypermiling Car Piloted by 11-Year-Old... →
As gas prices continue to skyrocket, the importance of fuel-efficient vehicles can’t be emphasized enough. Luckily, the Cambridge Design Partnership just unveiled a hypermiling concept car that can travel an astonishing 1,325 miles on a single gallon of diesel! While most green vehicles are tested through a series of intense trials, this concept car was put through its paces by an 11 year old...
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U.S. Navy Starts Delivering Drones Using Balloons... →
A few years ago when we visited AUVSI, the big conference organized by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, we took a look at some of the vaguely nutty ways that UAVs are landed. Launching is generally more straightforward, unless you need to be stealthy about it, which is why the U.S. Navy is looking to submerged submarines and high-altitude balloons to deliver drones.
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Fish oil compound stops leukemia in mice →
A compound produced from fish oil that appears to target leukemia stem cells could lead to a cure for the disease, researchers say.
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The art of molecular carpet-weaving →
Even the costliest oriental carpets have small mistakes. It is said that pious carpet-weavers deliberately include tiny mistakes in their fine carpets, because only God has the right to be immaculate. Molecular carpets, as the nanotechnology industry would like to have them are as yet in no danger of offending the gods. A team of physicists headed by Dr. Markus Lackinger from the Technische...
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China’s Parallel Online Universe →
As the showdown escalated between Chinese security forces and residents of Wukan, where villagers revolted against the Chinese Communist Party, you didn’t find as much discussion of the incident in Chinese social media as you might expect. And it wasn’t only because the internet was shut off in the town.
It was also a result of China’s development of a set of “social media clones” that ably mimic...
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The Future of Moral Machines →
A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.”
The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the title of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play about artificial factory workers rising against their human overlords. Just 22 years later,...
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IBM's Watson supercomputer turns to treating... →
The hive mind of servers behind Watson may have conquered Jeopardy, but now it’s turning its attentions to a more altruistic challenge — choosing the best treatment for cancer sufferers. Set to be piloted by doctors at Cedars-Sinai research hospital in Los Angeles, the system will offer evidence-based suggestions to doctors on what treatments could work for each person using case studies and...
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Tiny Optical Diode Could Solve Huge Computer... →
In this age of superfast fiber-optic Internet cables, slowness is still an issue. Light — or photons — traveling through the cables and carrying data have to be converted into electrons once they reach the computer. This not only takes time, the components that do the conversation take up space. The result: a huge bottleneck. On top of that the conversion is one more point at which...
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K-MAX RoboCopter Starts Making Autonomous... →
Helicopters are the most reliable way to get supplies to some of the more remote outposts in Afghanistan, but flying resupply missions is dangerous work. As of this week, some of those aerial resupply jobs will be taken over by an unmanned K-MAX helicopter, which flew its first successful mission over the weekend.
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2012 Prediction Roundup →
Experts are making predictions for 2012 in a wide variety of technology, business, and economics areas. Here’s our pick of the most interesting.
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The Mystery Behind Anesthesia →
Mapping how our neural circuits change under the influence of anesthesia could shed light on one of neuroscience’s most perplexing riddles: consciousness.
A video screen shows a man in his late 60s lying awake on an operating table. Just outside the camera’s view, a doctor is moving his finger in front of the man’s face, instructing him to follow it back and forth with his eyes....
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Making Revolution →
In October I joined a distinguished panel at the National Academy of Engineering on the future of manufacturing. One argument presented was that the United States needed to find things that it alone could make, ceding other manufacturing to China.
That wrongheaded thinking pervades discussion about the role of manufacturing in America’s future. It ignores huge opportunities by equating...
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Details of Earth’s core ‘ironed’ out →
Researchers have zeroed in on the behavior of iron—a key component of the Earth’s core—by conducting high-pressure experiments to simulate conditions at the planet’s interior.
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Drones used against Japan's whaling fleet →
Whaling opponents attempting to stop Japan’s annual whale hunt in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica have deployed a new weapon: pilotless drone aircraft that have already spotted its whaling fleet.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, whose campaigns are showcased on the Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet, said it located the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru off Australia’s...
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Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface →
The 40-inch SUR40, co-created by Samsung and Microsoft, is a thin tabletop computer that sees and responds to whatever is placed on it. Each of the table’s LCD pixels emits an infrared beam that reflects off an object back to a sensor. The processor synthesizes the sensor data to create an eight-bit image from which it can pick out shapes and large text, such as product names and numbers. Once...
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Sexbots for Women →
Androids that provide erotic pleasure to humans, aka ‘Sexbots’, are destined to end up in our beds in the future. I explored this concept a couple of years ago in my H magazine article, “Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasms.”
Typically, such sexbots are regarded as machines designed for men. But don’t women also desire cyborg stimulation? When will their plastic paramours arrive? What will...
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Will We Soon Be Able to Fire Laser Beams From Our... →
By day, Seok-Hyun Yun and Malte Gather are physicists at Massachusetts General Hospital. But at night, for the past four years, they worked on making a human cell behave like a laser. They built their human laser out of the same three components found in all lasers: a pump source, which provides the initial light energy; an optical cavity, which concentrates the light from the pump source into a...
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How fast?! China tests 300-mph train →
China launched a super-rapid test train over the weekend which is capable of travelling 310-miles per hour (500 kilometers per hour), state media said on Monday, as the country moves ahead with its railway ambitions despite serious problems on its high-speed network.
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Japanese Roboticists Are Building the Tallest... →
When you can make a humanoid robot that plays soccer and dances, why limit him to below-average or even average human stature? He should definitely be a giant robot instead, because there is nothing terrifying or awkward about that, not at all. Don’t worry, a Japanese robotics company is planning just that — a 13-foot-tall iron giant.
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Apple Hydrogen Fuel Cell Battery Plans Revealed →
Apple is planning to make devices powered by hydrogen fuel cells, according to patent applications published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The plans could create computers and phones with weeks-long battery power. It would also make the devices lighter and less bulky.
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Spring-loaded Pixels to Drive Holographic Displays →
Earlier this month, I sat through a 3-D showing of Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Hugo. I was surprised to find myself distracted by discomfort. Every twenty minutes or so I had to close my eyes to give them a rest. By the end of the film, I had a big headache. I’m not the only one who’s run into this problem. Stereoscopic projection, the sort that’s standard in cinemas, is hard on the brain. The...
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A bionic prosthetic eye that speaks the language... →
On the grand scale of things, we know so very little about the brain. Our thick-headedness isn’t quite cosmological in scale — we really do know almost nothing about the universe beyond Earth — but, when it comes down to it, the brain is virtually a black box. We know that stimuli goes in, usually through one of our senses, and motor neurons come out, but that’s about it. One thing you can do...
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Kinect weighs astronauts just by looking at them →
Astronauts will soon be able to stay fit thanks to a body tracking camera system built into Microsoft’s Kinect gaming sensor, which helps calculate their weight in zero gravity. Even during missions that last just a few weeks spacefarers can lose up to 15 per cent of their body mass because their muscles atrophy due to lack of use. To prevent this physical decline, crew aboard the...
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New technique makes it easier to etch... →
The team developed a method to chemically etch patterned arrays in the semiconductor gallium arsenide, used in solar cells, lasers, light emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs), capacitors and sensors. Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Xiuling Li, the researchers describe their technique in the journal Nano Letters.
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'Plasmonic nanoantennas' show promise in optical... →
The researchers at Purdue University used the nanoantennas to abruptly change a property of light called its phase. Light is transmitted as waves analogous to waves of water, which have high and low points. The phase defines these high and low points of light.
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Mapping The Universe Through Collective Brainpower →
Dark matter comprises slightly more than 80% of the mass of the universe. Despite its ubiquity, dark matter is difficult for astronomers to find because, well, it’s dark. That is, it doesn’t emit or scatter light, which means it can’t be directly observed. Instead, dark matter is detected by observing its effects on what astronomers can see – its gravitational pull, or “lensing”, on distant...
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Researchers develop paint-on solar cells →
A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame have made a major advance toward this vision by creating an inexpensive “solar paint” that uses semiconducting nanoparticles to produce energy. “We want to do something transformative, to move beyond current silicon-based solar technology,” says Prashant Kamat, John A. Zahm Professor of Science in Chemistry and...
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WatchWatch Earth 2050: Energy in 2050 tonight on Discovery Channel at 7pm PT (Check local listings)
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Seeing, Guiding and Benefiting from Humanity’s... →
Humanity’s advances to date have been accompanied by great leaps in the density, diversity, and virtuality of our societies, and in the miniaturization and efficiency of our technologies. Among these and other variables determining social progress, two stand out as particularly special. The more our intelligence gains access to “Inner Space,” both to the domain of very small size scales...
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Hands-On With The 4Moms Origami Stroller →
When I first saw the 4moms Origami stroller, I knew it would be a hit. It’s a robotic stroller that unfolds like the Autobots getting ready to roll out and has one of the nicest interfaces I’ve ever seen on a stroller (which is saying a lot). Why did it make me so excited? Well, first this stroller will beat the pants off any of those feature-rich Stokkes or Buzzes out there. Pull this thing out...
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Scholarly conference to deal with the legal status... →
Lawyers and policy wonks with a futurist bent are advised to take note. The University of Miami School of Law is organizing a conference called “We Robot: Inaugural Conference on Legal and Policy Issues Relating to Robotics.” They’re seeking scholars, lawyers, and roboticists who want to discuss a topic that will probably be making headlines in a decade: How the law will...
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Scientists Brace for Media Storm Around... →
Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free.
The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists...
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Eco-Friendly Battery Runs on Old Newspapers →
I’ll start you guys off with a quote here: In talking about Sony’s new battery technology, which uses old cellulose product like newspapers and cardboard to generate electricity, the BBC says: “Their work builds on a previous project in which they used fruit juice to power a Walkman music player.” Thank you, crazy Sony recycling-engineers.
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Self-healing electronics could work longer and... →
When one tiny circuit within an integrated chip cracks or fails, the whole chip – or even the whole device – is a loss. But what if it could fix itself, and fix itself so fast that the user never knew there was a problem?
A team of University of Illinois engineers has developed a self-healing system that restores electrical conductivity to a cracked circuit in less time than it takes to blink....
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Are you ready for ubiquitous surveillance by Big... →
For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at...
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Bioluminescence Bacteria To Be Used To Combat... →
Bioluminescence is an ability shared by creatures around the planet that allows them to generate light – in fact, 90% of life in the world’s oceans possess this characteristic. Whereas most animals use it to help them find food, attract mates, and defend against predators, a marine biologist is harnessing bioluminescent bacteria to save one of Florida’s most precious and threatened ecosystems –...
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Extreme Futurist Festival: TED Conference for the... →
Dr. Kim Solez is on a mission. The renal pathologist and University of Alberta professor is currently working to make the lectures from his course “Technology and the Future of Medicine” available to the general public via online videos. He’s “mainstreaming the technological singularity” and transhumanism, or, rather, helping those of us outside of research labs...
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Watch
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Automated Solar Feature Detection for Space... →
The solar surface and atmosphere are highly dynamic plasma environments, which evolve over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. Large-scale eruptions, such as coronal mass ejections, can be accelerated to millions of kilometres per hour in a matter of minutes, making their automated detection and characterisation challenging. Additionally, there are numerous faint solar features, such as...
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Universal transistor serves as a basis to perform... →
Most of today’s electronics devices contain two different types of field-effect transistors (FETs): n-type (which use electrons as the charge carrier) and p-type (which use holes). Generally, a transistor can only be one type or the other, but not both. Now in a new study, researchers have designed a transistor that can reconfigure itself as either n-type or p-type when programmed by an electric...
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Keeping Cells Alive in the Lab →
There is a lot of talk about personalized cancer treatment in medicine these days. One idea is to subject a tumor to different therapies to find the cocktail of drugs that will work with limited toxicity — well before a patient actually is treated. It’s what many oncologists look forward to — someday.
But it recently happened in a lab at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. A donated...
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Minihelicopter Flies Autonomously →
Siemens uses a minihelicopter equipped with onboard sensors to collect and interpret videos. Known as the quadrocopter, the aircraft uses the data to create a 3D digital model of its immediate surroundings. As reported in Pictures of the Future magazine, computer scientists working for Corporate Technology in Princeton and Munich have teamed up with robotics experts from the Massachusetts...
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Kenya Has Mobile Health App Fever →
Mobile health platforms are fast emerging in Kenya, where one startup’s newly launched mobile health platform is attracting nearly 1,000 downloads daily, and the dominant telecom, Safaricom, has forged a partnership that will give its 18 million subscribers access to doctors.
A World Bank official sees significant promise from such efforts, pointing to the fact that 50 percent of all Kenyan...
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New wonder-drug could give us all super-memory →
It sounds like science fiction, but neuroscientists have identified a molecule in mice that, when suppressed, significantly boosts memory. It’s meant as a radical treatment for Alzheimer’s patients, but there’s no reason the rest of us couldn’t take it, too. Baylor University researchers discovered that a molecule called PKR serves two crucial function in the brains of...