Monkey controls robot with its brain
Duke University, in conjunction with Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) have developed a way to translate complex brain signals into slightly less complex computer outputs in order to control a robot. The science is a bit beyond me but it seems pretty simple at a basic level: Monkeys walking on a treadmill produce certain brain waves associated with walking which are measured and then transmitted to a pair of robotic legs that mimic the monkey’s motion. The truly spectacular part of this experiment happened when the experimenters turned off the monkeys treadmill but found a way to keep the monkey thinking about walking. The robot kept going!
What does this mean? Well, for now it might not mean much, but eventually it could mean that people who become paralysed might one day be able to bypass the spine and control prosthetic limbs straight from the brain. This same sort of remote control might also be used for remote control of robots in hazardous work environments or even robotic soldiers, the sky’s the limit.
To learn more, see Duke’s medical news site or watch their video below:
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Automated garages
Imagine a world without carbon monoxide-filled walks to the car, without predatory spot-stealers and without accidental parking dings. Imagine a world in which cars park themselves and you are imagining the wonderful world of automated parking garages like this one by Klaus parking. Watch the video, it’s pretty cool.
If you’re interested in learning more, this is the best I could find from Gizmag.com.
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X-Ray vision??
After I heard about the new backscatter x-ray scanners that see through clothes, a friend of mine told me about a cheaper technique to look through women’s bathing suits and see what’s underneath. Now, I haven’t tried this, but if you’re interested in learning more (or seeing examples) go to XRayHunter.com and see for yourself.
Using the “near-infrared” color spectrum, cameras absorb light from the skin itself, ignoring light, tight clothes like bathing suits. As with any social ailment, there is a cure however, being sold by Cramer Japan in the form of an IR-proof swimsuit. More about that from Weird Asia News.
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eBooks in the round
In case you somehow missed it, I love eBooks. I love eBooks so much that I can’t stand their clunky design and unimaginative interfaces. Also I’m not so happy about their high price range but this design from Christian Holland has rocked my eBook-loving soul to its core. I love this thing and really want someone to make it a reality. You can find it and other lesser entries in this submission forum from design site Core77.
Thanks to the original article from TreeHugger.
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Oh Copyright, you seething souless monster you
So most of us here at Duenos die a little bit inside every time we think of Copyright as it applies to anything digital, technological, or really just any given joy that exists in the universe. One of my particular favorites in the RIAA, with their rather impressive track record:
Spying on students, trying to screw grandmothers, pursuing lower class single moms, and even inspiring a sort of nonprofit company to help people sued by the unethical corporate atrocity (can’t find the link for now, much appreciated if anyone can toss it this way). Oh and the MPAA isn’t any exception, they’ve even broken copyright themselves!
Anyway, in the spirit of all this I thought we might rehearse a little bit about copyright and fair use, as explained by our good pal Disney:
Making fair use of 27 Disney movies, the creators of this movie explain Copyright law, Fair Use, and how Disney intimidates people into staying away from its products. Will Disney consider suing the creators and increasing the negative publicity it gets from its actions?
A Fair(y) Use Tale (NOT a Disney movie)
Much thanks to www.theinquirer.net and Kent Yates at GSLIS@UIUC for the tip offs.
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Solar buses
Solar-power meets mass transit with the Tindo solar bus. This latest and greatest from the City of Adelaide in South Australia can hold 42 people and go for 200 km on one charge. The Tindo bus (named for the Aboriginal Australian word for “sun”) will be free to ride and started normal service last week.
For more detailed information check out the article from Inhabitat.com, or skip the middle man and go straight to the source at the Adelaide City Council.
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USB Booties
After USB genitals, this seems like the next strangest computer peripheral. These red Santa-like booties plug into a spare USB port on your PC and keep your feet warm while you surf. Is it overkill? Yes. Will people buy them? Probably. Should anyone ever think about these again? No.
Here’s a link to someone else’s Top 10 strange USB devices.
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Flying Men!
Imagine diving out of an airplane thousands of feet in the air, reaching terminal velocity and then landing right back on the ground, all without a parachute. This has been a dream of man since Leonardo da Vinci sketched out his first plans and probably far before that.
Yesterday the New York Times ran an article about one of the forerunners in what is formally called wingsuit diving, Jeb Corliss. Mr. Corliss came to wingsuit diving (which is basically people trying to be flying squirrels) after trying base-jumping and shark-baiting so you can imagine how dangerous this is. Still, despite it’s danger, there are teams in at least half a dozen countries trying to be the first to perfect the art of falling without a parachute. The original article can be found here at the New York Times website.
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High-Pitched Ringtones
This is an old story but there’s a chance you missed it so here I go again: To stop teenage loiterers, Welsh inventor Howard Stapleton invented a device that emits a very high frequency sound that older people simply cannot hear. The tone sounds like a mosquito buzzing in your ear and so was called The Mosquito. For more about the science and the story behind the invention, check out the very good Wikipedia page on the subject.
Of course no good deed goes unpunished and the teens have struck back by using the same frequencies as alert tones on their mobile phones, thereby avoiding turning their phones off in class. A minor victory, but still an annoyance for teachers I’m sure.
If you feel like trying out the tones for yourself, the best place to download them seems to be here. You can download a whole range of frequencies and use the highest one you can hear. Be warned though, one day that frequency will fall away and you won’t hear your phone anymore.
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NASA: How cool is that!
Is anyone else bothered by NASA having its own channel on basic cable? I could understand it if there were educational programs being shown most of the time or maybe displaying a live web cam of the Space Station or looking through the eyes of the Hubble telescope, but that’s not what it shows. Undoubtedly you probably just flick past it on your way to TBS or some other channel, not even seeing it.
Well, a friend of mine sent me a link to this article about NASA’s new collection of social networking tools called MyNASA and it begs the question, what is NASA selling? Government web sites are supposed to be badly programmed, ugly and uninformative and NASA.gov is so totally not. It’s slick, informative and dare I say fun. All the information you could want is right there in an easy-to-use format with interactive features, news feeds and a pretty decent kids’ club . Seriously, this site will make you fall in love with space all over again. NASA
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Interactive advertisements
I was walking through a not so busy area in Paris yesterday when I noticed the above plaque next to a billboard advertisement for coffee. Here’s a translation:
You are in front of an interactive advertisement.
To get a free multimedia offer from the brand shown on the poster
1. Activate your Bluetooth connection
2. Accept the mobile request
3. Get your media
I’ve included below the “gift” below and it was depressingly lame. Just a small digital version of the billboard ad itself. The whole experience does make me wonder about all the fun ways this technology could be used to better advertise other things. Just one idea: What if the advertisement had been for a concert or an album being released? The “multimedia offer” could have been a free mp3 track or something equivalent. Of course, that wouldn’t help for coffee, but there’s always smell-o-vision.
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Green web hosting
This website along with my personal domain, is hosted by Dreamhost, which, I was pleased to learn is completely carbon neutral. It turns out there there a number of green hosting options out there, and Dreamhost is just part of a growing number of tech companies (see recent post about Apple) with ecological aspirations. Check out Dreamhost’s green credentials or look at all the other options at Treehugger.com.
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Fun with electricity
Peter Terren from Australia clearly has no fear of electricity. Like Ben Franklin with his kite, Terren plays with homemade Tesla coils and rail guns like they’re, well, play-things. Also worth checking out are his experiments with far-too-powerful can crushers and lots of cool lasers.
The above photo was taken by Terren of he and his son sitting in his Hyundai under a homemade 5-kilowatt Tesla Coil. The car and its jolting accessory are profiled here
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Automotive emoticons
Ever wanted to say something to someone following you on the road but felt restricted by the normal options: the polite wave, the “go-around” hand out the window, and flipping the bird? Well here it is. This LED device sold by Think Geek displays one of 5 different emoticons (smileys): smiley, frowny, dubious, thanks, and back-off.
Thanks Jeff.
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Homemade 3-D printer
TreeHugger.com posted an article the other day about a cool DIY project at the Evil Mad Scientist blog. It’s all about a home-made 3-D or CNC printer that uses sugar as the primary building material. TreeHugger already did a cool review of the machine with their post, but they neglected to mention the really cool toaster mod pictured below.
For more about home-brew 3-D printing efforts, check out reprap.org and Fab @ Home, both really good places to find out about the grassroots of this revolutionary technology. For a really great treatment about just how revolutionary 3-D printing could be, read Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky.
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London gets more coverage
Almost all of central London will soon be under the heavy, potentially harmful, and comforting blanket of wireless internet. The Cloud Network has just flipped the switch on their wireless network covering the Financial District. Combined with the WiFi on the Thames previously reported on duenos, it’ll be hard to find a place where you can’t access the internet.
(via the Inquirer)
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For dog owners, poop may be a thing of the past
New research from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands suggests that Dutch dog food company Energique has eliminated the waste from dog food. Apparently the all-meat diet is absorbed almost completely by the dog, leaving a “a smell-free dry pellet that can be picked up by hand in a tissue” and little more. As if it couldn’t get any more unnatural, Enerqigue will also reduce the amount of times a dog has to drop one from three times a day to once a week.
Thanks to Regina’s del.icio.us feed once again for another intriguing story.
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Ever wanted to know how to power your moon colony?
My good friend Mike McCambridge (second from the right in the picture below), a senior at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, has been working with several peers on an amazing senior capstone project: designing a power plant that takes advantage of the moon’s particular thermodynamic characteristics in order to generate power.
The basic idea involves using a large, reflective panel to collect solar energy, heating a fluid to great temperatures, and transmitting the heated fluid to power a turbine. The group traveled to Huntsville, Alabama to speak with scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and trade ideas about the particulars of such a system.
Read more about this project here. It is amazing what brilliant projects and ideas can be generated even by undergraduate research.
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Roomba TV
Roomba, autonomous vacuum cleaner and primary reason to hate everything about American society. These little suckers are just plain odd, and so is this. An overenthusiastic Roomba owner has attached a spy cam to the front of his which can be found streaming live vacuum-packed action here. Obviously most of the time the stream shows nothing but wall as the Roomba recharges, so he has also put up these older videos. Thank God for the free market.
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X Prize for auto efficiency
The X Prize Foundation has announced a new competition to achieve automotive efficiency. Arguing that competition breeds success and citing Lindbergh’s prize-winning trans-Atlantic flight, the X Prize foundation shocked the world with the original Ansari X Prize for space flight by making space tourism a reality. Now it seems the group’s target is more terrestrial with the multi-million dollar prize going to the first group that can make a car that, among many other things, gets 100 miles per gallon. Read the full list of guidelines if you’re interested.
Originally found through this article at World Changing
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