Homemade Iron Man Glove Fires Lasers

In his latest project, laser enthusiast Patrick Priebe, owner of a company called Laser Gadgets, constructed a homemade Iron Man glove that lets him hold some pretty impressive superhero powers in the palm of his hand.

He can shoot a laser from his palm that’s powerful enough to pop a balloon or sear patterns into wood. He can also blast another laser from his knuckles, fire an aluminum slug and with an accompanying Iron Man arm piece, launch a missile made from cardboard and plastic.

The glove’s lasers are pretty substantial. A blue, 700mW laser blasts from his palm and is activated by the flex of Priebe’s hand. A 300mW laser comes from the top of his glove, deploying through an attached controller.

Priebe used aluminum to make the glove and spray-painted it with primer, metallic red and candy red on top. He made the inside firing mechanism with brass.

 

Priebe constructed the glove in anticipation of the new “Avengers: Age of Ultron” movie. He said it took him about three weeks to make.You can watch the glove in action here.
 

Haptic Glove Lets Gamers Feel the Virtual World

Rice University

With the imminent arrival of the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus, the era of virtual reality gaming is nearly upon is. Video game industry watchers expect the arrival of viable VR headsets to be the biggest revolution in gaming since the first generation of console machines some 40 years ago.
No matter how sophisticated, though, virtual reality headsets are still limited to the audio-visual experience. As such, several commercial and research groups are hoping to augment headsets by designing force feedback peripherals that replicate the sense of touch in the realm of virtual reality.

      

And whaddyknow, we have an example right here. A group of engineering students at Rice University introduced a prototype gaming glove this week that would let gamers literally feel the objects they touch in the virtual world.

The Hands Omni glove uses force-feedback design to approximate the sensation of touching, pressing or gripping a surface or object. If your avatar picks up an apple in the game — or more likely, a grenade — you’ll feel the object in your hand. The idea is, down the line, game designers could work with the Hands Omni software, programming touchable elements into new game titles.

The proprietary system uses a network of small inflatable air bladders in the glove to deliver the pressure to your fingertips. The glove is wireless and lightweight — abut 350 grams — and designed to be as unobtrusive as possible.

The Hands Omni glove was developed at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and sponsored by Virtuix, a Houston gaming technology company. Here’s a quick demo video from a recent design showcase.
 

Rare Turing Notebook Sells for $1 Million

A page from a notebook of British mathematician and pioneer in computer science Alan Turing is displayed during an auction preview in Hong Kong March 19, 2015.


A long-lost notebook owned by British mathematician and World War II code breaker Alan Turing sold at auction in New York on Monday for $1 million, Bonhams auction house said.

 

A chat-bot named "Eugene Goostman" made headlines for "his" good showing during a Turing test, in which he was able to fool human judges into thinking he was a real person.

DCI

The sale of the recently discovered notebook comes at a time of enormous interest in Turing's life and work generated by Oscar-winning movie "The Imitation Game".

The manuscript, which sold for $1.025 million in two minutes of bidding, dates back to the mid-1940s when Turing was working to break the Nazi Enigma code at Britain's Bletchley Park.

An original 1944 Enigma Machine, still fully operational, sold for $269,000 at the same auction, smashing pre-sale estimates of $140,000-180,000.
Both winning bids were in the room, but both buyers wanted to remain anonymous, the auction house said.


Turing was a computer scientist, philosopher and cryptologist ahead of his time who played a crucial role in breaking Enigma.
"We have no idea how many lives he saved. It is estimated that he shortened the war by two years," said Cassandra Hatton, director of Bonhams' history of science and technology department.
The notebook is believed to be the only extensive Turing autograph manuscript in existence and gives an insight into the man whose work, when he was just 24, led to the universal computer machine.
It features 56 pages of Turing's notes on the foundations of mathematical notations and computer science, made during his leisure time at Bletchley Park.

It shows that Turing was examining the works of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, among others.

Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 when it was a crime in Britain. Forced to undergo chemical castration, Turing killed himself in 1954 at the age of 41.
He was officially pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II only in 2013, six decades after his death.

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, nominated for an Oscar for portraying Turing in last year's film, has described the prospect of being able to hold one of his manuscripts as "thrilling".

 

What Chat-Bot's Turing Test Triumph Means for AI

A chat-bot named "Eugene Goostman" made headlines for "his" good showing during a Turing test, in which he was able to fool human judges into thinking he was a real person.

DCI

The notebook was bought from a stationers in the English university city of Cambridge, where Turing was a fellow at King's College.

It was among papers left by Turing after his death in 1954 to friend and fellow mathematician, Robin Gandy.

On blank pages of the notebook, Gandy wrote a journal in which he called Turing a "dead father figure." Bonhams said the document remained hidden among Gandy's personal effects until his death.

Before the sale, Hatton told AFP that she hoped the notebook can be made available to researchers.
"What I really, really hope for is that a collector buys it and makes it available to an institution, at least loans it for a few years and makes it available to scholars," she said.
Andrew Hodges, who wrote the biography that inspired "The Imitation Game" said Turing was "parsimonious with his words and everything from his pen has special value.
"This notebook shines extra light on how, even when he was enmeshed in great world events, he remained committed to free-thinking work in pure mathematics."

Bonhams said a portion of the proceeds will be donated to charity.

"The Imitation Game" won an Oscar in February for best adapted screenplay. It had been nominated for eight Academy Awards.

Cloud Lamp Brings Thunder and Lightning Inside

Interiors designers frequently speak about bringing the indoors outside to expand the living space. This designer wants to bring the outside in.

Richard Clarkson has conceived Cloud, a computer-controlled lamp that creates an audio-visual sensation for the homeowner. When a hidden sensor detects the motion of people around it, the lamp flashes and booms in realistic thundercloud manner.

In addition to bringing the weather indoors — sans rain — users can stream music through the fiber-filled cloud via a Bluetooth-compatible device. And the lights are able to change colors and brightness to adjust to your mood.
The Cloud is not for the budget-conscious. It costs $3,360 for the tricked-out model, which has a wireless remote, color-changing lights, two speakers plus a subwoofer and the motion detection. An additional $240 will get you a satellite add-on that makes the visual aspects of Cloud more realistic.

A less expensive version goes for $960 but doesn’t include the bells and whistles.

Credit: Richard Clarkson Studio

Elusive On/Off Switch Found for Human Consciousness

When I was a child about nine years old or so, I embarked on a mission to discover the barrier between waking and sleeping. I believed that if I concentrated each night before falling asleep, I would recognize the moment I slipped out of consciousness and into dream. I never found the precise line — although I did, unintentionally, teach myself to lucid dream.

But now there is research showing that the brain does have an on/off switch that triggers unconsciousness. Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe for the first time a way to switch off consciousness by electrically stimulating a part of the brain called the claustrum.

Their accidental discovery could lead to a deeper understanding of a fundamental mystery of the human brain; that is, how conscious awareness arises.

The discovery came while the researchers were studying a woman who has epilepsy. During a procedure, they used deep brain electrodes to record signals from different parts of her brain in order to determine where here seizures were originating. One electrode was place next to the claustrum, a thin, sheet-like structure underneath the neocortex. Although this area has never been electrically stimulated before, it had been implicated in the past as a possible control center for consciousness by neuroscientist Francis Crick, who identified the structure of DNA, and his colleague Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

Koubeissi and his team found that Crick and Koch might have been on to something. When they stimulated the area with electrical impulses from the brain electrodes, the woman stopped reading, stared blankly into space and didn’t respond to auditory or visual commands. Her breathing slowed as well. She had lost consciousness. When the scientists turned off the electrical stimuli, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of blanking out. Additional attempts were tried over two days and each time, the same thing happened.

New Scientist reported on the results and in the article Koubeissi says he thinks the claustrum indeed plays a vital role in triggering conscious. “I would liken it to a car,” he told

“A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there’s only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key.”

One researcher, Anil Seth, who studies consciousness at the University of Sussex, UK, pointed out that the woman in the study had had part of her hippocampus removed earlier as a way to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn’t represent a “normal” brain.

Additional research is needed. But the results could open wide a door on one of the most mysterious aspects of existence. We could determine once and for all what living creatures are aware of themselves and the world around them.

Credit: PASIEKA/Science Photo Library/Corbis

Algae Turns Its Internal Quantum Computer On and Off

 

Photosynthetic algae make the most of the energy they receive and then deliver that energy from leaves with near perfect efficiency.

 

Scientists have shown that certain algae which use quantum effects to optimize photosynthesis are also capable of switching it off. It's a discovery that could lead to highly efficient organic solar cells and quantum-based electronics.
Like quantum computers, some organisms are capable of scanning all possible options in order to choose the most efficient path or solution. For plants and some photosynthetic algae, this means the ability to make the most of the energy they receive and then deliver that energy from leaves with near perfect efficiency. This effect, called quantum decoherence, is what allows some algae to survive in very low levels of light.

Recently, scientists from the UNSW School of Physics studied one of these algae, a tiny single-celled organism called cryptophytes. They typically live at the bottom of pools of water, or under thick ice, where light is scarce. The researchers found that there's a class of cryptophytes in which quantum decoherence is switched off, and it's on account of a single genetic mutation that alters the shape of a light-harvesting protein.
In quantum mechanics, a system is coherent when all quantum waves are in step with each other. When it's coherent, it can exist in many different states simultaneously, an effect known as superposition.
The researchers used X-ray crystallography to determine the crystal structure of the light-harvesting complexes from three different species. Two cryptophyte species had a mutation that led to the insertion of an extra amino acid that changes the structure of the protein complex, which disrupts decoherence.

Original article appeared on iO9; all rights reserved.

Skateboard Tank Rolls Over Any Terrain

As it stands, skateboarding is fairly limited to the smooth surfaces of roads, sidewalks and skate parks. But a new all-terrain board — if you can even call it that — seeks to jump the curb and go off road.

Invented by Dan Baldwin, the so-called “Ungoverned” resembles a hybrid of a skateboard and tank and is designed to roll over rocks, sand, snow and other obstacles. The waterproof prototype’s spiked tracks are powered by a four-stroke engine situated between the feet of the rider, who control acceleration via a hand-held wired device. Top speeds haven’t been announced yet, but judging by this video, the Ungoverned has some real get up and go.

Baldwin points out that the 108-pound vehicle is much lighter than a snowmobile, not to mention the 143-pound Scarpar Powerboard, a similar prototype he created.

Australian startup Scarpar Pty is slated to further develop and bring Baldwin’s original Powerboard to market next year. In the meantime, he’s hoping Scarpar will do the same with the Ungoverned.

via Gizmag

Credit: Ungoverned

Alien 'Star Engine' Detectable in Exoplanet Data?

In 1948, astronomer Fred Zwicky, the esteemed co-discoverer of dark matter, speculated that “fusion jets” could be used by a future civilization to navigate our sun and solar system planets through the galaxy. He suggested that pellets of fuel could be fired into the sun to produce explosions that would push the sun along like firecrackers exploding in a tin can. But where to go?

Zwicky thought that the entire solar system could reach Alpha Centauri in a few thousand years.

Forty years later, physicist Leonid Shkadov proposed that far advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might harness the energy output of their sun for interstellar migration. They would use a “stellar engine” — no need for fusion motors here. Simply construct an immense spherical mirror that reflects some of the star’s radiation back onto its surface.

This radiation pressure on the star creates an imbalance where a net force pushes the star in the opposite direction. This is simply Newtonian physics, though Sir Isaac would have never imagined such an application.

To work, such a stellar engine would have to be a megastructure, millions of miles across (shown above). The bad news is that a planet might have to be dismantled to make such a monstrosity. The good news is that such megastructures — if they exist — should be detectable with today’s telescope technology.

Duncan Forgan, of the University of Edinburgh, proposes that such a mega-mirror might obstruct part of the disk of a star during our observations that look for planets passing across the face of a star, an event call a transit.

He modeled hypothetical light curves produced by exoplanets transiting a star that possesses a Shkadov thruster. Depending on its position, the gigantic mirror would abruptly block off the planet’s shadow prematurely (shown below), because it is occulting a portion of the star. The silhouette of the immense mirror would mysteriously truncate the predicted symmetrical U-shaped dip in starlight that is measure with each transit as a planet follows along its racetrack orbit.

ANALYSIS: Asteroid Forensics May Point to Alien Space Miners

It would be difficult to explain the oddball light curve that would be cause by such a intervening structure. Forgan cautions that the presence of starspots can produce “dents” in the transit light curve, as the planet crosses a starspot and this could be misinterpreted as an artificial structure. However the starspot would rotate out of view on subsequent transits. Assuming the monster-mirror is fixed in space, it’s silhouette should remain stable.

NASA’s Kepler space observatory has spent the last five years amassing a huge vault of planetary transit data on 150,000 stars in the constellation Cygnus. And so this hypothesis is testable.

The problem is there are many unknowns heaped upon many other unknowns. What is the probability an alien civilization has the wherewithal and audacity to try building such a monstrosity, and that it is close enough to detect?

After much speculation Forgan cautiously estimates a lower limit of one star in one million stars having such a detectable megastructure. This would put the nearest such star thruster 1,000 light-years away at best.

The Kepler database is several orders of magnitude smaller in surveyed stars. With such low chances of success it would be hard to convince anyone to fund a space observatory to go looking for alien engineering. So it will all be left as a serendipitous SETT (Search for Extraterrestrial Technology) opportunity as exoplanet surveys continue.

Why would a far advanced civilization go to the budget-busting expense of doing a megastructure project to steer its star around? It’s estimated that the sun has passed through 10 cold molecular hydrogen clouds laced with dust, along its galactic orbit. The consequences are that this would dim a star, and that it turn could cause some serious climate change on a planet. Long-lived aliens may want to steer around these galactic potholes.

Or the extraterrestrials might want to avoid a predicted close passage to a nearby star that might destabilize a comet cloud believe to surround planetary systems. (The approaching comet ISON is believed to be a distant visitor from this hypothesized Oort cloud around our solar system.)

There is an extraordinarily small but finite chance that evidence for such mega-engineering is buried in archival astronomy data. What’s more, the absence of such evidence might suggest there is an upper limit to how far a technological civilization can progress. Or, more sobering, it means there are narrow limits on the longevity of a technological society.

First look at Windows 8.1

How to Fit 1,000 Terabytes Onto a DVD

DVDs and Blu-Rays don’t get a lot of respect from technophiles, because the optical disks aren’t able to store as much data as a typical hard drive. A team at Swinburne University in Australia could change that, by making it possible to store an entire year’s worth of video onto an optical disk. That could be good news for movie buffs but would also appeal to big data centers that who prefer to store the tremendous amounts of information they save in the least amount of space.

Storing data on conventional DVDs and Blu-Ray disk involves a single laser that burns a mark into the disk’s surfacing, changing its chemistry. The mark represents a 1 or 0, which is the basic binary language of all computer data. But because the marks can’t be smaller than a half the wavelength of the laser beam, there is a limit, to how many marks can be burned into the surface of a disk.

The Swinburne team, led by optoelectronics professor Min Gu, did something different. They used two lasers instead of one.

Each laser beamed a different wavelength of light onto the disk. The first one was in the near-infrared and created a spot of light, just like an ordinary DVD laser. The second laser beam was violet and partially interfered with the near-infrared beam in a way that ultimately shrank the spot burned into the disk. The technique shrank the size of the spot down to nine nanometers, enough to put 1,000 terabytes on a disk. For comparison, a Blu-Ray disk can hold 50 GB of data and a typical DVD holds about 4.7 GB of data.

The lasers are similar to those used in current players, so building a commercial version wouldn’t require any new technologies. Not too far in the future, the behemoth storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disk might seem as quaint as the 1.4 megabyte floppy disk.

Wearable Solar Clothing Fit For Charging

Whether it’s drone-proof hoodies, eye-tracking dresses or pants that let you text from your pocket, these days, clothing is doing a lot more than just making fashion statements and shielding us from the elements.

New to this task-oriented wardrobe is Wearable Solar, a potential clothing line that incorporates solar panels into garments for charging personal electronic devices.

The project led by Christiaan Holland of Dutch creative agency Gelderland Valoriseert, fashion designer Pauline van Dongen, solar panel specialist Gertjan Jongerden and students from theUniversity of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Two prototypes were created — a dress and a coat. Van Dongen said she carefully studied the layered structure in human skin cells, then translated that research into her designs. For example, with the coat, flaps embedded with solar cells can be unfolded on the shoulder and waist when the sun is shining. Alternatively, the flaps easily fold away and can be worn invisibly. Just a head’s up: Be prepared to feel like a lost character from the Matrix or Mortal Kombat, as unfolding the solar flaps is tough look, full of sharp, jutting shoulders and sweeping accents at the waist.

“The coat contains fairly rigid solar cells, which is why I used a combination of wool and leather. These materials both provide the strength needed and are aesthetically pleasing,” Van Dongen tolda Dutch design website. “In total some 48 solar cells are incorporated into modular leather panels, allowing a typical smartphone to be 50 percent charged if worn in the full sun for an hour.”

She added: “For the dress I used flexible solar cells. These are less efficient but are easier to integrate and more comfortable to wear. The dress is made from a flowing lightweight wool combined with leather. The cells have been subtly integrated in such a way that it’s hardly noticeable when you wear the dress as a normal piece of clothing.”

Future Buildings Could be Made of Artificial Bone

This photo shows the brick-and-mortar pattern of simulated bone and nacre against the backdrop of real nacre found in the inner shell of many molluscs.

 material in town and its origins may surprise you.

Developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), human bone is the inspiration behind the latest high-tech composite, which can be made in just a few hours using a 3D printer.

The new material, which is lauded for its durability, low density and environmentally sustainable constituents, gets its strength from its bone-like structure. Real bones have a complex hierarchical structure thanks to their two main building blocks, collagen protein and hydroxyapatite minerals.

MIT's new material replicates this hierarchical pattern, which is produced in bones with the help of electrochemical reactions. Such reactions are difficult to reproduce in a lab, but with a 3D printer, the researchers were able to replicate the fracture-resistant structure.

Under a microscope, the synthetic material the researchers created looks like a staggered brick-and-mortar wall. A soft black polymer serves as the mortar, simulating the work of collagen, bone's yielding cushion. A stiff blue polymer forms the bricks, behaving like hydroxyapatite, bone's strong but brittle frame.

And just as collagen and hydroxyapatite help a bone withstand fracturing by dissipating energy and distributing damage over a larger area, so too does the lab-made material. In fact, the material may prove to be even stronger than bone.

"The geometric patterns we used in the synthetic materials are based on those seen in natural materials like bone or nacre, but also include new designs that do not exist in nature," said Markus Buehler, lead researcher in the study.

"As engineers, we are no longer limited to the natural patterns. We can design our own, which may perform even better than the ones that already exist."

The 3D-printed bone material is 22 times more fracture-resistant than any of its constituent parts, an impressive ratio for a lab-made composite.

Researchers suggest that the process of 3D printing super-strong metamaterials is both entirely possible and more cost-effective than traditional methods of manufacturing. Buehler hopes that one day, optimized materials like the one created in MIT's lab will form the basis of entire buildings.

"The possibilities seem endless," he said, "As we are just beginning to push the limits of the kind of geometric features and material combinations we can print."

Shape-Shifting Dresses Respond To Stares

A great dress can easily move people into long fits of staring. Conversely, now those long fits of staring can actually move a dress.

It’s not polite to stare. But you might not be able to help yourself if you see someone wearing either of these two dresses made by fashion designer Ying Gao. Each one contorts and lights up whenever it detects a fixed gaze.

“We use an eye-tracking system so the dresses move when a spectator is staring,” Gao toldDezeen. “(The system) can also turn off the lights, then the dresses illuminate.”

The dresses are embedded with eye-tracking technology that reacts to an observer’s gaze by activating tiny motors that move parts of the dress in captivating patterns. Both gaze-activated dresses use glow-in-the-dark thread, creating a psychedelic effect when under black lights. One dress boasts an experimental design with luminescent tendrils, while the other has a more traditional cut.

“A photograph is said to be ‘spoiled’ by blinking eyes — here however, the concept of presence and of disappearance are questioned, as the experience of chiaroscuro (clarity/obscurity) is achieved through an unfixed gaze,” writes Gao.

Wearable Computers Make a Fashion Statement

A wearable computing trend is at the heart of the "quantified self" movement in which people track anything from how many calories they burn to how well they sleep or their moods at any given moment.

The notion of being fashionably smart is getting a makeover as internet-linked computers get woven into formerly brainless attire such as glasses, bracelets and shoes. A wearable computing trend is at the heart of the "quantified self" movement in which people track anything from how many calories they burn to how well they sleep or their moods at any given moment.

"We are heading for the wearable computing era," Gartner analyst Van Baker told AFP. "People are going to be walking around with personal area networks on their bodies and have multiple devices that talk to each other and the Web."

Google Glass and other augmented reality projects are about to break onto the scene. But what does an augmented reality look like and how can it enhance our lives.

Understandably, the trend has found traction in fitness with devices such as the Jawbone UP, Nike's FuelBand, and Fitbit keeping tabs on whether people are leading active, healthy lifestyles. The devices use sensors to detect micro movements and then feed information to smartphones or tablets, where applications tap into processing power to analyze data and provide feedback to users.

San Francisco-based Jawbone jumped into wearable computing years ago, building electronic brains into stylish wireless earpieces and speakers for smartphones. Jawbone recently added muscle to its lineup of fitness lifestyle devices with a deal to buy BodyMedia.

BodyMedia makes armbands used to track caloric burn of fat-shedding competitors on US reality television show "The Biggest Loser." "There's an enormous appetite for personal data and self-discovery among consumers that will only continue to grow," said Jawbone chief executive and founder Hosain Rahman.

A Forrester Research survey conducted early this year found that six percent of US adults wore a gadget to track performance in a sport, while five percent used a gadget like UP or Fitbit to track daily activity or how well they sleep. Worldwide shipments of wearable computing devices could climb as high as 30 million units this year, according to Forrester.

Tiny 3D-Printed Microbattery Offers Big Power

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CHARGE YOUR CELL PHONE IN 5 SECONDS

An interlaced stack of electrodes was printed layer-by-layer to create the working anode and cathode of a microbattery.

Good new, techies: 3-D printers can now do more than make dust-collecting doodads. Researchers have developed a method of producing powerful microbatteries using these trendy contraptions.

Developed by a team of researchers at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, these lithium-ion microbatteries are no bigger than a grain of sand but hold as much energy as their much larger counterparts.

"The electrochemical performance is comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy density," said Shen Dillon, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We're just able to achieve this on a much smaller scale."

To create the microbatteries, researchers used a custom-built 3-D printer to stack electrodes -- each one less than the width of a human hair -- along the teeth of two tiny gold combs. The electrodes were contained within a special ink, extruded from the printer's narrow nozzles and applied to the combs like toothpaste being squeezed onto a toothbrush.

The electrode inks, one serving as a cathode, the other as an anode, hardened immediately into narrow layers, one atop the other. Once the electrodes were stacked, researchers packaged them inside tiny containers and added an electrolyte solution to complete the battery pack.

This novel process created a battery that could one day help power tiny medical implants as well as more novel electronics, like flying,insect-like robots. Such devices have been in development for some time, patiently awaiting an appropriately sized power source.

"[The researchers'] innovative microbattery ink designs dramatically expand the practical uses of 3-D printing, and simultaneously open up entirely new possibilities for miniaturization of all types of devices, both medical and non-medical," said Donald Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Jennifer Lewis, a professor of engineering at Harvard University and lead author of the microbattery research study, said her team is looking at using their novel 3-D printing process to create other precise structures with diverse electronic, optical, mechanical or biologically relevant properties.

living computer created with slime mold

The future of computing might just come from slime molds! Turns out these uber smart, super weird molds can do things that even our most advanced computers can't handle. Anthony explains why they're so cool, and what it might mean for next-gen tech.

 

 

 

Soft Exoskeleton Flexes Its Artificial Muscles

Tech-enhanced humans of the future — be they soldiers, officers of the law, paraplegics or the elderly — all stand to get a boost from motorized exoskeletons. But many current exoskeleton prototypes adhere to similar designs with rigid metal frames. However, a new design concept out of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University appears to be stepping in a more flexible direction.

As its name suggests, the Soft Exosuit does away with stiff leg scaffolding and instead uses super-elastic actuators located on the wearer’s ankles, knees and hips to help propel a person forward. Each of the suit’s “motors” are controlled by an air compressor that’s connected to a backpack on the user. The 7.5 kilogram suit is covered in flexible membrane that appear and function similar to artificial muscles.

Eventually, researchers want to integrate the system into clothing, so the Soft Exosuit can be easily worn and quickly deployed by soldiers and law enforcement officers. “You can imagine something like a spider web that’s integrated into tightly fitting pants,” Conor Walsh, a project leader from Harvard University, told NBC news.

Walsh was one of five members of the Wyss Lab to test the suit and says that getting used to the push-and-pull of the “muscles” is a bit awkward at first. But once a person gets their timing down, a noticeable boost can be felt.

Though production is still years in the making, Walsh says development of the suit will assist in three main areas: helping soldiers to walk farther and carry heavier loads, as athletic performance enhancers and in rehabilitation treatment for patients with weak or damaged muscles.

Tiny Channels Take Salt From Seawater

Drinking water is a vital need in many parts of the world, and one method of getting it is desalination, which is just taking the salt out of seawater. But the plants require either lots of energy or special filters — and both of those things are costly.

Now there’s a possible workaround: a system of tiny channels, built into a chip, that pulls the salt out of the water with little energy and no need for filter technologies that are difficult to make and maintain.

That would be a huge boon to areas where water is scarce, but seawater isn’t. The largest desalination plant is in Saudi Arabia, and some Caribbean islands depend on it. Both locales need a lot of energy to run the plants, though. The world Health Organization says about a billion people around the world have no access to safe water. Many of those people live in arid coastal regions in Africa and the Middle East.

Richard M. Crooks at the University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Tallarek at the University of Marburg, Germany, developed the idea. They forced salty water down a channel that splits into two branches. Each of the smaller channels was about 22 microns wide. The two small channels were connected to an electrode that juts into the point where they branch.

Then they applied just 3 volts to the electrode. The voltage changes some of the chloride ions, which have negative charges, into neutral chlorine. This has the effect of increasing the electric field strength and making a gradient across the two channels. That gradient forces ions into one channel, while the fresh water flows down the other.

The whole system is cheaper than filters because it won’t get clogged, and it uses a lot less energy than current desalination systems.

The two scientists are developing the technology with a startup, Okeanos Technologies, and presented their work in the journal Angewandte Chemie

Stem Cell Discovery Could Help Regrow Fingers

Fingernail stem cells could be used to develop new treatments for amputees.

Mammals can regenerate the very tips of their fingers and toes after amputation, and now new research shows how stem cells in the nail play a role in that process.

A study in mice, detailed online today (June 12) in the journal Nature, reveals the chemical signal that triggers stem cells to develop into new nail tissue, and also attracts nerves that promote nail and bone regeneration.

Stem cells have produced another scientific "miracle" -- this time allowing a blind man to see with nearly perfect vision.

The findings suggest nail stem cells could be used to develop new treatments for amputees, the researchers said. [Inside Life Science: Once Upon a Stem Cell]

In mice and people, regenerating an amputated finger or toe involves regrowing the nail. But whether the amputated portion of the digit can regrow depends on exactly where the amputation occurs: If the stem cells beneath the nail are amputated along with the digit, no regrowth occurs, but if the stem cells remain, regrowth is possible.

To understand why these stem cells are crucial to regeneration, researchers turned to mice. The scientists conducted toe amputations in two groups of mice: one group of normal mice, and one group that was treated with a drug that made them unable to make the signals for new nail cells to develop.

They found that the signals that guided the stem cells' development into nail cells were vital to regenerating amputated digits. By five weeks after amputation, the normal mice had regenerated their toe and toenail. But the mice that lacked the nail signal failed to regrow either their nails or the toe bone itself, because the stem cells lacked the signals that promote nail-cell development. When the researchers replenished these signals, the toes regenerated successfully.

In another experiment, the researchers surgically removed nerves from the mice toes before amputating them. This significantly impaired nail-cell regeneration, similar to what happened to the mice that lacked the signals to produce new nails. Moreover, the nerve removal decreased the levels of certain proteins that promote tissue growth.

Together, the results show that nail stem cells are critical for regrowing a lost digit in mice. If the same turns out to be true in humans, the findings could lead to better treatments for amputees.

Other animals, including amphibians, can also regenerate lost limbs. For example, aquatic salamanders can regrow complete limbs or even parts of their heart — a process that involves cells in their immune system. By studying these phenomena in other animals, it may be possible to enhance regenerative potential in people, the researchers said.

Cameras Could Take Night Photos Without a Flash

A team of scientists led by Andras Kis at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found a material that could make cameras five times more sensitive to light, reducing or even eliminating the need for a flash or a long exposure. The material — made from a mix of molybdenum and sulfur — was used to make a single-pixel prototype sensor that only needed 1/25th of a second to expose a nighttime streetscape that other cameras would require 1/5th of a second. The sensitivity of the new sensor is fast enough that moving people didn’t get blurred.

It works because molybdenite is much more sensitive to light than silicon, the other material other digital sensors in cameras are made from.

Besides sensitivity, there’s another plus to molybdenite: it’s cheap. Unlike other exotic technologies or semiconducting materials, there’s lots of it around and factories making image sensors out of it won’t need re-tooling.