Virgin Galactic to test flight in space this year

Photo By Courtesy of Sonja Rohde

Virgin Galactic, the space suborbital passenger flight offshoot of Richard Branson's Virgin Group, expects to test fly its first spacecraft beyond the Earth's atmosphere this year, with commercial suborbital passenger service to follow in 2013 or 2014, company officials said. Passenger are encouraged to be among the first 430 passengers on the company web site, however Reuter's reports that 500 passengers have been reserved.  Ticket prices are $200,000 with deposits starting from $20,000  Flights can be booked directly or through one of Virgin Galactic's Accredited Space Agents around the world, specially selected and trained  to handle all aspects of spaceflight reservations.

In October 17, 2011  Branson and New Mexico Governor, Suzana Martinez dedicated the first commercial spaceport, The Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space. A five-ship fleet is planned. According to William Pomerantz, Virgin Galactic's vice president of special projects in his speech to the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto, CA, Virgin Galactic's first ship, SpaceShipTwo, has completed 31 atmospheric test flights - 15 attached to its carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo, and 16 glide tests.

1. Photo By Mark Lennihan, Associated Press

Spray on clothing-in-a-can

Fabrican is a spray-on fabric technology that was named one of Time Magazine's 50 Best Inventions of  2010.

                Image:       

Fabrican Ltd 2010

Developed through a collaboration between Imperial College London and the Royal College of Arts;  the spray consists of a solution of tiny fibers that cross link after being sprayed, to create a stretchy non-woven fabric that adheres to the subject until it dries thus enabling a custom fit. After application, the item can be removed and machine washed like other fabrics, or reconstituted to create a new item.

Possible applications aside from spray-on fashion being considered by the makers include permeating the fibers with medicine to create highly portable instant field dressings for wounds, that stay sterile in the can until needed.  

'Scar Bodice' made from
 bathtubs of green tea 

Other innovative ideas for sourcing new materials for clothing include greener concepts, such as experiments in BioCouture using the cellulose created by bacteria in green tea to "grow" a dress or other clothing item. Results have a very organic almost leather-like quality. Using alternate supplies such as this for making clothing would potentially mitigate the need for cottons and other fiber-producing plants to be grown, harvested, processed and transported, as source materials could be available from local vats of bio-material.

Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing

Full-sized printed motorcycle with working gears. Autodesk gallery

http://gra-zone.blogspot.com/2011/12/nextengine-3d-scanner-innovators-world.html

Floating in bed? Tour living quarters in the International Space Station

Microsoft Surface 2

The Singing, Ringing Tree

The Singing Ringing Tree is a wind powered sound sculpture resembling a tree set in the landscape of the Pennine mountain range overlooking Burnley, in Lancashire, England.

Science off the Sphere: Knitting Needle Experiment

Blog referrals

http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog

Earth at night seen from Space by International Space Station

Coolest DJ table ever

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I once spoke to a successful DJ and had him describe the sense that, when he was creating, it was a strongly visual as will as auditory experience; that he could "see' the rhythms and melodies interacting as patterns in his head as he layered them. This table exemplifies that internal view of music, as well as making even non-musical visual types types such as myself want to play with it and see what I could create.

Apple iLens Concept: A computer screen embedded into a contact lens using cloud data storage (and Google's not far behind)

The technology to make contact lens based computing is possible is rapidly under development. Professor Babek Parvis, an associate professor at the University of Washington, specializes in bionanotechnology, which is the fusion of tiny technologies and biology. He has built a tiny contact lens with tiny electronics that can display pixels to a person's eye. (For more details on the technology and possible applications, see Parvis speaking in the fascinating video at the end of this post )

Visor- like design evocative
of Geordi La Forge?

Parvis is also working on "Project Glass" with Google, which tech watchers see as an indication of movement towards the eventual release of a lens concept by Google. While you're waiting for something similar to the lens concept to become available, you can some of the same benefits -if not full on computing- with Google's visor-like augmented reality glasses, which have already been street tested in San Francisco.

 Parva talks about the microcircuit 

contact lens technology he developed

Artist and scientist, Patrick Tresset, seeks immortality by putting his unique style of drawing into a robot hand

Patrick Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie direct the Aikon-II project, which uses computational modeling and robotics to replicate the sketching performed by a human hand. The robot, named Paul, has a style that resembles Tresset's, but plans are in the works to develop a robot that can evolve its own unique personal style.  

Reports Nick Clark, of The Independent newspaper in London,  "He believes he remains the artist at the heart of Paul's work. 'The robot in some ways is a replacement for myself. For the moment I'm still the author of the drawing and the author of the robot.'"

Sculpting with light and shadow

Courtesy Sydneycash.com

Ceiling vessel web

Sydney Cash is a sculptor, painter and jeweler. His work is in collections worldwide, including MoMA in NYC, and Le Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is based in Marlboro, New York.

With his light sculptures, Sydney manipulates light as if it were a solid, using mirrored panels to create radiant designs of illumination and shadow. These panels can transform an ordinary beam of light and a blank wall into a composite of design. This results in design elements that can be both a broadly textural as in the installation below at the Falcon Bar, or at once both substantially sculptural and ethereal  feeling. As they rely on projections on the planes of existing walls they inherently integrate naturally into existing color motifs, as well as potentially creating drama and a sense of depth with minimal space.  

"Higher Density"Sydney Cash