The future of pregnancy

A soldier's new best friend: BigDog robotic military pack-mule

BigDog is a robot controlled by an on-board computer developed by Boston Dynamics, along with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for the future military use to carry supplies for soldiers across uneven terrain that wheeled vehicles cannot easily negotiate and a range of weather conditions, including snow. Funding is through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

BigDog stands about 2.5 (0.76) feet high by three feet long (0.91 m) long, weighs 240 pounds (110 kg), and can carry up to 400 pounds of supplies or equipment up inclines up to 35 degrees. Most remarkably, it can regain its footing after being pushed and its independently placed  feet allow it to negotiate narrow and difficult terrain. An 18 month testing period will begin this summer, prior to use by troops in the field.

 

Baby robot shows child development from the inside out

 Researchers at Osaka University's Graduate School of Engineering have created "Child-robot with Biomimetic Body," or CB2 in order to better understand how children learn and develop. CB2 has a soft touchable body and responds like a 1-2 year old in movement and facial expression, giving an eerily accurate childlike impression when observed.

More importantly, from a research point of view, CB2  has sensors that are responsive to touch that will help us to understand how the feedback from touch helps a child learn to recognize the dimensions and abilities of  his own body.  CB2 also develops social skills by observing facial expression, and sorting  them into categories such as "happy" or "sad".  Additionally, response to language is tracked in ways far beyond learning to associate a repeated word with a particular object. As CB2 learns, his social and cognitive behavior changes and his movement adapts to incorporate the new knowledge, much as a child would.

Previously, research was necessarily based entirely on observation of children responding to stimuli.  Never before has it been possible to observe the effect of touch and other stimulation on building intelligence and self-awareness from the inside out by seeing how the artificial brain, specifically designed to mimic a child's, adapts and changes  to its environment.The research team hope to create a more sophisticated robot with the intelligence and responses of a three year old in a few years.  

Scan me! Barcode and QR interactive tattoos

Tattoo artists are constantly searching for a fresh and original ways for their clients to express themselves- and to stand out.  New inking trends include light up tattoos and research  into color changing and even emotion-sensing tattoos.

Barcode and QR tattoos started as a bit of an underground movement, sometimes to make some sort of philosophical statement about numbers, databases and general consumerism, or perhaps for their inherently ambiguous meaning prior to reading and (then) edginess due to their then rarity and cyber-crossover quality.
 

Classic barcode reads "Joe",
 the bearers name 

Newer QR tattoos are able to store much more information than the simple barcodes that started the trend. These barcodes are readable by any iPhone or QR scanner. The embedded information can be text, a URL or any other data.

Taking this one step farther tattoo artist, on June 16, 2011, Paris-based tattoo artist Karl Marc realized the world’s first animated tattoo which was featured in a You Tube video as part of a Ballantine's Whiskey advertising campaign. Scanning the tattoo makes it "come alive" with and animation that plays on your phone for a truly original effect.

Video of Animated Tattoo

Another artist developed a tattoo that touts itself as ‘the first random tattoo in the world,’ This tattoo generates random content every time it's scanned by a smartphone.

Perhaps, more usefully,  someday we can easily change the QR code tattoo to contain whatever information would be most useful at that moment as sort of an ultra-portable source of personal data.  For instance you could have your dental  records available when you visited  a new dentist for them to scan to saving filling out new patient forms, or keep emergency medical information such as blood type and drug allergies and medical history  literally "on" you at all times in case of an accident .

Scan me! A new way to give out your contact info

As a social connector, your contact information could be scanned by new friends to instantly allow them to follow and link up with you on various social media.  Indeed, one might no longer hope to get the traditional phone number in a club and instead aim to be offered to scan their tattoo.

 Barcode tattoos:Now old-school interactivity
(seen here in the form of  affordable
low commitment temporary tats)

Safeguards against security and privacy concerns, as well as the potential misuse of this technology as a way for governments to control, "brand", trace or segregate populations for their own purposes may be something that needs to be considered carefully as it becomes more available.

Video for the first random QR video

Amazing interactive windows

Commanding the dancer at  a Parisian boutique window

A passerby changes the image at the window at Repetto, a French boutique that sells ballet shoes. A tired traveler waves her hand to "grow" a tree across her city-view hotel window for privacy. Windows are getting more delightfully interactive with every passing year. On a more basic note, switchable windows, which change from clear to opaque at the touch of a button, are now widely available to consumers.

Interactive window display concept by Gustaf Engström 

The future of hotel windows: 

Personalized interactivity and light therapy to combat jet-lag

Video of interactive hotel window features

Switchable windows for  privacy at the touch of a button

Oil spill-cleaning nanobots, explosive-sensing wetsuits- underwater micro-tech hits the beach

Stretchy waterproof sensor
detects underwater explosives

Nanobots have long been considered for entering the bloodstream to combat disease, not unlike a more sophisticated version of the concept in the classic sci-fi movie "The Fantastic Voyage".  They are even being taught be able to join together, "think" and act collectively as one larger entity, with one possible application being to be deployed individually through small cracks and then, once in, joining together into a larger entity to rescue victims of earthquakes or other disasters.

 Now Joseph Wang, much-lauded professor of Nanoengineering at UC San Diego, has developed and is testing prototypes of the first nanobot designed to help clean up after oil spills.

The clean room in the Nanoengineering lab

These "microsubmarines" - about ten times smaller than the width of a human hair-  require very little fuel and move ultra-fast. They  have a "superhydrophobic" (water repellent and also very oil absorbing) coating which allows them to glide through the water and pick up oil.  Tests show the cone-shaped microsubmarines can collect droplets of olive oil and motor oil in water and transport them through the water.

Wang has already been named on 15 separate patents, with wide ranging applications from microfabricated DNA "applicable for broad use in nucleic acid analysis, particularly for measurement of nucleic acids (e.g., DNA and RNA), and their sequences and interactions, and for detection of DNA damage", to flexible sensors that can be printed onto the fabric of wetsuits to detect underwater explosives.

Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico: environmental
and public relations disaster

The UCSD Nanoenigeneering Department also actively seeks to collaborate with industry and governmental partners that could benefit from the research and patents developed.  Bearing in mind the both urgent importance of finding new tools to contain and eliminate oil spills, and the understandable corporate focus on not only protecting the environment, but also the public perception of the gas and oil industry; it seems likely that this technology will gain the interest and support it needs for full development to of its potential create another tool to combat environmental disasters.

Dr. Joe Wang 

      Dr. Wang explains the potential  applications of nanotechnology

3D metal printing

Printing a bicycle with a 3D printer

Sure, you can print a bicycle on a 3-D copier! - but will it work when you try to ride it?

British engineers Chris Turner and Andy Hawkins take up a challenge to build a bike by using a 3-D copier. Their Airbike is made entirely of nylon – yes nylon – but it is supposedly as strong as steel. Although most printing is done using a plastic-like polymer, 3-D printing is now being done in many other media, including metal and glass.

Although the Airbike is just a prototype, the possibility of making custom bikes or simply printing spare parts (or upgrading!) when one needs replacement is intriguing. Musicians are already playing with the idea of customizable guitars, where one downloads open source specs and uses them to print custom parts on a home 3-D printer. One can imagine a vibrant online community will like soon exist, where people will offer now designs and tweak each others design ideas electronically.

Autodesk has a full-sized printed motorcycle in its San Francisco Design Gallery, however  the chopper is  printed with the considerably less hardy  material frequently used for prototyping.  Autodesk, maker of the ubiquitous AutoCAD software is a big player in the  growing 3-D printing market, leading the market in design software for the emerging technology and even planning to open Kinkos-like 3-D printing retail outlets shortly. Home 3-D copiers should be available soon as printers are already being tested for mass marketing to the home consumer market in Europe.

Full-sized printed motorcycle with working gears,
 courtesy Autodesk Design Gallery (Occupy San Francisco in background)

In artist Suzuki's world, lakes unzip and leaves wink at you as they fall...

Boat shaped like a zipper (still here) makes its
wake the zippers teeth as it moves

The artist with his Arial Beings

Yasuhiro Suzuki, a 32 year old artist re-envisions mundane objects and experiences into something both fresh and fantastic.  His work connects immediately an emotional basis and at the same time is thought provoking as he explores the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate.  

Arial Beings drift over travelers  in an air-themed
 installation at Heneda Airport

Suzuki creates a magical world where falling leaves blink at you, zippers unzip lakes and cabbages lend you their leaves to use as bowls as his Arial Beings are freed from gravity to float along unseen movements of air on their own accord.

Suzuki has new book out, 'Blinking and Flapping' covering some of his recent works, that is available for international shipping through Amazon Japan.

Each of the leaves peels off to make an individual bowl 

Zipper Boat from a distance

'Blinking and Flapping' focus is on the pieces shown at a major retrospective of his work that took place late last year at the Hamamatsu Museum of Art. Indeed, the body of water shown being "unzipped" is Lake Hamamatsu.

The zip measures 26 x 56 x 170cm, and is most effective seen from some distance and speed, where the widening wake from the boat creates the sense of the water being unzipped.

Standing under Blinking and Flapping

The falling leaves are printed with an open eye on one side and
a closed on the other, so they blink as they flutter around you 

Google Drive (GDrive) launch expected today- with 5GB of free space

Google's launch of it's long rumored Google Drive, is slated for today. Word of the release was leaked prematurely on the company's french blog.

Google Drive, or GDrive, announced it would launch offering a welcome 5GB of free cloudstorage space for consumers and inexpensive additional capacity, a move calculated to undermine market share of existing cloud storage competitors such as Dropbox, as curious consumers who might not have been initially willing to pay for cloud storage are willing to sign up with Drive to try it out. Presumably, they will develop a certain comfort with the Google system as their needs increase. The overall lower costs and reportedly easier format may tempt existing customers to switch as well.

Rival start up Dropbox, recently valued at 4 billion dollars, reportedly was scrambling to make file sharing easier in anticipation of the release this week and Microsoft has recently upgraded its Skydrive service. Despite its later entry into the field, behemoth Google is likely to make some ripples as competition ramps up.



Google's video of the Google drive features

"Look, Ma! No hands!" Blind man takes a spin in Google's self-driving car as Google prepares public for eventual release

Steve Mahan, who is 95% blind, takes Google's self-driving car, a Prius, out for a spin- including a trip through a fast food drive-through and to pick up his laundry at the dry cleaners.  This visually illustrates how self-driving could give him the freedom to navigate his life with the same convenience as a sighted person takes for granted. His drive was one of one of many that have totaled over 200,000 test miles logged by Google's self-driving cars on California roads. There have been no accidents during the driver-less operation of the cars, however there has been, ironically, one fender-bender on Google's private lot while under the the car was under the control of a human driver.    

Not coincidentally, this is video release was timed as part of an increasing media campaign, that included California State Senator Alex Pedilla appropriately arriving in the state capital in a driver-less car for a press conference on the subject. This media campaign is meant to pave the road for consumer acceptance of the technology in advance of California's impending draft of legislation- based on similar legislation that has already been passed in Nevada, that would create safety road rules for self-driving cars and allow them to be legalized.

"...the way this would change my life is to give me the independence and the flexibility to go the places I would want to go and need to go when I need to do those things."