Sep 12, 2015
The making of a working Star Wars BB-8 droid
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: robotics/AI
The making of a working Star Wars BB-8 droid.
You can now buy Star Wars’ adorable BB-8 droid and let it patrol your home.
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Sep 12, 2015
Better Than ‘Blade Runner’: Re-Imagining Our Cities
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: electronics, engineering, entertainment
Drawn to the Future, a major exhibition on visualization technology featuring leading pioneers in architecture and engineering tech, highlights how our experience of our cities and buildings will rapidly change.
Images of the city have always wielded psychological, emotional and political power. Anyone brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies and US TV shows will have had that uncanny experience as a first-time visitor to a US city — a sense of déjà vu, the feeling of being on a movie set, in a story. I took the Blade Runner cityscape so seriously as a student in New York in 1983, that after a late-night showing of the film, I went into a phone box and rang the number dialed by Harrison Ford on the ‘video screen’ (555−7563 in case you’re interested). The decay of Ridley Scott’s dystopian future spilled over into the rodent-rich, un-gentrified, occasionally threatening Lower East Side of the time.
Continue reading “Better Than 'Blade Runner': Re-Imagining Our Cities” »
Sep 12, 2015
Space Internet: Elon Musk’s New Dream
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, internet, space
Elon Musk has yet another dream to make this world a better place, namely Space Internet. And it’s feasible.
Sep 12, 2015
Humans Will Have Cloud-Connected Hybrid Brains
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: biotech/medical, computing, engineering, nanotechnology, Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI
So, you think you’ve seen it all? You haven’t seen anything yet. By the year 2030, advancements will excel anything we’ve seen before concerning human intelligence. In fact, predictions offer glimpses of something truly amazing – the development of a human hybrid, a mind that thinks in artificial intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, spoke openly about this idea at the Exponential Finance Conference in New York. He predicts that humans will have hybrid brains able to connect to the cloud, just as with computers. In this cloud, there will be thousands of computers which will update human intelligence. The larger the cloud, the more complicated the thinking. This will all be connected using DNA strands called Nanobots. Sounds like a Sci-Fi movie, doesn’t it?
Kurzweil says:
Sep 12, 2015
Ras Labs Is Testing Futuristic Muscle Material That Could Make Robots Feel More Human
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: biotech/medical, cyborgs, materials, robotics/AI, space
Synthetics startup Ras Labs is working with the International Space Station to test “smart materials” that contract like living tissue. These “electroactive” materials can expand, contract and conform to our limbs just like human muscles when a current moves through them – and they could be used to make robots move and feel more human to the touch.
Ras Labs co-founder Lenore Rasmussen accidentally stumbled upon the synthetic muscle material years ago while mixing chemicals in the lab at Virginia Tech. The experiment turned out to be with the wrong amount of ingredients, but it produced a blob of wobbly jelly that Rasmussen noticed contracted and expanded like muscles when she applied an electrical current.
It would be years later when Rasmussen’s cousin nearly lost his foot in a farming accident that she would start to employ that discovery to robotic limbs and space travel. The co-founder thought her cousin might lose his foot and started researching prosthetics.
Sep 12, 2015
Samsung Chip to Bring 6GB of RAM to Your Smartphone
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: computing
Sep 12, 2015
$11mn, 36-hour historic head transplant to be carried out in China in 2017
Posted by Dan Kummer in category: biotech/medical
Italian doctor Sergio Canavero, along with his Chinese colleague Ren Xiaoping, is set to conduct the world’s first head transplant on a 30-year-old Russian patient suffering from a rare disease. The operation is planned for December 2017.
The project was first announced in 2013, and the man who volunteered for the procedure is Russian Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from the extremely rare, progressive Werdnig-Hoffmann disease.
“Canavero initially joked it would be a Christmas present, but now this is becoming a reality.
Continue reading “$11mn, 36-hour historic head transplant to be carried out in China in 2017” »
Sep 12, 2015
Silicon Valley is raiding tech academia: “Uber would like to buy your Robotics Department”
Posted by Scott Davis in categories: robotics/AI, transportation
Your next Uber driver may not be human.
Silicon Valley is raiding technology departments of universities around the U.S.—can tech academia survive?
Sep 12, 2015
Scientists discover cause of and potential treatment for muscle weakness and loss due to aging
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: chemistry, life extension
As we grow older, we lose strength and muscle mass. However, the cause of age-related muscle weakness and atrophy has remained a mystery.
Scientists at the University of Iowa have discovered the first example of a protein that causes muscle weakness and loss during aging. The protein, ATF4, is a transcription factor that alters gene expression in skeletal muscle, causing reduction of muscle protein synthesis, strength, and mass. The UI study also identifies two natural compounds, one found in apples and one found in green tomatoes, which reduce ATF4 activity in aged skeletal muscle. The findings, which were published online Sept. 3 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, could lead to new therapies for age-related muscle weakness and atrophy.
Sep 12, 2015
How curly nanowires can absorb more light to power nanoscale electronic circuits
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: electronics, energy, materials, nanotechnology, solar power, sustainability
This illustration shows a prototype device comprising bare nanospring photodetectors placed on a glass substrate, with metal contacts to collect charges (credit: Tural Khudiyev and Mehmet Bayindir/Applied Optics)
Researchers from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, have shown that twisting straight nanowires into springs can increase the amount of light the wires absorb by up to 23 percent. Absorbing more light is important because one application of nanowires is turning light into electricity, for example, to power tiny sensors instead of requiring batteries.
If nanowires are made from a semiconductor like silicon, light striking the wire will dislodge electrons from the crystal lattice, leaving positively charged “holes” behind. Both the electrons and the holes move through the material to generate electricity. The more light the wire absorbs; the more electricity it generates. (A device that converts light into electricity can function as either a solar cell or a photosensor.)
