About 3 p.m. Sunday, Bellevue firefighters were called to the 17100 block of Northeast Fifth Street after neighbors saw flames and smoke.
“It appears that a glass bowl, partially filled with water and elevated on a wire rack in a sunny area of the home’s deck, provided the right conditions to focus the sunlight and start a fire,” Lt. Eric Keenan said.
They should have listened to the warnings from the ants.
Okay, perhaps “featured” is a bit of a stretch, but an 80beats article was indeed shown on-screen, clear as day, in yesterday’s episode of the Report. The second segment was on several nations racing to exploit the Arctic. While showing a screen grab from our site, Stephen said (it’s cool—he and Discoblog are on a first-name basis), “The Russkies have announced a scheme to power their Arctic oil drilling with floating nuclear power plants. This is a brilliant scheme. The one thing I always thought was missing from nuclear power plants was the ability to capsize.”
The segment also included this gem: “Well, America can not allow an Arctic nuclear gap. That’s why we have to leapfrog the Russians in technology, by cutting out the middleman and simply drilling for oil with nuclear missiles.”
Seattle officials paid $2.25 million for the fossilized remains of the 3.2 million-year-old hominid known as Lucy to be on display at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. The problem is that no one wanted to visit the world’s oldest and best preserved human fossil, even though this is the first time she has ever traveled outside of Africa.
So far, Lucy’s been in Seattle for 5 months, and only 60,000 people have visited the exhibit (officials had expected more like 250,000). As a result, the science center has lost half a million dollars, resulting in layoffs of 8 percent of its staff and a wage freeze.
Lucy was supposed to go on a six-year, 10-city tour. The event started out strong: Visitors in Houston loved Lucy so much that officials extended her stay for a few months. By the exhibit’s end, Houston’s museum had clocked in more than 170,000 visitors. But a poor turnout in Seattle is making museums cancel their plans. The Field Museum in Chicago has pulled out, and the Denver museum of Nature and Science was apparently worried that transporting Lucy might damage her fragile remains.
CES finishes today, and hordes of attendees are making their way to the airport for their return journeys home. But next year, maybe we can all catch the show without the hassle of plane trips, getting lost in the casino while looking for the actual hotel part of the hotel/casino combo, and fighting it out over the last seat on the shuttle bus.
Anybots gives us an alternative with its robotic telepresence system. Their QA robot can be controlled from the comfort of any networked computer, allowing you to wander around and check out booths in spirit, if not in body. The QA has a 4 to 6 hour battery life (which, to be fair, is about my daily limit for walking up down the show halls too). It’s tall height means that it’s built in camera has a normal human eyeline, and it’s body is jointed to allow the QA to express some basic gestures and look down. While watching the camera feed and controlling the QA remotely, a loud speaker and microphone lets you converse with any humans that might be present (the LCD screen on the QA’s chest can display a photo of its operator so that people can know who they are talking to.) The base is similar to a Segway’s, allowing the robot to roll around while remaining upright, and has a built in LIDAR system to automatically detect potential obstacles.
Of course, there is still one thing missing from the QA that gives going to the show in person the edge, at least for now–the current version has no arm with which to grab those free vendor giveaways…
One of my favorite items at CES was HeartMath’s emWave PSR, a biofeedback device that’s supposed to help you “balance your autonomic nervous system.” Doing that is supposed to put you in that famous zone where your performance at just about any task is elevated, like the athlete who says she can’t miss a shot or the ball she’s swinging at looks like a watermelon. What psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.”
To bring you to this promised land, the emWave watches your pulse, but the goal isn’t to lower your heart rate, as you might expect–it’s to smooth out the rhythm, regardless of what your pulse is. HeartMath says they have 17 years of research of their own research plus published, peer-reviewed studies showing that a smooth pulse indicates the balance, or “coherence,” of your sympathetic nervous system (which triggers stress responses) and your parasympathetic nervous system (which triggers calming responses). Which is nice.
The emWave PSR itself is very simple: A rectangular device about the size of an Altoids box connects to a PC and to a clip that attaches to your ear lobe and monitors your pulse. The box has a light that moves back and forth (think KITT’s scanner), showing the proper breathing rhythm. Meanwhile the PC shows a graph of your nervous-system coherence, and this biofeedback is essential to the project–once you have a clear idea of what internal process achieves the desired result, it becomes easier to focus on and reproduce that. It’s like a shipwrecked person who’s trying to learn to wiggle his ears finally finds a mirror.
As proof that there’s nothing that can’t be upgraded with a healthy dose of high-tech goodness, there is the new Brother Quattro 6000D sewing machine. With a list price of $600, this sewing-machine-of-the-future features a 32-square-inch Sharp LCD screen. The screen is hooked up to a camera mounted above the needle for precision positioning of fabrics (the sewing area is helpfully illuminated by a cluster of natural-daylight LEDs). The Quattro 6000D can also automatically embroider designs from an onboard library thanks to its built in computer — additional designs can be loaded using one of three USB ports.
Of course, computer technology pretty much began thanks to the textile industry. Still it’s a little disconcerting to find probably more raw onboard computer power than we needed to land a man on the moon in a tool for a craft with such a comforting, low-tech vibe. Some futurists predict that when virtually every human-made object has an embedded, networked computer, it will lead to a new stage in human evolution beyond our current comprehension, when human and machine intelligences merge. Having seen the Quattro 6000D in action, I can tell you that if this occurs, we can at least be assured that neatly hemmed edges will certainly be involved.
If I ever win the lottery, once I get that check deposited in my bank account, my first call will be to Simcraft, makers of the utterly awesome APEX SC830. The SC830 is designed to be a training simulator for professional race car drivers. The simulator boasts three degrees of freedom, allowing it to roll, pitch and yaw in response to motion within the simulation– I tested it out, and I could really feel the car pulling around curves. (This was before I spun out and crashed horribly, proving that in real life I should never be allowed near the steering wheel of a race car). It’s an amazingly realistic experience, and the company told me the military have also used it to train drivers to handle off-road conditions. A flight simulator version is also in the works.
I own a Roomba, and personally, now that I have one, I can’t quite see the need for any other pets (my Roomba is notably more affectionate than many cats I have known, for example.) But apparently I’m in a minority, because the iRobot corporation has developed an addition to the Roomba line specifically designed for pet owners, and their never-ending battle against shedded fur. The new model comes with a large capacity bin to handle the extra debris that arises when someone insists on having organic lifeforms as their domestic companions, and the design of the sweeper system has been tweaked so that all that hair doesn’t get tangled up around the brushes.
CES isn’t always about the bells and whistles. Sometimes it’s about elegant design. Areaware is a New York-based company that aggregates futuristic products from a consortium of industrial designers. Their booth featured, among other things, a wooden radio and a folding bicycle. What caught my attention though was their “Moof” bike. An elegantly designed single-speed, the Moof includes front and back solar LED’s artfully integrated into the bike tube, solving a classic cyclist’s dilemma: you really ought to have a light on your bike, but most bike lights make you look like a total dork. You can be the coolest cruiser around town (see pic below) later this year for $500.
You’d think that a conference session titled “Greener Gadgets: The Future of Consumer Technology,” would be focused on the latest environmentally-oriented cutting-edge technology to emerge from places like Silicon Valley. In fact, the take-away from the session panel was that if you’re really interested in learning how to build low-power, long-life, non-toxic devices with a small ecological footprint, the kind of places you should visit are Africa and India.
David Floyd, managing director of British company Freeplay Energy, explained why, using the example of a solar-powered radio his firm had developed for classrooms in Africa (the goal was to allow national governments to broadcast educational programs to schools over the airwaves.) Solar power was essential because so few places in Africa have access to electrical power. Other companies had approached the problem by trying to combine an off-the-shelf solar panel with an off-the-shelf radio, but the power demands of the radio, designed for the Western world where electricity is plentiful, doomed those radios to failure.
DiscoBlog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's edited by Eliza Strickland, and written by Brett Israel and Andrew Moseman.
Cross-posted from Cosmic Variance:
Lucy flew all the way from Ethiopia for nothing.
One of my favorite items at CES was HeartMath’s emWave PSR, a biofeedback device that’s supposed to help you “balance your autonomic nervous system.” Doing that is supposed to put you in that famous zone where your performance at just about any task is elevated, like the athlete who says she can’t miss a shot or the ball she’s swinging at looks like a watermelon. What psychologist 
