If you’re too far away from your honey to exchange real kisses, you may soon be able to kiss him or her over the phone, using the—you guessed it—KissPhone.
You actually kiss the phone—on its big, pink lips, to be precise—and the pressure, temperature, percussion speed, and “sucking force” of your mouth are measured. The phone then transmits these signals to your partner’s KissPhone, which reproduces the conditions of the kiss.
It’s not quite the gadget you see on Minority Report—but it’s close. MIT researchers have built a device that can turn any flat surface into a touchscreen for computing—and to surf the Web, all you have to do is move your hand.
Built with a Web cam, a mirror, a projector, and a smart phone, the device can be worn like a necklace, and can act like an omniscient personal assistant, letting you know if your flight is late, helping you shop, or even providing a phone number. But there’s one caveat: You have to wear color-coded finger gloves on your index finger and thumb, so the Web cam can pick up your hand movements.
Cell phones are fragile: One slip of the fingers and yours can be headed for a disastrous meeting with the sidewalk, leaving you headed to the store for a replacement. Once again, however, nanotechnology might be coming to our rescue.
Clemson University scientists led by Apparao Rao say they’ve created a new process to help make phones, car bumpers, or other often-broken items a little more resilient. The researchers built beds of tiny coiled carbon nanotubes that act as spring-like shock absorbers, protecting the object from a fall or collision.
Most people, even without refined taste for wine, probably could taste the difference between vino from a box and a $50 chardonnay. But perhaps few of us have the palette to tell a really good wine from a really, really good wine. Well, fear not—the machines are coming to do the job for us.
Two different groups have recently announced new designs that could help consumers know whether they’re guzzling the good stuff or imbibing a fraud. First, scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory created a counterfeit-resistant cap. Roger Johnston and Jon Warner’s design fits over the cork, and once it’s attached to the wine bottle, it completes a circuit.
The machines have schooled us once again.
Last week we wrote that Polaris, the poker-playing computer designed by University of Alberta researchers, was headed down to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. After a narrow loss against two human poker pros in 2007, the design team tweaked their program and came back for another shot.
This time, Polaris prevailed. The contest came down to the wire, and the computer trailed with only two matches to go. However, Polaris staged a comeback and came out on top.
Wait till next year, humanity.
Image: flickr/Jam Adams
It’s hard not to be impressed with the grandeur of Times Square—unless you’re especially conscious of saving energy, in which case all those illuminated signs might force upon you the mental image of polluting power plants working overtime to keep the light show going. If that’s the case, it might make you feel better to know that a greener electronic billboard is coming to New York.
By the time the ball drops this New Year’s Eve, Times Square may have its first solar and wind-powered billboard. Ricoh, a Japan-based electronics company, plans to install a 47-by-126-foot sign featuring their logo at the intersection of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in December.
It’s the middle of a high-stakes poker game. You steal a glance at your opponent—do they have a tell, or some physical tick that might inform you whether they’re bluffing or they actually have great cards? But all you see is a glowing laptop monitor, no help at all.
Phil Laak and Ali Eslami confronted this difficulty last summer, when they went to battle against Polaris, a poker-playing computer programmed by scientists at the University of Alberta. In a match-up called “The First Man-Machine Poker Championship,” man triumphed, but barely. Now an improved Polaris has returned for a rematch, and as the poker world gathers in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker later this week, other human players will try to defend humanity’s honor.
If facial recognition software that can compare your features to a criminal database, or gather data for advertisers, wasn’t futuristic enough for you, consider this: Someday when you’re taking a class from a robot instructor, it might be able to tell how well you understand the material solely based on your facial expressions.
Jacob Whitehill, a computer science PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, has created software that would allow him to control how fast a video played just by moving his face. That was the first step, he says—showing that a computer could pick up on facial movements and, if it was programmed correctly, use those movements as instructions. You can check out video of his “smile detector” here.
Last month, British microbiologist Peter Wilson released his revolting finding that a person’s keyboard could harbor five times as many bacteria as a toilet seat. That’s a recipe for sickness in any office, but it could be downright deadly in a hospital, with doctors and nurses passing germs as they type data into the computer. So Wilson is trying to change that, along with other researchers at University College London Hospital and American company Advanced Power Components. Specifically, they have designed a keyboard for the U.K.’s hospitals that notifies you when it’s dirty.
There are some things that most people think should never be made out of wood—things that produce extreme heat through a combustion process, say, or things that could collide with an oncoming semi at 190 mph while carrying human cargo. But you never know unless you try—so a group of industrial design grad students at North Carolina State are taking on the absurdly ambitious, and very cool, task of building a high-powered, high-speed automobile out of wood, held together mostly by glue.
The specs are impressive—over 600 hp, top speed of 190 mph, zero to 60 in just over three seconds, 2,500 pounds, and 20 mpg—but it’s all pretty hypothetical at the moment (as are, I assume, the Lambo-style doors). But the aptly named “Splinter” isn’t just a bunch of two-by-fours nailed together. The students are using the project to explore the potential of wood as a building material, so pretty much every part contains wood composites, like plywood. The car also contains a fair amount of glass and metal—including the shocks and a Cadillac Northstar sourced V-8 combustion engine.
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