Just as Beethoven suffered through hearing loss and Hemingway struggled with depression, an artist at New York University is also suffering for his art, but in a slightly different way: his body has rejected part of the camera that he implanted in his head.
Back in November, Wafaa Bilal, an NYU photography professor, embarked on a novel art experiment: he went to a Los Angeles tattoo shop and had a titanium base inserted behind the skin on the back of his head. Three posts that extended from this insert were then attached to a camera that snapped pictures once a minute, viewable to everyone on his website.
The robotic ears of the U.S. Army just got an upgrade: now robots don’t have to be right next to a wall to detect humans breathing on the other side.
Created by the California company TiaLinx, the Cougar20-H is a radar-using robot that looks like a small blackboard on wheels. As Wired reports:
The … Cougar20-H “can … be remotely programmed at multiple way points to scan the desired premise in a multi-story building and provide its layout,” TiaLinx boasted.
The remote-controlled robot could save lives as troops battle insurgents in Afghanistan and other regions because it allows them to ‘see’ who’s inside a building before they physically enter. And there’s the possibility that it could be used to fight human trafficking or to help with rescue missions.
Hospitals may start packing heat in the near future, but patients–especially burn victims–will be rejoicing. The “skin gun” fires stem cells instead of bullets, and it can heal second-degree burns faster than we’ve ever done it before.
Usually, skin grafting is an arduous process: It takes weeks to grow a fragile patch of skin over a wound. But with the skin gun, the grafting process takes 90 minutes and patients heal up within four days. And in the world of skin grafting, that speedy timeline is precious because it means that infections have less of a chance of setting in and killing patients.
Have you ever wondered why woodpeckers don’t pass out after scrounging a meal from a tree? Their little brains, after all, undergo decelerations of 1200g as they bang their beaks against the wood–over ten times the force needed to give a human a concussion. Now scientists are learning how to harness the woodpecker’s special abilities not to prevent headaches, but to safeguard our gadgets.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed CT scans and video footage of the golden-fronted woodpecker (Melanerpes aurifons) to design better shock absorbers. They found that woodpeckers have four traits that ease their noggins: fluid between the skull and brain, a beak that is slightly elastic, a section of soft skull bone, and a bone called the hyoid, or lingual bone, which is also somewhat elastic.
The scientists then constructed a woodpecker-inspired shock-absorbing system around a circuit using materials that approximated the bird’s four absorbers. For example, rubber represented the supportive and slightly-elastic nature of the hyoid bone, while aluminum mimicked the brain-skull fluid. With the circuit securely surrounded, they stuffed it inside a bullet and fired the bullet at an aluminum wall using an air gun.
Can you tell the difference between Jonagold, Braeburn, and Cortland apples? Your grocery store’s self-checkout machine can–or at least it’ll be able to in the next few years as Toshiba perfects the software for the self-checkouts of the future.
This futuristic machine uses a webcam to perceive the shape and color of fruits, vegetables, and other non-barcoded items, and then it uses an algorithm to pick the best candidate within its database. Shoppers have the ability to OK the machine’s decision if it’s right, or to correct it if it’s wrong. And the scary thing? The machine learns from its mistakes. From New Scientist:
“This system gets smarter as you use it more,” says Kubota. He says recent tests showed it was able to recognise produce even when it was placed in a clear plastic bag. Still, it is not perfect yet. Naoki Mukawa at Tokyo Denki University warns that users could take advantage of the re-educating mechanism to allow the wrong identification to go through because the mistaken product might be cheaper.
That’s not the only hurdle. New Scientist found a skeptic in Keiji Yanai, a researcher at Tokyo’s University of Electro-Communications:
He says this type of object recognition system is more difficult to perfect than facial recognition technology, as it is harder to distinguish between generic objects. Similar ideas designed to identify products without barcodes have never made it to market in the past, he adds.
And though it’s a work in progress, there is nevertheless a time line: Toshiba has plans to introduce these smart self-checkout counters by 2014. Until then, you still have to scroll through oodles of images to find your match, or else visit that contraption of carbon and water otherwise known as a human being.
Jet-heads rejoice: Starting in March, you can buy your own water-propelled jetpack, enabling you to soar over 32 feet into the air while traveling nearly 22 miles per hour.
Invented by Raymond Li, the JetLev works by shooting water out of two nozzles. Because the jetpack’s fuel and engine aren’t directly strapped onto the user–they’re housed separately on the water, and the flyer is connected via a long tube–the jetpack is not only safer than most, but also three times as powerful. As New Scientist reports:
“It’s the same reaction force a firefighter experiences when he points a water jet at a fire,” says Li.
But aside from the jetpack’s abilities, the price tag also sets it apart from your average fire hose: it costs $99,500. If resorts and outdoor rental companies snatch up this gadget, though, zooming along the waterfront via jet pack may soon be a common sight. Li hopes that it will have more practical applications, too, like search and rescue and–yes–firefighting. The task of creating a workable hydro-jetpack wasn’t easy. From New Scientist:
It’s the result of a decade of hard work and following a dream that most engineers thought was impossible. “No one had done anything like it before,” says Li. “Almost everyone thought I was crazy. It was hard to get quotations for prototype fabrication, raising capital, finding development partners and suitable venues to do the testing.”
Even U.S. intelligence agents make decidedly unintelligent decisions at times. So it may not come as a surprise that the government is willing to invest in any project that could help agencies spot and correct their own decision-skewing prejudices–even if that project is a video game.
Dubbed “Sirius,” the anti-bias project is the brainchild of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a government agency whose mission statement might as well have come from a spy novel: to invest in “high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.”
One of those overwhemlming advantages: clear, bias-free thinking. That’s why computer scientists, gaming experts, social scientists, and statisticians will descend on Washington, D.C. in February to discuss the program. The focus of the Sirius project is on “serious games,” or educational video games. As IARPA reports:
Robots aren’t only getting smarter nowadays–they’re also getting stronger. Researchers have now created a robot hand that can withstand hammer hits and other hard blows.
Led by Markus Grebenstein, the researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) created a robot hand that functions virtually as well as a human’s appendage. The dexterous hand has 19 degrees of freedom–considering that the human hand has 20 degrees of freedom, that’s pretty good. The hand’s delicate movements are controlled by 38 tendons, each linked to a separate motor on the forearm. From IEEE Spectrum:
Another key element in the DLR design is a spring mechanism connected to each tendon. These springs … give the tendons, which are made from a super strong synthetic fiber called Dyneema, more elasticity, allowing the fingers to absorb and release energy, like our own hands do. This capability is key for achieving robustness and for mimicking the kinematic, dynamic, and force properties of the human hand.
The tendons, when tensed, are what allow the hand to withstand hits. But just how strong of a hit can it endure? The hand remained resilient after receiving a blow of 66 G’s administered by a baseball bat. Researchers are pleased with the outcome and see it as a big step towards more widespread use of service robots. As IEEE Spectrum reports:
“If every time a robot bumps its hand, the hand gets damaged, we’ll have a big problem deploying service robots in the real world,” Grebenstein says.
Cell phones will soon make a giant leap for mankind–right into outer space. In the coming year, British engineers from Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) plan to send a cell phone into orbit to test whether cell phones are tough enough to withstand outer space, and whether they’re powerful enough to control satellites. As the BBC reports:
“Modern smartphones are pretty amazing,” said SSTL project manager Shaun Kenyon…. “They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory…. We’re not taking it apart; we’re not gutting it; we’re not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite – we’re flying it as is,” Mr Kenyon explained.
The jury’s still out as to what cell phone model will be the world’s first orbital smartphone–but the scientists have already decided to pick one that uses Google’s Android operating system. That software is open source, allowing the engineers to tweak the phone’s functions. Not every phone, after all, comes off the shelf with the ability to navigate a nearly 12-inch-long, GPS-equipped, pulsed-plasma thruster satellite.
Online flashers could soon be out of a hobby, thanks to a team of software engineers from the University of Colorado and McGill University. The team is developing a system called SafeVchat, which is meant to detect and filter out obscene images, foiling even the fastest of flashers.
The team tested their algorithms at Chatroulette, the infamous online video-chat service that lets you communicate with randomly-selected strangers, and the results looked good.
As you can probably guess, the problem with seeing video images of random strangers is that some of these people are all-too-eager to show off their flesh. Despite the age restrictions on some video-chat sites and the noble-yet-feeble first attempts at creating filtering software, flashers still peddle their wares with ease and have seemed as unstoppable as a bad rash.
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
The robotic ears of the U.S. Army just got an upgrade: now robots don’t have to be right next to a wall to detect humans breathing on the other side.
