You are currently browsing the grinding.be archives for November, 2010.
Tongue tied on your next date? Let your bottle of vodka do the talking for you. Medea Vodka can be programmed with up to three messages, 255 characters each in length. Your chosen message will then scroll across the screen, speaking for you, when you can’t.
Via nytimes.com.
Keim, director of NAU’s Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics and division director of Translational Genomics Research Institute, said that while the plague is less of a threat to humans than at other periods in history, such as the Middle Ages, the current plague research can be applied to ongoing health threats around the world.
This type of DNA fingerprinting can be used to characterize both natural and nefarious plague outbreaks — which is crucial when a bacterium is used as a biological weapon.
“This work is more of a model for our control of epidemic diseases such as Salmonella, E. coli and influenza,” Keim said. “Plague took advantage of human commercial traffic on a global scale, just as the flu and food-borne diseases do today. Future epidemiologists can learn from this millennium-scale reconstruction of a devastating disease to prevent or control future infectious disease outbreaks.”
Via ScienceDaily.
The SenseFly Swinglet CAM, via crunchgear, who’s calling it “a micro version of real aerial survey vehicles“.
Nice. Need to carry something heavier than 150g? They can design a larger platform to fit your needs.
The famous NASA doped spider webs, created by French designer Guillaume Lehoux for his SOD Project :
Link and photo via treehugger.com.
What if I told you that movie theaters may become a little bit similar to Big Brother? A U.K. security firm just earned a grant to use special cameras embedded into movie theater screens to capture your facial expressions — to serve you more relevant ads. Just when I thought privacy couldn’t get any worse, this is sure to shake up movie goers.
The security firm, Arlia Sytems is planning to use infrared to detect the facial expressions of an individual’s face. It will use 3D facial recognition technology to determine things like whether the audience is looking at a certain ad, where on the screen their eyeballs are tracking and how targeted ads are being received.
Via dvice.com.
From Gizmodo, play with digital clay and then print out your masterpiece:
It’s probably the easiest way to design 3D objects, without mucking around on CAD or other design programs. Actually using your fingertips to bend the lump of clay within the iPad app, turning it into a little object to print out—well, it sounds like a dream come true. Imagine your mom making Christmas tree ornaments this way, or being able to conjure up a little doohicky for sliding under a short table leg, within minutes?
Now the 3-D printers need to drop in price, just a little more…..
When gorgeous mountain views, sandy beaches or unknown cities will no longer thrill:
Cambodia depends on tourism for about a fifth of its GDP. Its premier attraction is Angkor Wat, the magnificent complex of ancient Buddhist and Hindu buildings, which draws 2 million visitors annually, by some estimates. But hundreds of thousands of tourists also visit two sites in Phnom Penh with a more grotesque appeal: S21, a Khmer torture center that later became a museum; and the killing fields at Choeung Ek, where some 9,000 bodies were buried en masse and where more than 5,000 human skulls are displayed in a glass-and-concrete stupa.
Now the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism plans to restore 14 Khmer Rouge–era buildings in Anlong Veng, which became the Communists’ last pocket of resistance after Vietnamese troops overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. For years, the town was a fief run by Pol Pot (the dictator formerly known as Saloth Sar) and his deputy Ta Mok (who was known as “The Butcher”). A number of sites from that era will be rebuilt as attractions, including Mok’s lakeside compound, Pol Pot’s house and the bungalow on a cliff where he was eventually imprisoned, a radio station that used to broadcast propaganda, and a munitions warehouse—complete with stockpiles of the anti-personnel mines that not infrequently still rip the legs off local farmers.
Via disinfo.com, a machine that prints layers of cells mixed with fibrinogen, type 1 collagen and thrombin has been reported by technologyreview.com.
The system, which lays down cells with the same fluid-based inkjet technology used in many printers, could print large swathes of living tissue directly onto the injuries of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Covering burns and related wounds is of critical importance because, the scientists note, “any loss of full-thickness skin of more than 4 cm in diameter will not heal by itself.”
See also:
Hat-tip to @catvincent!
A “frame from an upcoming timelapse journey”, from J.Morganized’s photostream.
“Elementary school children in Korea in the cities of Masan and Daegu are among the first to be exposed to EngKey, a robotic teacher. The arrival of EngKey to Masan and Daegu is just a small step in the mechanization of Korean classrooms: the Education Ministry wants all 8400 kindergartens in the nation to have robotic instructors by the end of 2013. Plans are already under way to place 830 bots in preschools by year’s end. EngKey can hold scripted conversations with students to help them improve their language skills, or a modified version can act as a telepresence tool to allow distant teachers to interact with children.”
Via /..
3D Printers are getting ever more advanced and, apparently, ever bigger too. Proof to that is the Urbee Hybrid, the result of a partnership between transportation company Kor Ecologic and Stratasys, who we’ve already seen shamelessly rebranding its 3D printers as HP Designjets. Kor provided the concept and the underpinnings of the thing, a design that amazingly has its roots in the early ’90s but has been given a new, teardrop body 100 percent printed by Stratasys. Underneath is a plug-in hybrid powertrain that manages up to 200mpg on the highway and 100mpg around town running on ethanol or plain ‘ol gasoline.
No plans for production (so far). Via engadget.com.
Not something you see everyday outside your office window:
MASS MoCA director Joseph Thompson describes the development of Geometric Death Frequency-14: “Pure data and algorithms based on particle physics served as the primary guiding forces behind the sculpture’s shape, texture and size.”
Assembled from 420,000 robotically milled black spheres, Federico Díaz’s sculpture draws inspiration from a digital photograph of the museum’s clock tower entryway. The artist, who lives in the Czech capital Prague, transformed the two-dimensional image into pure data, then used analytical and fluid-dynamic modeling techniques to reshape the building’s contours into wavelike forms.
“Federico is the ultimate shape-shifter, in a way,” said MASS MoCA director Joseph C. Thompson in a statement. “The bricks and mullions and windows of our buildings become files of digital data; the pixels become black spheres meticulously cut, stacked and assembled; the courtyard becomes and contains sculpture. There’s something alchemical or magical about it, and all the while Federico remains behind the curtain, as if to say, ‘Look ma, no hands.’”
Words and picture via wired.com.
The fantastical becomes real:
Imagine objects three-dimensionally printed from a bed of nylon powder; shapes appearing to seamlessly morph and merge with each other; and new forms randomly self-generated by computer software. Lab Craft, a new Crafts Council touring exhibition, presents the imagined as real objects.
Curated by design commentator Max Fraser, the exhibition features 26 of the most experimental names in craft and design, each of them combining traditional craft skills with the use of cutting-edge digital technologies.
One of my favorite pieces shown:
In this vessel, Eden likens the symbolic surface decoration on an ancient Chinese ceremonial wine vessel to the encoded information of a QR code. The vessel’s unique QR code forms the footprint of the piece, which is created by a 3D printing process, and so runs throughout the form
Words, pictures and links via guardian.co.uk. See the exhibit in person at Turnpike Gallery, Leigh until December 18th.
From New Scientist – Health:
Eberthart Zrenner and colleagues at the University of Tübingen in Germany have developed a microchip carrying 1500 photosensitive diodes that slides into the retina where the photoreceptors would normally be. The diodes respond to light, and when connected to an outside power source through a wire into the eye, can stimulate the nearby nerves that normally pass signals to the brain, mimicking healthy photoreceptors.
The team reports that their first three volunteers could all locate bright objects. One could recognise normal objects and read large words. …
…. As a safety precaution, the implants in this first pilot study were removed after several weeks, says Walter Wrobel, head of Retina-Implant, a company based in Reutlingen, Germany, formed by the researchers to eventually market the implant. “Based on the results of this study, we have designed a new system, which is being implanted permanently, or as long as patients like it.”
In the new system, the power source connects to the retinal implant via a mechanical coupling through intact skin, not via a wire through an incision in the skin as the earlier system did. “That means they can shower easily, leave the hospital and go around town on their own,” says Zrenner. “They can go out for a meal, and really see things, like a nice glass of beer.”
See also:
From Science Daily:
Researchers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have reached an early, but important, milestone in the quest to grow replacement livers in the lab. They are the first to use human liver cells to successfully engineer miniature livers that function — at least in a laboratory setting — like human livers. The next step is to see if the livers will continue to function after transplantation in an animal model.
…
To engineer the organs, the scientists used animal livers that were treated with a mild detergent to remove all cells (a process called decellularization), leaving only the collagen “skeleton” or support structure. They then replaced the original cells with two types of human cells: immature liver cells known as progenitors, and endothelial cells that line blood vessels.
The cells were introduced into the liver skeleton through a large vessel that feeds a system of smaller vessels in the liver. This network of vessels remains intact after the decellularization process. The liver was next placed in a bioreactor, special equipment that provides a constant flow of nutrients and oxygen throughout the organ.
After a week in the bioreactor system, the scientists documented the progressive formation of human liver tissue, as well as liver-associated function. They observed widespread cell growth inside the bioengineered organ.
The ability to engineer a liver with animal cells had been demonstrated previously. However, the possibility of generating a functional human liver was still in question.
via The Grumpy Owl (Who has a much more humorous take on this)
