Like the Grand Theft Auto RC missions come to life, this helicopter can grasp objects for transport. They don’t have to be a special size or shape, and it can lift them even if they are not centered. This is thanks to a load-balancing hand (originally developed as a prosthesis) that relies on flexible joints and a tendon-like closing mechanism. As you can see in the video, the light-weight chopper has an on-board camera so that the operator can see what is being picked up. This little guy has no problem lifting objects that are over one kilogram while remaining stable in the air.

Link and photo from hackaday.com.

See also:

• Parrot – an AR drone you can pilot from your iDevice
• MikroKopter – HexaKopter
• Lockheed Martin’s Samurai Monocopter
• Robotic Shotgun Autocopter
• Killer robots to get silent-running whisper mode

Currently in the prototype stage, from medgadget.com:

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed tiny generators that can produce enough electricity from random, ambient vibrations to power a wristwatch, pacemaker or wireless sensor. In humans, these vibrations could come from moving muscles or limbs. The generators have demonstrated that they can produce up to 500 microwatts from typical vibration amplitudes found on the human body. That’s more than enough energy to run a wristwatch, which needs between 1 and 10 microwatts, or a pacemaker, which needs between 10 and 50.

Scientists of the University of Pennsylvania are creating electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body, through the use of thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates.

While implanted electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don’t need protection. The whole process is pretty much seamless: The electronics on the flexible silk substrates conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.

To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal – so far the technique is tested on mice – and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface.

In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers report that such circuits can be implanted in animals with no adverse effects. And the performance of the transistors on silk inside the body doesn’t suffer.

The researchers are now developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.

From nextnature.net.

Never leave home without your mp3 player again:

Wearable technology was the topic du jour on the The Gadget Show, a British television series focusing on technology. On the episode, the hosts, Jason and Suzi were challenged to create a wearable technology prototype and have it judged by designer Wayne Hemingway.

Via Syuzi at fashioningtech.com.

The implanted chip, according to the MIT team behind it, features a “microfabricated polyimide stimulating electrode array with sputtered iridium oxide electrodes” which is implanted into the user’s retina by a specially-developed surgical technique. There are also “secondary power and data receiving coils”.

Once the implant is in place, wireless transmissions are made from outside the head. These induce currents in the receiving coils of the nerve chip, meaning that it needs no battery or other power supply. The electrode array stimulates the nerves feeding the optic nerve, so generating a image in the brain.

The wireless signals, for use in humans, would be generated by a glasses-style headset equipped with cameras or other suitable sensors and transmitters tuned to the coils implanted in the head.

Currently implanted in Yucatan minipigs, human trials are still three years away. Link and photo via theregister.co.uk and original article (available to subscribers only) at Biomedical Engineering.

Norbert Eisenreich, a senior researcher and deputy of directors at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (ICT) in Pfinztal, Germany, said his team of scientists have come up with a substance that could replace plastic: Arboform — basically, liquid wood.

It is derived from wood pulp-based lignin and can be mixed with a number of other materials to create a strong, non-toxic alternative to petroleum-based plastics, Eisenreich said, as reported by DPA news agency.

Car parts and other durable items made of this bio-plastic already exist, but the chemical hadn’t been suitable for household use until now, due to the high content of sulphurous substances used in separating the lignin from the cell fibers.

The German researchers were able to reduce the sulphur content in Arborform by about 90 percent, making it much safer for use in everyday items.

Bolstering Arboform’s environmental credentials, Eisenreich’s team also discovered that the substance was highly recyclable.

“To find that out, we produced components, broke them up into small pieces, and re-processed the broken pieces — 10 times in all. We did not detect any change in the material properties of the low-sulphur bio-plastic, so that means it can be recycled,” said Inone-Kauffmann.

From dw-world.de, via core77.com.

From MIT news:

The ubiquitous barcodes found on product packaging provide information to the scanner at the checkout counter, but that’s about all they do. Now, researchers at the Media Lab have come up with a new kind of very tiny barcode that could provide a variety of useful information to shoppers as they scan the shelves — and could even lead to new devices for classroom presentations, business meetings, videogames or motion-capture systems.

The new system, called Bokode, is based on a new way of encoding visual information, explains Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, who leads the lab’s Camera Culture group. Until now, there have been three approaches to communicating data optically: through ordinary imaging (using two-dimensional space), through temporal variations such as a flashing light or moving image (using the time dimension), or through variations in the wavelength of light (used in fiber-optic systems to provide multiple channels of information simultaneously through a single fiber).

A quick, easy and cheap method of detecting pathogens, viruses and toxins? The printed technology looks promising:

Scientists at McMaster University have come up with a new methodology to create cheap biosensors using an inkjet printer. By applying a “lateral flow” sensing paradigm commonly seen in pregnancy test strips, the developers showed how one can implement a FujiFilm Dimatix Materials Printer to create sensors that can detect the presence of toxins, specifically acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors such as paraoxon and aflatoxin B1.

Link, photo and words via medgadget.com.

Representing the next phase of prosthetic technology, osseointegrated prosthetics are faux limbs that knit themselves with the person’s bone. Since the prosthetic is attached to the bone itself, it creates a more natural movement for the wearer. Last January, we reported on the first dog candidate Cassidy, to receive the new technology. This week, National Geographic is reporting that the German shepard is doing well with his new limb.

Link and photo via nationalgeographic.com.

See also:

• Prosthetic limbs that fuse with your skeleton

Thanks to LBA for the link to the update!

Jen Hui Liao’s Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model’s help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.

The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.

Link and video via we-make-money-not-art.com.

The thought of being strapped into a machine and forced to draw whatever has been programmed by into the machine is an interesting ethical consideration…..

Developed by MIT students Carnaven Chiu, Xiao Xiao, Keywon Chung, and Peggy Chi , SOS: Stress Outsourced is a networked wearable system that allows users to send and receive massages anonymously. A new type of haptic social networking (or social therapy), SOS allows stressed individuals to send anonymous signals via the wearable to a global social network. In response, individuals within the network calm the stressed victim by sending them a “massage” stroke.

Link and words via fashioningtech.com.

Worried about your data if you lose your flash drive? Fujitsu may soon offer a commercial solution:

The company will deny it of course, but the sharp eyes over at GetUSB just released some top-secret info regarding Fujitsu’s prototype USB flash drive that can erase the data it contains after a set amount of time, or if someone attempts to copy or transfer the data to an “unauthorized workstation or server”

Link via technabob.com.

Georgia Tech has announced plans to silence larger UAVs. From theregister.co.uk:

Some robotic aircraft are already very quiet – the small battery-powered aeroplanes, often hand-launched, which are used for infantry reconnaissance and perimeter security are almost totally silent. Electric quadcopters, as favoured in some situations by the Merseyside plods and (it is rumoured) the SAS, are also unobtrusive. Such technology typically causes a stir only when employed in the form of flying genitalia.

But larger machines, able to tool up with deadly weapons and wreak havoc among their puny human opponents, are much noisier. The racket of engines, propellors and whatnot – when at low level – often warns the hapless fleshies beneath, giving them a slim chance to hide or escape.

Gaeta and his colleagues want to take away that chance. The plan is to equip the roving robotic spyeyes and gun-platforms of tomorrow with Blue Thunder-style whisper mode*. The GIT team have apparently visited unnamed “US military installations” for the purpose of examining machines already in operation.

Silent death from above.

Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center and HP recently announced a prototype of a flexible lightweight computer screen that stands to revolutionize computers and electronic devices. Created in a similar roll-to-roll manufacturing process as thin-film pv, these new computer screens are printed onto plastic sheets that are virtually indestructible, use less energy and are less costly to produce than conventional screens. These new displays could potentially use up to 90% less materials by volume to produce as well.

Link and photo via inhabitat.com.

     Cory Doctorow’s fantastic and amazingly useful novel Little Brother posits a world where Microsoft has started giving out gaming hardware (a new generation X-Box) for free as a loss leader and makes up the profits on the back end with pay-per-use subscription fees and games.     The free and ubiquitous X-Box hardware is uncerimoniously hacked and then becomes the base unit of a vast undernet, allowing the protagonist and others to operate out of sight of the DHS.

     Well, first of all the Paranoid Linux distribution that was one of the fictional resources of the book is now in real development.

     Now?  Microsoft has submitted a patent for a free or subsidized computer system that would make its profits off of a pay-per-use or subscription system.  

     US patent application number 20080319910, published on Christmas Day 2008, details Microsoft’s vision of a situation where a “standard model” of PC is given away or heavily subsidized by someone in the supply chain. The end user then pays to use the computer, with charges based on both the length of usage time and the performance levels utilized, along with a “one-time charge”.

Microsoft notes in the application that the end user could end up paying more for the computer, compared with the one-off cost entailed in the existing PC business model, but argues the user would benefit by having a PC with an extended “useful life”.

“A computer with scalable performance level components and selectable software and service options has a user interface that allows individual performance levels to be selected,” reads the patent application’s abstract.

“The scalable performance level components may include a processor, memory, graphics controller, etc. Software and services may include word processing, email, browsing, database access, etc. To support a pay-per-use business model, each selectable item may have a cost associated with it, allowing a user to pay for the services actually selected and that presumably correspond to the task or tasks being performed,” the abstract continues.

Integral to Microsoft’s vision is a security module, embedded in the PC, that would effectively lock the PC to a certain supplier.

     Sure if such a box ever sees the light of day, it will require some serious hacking.  But once upon a time Cable couldn’t be stolen, iPhones and X-Box’s were unhackable, and CDs and DVDs were supposed to be impossible to copy.  

     Welcome to 2009, where Microsoft is trying their best to see you living in a more fictional world.    Also welcome to a world where companies are trying their damnedest to change how you think about the things you posess and who really owns them.    Food for thought and fodder for Grinding? 

I really wanted to say “Turns Phone into Tricorder” but I couldn’t bring myself to geek like that in public.

LOS ANGELES — A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria and other illnesses.

Check out the original article (here at WIRED) to see some exclusive pics of the hack in process. 

Via The Register, Germany is testing a new unmanned airship design:

Stem cells taken from a woman were used to grow new cells that were grafted onto a donated trachea, in effect giving the woman a new trachea. Ideally, a person would receive a new organ grown from their own cells, but this is the next step in organ transplant.

- photo via news.bbc.co.uk

“Surgeons can now start to see and understand the potential for adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their ability to treat patients with serious diseases.”

He said that in 20 years time, virtually any transplant organ could be made in this way.

US scientists have already successfully implanted bladder patches grown in the laboratory from patients’ own cells into people with bladder disease.

The European research team, which also includes experts from the University of Padua and the Polytechnic of Milan in Italy, is applying for funding to do windpipe and voice box transplants in cancer patients.

Clinical trials could begin five years from now, they said.

Link and photos via news.bbc.co.uk.

- photo via inventorspot.com

From inventorspot.com, comes the news that scientists have developed a mixture of frozen saline and liquid designed to be injected into the lungs, arteries and veins of critically ill patients and cool them down internally. Lowering the body’s temperature would give doctors more time to work on patients during taxing or delicate operations. Successfully tested on larger animals, the company that developed it is seeking FDA approval to begin trials on humans.

- photo via nationalgeographic.com

It’s no mystery to scientists that bees have been disappearing and or dying off in record numbers. Besides contributing billions of dollars to the US economy, they play an important role in the pollination of crops. That apple you are eating? Not possible with out a little help from the honey bee.

Tracking their movement has come one step closer:

In the bee-tracking project, Wikelski and his colleagues are using transmitters the size of three or four grains of rice, powered by a tiny hearing-aid battery and with a crystal-controlled oscillator and an antenna measuring up to an inch and a half.

The transmitters, at a featherweight 0.006 ounces (170 milligrams), are small and light enough to attach to the backs of bees from two relatively hefty species, weighing .02 ounces (600 milligrams), with just a bit of eyelash glue and superglue.

Even loaded up with these backpacks, nearly a third of their body weight, “they fly beautifully,” says Wikelski.

The transmitters allow the scientists to track the insects as long as the bees remain within a few miles of their receiver. So far Wikelski and his team have fitted tags on orchid bees at Panama’s Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and conducted successful indoor tests in a New Jersey lab with North America’s biggest bee species, the carpenter bee.

These early tests are proof of concept. Most bees are much smaller than orchid and carpenter bees. In fact, many wild bee species are the size of just a pine nut.

The tags are tiny, but need to be smaller still for honey bees. Although they have tiny robots, having a camera on a bee would make for excellent surveillance. They would just have to avoid being swatted.

Link and photo via nationalgeographic.com.