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Snake robots to aid injured soldiers

snakebot_x2202A snake-like robot is being developed to aid medics in the rapid diagnosis and treatment of injured soldiers, from Technology Review:

Choset and his students have engineered a highly articulated robotic arm that consists of multiple actuated joints, which give the robot a snakelike flexibility. Each joint has two degrees of freedom that, working together, allow the robot to flex, retract, and twist into different configurations, much like a live snake.

As ever snakebots+military immediately put me in mind of Alastair Reynold’s excellent Century Rain.

[via Slashdot][image from Technology Review]

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Cheaper to give away Kindles than print the New York Times

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According to an analysis by Silicon Alley Insider, it actually costs the financially struggling New York Times Company about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead. And an inside source tells them their estimate of the Times‘s printing costs is so low it’s “not even in the ballpark.” (Via Instapundit.)

Bottom line: “as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”

No, papers can’t–yet–force everyone to read their content on some sort of hand-held device. But in the future, why not? Subscribe, and get a free ebook reader to which stories are uploaded regularly as they’re posted. Bonus: you can use the reader for other kinds of content, too. Which would also drive ebook sales. Win-win.

(And I say this as the former editor of a weekly newspaper, who once swore up and down that nothing would ever replace traditional print…a former newspaper editor, I might add, who now reads his local newspaper‘s digital edition exclusively.)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]newspapers,ebooks,media,technology[/tags]

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Fabricate your own military hardware

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Fabrication technology – sometimes known as ‘rapid prototyping’ or 3D printing, among other names – is a real Pandora’s box. The benefits of being able to ‘print’ a solid object are manifold (reduced industrial wastage, low overheads and so on), but the technology doesn’t care what it is that you’re printing out, or who’s doing it… or what they’re doing it for.

This is a topic that Futurismic‘s own Sven Johnson has discussed here and elsewhere, but it’s rapidly moving from the realm of the theoretical into reality. For example, fabrication start-up Shapeways has a video of of a guy who has printed off a miniature remote controlled helicopter:

“So what?”, you might be thinking. But as Bruce Sterling points out:

… all that’s missing from the nightmare scenario is a tiny fabbed bomb and some fabbed GPS. Given those, the Israelis are in for hell on earth.

It’s still a relatively pricey way of doing things, but as the overheads drop the potential of 3d printing to put dangerous tools in the wrong hands rises in parallel with its ability to make our lives better. A rising tide floats all boats, after all.

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What the hell is a ‘smart grid’, anyway?

electricity pylonOne of President Obama’s first actions has been to announce his intentions to build a ‘smart grid’ for the US energy infrastructure. WorldChanging explains the concepts behind the buzzphrase, and I’ll paraphrase their five broad categories here:

  • End-user smart metering to use energy more efficiently
  • Systems to integrate electricity generation with electricity storage
  • A communications network that shares data on performance, demand and availability of power
  • An ‘application platform’ that allows third-party utilities to connect the above systems together in useful ways
  • Monitoring and controlling systems that allow the grid to respond to service interruptions in a self-healing manner

In other words, it’s a lot like an internet for power, if you will – not to mention a far cry from the crude lacework of cables and substations we have at the present time. There’s a lot of work to be done, but the benefits of investing the time and money promise to be immense. I wonder what our lot in Whitehall are doing about the UK grid at the moment? [image by C P Storm]

If you’re interested in seeing the sixty odd discreet technologies that break down into the five groups above, the US Department of Energy has made a big old PDF report on smart grids.

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Singularitarianism 101: What’s the point of uploading your mind?

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exploding mind statueTranshumanist thinker Michael Anissimov has decided to attempt answering the question that almost everybody asks about the the idea of universal mind uploading – namely, why the hell would we want to do it?

His seven reasons include economic growth (topical), greater subjective well-being and environmental recovery, but the one that will probably surprise most of all is his suggestion that mind uploading would forge closer connections with other humans:

Our interactions with other people today is limited by the very low bandwidth of human speech and facial expressions. By offering partial readouts of our cognitive state to others, we could engage in a deeper exchange of ideas and emotions. I predict that “talking” as communication will become passé — we’ll engage in much deeper forms of informational and emotional exchange that will make the talking and facial expressions of today seem downright empty and soulless.

It all sounds a bit like a Greg Egan novel, doesn’t it? Personally, I’m first in the queue for upload (assuming it becomes possible within my lifetime), as I find corporeal existence to be massively distracting – I could get so much more done if I didn’t have this bag of meat to worry about… [image by Alex // Berlin]

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