Usually, when we hear about some new technological prototype that’s seemingly stepped off of the page of a science fiction story, it’s the military that always seems to get first dibs on the new toys.
So how refreshing to read this story about the robotic exoskeleton power-suit that a team at the University Of Tokyo have developed … specifically to boost the strength of Japan’s ageing farmers. [Image borrowed from linked article]
Philips has come up with a design for a tiny food analyzer, something that small food companies could afford: and something that raises the distinct possibility the day may not be far off when you’ll be able to carry your own personal food analyzer around with you to make sure you really are eating steak and not soy, or drinking Guinness and not somebody’s backyard brew with a load of food coloring in it (although if you can’t tell if you’re drinking real Guinness, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to drink it, anyway).
It’s all being made possible by “lab-on-a-chip” technology which puts the components for this kind of analysis on a single computer chip–just like in a Star Trek tricorder. (Via New Scientist, which made the Star Trek comparison first, so don’t blame me!)
Read the complete patent application.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)
[tags]food, technology, Star Trek[/tags]
Scottish scientists report that they have produced an artificial arm that is “more powerful than the real thing.” (Via MedGadget.)
According to The Scotsman newspaper:
The researchers say their new arm is capable of repeatedly lifting a weight of 10kg up above head height and could do so all day, compared with the average human being who would tire within minutes. The wrists could rotate 360° and anyone using it could perform hundreds of push-ups.
This raises an ethical question: a patient with such an arm could possibly hurt themselves or someone else. As a result, the arm’s power might actually have to be scaled down.
(Kudos to David Gow, the lead developer, for pointing out in the article something Steve Austin [The Six-Million-Dollar Man of television fame] really should have had to worry about, but never did: “You have to attach it to the patient’s body and that could cause damage if the weight is too heavy. It could snap their ribs.”)
The arm was developed by Touch Bionics, and is designed to complement the the world’s first bionic hand, pictured above and announced last year. Touch Bionics calls its technology i-LIMB.
(Image: Touch Bionics.)
[tags]bionics, technology, medicine[/tags]
The next big frontier for the software and web corporations is in your pocket – your mobile phone. But have you ever wondered why exactly the search giants like Yahoo and Google are so keen to get access to your handset? Sandy Pentland, an MIT researcher, explains in an interview at Technology Review:
“It knows where you are, and this is obviously sort of useful. But the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you’ve never seen in your life. That’s an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic. It’s about making the “dumb” information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in.”
Quite. But as Nicholas Carr points out, that’s not quite as utopian as it might initially seem:
“… it’s easy to see the vast commercial value of automatically harvesting a continuous stream of data on a person’s location, activities, relationships, and social roles and using it to personalize services and advertisements or, in the extreme, manipulate behavior for profit-making ends.”
Well, it’s not like we’re unused to having our behaviour analysed and manipulated for commercial purposes … or to the idea that external agencies can spy on us by subverting our gadgets. But the point is that technologies in their default states are making it much easier – rather than rejecting Big Brother, have we instead slipped him into our back pocket? [Image by Milica Sekulic]
Here’s a little reminder of just how quickly things have moved in recent times: the humble silicon transistor was born sixty years ago to the day. [Image cribbed from linked article.]
And if it strikes you as strange that we should celebrate the birthday of the semiconductor, you’ll probably get an even bigger state of cognitive dissonance from this funeral held for a mainframe computer. [Via BoingBoing]
All we need now to complete the set is for someone to legally marry their laptop … I’ve proposed to mine, but she says I’m too demanding of her time and resources already. 🙁 </3
