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The MyoPhone Link Led by Rebecca Allen, the group is working on new displays that would leave our hands totally free. One application, called the MyoPhone, uses displays located both on the lens and in the frame to accomodate peripheral vision. By using subtle muscle contractions, MyoPhone can answer and respond to a call without disrupting activities in your physical environment. Incoming calls flash discreetly in one's peripheral vision and caller identities are displayed, equally discreetly, on the lens of a pair of glasses. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Cities That Shine Link Catalytix, a group associated with Richard Florida, has developed a regional creativity scorecard. And now, Visa USA has identified what its research considers the most entrepreneurial cities in the United States. The Visa Entrepreneur Index was compiled using data such as the average number of new businesses created each year (or expansions and divisions of those businesses) and the number of new patents issued by the U.S. Patent Office. The top 10 cities are: Austin San Diego West Palm Beach Houston Raleigh Dallas Detroit Salt Lake City Phoenix Seattle [ permanent link to this entry ]
Victimless Leather Link Part of the Symbiotica program at the University of Western Australia, this artistic grown garment hopes "To confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and will further confront notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise. An actualized possibility of wearing 'leather' without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion."
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Using RFID Tags to Make Teeth Link French RFID startup Dentalax has launched its RFID-based system to provide a way to reduce errors and improve productivity in the development of dental prosthetics such as crowns and bridges. The tag is embedded by the dental lab in the cast which will be used to make the prosthesis. Then it is used to record the whole history of the crown, a process requested by a European sanitary regulation. Before delivering the bridge to your dentist, all the data is copied to a smart card that will be given to you. The company is also studying the idea to put directly the tag inside the prosthesis. Maybe one day, when your dentist installs your new bridge, you'll also be the owner of a deactivated RFID tag inside it. [ permanent link to this entry ]
A Real Neural Network Link Instead of playing round with mathematical models of neural networks, a University of Florida scientist has grown a real neural network in a dish - and then trained it to fly an F-22 fighter jet simulator. The "brain" - a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat's brain and cultured inside a glass dish - gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene. As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage assessments. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Smart Fabrics Make for Enhanced Living Link Imagine a handbag that warns you if you are about to forget your umbrella or wallet, and which you can later turn into a scarf that displays today's pollution levels. Or how about creating a wall hanging that glows if someone tries to use your home's wireless internet connection? All these bizarre objects could soon be possible thanks to a system of computerised fabric patches developed by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each patch contains a functional unit of the system - a microprocessor and memory plus either a radio transceiver, a sensor, a microphone, batteries or a display. Put the patches together in different ways and you can create a variety of information-providing or environment-sensing objects, say developers Adrian Cable, Gauri Nanda and Michael Bove at MIT's Media Lab. [ permanent link to this entry ]
The Futures Lab at POP!TECH You can read his account of the conference at his personal weblog here. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Korean Diabetics Get Their Own Phone Link I have a feeling that we may have posted this innovation to News From the Future earlier in the year, but in any case, it makes for an interesting example of convergence and more to the point, embedded technology. LG Electronics is selling a new convergent phone in Korea. The LG KP8400 is an average mobile phone with an integrated blood sugar tester. While many companies are trying to integrate multimedia features into their mobile phones, LG Electronics has targeted another type of mobile electronics for integration; blood sugar meters for diabetics. The LG KP8400 features an integrated blood sugar tester. Just as diabetics would normally take a drop of blood on test paper and insert it into a dedicated reader, users of the KP8400 can insert a drop of blood on test paper and insert it into the side of the phone, which will then display a blood sugar reading. It can also take advantage of the phone's connectivity to upload the reading to an online database for later access and tracking rather than requiring the user to record it manually. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Biomimetic Robots: A Photo Gallery Link Once again, technology is imitating nature with a new class of biologically inspired robots called "Biomimetic Robots." In this very long article, IEEE Computer Magazine looks at several projects currently underway. All these projects will have practical applications a few years from now. They include robotic lobsters for underwater mine research or flying insect-based robots for future spatial missions. Other projects are about cricket-inspired robots to be used in rescue missions or scorpion-like robots to be deployed in hostile environments for humans. and of course, there are the now famous and robust "sprawling" robots based on cockroaches. For more information, read the whole very well documented article. Or read this summary for a photo gallery and direct links to all the projects. [Smart Mobs] [ permanent link to this entry ]
Click 2 Touch: "Feeling Clothes Online Before You Buy" Link This software will become commercially available next year for retailers. But you can see demos on the site. With it, you'll be able to use interactive virtual reality animations to look at various fabrics and their respective qualities, such as smoothness or elasticity. For more information, you can read two short articles from e4engineering.com or BBC News Online. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Browsing Reality with Sensor Networks Link Welcome to the world of 'Reality Mining'! The billions of networked sensors that exist today are generating humongous streams of data. When this massive flow of data is 'mined' and distilled, we will discover our environment in a way that never existed before. Suddenly, sensors would look like pixels and we would start to browse reality as easily as we browse web pages today. This is a concept that we at The Futures Lab have been talking about for some time, having created a variety of scenarios for leveraging such a future Accenture Technology Labs are also thinking about this and they already have designed some demos of reality mining software. Their demos include web agents, data modeling, GIS systems and much more. They also show how you could detect fires or how you would do virtual shopping. Here is a summary of their thinking, containing a couple of examples. [ permanent link to this entry ]
The World's Cleanest Car? Link to put into production an air-propelled car as soon as next year. According to the company's web site, the "MDI Air Car is capable of a top speed of 110 km/h and will cover 300 kilometres on one tank of fuel, all at a cost of just a penny per kilometre. All of this at "zero pollution". In fact the car cleans the air it uses!" It should be mentioned that although the vehicle's top speed is 70 mph, it can only go about 50 miles at that speed. An electric pump compresses air into the tank, making the Air Car go. The pump plugs into a regular power outlet to complete its four-hour recharge cycle. Also of interest is the company's concepts for further applications of the air compression technology, which include public transportation options.
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Fill 'er Up, With Microbes Link The car you drive in the future may well be powered by the breath of tiny living organisms. Researchers are goading tiny organisms like bacteria and algae into producing fuels like hydrogen and methane. By taking advantage of nature's ability to transform sunlight and simple sugars into usable fuels, those involved in the work have shown with their early successes that they're on the right track. The process is not useful yet, but the technology could be a solution to the world's dependence on fossil fuels. [ permanent link to this entry ]
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