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Artificial Gills Link Developed by Israeli inventor Alon Bodner, the battery-powered artificial gill system aims to extract the small amounts of dissolved air that already exists in water to supply breathable oxygen to scuba divers, submarines and underwater habitats. It utilises a high-speed centrifuge to lower the pressure of seawater in a small sealed chamber. This allows the dissolved air to escape back into a gaseous state - much like the way carbon dioxide is liberated from a soft drink when you reduce the pressure on it by popping the bottle cap. The air thus liberated is then transferred to an airbag for the diver to use. The downside of the unit so far is that the system requires massive amounts of electricity, so a one-kilo battery powering the thing would last just one hour. [ permanent link to this entry ]
15 Tech Concepts You'll Need To Know In 2006 Link Body Area Network (BAN)- Essentially wireless implantable medical devices (e.g. pacemaker, hearing implants...) that allow a doctor to monitor and adjust your implant remotely. SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony)- Aren't acronyms great? So far the proliferation of VoIP has been relatively peaceful. But you can be assured that if it's there, people will hack it - enter SPIT. VoIP can be potentially used, like e-mail, to send a single voice message to thousands of recipients simultaneously, creating a telemarketer from hell. Nanoparticle Batteries - Murphy's Law would state that even if your batteries lasted 10 times longer than they do at the present, they would still die at the wrong time. But if developers like Toshiba have anything to do with it, at least you won't have to wait that long for it to recharge. Using nanoparticles to improve lithium-ion absorption during recharging, the new batteries will apparently go from zero to 80 percent charge in 1 minute. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Survey Gauges Teens' View of Tech Future Link The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, which gauges Americans' attitudes toward invention and innovation, found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past. Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent). More... [ permanent link to this entry ]
Surveying The Future of Nanotechnology Link The Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis and Forecasting at Tel Aviv University has recently surveyed nanotechnology experts worldwide for their thoughts on the future of the field. According to the resultant report, the next decade will see dramatic growth in nanotech applications. - Among the estimated predictions made in the report: - Biodetection with smart nano surfaces by 2008 - Smart probes and targeted drug delivery by 2013 - Cells on chips replace testing on live animals by 2013 - In vitro construction of human organs by 2018 - Nanomachines inside the body by 2025 The full 39-page report is available for download [PDF, 500k]. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence Link SWAMI, which apparently stands for "Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence," is a EU-funded project, now working on a set of deliverables to forecast, forewarn, and suggest policy options for the coming era where everything is intelligent, nothing works quite right, and nobody knows why: The Project Summary readsas follows: This project aims to identify and analyse the social, economic, legal, technological and ethical issues related to identity, privacy and security in the forecasted but not yet deployed Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environment. A portion of the project deliverable has been released. Somewhat deviously entitled "Dark scenarios in ambient intelligence: Highlighting risks and vulnerabilities", you can download the document here (PDF, 900k). [ permanent link to this entry ]
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