by Aaron Saenz on September 2nd, 2010
Are robots enabling hospital layoffs? A little.
Is your company feeling the pains of the recession? Robots may be the cure. El Camino Hospital in Silicon Valley is looking to cut expenses, so they’ve invested in 19 Aethon TUG robots. These smart carts can haul supplies around the hospital, making deliveries and pickups at a fraction of the costs of human workers. El Camino recently announced that it would further be cutting costs by firing up to 140 workers from its two facilities in Los Gatos and Mountain View. Coincidence? Yes, mostly, but it’s still a sign that as robots begin to work in human environments, some humans will be leaving.
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by Aaron Saenz on September 2nd, 2010
Is this the fountain of youth?
A recently published study in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research shows that heavy drinkers actually live longer than those who abstain from alcohol. Scientists at the University of Texas Austin and Stanford University studied more than 1800 individuals over a twenty year period and correlated their alcohol consumption with all forms of death. Moderate drinkers, those that consume one to three drinks per day, had the lowest mortality rates. Heavy drinkers were 70% more likely to perish, and abstainers (those who currently did not drink) were over 100% more likely to die than moderates. Even controlling for past drinking habits (some abstainers were recovering alcoholics), sociodemographic info, and health, heavy drinkers were still only 45% more likely to die than moderates while nondrinkers rated in at +51%. While the authors don’t propose a single cause for why heavy drinking may be less detrimental to your health than abstaining, it seems clear that lifting a cup, especially in moderation, may be a fun means of pursuing longevity.
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by Aaron Saenz on September 2nd, 2010
Snakes in trees! Robots in trees! Robot snakes in trees!
Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handing when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.
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by Aaron Saenz on September 1st, 2010
Touchscreens and swarm robotics go together like geeks and video games.
Mark Micire’s PhD dissertation puts robotic control at his fingertips. The UMass Lowell student developed a command and control program for the Microsoft Surface touchscreen so that swarm robots can be easily guided. Watching Micire’s program in action makes it look like he’s playing StarCraft, only with real robots. Teams of bots can be color coded, groups can be selected by circling them with a finger, and robots can be commanded to move either individually or en masse. You can even manually drive a robot with a special pop-up interface. What’s the use for this multitouch control system? There are military applications, but Micire has a strong background in search and rescue robotics. Touchscreen swarms could be the next innovation in disaster relief. Watch Micire’s demo his system in the video below.
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by Aaron Saenz on September 1st, 2010
Singularity University's GSP class of 2010.
Singularity University recently wrapped up its second summer graduate studies program (GSP ‘10). SU, started by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, among others, aims at preparing humanity for accelerating changes in technology. How are they going to do this? By training students. For this year’s GSP, 80 students spent 10 weeks learning about accelerating technologies from the some of the top minds in their field, including Vint Cerf, Ralph Merkle, Bob Metcalfe and more. How do you know the summer program a success? Well, you could look at the team projects that the students produced, which as we discussed before could lead to a dozen new tech startups. You could also just ask the students what they thought of their time -which is exactly what I did during the SU closing ceremony last Friday. Videos are below.
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by Aaron Saenz on September 1st, 2010
SciFi legend Arthur C. Clarke gives us a vision of the distant future - the year 2000!
Arthur C. Clarke predicted the rise of telecommuting, telemedicine, and mobile phones decades before they existed. I recently came across his televised interview with the BBC Horizon program recorded in 1964. In it, the world famous writer, inventor, and science promoter shares his vision for the world of tomorrow. A world in which you and I currently live. As Singularity Hub strives to provide some insight into how emerging technologies may develop and affect our world in the years ahead, I thought it would be enlightening (and humbling) to see how one of the last century’s most creative and brilliant minds handled predicting our future. The 1964 BBC interview is provided for you, in full, in the two videos below, along with Clarke’s last interview given in 2007 at age 90. It’s remarkable what Clarke got right in his predictions, hilarious what he got wrong, and thought-provoking in what yet remains to be seen.
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by Aaron Saenz on August 31st, 2010
Cardionet struggles despite the need for mobile realtime heart monitoring.
Cardionet MCOT allows you to monitor your heart in realtime, which can be of major benefit for those prone to heart attacks and disease. The device, which consists of a few sensors and a monitor, has been on the market for several years but continues to struggle. The company behind the technology, also Cardionet, has seen its share prices fall to record lows. According to press releases from the company, mediocre sales can be linked to low reimbursements by major insurance carriers like United Healthcare and Wellpoint. The company was also dealing with a securities class action litigation. Yet these problems pale in comparison to a larger strategic mistake: the company needs to stop worrying about improving their business and start worrying about improving their technology. Cardionet MCOT needs to be adapted and made cheaper or it won’t be able to compete.
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by Aaron Saenz on August 31st, 2010
Ze'ev Klapow taught Willow Garage's robots some new tricks as a summer intern..
I’m not sure what you’re favorite summer job was during high school but I bet it wasn’t nearly as cool as Ze’ev Klapow’s. He’s one of the student interns at Willow Garage and this summer he got to spend his time hanging out with the company’s most popular robots. Klapow developed a prototype IR sensor for the Texai, a telepresence bot, so it could detect and avoid ledges. No more falling to its death whenever it neared a set of stairs or other sharp drop. He also developed code for the PR2 research robot that allows it to calibrate its sensors with almost no outside help. Klapow’s work is available as part of the Robot Operating System (ROS), free for anyone else to use, improve, and adapt. Check out Ze’ev explaining his work in the video below. Robotic suicide avoidance and auto-calibration, not bad for an intern.
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by Aaron Saenz on August 31st, 2010
The debate on fish oil supplements rages on.
A new study by Dutch scientists found that low doses of omega-3 fatty acids provided little to no help preventing future heart attacks in patients with a history of heart disease. As published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers followed 4837 patients for 40 months and gave each supplements containing docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), as found in fish oil, and/or alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), as found in certain nuts and vegetables. All patients had previously had a myocardial infarction (heart attack). By examining which patients had (another) MI during the 40 months of observation, the researchers determined that these fatty acids weren’t helping. Does this spell the end for fish oil supplements? Hardly. The Dutch work is important, but still leaves many questions unanswered.
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by Aaron Saenz on August 31st, 2010
SU's students face a difficult final project: helping a billion people in the next decade.
Dreaming big is easy when you believe in the exponential growth of technology. Singularity University just wrapped up its second summer Graduates Studies Program. This year’s 80 students were challenged with positively affecting 1 billion people in the next decade. Drawing on what they had learned about accelerating technology in the past 10 weeks of study, the students laid the groundwork for more than a dozen new startups in five general areas of interest: Water, Food, Energy, Space, and UpCycle. The ideas they came up with were pretty interesting. I was able to attend SU’s closing ceremony last Friday, chat with the students about their projects, and get a sense of how the university is achieving its goal of preparing humanity for accelerating technological change. There’s a bunch of videos of the event for you to browse through below. Enjoy.
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by Aaron Saenz on August 30th, 2010
Now Lego and ROS can play together.
Those little Lego robots you’ve been building just became much more powerful. Willow Garage recently announced that it designed code to link the popular Lego Mindstorms NXT to the formidable Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is an open source collection of robotics software that has been used on everything from autonomous cars to humanoid bipeds. We’re talking world class robotics research here. Now that versatile library can be accessed by amateur and beginning robotics engineers using Lego NXT. To demonstrate the new capabilities, Willow Garage plugged models from Lego Digital Designer into ROS’s 3D visualization display. Using ROS code, the NXT robot can build maps of its surroundings, and it can use those to navigate around. That’s just a tiny sample of all the cool code that is now available. Check out the video below to see beginning of the ROS/Lego alliance.
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by Aaron Saenz on August 30th, 2010
May Griffith's collagen based synthetic cornea has been successful in trial patients for two years.
Researchers in Canada and Sweden have successfully treated corneal damage by implanting human collagen into patient’s eyes. According to results recently published in Science Translational Medicine, 10 Swedish patients received biosynthetic corneas crafted from collagen and were monitored for 24 months as part of a phase I clinical trial. Cells from the patients (including nerve cells) grew onto the collagen, allowing for natural tearing, and 6 saw noticeable improvements in vision. The work was spear headed by May Griffith of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and surgery was led by Per Fagerholm of Linkoping University in Sweden. Millions of people around the world could have their vision restored by this new material, and it represents a significant step towards regenerating the eye.
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