Five days after launch on Kickstarter, the 3Doodler 3D printing pen boasted over 21,000 backers and $1.9 million in pledges. Their goal was $30,000! What’s so special about the 3Doodler? If nothing else, it rivals the lofty infomercial marketing heights of Slap Chop or ShamWow. But let’s get something straight—3Doodler is a crafting “pen” not a handheld 3D printing pen (whatever that even means).
Is a billion euros enough to understand the human brain? The Human Brain Project thinks it’s a good start, and on January 28th, the European Commission agreed. The Human Brain Project was one of two projects to get a billion in backing after a two year decision period. Henry Markram, the project’s founder and co-director, hopes to use the funds to build a digital model of the human brain from the ground up to better understand how the brain works.
By knocking out a specific group of neurons, scientists were able to prevent mice from feeling cold. The study sheds light on how the nervous system transmits sensory information from the body to the brain and may help develop more sophisticated pain medicines.
Devon Carrow was born with eosinophilic esophagitis, an allergic inflammatory disease in which white blood cells build up in the esophagus that makes exposure...
A device that delivers electrical shocks directly into the brain has been shown to alleviate symptoms in people with early stage Parkinson’s disease better...
Humans have been doing surgery for 10,000 years, and for most of that time, undergoing a procedure was an immensely painful, high-risk endeavor. But with the rise of advanced techniques in the last 150 years, modern surgery has become sterile, anesthetized, and often minimally invasive. So how has surgery improved more recently? Robots, of course. Robotic surgical tools are not only already here, they’ve been on the surgical scene for over a decade.
Here’s one dealer that won’t attempt to cheat you with sleight of hand – because it doesn’t have any, strictly speaking. More like bulbs with suction cups.
The time has come for Google Glass to drop its "Project" moniker and move into the hands of the public. No, the wirelessly connected eyewear hasn't hit the shelves just yet, but Google has taken the next step in bringing the device to market. The company has announced the "If I Had Glass" promotion allowing members of the public the opportunity to get their hands on the Explorer prototype that few have been able to test. Additionally, a sleek Glass-devoted website has launched with a new commercial called "How It Feels" that helps to better define exactly what the device can and can't do.
It’s hard to imagine a Star Trek away team without their tricorders waving back and forth, scanning for life forms. Was there anything those things couldn’t do, and might we primitive 21st century humans develop a similarly powerful handheld diagnostic technology? The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, announced in 2012, officially opened registration in early 2013 to find out.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the Argus II artificial retina to restore partial sight to patients who are blind. The device, sometimes dubbed a bionic eye, was designed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to help people who suffer from retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary degenerative disease that causes degradation of retinal function. Although it does not restore full sight to the visually challenged, those with the disease are able to once have limited, low-resolution vision.
Once Planetary Resources has figured out how to get to an asteroid and how to mine it—what will they mine? Near-Earth asteroids contain abundant iron, nickel, platinum group metals, and water. If space is to be the “final frontier,” we’ll need to live off the land—and asteroids are a low gravity (in other words, cheap) way to harvest materials.
Taking blood is a fine art. Even the most experienced practioner may require more than one stab to find a vein—seems only natural to wonder, might a robot do the job better? Mountain View’s Veebot thinks so. Veebot wants to take the art out of needlework with their robotic venipuncture machine.
The folks at Kickstarter have given the green light to two projects near-and-dear to the hearts of geeks, techies and futurists alike: the construction of a Death Star and a desperate call to fund X-wing fighters for the Rebel Alliance.
A showdown over the meaning of ownership in the digital world between online retailers and content creators is on the horizon. The US Patent and Trademark Office recently awarded Amazon a patent titled Secondary Market For Digital Objects, wherein the mega-retailer describes a marketplace for the transfer of used digital objects, whether ebooks, audio, images, video, and even apps. As stated in the patent, "transfers may include a sale, a rental, a gift, a loan, a trade, etc."
Bioprinting firm, Organovo, isn’t anywhere near 3D printing a hand or heart. But a recently announced partnership with 3D modeling software giant Autodesk (maker of AutoCAD) might speed things up a bit. As Autodesk’s Carlos Olguin says, “Life is becoming a nascent design space in an engineering sense. It’s subject to specs, subject to QA, it’s repeatable. Biology is becoming an engineering discipline.”
What would your world be like if you couldn't see color? For artist Neil Harbisson, a rare condition known as achromatopsia that made him completely color blind rendered that question meaningless. Not being able to see color at all meant that there was no blue in the sky or green in grass, and these descriptions were merely something to be taken on faith or memorized to get the correct answers in school. But Neil's life would change drastically when he met computer scientist Adam Montandon.
A swarm of helicopter drones are being deployed to British soldiers in Afghanistan thanks to the UK's Ministry of Defence. Dubbed the PD-100 "Black Hornet" Personal Reconnaissance System, the Norwegian-developed drones are finding utility and praise among the Brigade Reconnaissance Force as they are being used by the British military to identify "insurgent firing points and check out exposed areas of the ground before crossing."
Technological progress advances our ability to build bigger and badder machines. A recent example is Sea Installer, part of the next generation of powerful wind...
Tied tight with advancing technology are concerns human development is irrevocably damaging the planet. Back in 2001, one theory warned warmer oceans and overfishing...
Phrases like "viral art" or "infectious sculpture" only begin to provide vague impressions of what British artist Luke Jerram has created: human-scale glass sculptures of viruses, bacteria, and other organisms from the microbiological world. The sculptures aren't just creative interpretations, but derive from scientific images and models and created at approximately a million times larger scale.
Love video games but want the kind of physical and social interactivity that board games deliver? That's the motivation behind the development of Sifteo Cubes, the touchscreen cubes that communicate wirelessly and have sensors on each of their four sides.
You know those guys at the side of the road, tossing and flipping signs in the air trying to get you to go into that IHOP or get your car washed? Well those guys are now, sometimes, robots.
The next big thing in shopping may be to walk away empty handed. That's because an increasing number of companies are putting up virtual stores that have no physical merchandise; instead, posters display products with quick response (QR) codes. Customers scan the matrix barcodes with their smartphones, pay for the items in their virtual cart, and items are delivered to their doors within hours to days, depending on the items. It's the advantage of window shopping without the hassle of standing in line to check out.
Microchimerism results when cells from two genetically distinct populations appear in the same tissue, organ, or individual, such as occurs during an organ transplant or...
Memorizing numerous passwords is inconvenient. This is known. To counteract said inconvenience, many people use memorable (read: hackable) passwords on multiple sites. Which is a shame because security experts advise that, at a minimum, we use different, random, alpha-numeric strings for every website and switch them out every few months. Kind of the opposite of convenient. And even this method provides but a fig leaf of security.
The video streaming service Netflix is advancing the line in the battle for the future of television. CEO Reed Hastings recently indicated in a letter to stockholders to mark February 1, 2013 as a "defining moment in the development of Internet TV." Why? Because that is the day that its much hyped original program House of Cards was not only released, but the entire 13 episodes were made available all at once.
The most extensive bilateral arm transplant to date has been successfully achieved thanks to an interdisciplinary team of doctors and nurses at John Hopkins Hospital. The operation, which was performed on December 18, lasted 13 hours and involved 16 physicians from orthopedics, vascular medicine, plastic surgery, and other disciplines from five hospitals.
Bringing iRobot and InTouch Health's core technologies together gives medical telepresence robots more range, flexibility, and automation. Doctors need only note on an iPad where the robot should go, and RP-Vita takes it from there. It navigates the hall, avoiding humans and other obstacles, and enters the requested room to begin the session—where the doctor can talk to the patient and even plug in various monitoring devices to check their vitals in session.
In early 2013, a single 489 pound bluefin tuna sold in Japan for a record $1.76 million. That’s roughly two homes in San Francisco and a Ferrari for each driveway—two and half times last year’s record $736,000. It makes a shocking headline. But notably the price is not representative of the market. Buyers traditionally compete to attract headlines in the first auction of the new year. Although current prices aren’t anywhere near $3,500/lb, it is true bluefin tuna are getting more expensive. (See here for Tokyo fish market wholesale prices back to 1997.) Rising demand from sushi restaurants combined with diminishing supply has led to fewer fish and higher prices.
As home computers have become near ubiquitous, unused computing power has risen in tandem. Just think how often your laptop is asleep on your desk. So, why let all those idle processors go to waste? Einstein@Home—a web of over 335,000 private personal computers—and other projects like it aim to put lazy machines to work.
What if you could charge your phone, tablet, or laptop in 30 seconds and have it work all day long? That's the promise presented in a short film titled The Super Supercapacitor that profiles the work of UCLA inorganic chemistry professor Ric Kaner, whose research focused on conductive polymers and next generation materials.
For Twitter sentiment to be a useful barometer, you needn’t require Tweeters be professional investors. But you do need them to actually care enough about stocks, commodities, or currency trading to Tweet key words about them. How many actually do that isn’t clear. The number is far from zero—but is it enough to be meaningful?
A university-led collaboration to develop social robots has publicly unveiled its work in progress: a robotic one-year-old boy. As reported by Gizmag, the android named Diego-san is...
What if you could read my mind? What if I could beam what I’m seeing, hearing, and thinking, straight to you, and vice versa? What if an implant could store your memories, augment them, and make you smarter?
After a few early-2000s misadventures in Microsoft tablet PCs—the tablet was effectively re-introduced by Apple’s iPad in early 2010. And just two years on, global tablet sales are projected to overtake laptop sales. That was fast!
