Cutting Edge

Have you noticed how many times bullets miss their mark in the movies?

If you need to shoot a bank robber, Sean Bean, John Malkovich, or even an ugly looking two-dimensional chap on a distant target, it seems as if it's very much a hit-or-miss affair.

This, believes professor Timothy Kraft of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, is because no one has re-thought the basic principles of a pistol sight for a hundred years.

Kraft, who happens to rather enjoy shooting and is good at it, dedicated some of his finest mental armory to solving the problem. As he describes it on the university's site, … Read more

Japanese robot maker Kokoro, best known for its Actroid line of ultra-lifelike androids, will make robot clones of people in a special limited-time offer.

The New Year promotion is being offered via select department stores in Japan. People willing to pay about $225,000 can have themselves recreated in robot form, with their robot clone having exactly the same face, hair, eyes, and body.

Kokoro will also model the buyer's voice, facial expressions, and upper-body movements to create the most lifelike doppelganger possible.

The Actroid and Geminoid androids are powered by a quiet air servo system that moves their … Read more

Not so long ago, large, numerate brains got together to create a mathematical formula for choosing the right wife.

Not content with satisfying the need for perfection in human relationships, mathematicians have now dedicated themselves to creating equations for the perfect relationship with the physical world.

Yes, according to the Telegraph, a British math professor has created a formula for successfully slipping your car into a parking spot.

You might think this a trivial pursuit. You'd be right. However, Vauxhall Motors, which participated in this useful experience, claims that 15 percent of hardy Brits say that the the biggest … Read more

A certain American Airlines 757 pilot gave me and a couple of hundred others a very hard landing this week.

So my jaw finally began to cease chattering when I discovered NASA is beginning to work on dropping flying things from the sky to see if perhaps the impact can be absorbed.

NASA's Web site told me that it dropped a helicopter from 35 feet in order to see whether an expandable honeycomb cushion that NASA calls a "deployable energy absorber" could minimize damage to life, limb, and even nervous systems.

The MD-500's landing gear did … Read more

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest near-infrared image of the universe in history, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced on Tuesday.

The image, which was taken in August by the "HUDF09" team, features galaxies that formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang. NASA said that not only are those the oldest galaxies ever seen, but the data that can be extracted from the image will provide "insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe's history."

Hubble was able to capture such detail, thanks to the … Read more

As Eric Jones fought off cancer a few years ago, his weakened immune system left him vulnerable to strep pneumonia and sepsis, which developed into the blood-clotting disorder known as Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation.

Without enough blood supply to his extremities, he wasn't expected to come out of a month-long, medical-induced coma and be able to keep his arms and feet.

Jones was fortunate to fare better than expected, but he did lose movement in his left hand, his right hand's fingers and thumb, his toes, and parts of his feet. Even with intensive physical therapy and the aid of crutches, his mobility was severely affected, and he was unable to do such previously simple tasks as walk while holding a coffee mug, play Legos with his kids, or perform on the piano.

Enter ProDigits, believed to be the world's first powered bionic finger solution, whose commercial launch developer Touch Bionics announced Tuesday. With a silicone skin designed specifically to fit around his right hand, the ProDigits prosthesis gave Jones, who began to use the latest model this summer, a movable thumb.

In other words, it gave him opposition, without which the hand is considered to be 40 percent impaired.

"I didn't want to wait even one more day before I could start using it," Jones says. "ProDigits offers me functionality that I can't get anywhere else; it offers me the ability to grasp... I can pick something up and walk out to the car with it, rather than have to put it in a bag. Most importantly, I'm able to take care of my kids--play games with my kids, take them to school, make dinner."

Touch Bionics is probably best known for its i-Limb Hand, a full-hand prosthetic with five individually powered digits released in 2006. ProDigits takes this prosthetic a step further, because it caters to patients like Jones with partial hands on a case-by-case basis. The sockets themselves are custom-designed by clinicians to suit individual needs.… Read more

MIT's Riley Crane only found out about DARPA's red balloon challenge a few days before it started. Yet his team went on to win the contest through its savvy use of the Internet.

The challenge posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked people to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons floating above the U.S. in one day. Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10, participants had to figure out how to work with others to solve the puzzle.

Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed … Read more

MOJAVE, Calif.--Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne took the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004, unveiled the VSS Enterprise Monday, a sleek commercial rocket plane that represents the ultimate thrill ride for well-heeled space tourists and amateur astronauts.

Seating six passengers and two pilots, Virgin Space Ship Enterprise--also known as SpaceShipTwo--will begin test flights next year with commercial launchings carrying paying customers starting after government regulatory requirements are met. More than 300 people have already put down deposits or paid the full $200,000 cost of a ticket for future sub-orbital … Read more

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won $40,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for correctly finding the locations of 10 red balloons scattered across the U.S.

Launched on Saturday, the DARPA Network Challenge released the 10 red balloons into the air, then dared contestants to find their latitude and longitude by the end of the day. Since no one person could track down all 10 in just one day, the point of the contest was to see how participants would use the Internet and social networking to team up with others to solve … Read more