Shareable Ink is hoping to popularize a camera-in-a-pen that wirelessly transfers text written on paper to a remote database to better track such data as glucose levels.
(Credit: Shareable Ink)It all started when anesthesiologist Vernon Huang wanted to figure out a better way to streamline his billing. How could he bridge the gap between what's written on paper and what must be entered into an electronic database?
Huang, who's clocked in time as a senior manager for health care markets at Apple, designed a digital pen whose tiny camera embedded right next to the ink cartridge captures every stroke of the written word on film and whose images are uploaded wirelessly and automatically to a remote database.
He knew such an invention has a range of applications well beyond billing, and founded Shareable Ink (headquartered in Newton, Mass., with a branch in San Mateo, Calif.). Medgadget caught up with Huang at TedMed and posted a shaky but informative demonstration:
There is, of course, competition. ... Read more
Photochromic lenses that allow you to walk from inside to outside without putting on UV-filtering lenses have been around for decades. But the technology is just making its way to contacts.
The contact lens on the left contains photochromic dyes that darken in the presence of UV light.
(Credit: Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology)Traditionally, these light-to-dark lenses have been constructed by coating a normal lens with a photochromic dye. When UV light hits the dye, the individual molecules expand, darkening the lens and absorbing light. Coating contacts, however, doesn't work so well.
So researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have laced contacts with a matrix on nano tunnels filled with these photochromic dyes. Not only has the team been successful in producing transition contacts; these contacts darken in the presence of UV light faster than standard lenses (just 10 to 20 seconds).
The researchers are now working on isolating the photochromic material to just the corneal region of your eye, granting you all of the UV filtering without turning your entire iris black.
But until they graft the timeless style of a Wayfarer onto my eyeball, I'll pass.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
(Credit:
Peking University and Tsinghua University)
That tiny, plastic-looking black cube up there can absorb up to 180 times its own weight in toxic waste without absorbing any water. How? As with just about every amazing and/or inexplicable scientific breakthrough nowadays, the answer is spelled N-A-N-O.
Researchers at Peking and Tsinghua universities, both in Beijing, have adapted carbon nanotubes into a sponge-like material that can be squeezed dry, which sounds like extremely exciting news for the infomercial cleaning product industry. One minor detail:
Since carbon nanotubes are hydrophobic, there's no modification required to make them not absorb water.
For the record, that includes mysteriously blue infomercial demo water, so there goes that. If not absorbing 20 times as much water as its leading competitor, what exactly is this new type of sponge good for? Environmental cleanup, evidently. See, instead of just dropping dispersants into the middle of an oil or chemical spill--which forces the spill to simply absorb into the water--these light and porous nanosponges could float in water and be used to sop up the spill, after which they could theoretically be wrung dry and reused, like so:
The scientists detail their findings in Advanced Materials. It's an amazing idea, but I get the feeling that carbon nanotube sponges, riskily abbreviated as CNT sponges, won't exactly be cheap.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
The hardware added to this cell phone costs around $10.
(Credit: Ozcan Research Group/UCLA)To picture the next-gen microscope, don't picture a microscope at all. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, is adapting cell phones to sample biological images.
This is no iPhone app. Ozcan, who formed the company Microskia (on the heels of the UC Berkeley team that developed CellScope), has built a prototype whose cell phone camera sensor can detect a slide's contents at a cellular level--reading, for example, an increase in white blood cell count that might indicate a new infection or injury. That information can then be forwarded wirelessly to a lab or hospital.
The brilliance of Ozcan's design is that magnification is done electronically, requiring no lens. (CellScope, on the other hand, takes a more conventional approach as a miniature microscope with expensive lenses.)
... Read more
(Credit:
NASA)
The International Space Station isn't just an orbiting laboratory, spaceship testing ground, and multinational geek fest--it's also the world's highest (250 miles) and fastest (17,500 mph) computer network. We burrow under its metal skin and siphon out its most interesting specifications, like some kind of star-hopping alien data vampires (but without the plutonium-coated fangs).
Read more of "Space Station IT: High technology" at Crave UK.
(Credit:
Jonathan Worth/PopSci)
I know most of you out there think we landed two Americans on the moon in 1969. Well, let me tell you that you're wrong. It's all a hoax! It was done on a sound stage and George Clooney and Dan Aykroyd were involved!
I mean, look at this real-life version of the Atari classic Lunar Lander vector game!
It took British engineer Iain Sharp less than $800 and a year to build this replica in his garage to honor the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, and it works almost like the real thing. It's powered by a pair of old PCs he wrote custom software for. In addition, the movements are controlled by things like old inkjet printer motors, and fishing line. But what's important is it works just like a real lunar lander would--if one existed.
If Sharp can make a device like this in his garage in his spare time then it's not a leap to assume the U.S. government could have made a full-size mock-up with the years and millions it took to make the so-called "moon shot" happen. This awesome toy might be all the evidence I need. Myth busted.
(Via PopSci)
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for iPhone.
OK, that's probably a little overly dramatic, but the new NASA iPhone app, which was released Friday, is pretty cool.
With NASA's iPhone app, space geeks can access all kinds of information about their favorite missions.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Designed to provide information, updates, and images on all current and scheduled NASA missions, the app--which can be found in Apple's App Store under the name "NASA app for iPhone--nicely allows you to search for any specific mission, say, Constellation, and then find information and images just for that project.
"Users can access NASA countdown clocks, the NASA Image of the Day, Astronomy Image of the Day, online videos, NASA's many Twitter feeds," and more, the space agency said in a press release about the app. It also allows users to track where the International Space Station is at any moment, as well as other spacecraft orbiting the planet, in three different views: maps with labels and borders, available visible imagery of satellites, and satellite positions overlaid on maps with country labels and borders.
Already, NASA nuts--you know who you are--have had access to much of this information online. But now, having it all available in a free iPhone app is going to keep these people happily staring down at the screen of their devices no matter where they are.
And for NASA, anything it can do to get more people excited about its various missions and projects is a good thing as it struggles for public resources and attention in an era where the economy is in trouble and people are increasingly distracted by other things.
The maple seed device seen next to actual samara seeds.
(Credit: Eric Schurr/A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland)Remember as a kid being entertained by how maple tree seeds (or samara fruit) would spin like helicopters as they fell around you in the fall? I do, and that's why I love this prototype rotorcraft by graduate students at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering.
It's a remote-controlled monocopter with a design based heavily on the aerodynamic and geometric properties of maple seeds. Researchers have tried for years to create an unmanned aerial vehicle that could mimic maple seeds' spiraling fall. The results out of Maryland are awesome.
As you can see in the video after the jump, the patent-pending device uses just one blade to take off, as well as a stabilizer to keep it steady. It looks weird, but it works. This is a great example of nature influencing science.
The students say they've created he world's smallest controllable single-winged rotorcraft, with the most minuscule having a maximum dimension of about 3.7 inches and a wing equal in size to a natural samara. Graduate student Evan Ulrich says he thinks the 'copter could be mass produced as a toy for less than $100, which even sounds high to us given that one of the parts experimented with is a vibrating motor from a pager.
There could also be military or rescue applications: a flyer fitted with a small camera could easily be sent across an area looking for survivors--or targets.
But no matter what the flyer ends up being used for, one thing is sure: I want one badly.
... Read more
Jimmy McBride's "The Black Eye Galaxy" measures 45 inches by 60 inches and sells for $2,000. Most of McBride's space quilts are for kids, be we think adults would like them, too.
(Credit: Jimmy McBride)
On these chilly fall days I like to combat my crippling seasonal depression curled up in a blanket with a grilled cheese sandwich, soup, and some strong liquor. If only my blanket was as nice as these space-inspired quilts.
Designed by artist Jimmy McBride, the quilts draw inspiration from both astronomy and sci-fi movies--a mixture of real science and imagination. Plus they look really warm.
If you happen to be in the New York area, you can see the quilt pictured above at the Made in New York: City Quilting exhibition through November 14. Click on the gallery below to see more of McBride's spacey creations.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
(Credit:
Caltech)
Researchers at Caltech have developed a mobile, four-wheeled robot that could help refine artificial retinas and other prostheses used by the visually impaired.
At first glance, Cyclops resembles a bot you might find on the battlefield, and it's hard to imagine what connection it could have to restoring sight. But dig a little deeper and it starts to make sense that a remote-controlled robot with an onboard camera could deliver some very useful data.
The digital camera can emulate left-to-right and up-and-down head movements. The idea is that as artificial vision prostheses increasingly become a reality, scientists could use the mobile robotic platform to mimic those devices--and more importantly, to get a better sense of how well they work for people who wear them.
The researchers might do that by asking the robot outfitted with an artificial vision aid to navigate obstacles in a corridor or follow a black line down a white-tiled hallway to see if it can find--and enter--a darkened doorway. All the while, they could try out different pixel arrays (say 50 pixels vs. 16 pixels), as well as image filters (for factors such as contrast, brightness enhancement, and grayscale equalization) to venture an educated guess as to what settings maximize a subject's sight.
Wolfgang Fink
(Credit: Caltech)But "we're not quite at that stage yet," researcher Wolfgang Fink says of such independent maneuvering. Fink is a visiting associate in physics at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., and founder of the school's Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory, where where he and Caltech visiting scientist Mark Tarbell are collaborating on Cyclops with the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The pair designed and built the body of the battery-operated rover using off-the-shelf parts, then furnished it with an onboard computing platform that allows for processing and manipulating images in real time using software they created called "Artificial Vision Support System."
Cyclops, so named because it's monocular, is about 12 inches wide by 12 inches long and 10 inches tall (the camera can be mounted on a mast to make Cyclops the height of an average person). It weighs about 15 pounds, Fink estimates, and can move at an "expedited walking speed" of about 2 to 3 feet per second.
For now, the platform itself is controlled remotely, via a joystick, and can be operated through a wireless Internet connection. "We have the image-processing algorithms running locally on the robot's platform," Fink says, "but we have to get it to the point where it has complete control of its own responses."
Once that's done, he adds, "we can run many, many tests without bothering the blind prosthesis carriers." ... Read more
