One of the world’s most interestig inventors, entepreneurs, and engineers, Kamen has brought to prototype a fully operational robotic arm which promises to revolutionize prosthetics as we know it.
Dean says that fatalities are down because of battlefield tech and triage methods. But that many soldiers are coming back missing limbs. He wanted to make an arm to replace their missing ones. He wants it sensitive enough to pick up a grape or allow soldiers to use a razor to shave, but be self-contained in terms of power. And a two- year deadline.
He say that a year later, they built an 8.9-pound arm using titanium, custom motors, and so on. There’s 18 degrees of freedom, and they’re now seeing a demo of a man who is scratching his nose. Dean says he did this in one year.
The control techniques are revolutionary. He’s playing a video of a guy who didn’t have both his arms for 18 years, and learned how to use the arms effectively in less than two dozen hours of training. He’s showing a video that shows a guy who knows how to punch, pass a Ping Pong ball to his friend and pour a drink for another man who is holding a cup with the same type of arm. Then the video shows Chuck, the man with no arms, for the first time in 13 years, feeding himself cereal. source
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” said Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, the latest from the Cern, the particle physics center that created the internet.
Imagine a data transmission system 10,000 times faster than the fastest broadband internet connection. The developments from Cern signal not only the obsolescence of the web, but the desktop computer as well. “The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge,” said Doyle.
“Huge.” I think this may be understated. Other descriptive terms that come to mind include, “watershed,” “breakthrough,” “revolutionary,” I think you get my drift.
“With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
After Google, what’s next? Writing at Times (UK), Jonathan Richards talks to the “real” inventor of the world wide web (sorry Goracle), Tim Berners-Lee, and speculates on the future of the internet. A fascinating article indeed. Here is an excerpt:
The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web’s development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data — not just a web page — so that it can “communicate” with other information.Whereas the existing web is a collection of pages with links between them that Google and other search engines help the user to navigate, the “semantic web” will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information — a written street address and a map, for instance — which in turn will give rise to new services.
“Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web,” Mr Berners-Lee said. “Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.
The UK Daily Mail is reporting that the Army has begun tests have on a new tank, an Invisible one. Here is a picture of it.
Nice, isn’t it? What’s that? You can’t see it?
Well, that’s because it’s invisible……
New technology that can make tanks invisible has been unveiled by the Ministry of Defence.
In secret trials last week, the Army said it had made a vehicle completely disappear and predicted that an invisible tank would be ready for service by 2012.
The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank.
Now you see it: How the tank might look with background images beamed onto the side
The result is that anyone looking in the direction of the vehicle only sees what is beyond it and not the tank itself.
A soldier, who was at the trials, said: “This technology is incredible. If I hadn’t been present I wouldn’t have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees - but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun.”
The release ends months of waiting for Mac fans, after Apple pushed back the launch to finish development on its much-hyped iPhone.
Early reviews for Leopard have been positive with veteran technology writer Walt Mossberg calling it “evolutionary, not revolutionary”.
Apple is hoping to build on recent strong sales of its Mac computers.
In the last three months, Apple sold 2.2 million Macs, up 400,000 on its previous best quarter.
The company is touting Leopard as a Vista-beater, pointing to new features not found in the new operating system (OS) from Microsoft that drives many PCs.
Aren’t you excited? I thought so.
So, as fires continue to burn in California, and authorities find a live grenade at the Mexican embassy in New York, and Feds warn of shoe bombers again, and the Daily Pos kids are advocating conversion to moon god worship, and so on, and so on……..
We come to another Friday, time for The World Famous Friday Open Thread: A Free Speech Zone.
