Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.
There was a time when young, engineering minds were content with putting together radio controlled vehicles for leisurely amusement. Now, they're using their clever brains to make UAVs fly longer and land anywhere. At least we know who to blame when robopocalypse finally rolls around. This is alt-week.
There's a more efficient way to harvest energy from the backyard than by wiring up hapless critters. Researchers at the University of Georgia have proof: they've discovered a way to generate electricity from plants through hijacking the photosynthesis process. By altering the proteins inside a plant cell's thylakoids, which store solar energy, scientists can intercept electrons through a carbon nanotube backing that draws them away before they're used to make sugar. While the resulting power isn't phenomenal, it's still two orders of magnitude better than previous methods, according to the university. The protein modification method may have a rosier future, as well: the team believes that it could eventually compete with solar cells, producing green energy in a very literal sense.
We'd probably say something like, "I always thought it would be cool to build a giant fire breathing piranha plant," and then promptly forget about following through. Also, hey, that sounds dangerous! Hack-a-day's Caleb Kraft, however, doesn't allow silly things like fear of seared human flesh get between him and his dreams. (This is the same man who created an incredible Portal gun, in case you forgot the name.)
Kraft created a six-foot tall, fire-breathing "piranha plant" -- also known as "that bastard plant hiding in Super Mario World's pipes" -- using PVC pipe, butane and a whole mess of other materials. The results are -- well, we can think of a variety of adjectives that'd fit perfectly well here, but you'll likely come up with a few of your own after watching the video of it in action below the break.
Dustin Adams, a Ph.D student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has teamed up with colleagues at his school in order to craft an app that helps visually impaired users line up the ideal snapshot. The project started out as a quiz, asking 54 people with varying degrees of ocular impairment what they found most difficult about taking photos. From there, he essentially boiled that down into requirements for a smartphone program. For starters, the app does away with a conventional shutter button, instead relying on an upward swipe gesture to grab a frame.
Moreover, it integrates face detection and voice accessibility, enabling the phone itself to talk to the photographer and alert him / her as to how many faces are detected and in focus. The app also captures a 30-second audio clip whenever the camera mode is activated, which helps remind users of what was going on during the capture of a shot. Unfortunately, there aren't any screenshots or videos of the app in action just yet, but that's scheduled to change when it's formally unveiled at the Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments conference in Greece later this month.
Move aside, Sand Flea, you're not the only jumping robot in town. The researchers over at the University of Pennsylvania have taught their little six-legged X-RHex Light to make leaps and bounds as well, making it one of a few bots to both run and jump effectively. While it can't spring as high as the Boston Dynamics critter, the X-RHex can cross gaps with not just a bound but a running gait, given enough room. It can also flip itself over, climb onto a ledge with a double hop and perform a leaping grab to something as high as 73 centimeters (28.74 inches). The X-RHex itself isn't new; the curved-legged contraption has been around for at least a couple years, and even sported a cat-like tail for balance at one point. Still, the fact that the hefty 6.7 kilogram (14.8 pound) machine can now somersault through the air is a quite a victory, and one that reminds us of the impending robocalypse. Check the video below to see the bouncy guy in action.
Viruses usually have to be rendered inert to work in humanity's favor, as anyone who has received a flu shot can attest. Auburn University has bucked that trend by discovering a way to put active viruses to work in not only diagnosing sickness, but in preventing it in the first place. It's using bacteria-hating (and thankfully harmless) viruses as biosensors to quickly identify superbugs, or antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can sometimes prove fatal. As the viruses change color once they've reached impervious bacterial strains, in this case variants on Staphylococcus, they can reveal superbugs within 10 to 12 minutes -- a potentially lifesaving interval when current purification-driven methods can take hours. Auburn would like to eventually use what it has learned to develop more effective antibacterial glass and similar surfaces. If successfully put into practice, either breakthrough could mitigate what's already a major medical crisis.
[Image credit: Bob Blaylock, Wikipedia]
We've seen plenty of robots scale walls over the years, from models that emit supersonic streams of air to gecko-inspired creations, but few can carry more than their own weight, much less handle rough terrain. Enter this unique Swiss-made machine, which handles both tasks with aplomb thanks to the rapid melting and cooling of its thermoplastic adhesive feet. Created by the whiz kids over at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the plastic compounds in the contraption's tootsies melt at around 70 degrees Celsius (158 Fahrenheit), where they're tacky enough to stick and fill surface gaps. If the bot needs to take a step forward, a thermoelectric effect kicks in to cool the plastics down, detaching the foot in the process. Repeat the motion several times and you get a tiny climbing critter that's able to carry about six to seven times its own weight over complex surfaces, a feat that's sure to be of actual use someday. It's certainly more practical, though a lot less fun, than one that mixes cocktails. Go on after the break to see the little climber in action.
"Emergency taking place!" That's quite possibly the last thing you'd want to hear from anyone smelling your breath -- a female humanoid robotic head mounted atop a rectangular pink and red box being no exception. Similarly, a robotic hound passing out after smelling your feet should certainly be cause for alarm. Japanese company CrazyLabo paired up with Kitakyushu National College of Technology to create both bots, tasked with smelling your breath and your feet, respectively. The woman, named Kaori-chan, passes judgement on four levels, with feedback ranging from "It smells like citrus!" to the dire exclamation you read about above.
The pooch, for his part, doesn't speak, but instead displays varying levels of affection -- it'll cuddle up if things are looking good, but it'll bark or growl if it's time to change those socks. If the situation is beyond repair, he'll collapse, as Chopin's funeral march plays in the background. It's just as depressing as it sounds. Granted, it's all in good fun, but if you're easily offended (or often offending), you probably won't want to venture any closer than the demo video at the source link below.
It's always better when more prizes are involved, right? In the case of this week's giveaway, Diamond Multimedia, a company specializing in gaming hardware, is hooking our readers up with four of them. The first two winners will receive a Radeon HD 7850 video graphics card (valued at $200 each), while the next two will get either a GC1000 USB game console video capture device ($130) or a VStream Wireless USB PC to TV HD content streamer ($100). Start your engines, enter using the widget below and good luck!
On May 6th, 1949 EDSAC (or Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) ran its first programs, calculating a table of squares and generating a list of prime numbers. The massive vacuum-tube-powered machine was put into service at the University of Cambridge and almost immediately changed how research was done at the school. It was among the first general-purpose computers capable of storing programs in rewritable memory, which took the form of mercury delay lines. Maurice Wilkes, the designer of the EDSAC, certainly earned his place in computing history, but David Wheeler's later contributions were equally important. Using the EDSAC he invented subroutines, an essential component of modern programming that allows developers to reuse bits of existing code to simplify the act of writing software. This milestone piece of machinery is little more than scraps at this point, but a team at the UK's National Museum of Computing is working to build a working replica. The hope is to have the computer up and running by May of 2015. For some more insight into how the EDSAC changed the face of computing, check out the video after the break.
[Image credit: University of Cambridge]
The White House West Wing, as ever, is very busy. It's nearly time for White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's daily press briefing, which today (April 22nd) will reveal that the Boston bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, won't be tried as an "enemy combatant." Just upstairs, the atmosphere is thankfully less intense. In the East Room and surrounding chambers, over 100 students -- STEM-based competition winners from 40 different states -- are making their best efforts to remain chipper while explaining projects they've no doubt discussed dozens (if not hundreds) of times before.
Later this afternoon, President Barack Obama will address the dozens of attendees -- accomplished students and educators, as well as folks like Bill Nye ("The Science Guy"), Levar Burton (of Reading Rainbow fame) and Kathryn D. Sullivan (the first American woman to walk in space). He'll characterize the students' projects as "really cool," and he'll call out some lucky winners by name while speaking to the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States.
Today is the culmination of years of work for many attendees, and it's an important day for the current administration as well. The White House Science Fair is an annual highlight of its "Educate to Innovate" initiative -- the Obama administration-led program that directs both public and private funds to a variety of programs, all aimed at bolstering STEM education in the US. It's a long-term, ambitious plan, and one that the White House is re-dedicating itself to in its proposed fiscal year 2014 budget: a planned reorganization coupled with $265 million, "redirected from within the Department [of Education] and from other agencies."
Beyond the occasional PR bump that events like the White House Science Fair bring, the Educate to Innovate initiative is largely one that won't reap dividends for some time. In 20 years, however, it may be the most important component of Obama's legacy.
Nothing locks down data better than a laser-based quantum-encrypted network, where the mere act of looking at your data causes it to irrevocably change. Although such systems already exist, they're limited to point-to-point data transfers since a router would kill the message it's trying to pass along just by reading it. However, Los Alamos National Labs has been testing an in-house quantum network, complete with a hub and spoke system that gets around the problem thanks to a type of quantum router at each node. Messages are converted at those junctures to conventional bits, then reconverted into a new encrypted message, which can be securely sent to the next node, and so on.
The researchers say it's been running in the lab for the last two and a half years with few issues, though there's still a security hole -- it lacks quantum integrity at the central hub where the data's reconverted, unlike a pure quantum network. However, the hardware would be relatively simple to integrate into any fiber-connected device, like a TV set-top box, and is still more secure than any current system -- and infinitely better than the 8-character WiFi code you're using now.
The (almost) all-plastic 3D-printed Liberator pistol was announced by Defense Distributed late last week, but with the gun's blueprints and construction details now live on the company's own DefCAD design site, it's also released a video taken during its testing. In front of a Forbes onlooker, the clip apparently shows a .380 caliber bullet being fired by the Liberator.
The only non-plastic part of the design is a common nail, which acts as the firing pin. Defense Distributed's founder Cody Wilson has worked over a year on the project, apparently citing the one-shot pistols that were designed to be air-dropped over France during World War II as inspiration -- also called the Liberator. This modern version is, however, formed of 15 components made inside a Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. The video of the test shot and more details are right after the break.
Welcome to The After Math, where we attempt to summarize this week's tech news through numbers, decimal places and percentages.
This week's After Math appears to have taken on a comic book theme. Want to make your own Thor hammer? How about your very own Atomic Watch -- rather than those radio-wave-based excuses of a timepiece? We've also got the very real prospect of civilian flights to outer space and, er, Kobe Bryant advertising Lenovo smartphones. Stranger things have happened, right? Join us after the break.
We've seen Emotiv's Epoc headset control cars and trapeze acts, but now a small posse of students at Columbia University is teaching it how to control a robotic arm. The appendage, aptly named ARM for Assistive Robotic Manipulator, was envisioned as a wheelchair attachment to help the disabled. According to the team, the goal was to keep costs in the neighborhood of $5,000 since insurance outfits Medicare and Medicaid won't foot a bill for assistive tech that's much more than $10,000. To keep costs low, the crew built the limb from laser cut wood, and managed to keep the final price tag at $3,200. Since picking up EEG signals and interpreting them accurately can be tricky, the group says it settled on monitoring EMG waves, which are triggered by muscle movements, for additional reliability.
Lifting your eyebrows makes the device open its grip, clenching your teeth shuts it and moving your lips to the left and right twists the claw, while other motions are currently handled by using a PlayStation 2 controller. In the lab, the contraption has seven degrees of freedom, but it was reduced to five when we took it for a spin. It was hit or miss when this editor put the headgear on, between making sure facial gestures were spot on and the equipment's attempts to pick up clear signals.
