Double Amputee Transformed Into Mermaid With Help From Prosthetics Despite her passion for swimming, it was never Nadya Vessey's dream to be a mermaid. She started swimming after losing her first leg when she was seven, and continued to swim competitively after the second was amputated at the age of sixteen. Vessey picked herself back up on two prosthetic legs and, unlike many Disney fans, didn't give in to any mermaid fantasies. She's used these legs for decades, until now that she's received some assistance from Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop. It all started on the beach where a four-year-old boy questioned her lack of limbs when he saw her taking her fake ones off. The peeps at Weta let us in on how exactly the tail works. Now that she’s been whipping her tail back and forth for a bit, Vessey plans to use it for the swimming section of an upcoming triathlon. Source: the Telegraph Photos via Oprah.com, Matmantra, and Stuff
Robot Skin Can Feel Touch, Sense Chemicals, and Soak Up Solar Power When you meet your robot overlord, it may be wearing super-intelligent skin designed by a Stanford researcher--a solar-powered, super-sensitive, chemical-sampling covering that makes your meatbag covering look pathetic. Zhenan Bao is behind the advances, and the recent development centers on a stretchable solar cell system that can expand and shrink along two different axes, making it perfect for incorporation into artificial skin for robots, human prosthetic limbs, or even clothing. Bao's earlier successes with artificial skin have resulted in a highly flexible and durable material, which is part of a flexible organic-chemistry transistor, built on a thin polymer layer. When the skin is subjected to pressure, the current flowing through the transistors is modified as tiny pyramid shapes molded into the polymer layer compress, resulting in a super-sensitive transducer that can apparently detect the pressure from a house-fly's feet.
손오공의 '슈퍼보드'가 되고 싶은자동차. :: 행복한 하루를 위한 속삭임 만화 '날아라 슈퍼보드'에 보면 손오공도 이젠 여의봉을 타고 다니기 보다는 첨단 기기인 슈퍼보드를 타고 하늘을 날아 다니면서 온갖 악당들을 물리치는 걸 볼 수 있습니다. 그리고 영화'Back to The Future'에서는 날으는 스케이트 보드를 선 보이기도 했는데요. 이젠 저희들도 자동차를 이용하기 보다는 가까운 거리에서는 날라다니는 슈퍼보드와 같은 스케이트 보드를 접할 수 있는날이 멀지 않은 것 같군요. 인테리어 모티브 디자인 어워드 2008 이미지는 클릭하시면 크게 보이걸랑요~~~~ 크게해서 보세요. 자동차라고 하기에는 조금 이상하게 생겼습니다. 바닥에 달린 5개의 팬을 적절히 이용해서 조종을 하게 되는데요. 충전은 가정이나 사무실등 어디서나 가능합니다. 기술과 디자인이 발달할 수 록 자동차들의 모습이 점점 심플해 지는 것 같습니다. Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment | Wired Business SAN DIEGO, California — Imagine a drug that can reduce your need for sleep, increase your concentration and make you smarter, with minimal side effects. Call it Morvigil. What would such a drug do to society? The best answers to those questions, writer Quinn Norton told conference-goers at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego Wednesday, is to be found in the history of another substance: coffee. Coffee debuted in the late 17th century in Oxford, England — leading to rowdy coffee houses, jittery arguments and even an attempt by King Charles II to ban the substance for inspiring seditious behavior. The other consequence: the Enlightenment. (Disclaimer: Norton is a Wired.com contributor and a friend, but her talk was clearly one of the hits of the conference.) A drug like Morvigil could easily do the same, though Quinn thinks its unlikely "people will be popping pills together in a pill house." Call it a second Enlightenment. "How do we give ourselves permission to modify?"
The Robot Hiring Boom Has Arrived The knock against many technology companies is they create too few jobs in their own countries. That complaint needs serious amending. Tech companies are creating plenty of jobs for robots. Foxconn currently supplements its 1.2 million human workers with 10,000 robots. In one regard, this investment will help the company's labor relations. The official response to the media sounded every bit as cynical. Watch: What's the Big Idea? Foxconn has annual revenues of over $60 billion, and the company has put up an astounding compound annual growth rate of over 50 percent for the last decade. This could be a step in the right direction from both a business and humanitarian perspective. What's the Significance? The use of industrial robot labor is spreading rapidly in China. Every industry, from agriculture, to the military, will be impacted by robot labor. Watch here: Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Mind-Reading Experiment Reconstructs Movies in Our Mind The approximate reconstruction (right) of a movie clip (left) is achieved through brain imaging and computer simulation.UC Berkeley It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. He believes such a technique could eventually reconstruct a dream or other made-up mental movie well enough to be recognizable. People shouldn't be worried about others secretly eavesdropping on their thoughts in the near future, since the technique requires a person to spend long periods in an MRI machine, he noted.
Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound Dr. William J. Tyler is an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, is a co-founder and the CSO of SynSonix, Inc., and a member of the 2010 DARPA Young Faculty Award class. Every single aspect of human sensation, perception, emotion, and behavior is regulated by brain activity. Thus, having the ability to stimulate brain function is a powerful technology. Recent advances in neurotechnology have shown that brain stimulation is capable of treating neurological diseases and brain injury, as well as serving platforms around which brain-computer interfaces can be built for various purposes. For example, deep-brain stimulating (DBS) electrodes used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease require neurosurgery in order to implant electrodes and batteries into patients. A portion of our initial work has been supported by the U.S. How can this technology be used to provide our nation’s Warfighters with strategic advantages?
Scientists Read Dreams By Mo Costandi of Nature magazine Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep. A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep. This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between seven and ten times, on different days, for each participant. Perchance to dream Most of the dreams reflected everyday experiences, but some contained unusual content, such as talking to a famous actor. “We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams,” says Kamitani.
On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces Brain computer interfaces (BCI) are becoming increasingly popular in the gaming and entertainment industries. Consumer-grade BCI devices are available for a few hundred dollars and are used in a variety of applications, such as video games, hands-free keyboards, or as an assistant in relaxation training. There are application stores similar to the ones used for smart phones, where application developers have access to an API to collect data from the BCI devices. The security risks involved in using consumer-grade BCI devices have never been studied and the impact of malicious software with access to the device is unexplored. We take a first step in studying the security implications of such devices and demonstrate that this upcoming technology could be turned against users to reveal their private and secret information. Papers are restricted to registered attendees until the event begins. Text of BibTeX entry: