5 Floating Utopia and Ocean City Projects: From Seafaring Condos to Oceanic Micronations Who hasn’t imagined living on their very own floating paradise ? For those aboard ResidenSea, a permanent ocean-going residence, this dream is at least a partial reality. Freedom Ship (upon its completion) will take floating cities to a new level and if the Living Universe Foundation has its way the oceans will just be a first stop on the humanity’s path to the stars. This collection is roughly sequenced from most practical (but also most mundane) to most extraordinary (but also least plausible)! ResidenSea is a (perhaps unsurprisingly) Florida-based company that manages the world’s only mobile and full-time floating luxury community called The World . The Freedom Ship project is a serious step up from ResidenSea but also unbuilt as of yet, though 1/5 of the on-board living units have already been sold. The Living Universe Foundation is a strange organization dedicated to the long-term colonization of the galaxy. So where did this all start?
High-Tech Robot Skin High-Tech Robot Skin Goddard Technologist Proposes Sensitive Skin Covering for Robots The ballerina gracefully dances on a small stage. Image right: High-Tech Robot Skin: Goddard technologist Vladimir Lumelsky believes the future of robotics lies with the development of a high-tech, sensor-embedded covering that would be able to sense the environment, much like human skin. New Laboratory Under Development Lumelsky, until recently a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has begun setting up a laboratory at Goddard to develop a high-tech covering that would enable robots to sense their environment and react to it, much like humans respond when something or someone touches their skin. "Robots move well on their own, especially when nothing is in the way," Lumelsky explained. Touch Sensing Remains Key Although great headway is being made in the area of computer vision, vision isn’t enough, he said. Use of Infrared Sensors Challenges Ahead Lori Keesey Goddard Space Flight Center
10 Futuristic Materials Lifeboat Foundation Safeguarding Humanity Skip to content Switch to White Special Report 10 Futuristic Materials by Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Michael Anissimov. 1. Aerogel protecting crayons from a blowtorch. This tiny block of transparent aerogel is supporting a brick weighing 2.5 kg. Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Carbon nanotubes are long chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp2 bond, even stronger than the sp3 bonds that hold together diamond. “Metamaterial” refers to any material that gains its properties from structure rather than composition. We’re starting to lay down thick layers of diamond in CVD machines, hinting towards a future of bulk diamond machinery. Diamonds may be strong, but aggregated diamond nanorods (what I call amorphous fullerene) are stronger. Transparent alumina is three times stronger than steel and transparent. inShare28 Materials
Princeton engineers make breakthrough in ultra-sensitive sensor technology Princeton researchers have invented an extremely sensitive sensor that opens up new ways to detect a wide range of substances, from tell-tale signs of cancer to hidden explosives. The sensor, which is the most sensitive of its kind to date, relies on a completely new architecture and fabrication technique developed by the Princeton researchers. The device boosts faint signals generated by the scattering of laser light from a material placed on it, allowing the identification of various substances based on the color of light they reflect. The sample could be as small as a single molecule. The technology is a major advance in a decades-long search to identify materials using Raman scattering, a phenomena discovered in the 1920s by an Indian physicist, Chandrasekhara Raman, where light reflecting off an object carries a signature of its molecular composition and structure. Micrograph of a sensor developed at Princeton for sensing Raman scattering. (Photo Credit: Stephen Y.
Synthetic Skin Sensitive to the Lightest Touch 14 September 2010—Today’s advanced robots and prosthetic arms can grab an egg or a plastic cup without crushing it, thanks to tactile sensors on the fingertips. But you wouldn’t say they’re sensitive enough to pat a baby to sleep. For that you’d need to cover the robot arm with pressure-sensitive synthetic skin that could sense a featherlight touch. Two research groups, one at the University of California, Berkeley, and the other at Stanford, have independently made advances toward such a sensitive system. Their prototypes are as good as human skin at quickly detecting small amounts of pressure: Within 100 milliseconds, they can feel pressures ranging from 15 kilopascals to less than 1 kPa. (The gentlest touch you can feel is 1 kPa.) The research teams reported their results on the Web site of the journal Nature Materials on 12 September. The two designs have trade-offs in flexibility and pressure sensitivity. Prachi Patel is a contributing editor to IEEE Spectrum.