February 13th, 2008 10:55 AM | by Christen da Costa
Ann Arbor, Michigan has been on a green project ‘tear’ lately. Earlier this year they began by replacing all standard streetlights with LEDs. Now they’ve got a project on the books called The Interstate Traveler Hydrogen Highway. The state of Michigan hopes to connect Ann Arbor and Detroit using a raised railway like system that combines Maglev, Hydrogen and Solar Power technology. The system, called the ‘rail conduit cluster’, will be zero emission and carry cars, people, and even distribute electricity, water, liquid waste, fiber optics, hydrogen, oxygen (not sure what this would be used for) and other fuels. The project’s brainchild is NEWTY award recipient Justin Eric Sutton. They’ve even designed an ‘active floor restraint’ for loading cars and cargo. The construction is set to start this year.
More pics and details after the ‘leap’
Update: According Megan Owens, the Exectuive Director, Transportation Riders United of Detroit this story is incorrect. “Your story about a maglev train being built in Ann Arbor is wrong. The idea is neat, but Ann Arbor officials confirm that there is no truth to this rumor.”
February 12th, 2008 3:23 PM | by Christen da Costa
Thousands of war veterans have returned home from the wars in the Middle East. Unfortunately, a large number of them have returned home missing limbs due to IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Often adapting to life with a missing limb is challenging to say the least. Lower replacement prosthetics are advanced - in the 21st century as Dean Kamen puts it. Upper prosthetics on the other hand, are decades behind and offer little articulation.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency finally decided to address this growing issue. In 2005, Dean Kamen, the famed inventor of the Segway, won $18 million in funding to produce a bionic limb. What they’ve conceived is both mind blowing and exciting.
February 11th, 2008 11:32 PM | by Christen da Costa
Researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia have developed a knee brace like device, that when worn while walking will charge an internal battery. The Biomechanical Energy Harvester (sounds more like an implant - it ain’t) generates power at the end of a walker’s step similar to that of an electric or hybrid car braking (that’s according to the researchers). Wearing the device on each leg can generate 5 watts of electricity at a normal pace. At a fast pace the device can generate up to 13 watts. With just one minute of walking and the Biomechanical Energy Harvester can power a standard cell phone for 30 minutes of talk time. That puts the Hymini to shame. Although, I doubt it costs a mere $49 like the Hymini. Dare I say: “The green energy race is on’.
The biggest scam in home computing has to be the printing. Sure printers are cheap, but you’ll fork over your kid’s college fund to print the family album. Plus, it’s a total pain to manage since half the ink cartridges get clogged and don’t last that long. ZINK technology, or Zero Ink technology, removes the ink and bundles it in a piece of paper. No word on cost just yet (probably not cheap, though), but Polaroids got a mobile printer using the technology. Here’s how it works:
ZINK Paperâ„¢ is at the heart of ZINKâ„¢ Zero Inkâ„¢ Technology. ZINK Paper is an advanced composite material with cyan, yellow, and magenta dye crystals embedded inside and a protective polymer overcoat layer outside, enabling true ink-free prints. Before printing, the embedded dye crystals are colorless, so ZINK Paper looks like regular white photo paper. A ZINK-enabled device uses heat to activate and colorize these dye crystals.These crystals, named Amorphochromicâ„¢ crystals, represent an entirely new class of molecules, invented by ZINK Scientists through a rigorous discovery process. The properties of each dye crystal were finely tuned to achieve the color palette and image stability required for beautiful, full-color digital prints. ZINKâ„¢ scientists also invented a way to activate each of the crystals independently using heat pulses of precisely determined duration and temperature to achieve any color under the rainbow. The printing process is now radically simple.
I wrote about a ‘floating bed‘ back in July ‘06. It went for a cool $200,000 for a 1/5 scale model. The full scale went for over $1 million. Hoverit Lounger is essentially the same thing, but in an acrylic like lounge chair that you’d fine pool side at the hippest Hollywood hotel pool. It uses opposing magnets and costs a reasonable $11,500. Hoverit plans to release a fully cushioned version in March. The pics don’t really show full flotation but it’s good enough.
Here’s the full quote from Mr. Rutan, Richard Branson’s head of Virgin Galactic space flight operation: “Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the safety level of new spaceships will be as safe as the modern airliner”. That’s probably exactly what you DON’T want to say when trying to sell the-yet-released million dollar-a-ride commercial space flight program. Nonetheless, Virgin Galactic already has over 200 “firm reservations” and $30 million in deposits. More importantly, and hence the true purpose of this article, is that Rutan revealed Virgin Galactics new space craft today (as seen above) called SpaceShipTwo. Although flights won’t begin until 2009 or 2010, Branson’s space planes are more then half way to completion. Space PLANES you ask? SpaceShipTwo will carry the actual passenger in space, while WhiteKnightTwo, a glorified carrier plane, will carry SpaceShipTwo high into the sky for release. Currently, Virgina Galactic is putting some of it’s tentative passengers through G force testing as I recently saw on MSNBC.
You ever wonder where your fruit came from? And if you’re like me, you probably think it’s just “labeled� organic and they’re in fact pumping it full of chemicals and hormones rbST style. Dole Food now labels its bananas with a three-digit organic code. Visit Doleorganic.com, plug in the code and you’ll see the plantation it grew on, organic certification details, worker photos, and get this: satellite maps images via Google Earth. Course this could all be easily fabricated. Credence could be brought to the table by having the workers take monthly pictures with recent newspapers - kind of like the kidnappers do in the flix.
If someone told me that a turbine gas engine would end up inside a silicon chip a few years ago I would have told them their crazy. Hell, if someone told me today, I’d say their crazy. Well, some folks over at MIT - you know, the place where all those genius plans for technology are hatched - are a few steps away from accomplishing this. The gas turbine engine, which would be about the size of a quarter, would reside inside a silicon chip and would apparently run 10 times longer then today’s batteries of the same weight.
“The miniature microengine would be made using six bonded silicon wafers in which the compressor, combustion chamber, spinning turbine, and other necessary features are pre-etched into the individual layers of silicon. Inside the tiny combustion chamber, the fuel and air would mix and burn. The turbine blades, made of microfabricated materials, would spin at about 20,000 revolutions per second.”
According to MIT Professor Alan Epstein of the department of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, the chips will be ready for testing within a year’s time, and ready for market place in 3 years or more.
We’ve all heard about the invisibility cloaks, right? Well, I’ve only seen them in pics until now. Check out the video here.
The invisibility cloak works by capturing what is behind the user at that very second, and then displays the captured image on its special material. This creates the illusion of invisibility.
