Wired NextFest Infrared X-ray Machine

Last week my ear was bugging me. I thought, "an X-Ray" is totally overkill for just figuring out what's clogged up. Then, I wished for the Star Trek: Next Generation level of technology. The "scans." Bah. Too far in the future. Actually, it was one week into the future... Live at the WIRED NextFest at the Jacob Javitz center in New York City, an Infrared X-ray Machine displays your vessels and muscle directly on top of your skin by just moving your body under the beam.

Wanted: Buzz Hargrove For Crimes Against Humanity

On Tuesday, CAW union leader, Buzz Hargrove expressed concerns that the clean-air laws would “devastate” the auto-industry. Thanks to the auto-industry, we can get everywhere faster. Automobiles make us look cool. They make people like the Saudis wealthy—wealthy enough to fund terrorist attacks. They are the #1 cause of accidental deaths. Oh, and the pollution belched by cars is killing our planet. If you’re pro-auto industry, you’re against humanity.

Hargrove is whining that he wasn’t consulted about the Conservatives’ plans. The auto industry is doubly at fault for greenhouse emissions. Getting Hargrove’s input is like the farmer getting the fox’s input on the henhouse design.

This is a criminal mindset that exposes the true face of organized labor. The CAW pretends to be a benevolent organization that is fighting for the rights of the underclass. It is a partisan organization that has one goal: to promote the well being of its members at the expense of all others. The only difference between big business and big labor is big business aims to provide something for everyone; big labor aims to provide something for itself from everyone else.

Cars and industry vie for first place as the worst polluters on the planet. Canada’s new laws push to clean up the auto industry. Technology has to reach a critical mass to become affordable. DVD players cost $500 five years ago; now they’re $25. If the same level of attention were put on the energy industry, we would undergo a revolution like the personal computer revolution. Energy usage is our chief way to convert tasks from menial labor to automation. Instead of hauling water, your pump can siphon water to your home. Cleaner energy. More efficiency. Variety of power generation. All of these are possible if alternatives are explored. The energy question needs the equivalent of a Steve Jobs: part-psychopath; part-visionary; part-expert. With the right amount of money, will and experience, the energy consumption could be revolutionized. Hargrove is jeopardizing the people who he is charged with helping. Instead of positioning them and their industry to take advantage at the next chapter of transportation, he is digging his claws into the past and holding on for dear life.

In lieu of visionaries, we have dogma. Buzz Hargrove is trying to protect the income of his union members. They contribute to the brute force size of the CAW and the clout of Buzz Hargrove. The auto industry will drag its heels because it’s in bed with Big Oil. So, when the new legislation makes life hard on the auto industry, it will make life hard on the autoworkers. Luckily, ex-autoworkers cannot vote out Buzz Hargrove for his actions in the battle to control Greenhouse Gases and global warming. But Hargrove needs to be held accountable for abusing his clout to endanger our lives—to trade in our future for a 3% wage increase and job security for a people who build devices that cause so much so much harm.

Stroke It Up For a New Engine Base don An Old Idea

This article from Wired Magazine has me excited. What happens if you're in the back pocket of big oil and you made Detroit into Motor City; and the whole world is tired of gasoline engines superheating the world and belching out carcinogens. Sure, oil revenues funded 9/11, but let bygones be bygones. Oh, and Hugo Chavez is awash in American money so he can live large as a burr in the side of the White House. It seems like gasoline engines are passe. But, wait! What if engines could get twice the mileage and emit just an inkling of lung disease? If the Scuderi Group have their way, this could be the future of automobiles.

From Wired:

Carmelo Scuderi, a Massachusetts engineer and inventor, started tinkering with the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine when he retired in the mid-1990s. The result was a radical new design that could make engines for anything from gas-powered lawn mowers to diesel locomotives lighter, far more efficient, and a whole lot easier on the environment.

Scuderi died in 2002, shortly after patenting the basic concept for his engine. Since then, his children have made it their mission to bring the engine to market. Five of them now work full time for the family startup, the Scuderi Group.

Scuderi began by splitting the heart of the internal combustion engine -- the chamber where air is compressed, mixed with fuel and then ignited -- into two separate cylinders, linked by a passage. Air is compressed in the first cylinder, and then shot through the passage into the second cylinder, where it mixes with the gas and burns.

The general idea of a split-cycle engine has been around for a century, but none have ever matched the efficiency of traditional engines. Scuderi believed he could solve the problem by pumping highly pressurized air from the compression cylinder into the combustion chamber, and then allowing the fuel and air to ignite when the head of the piston was already moving away from the top of the combustion cylinder.

The method was counterintuitive, because it creates a condition known as firing after top dead center, considered a cardinal sin in engine design since at least the days of Henry Ford.

"In a normal engine, firing after top dead center doesn't work, because the piston will outrun the flame, so you can't build up any pressure," says Scuderi's son, Sal. In the Scuderi engine, however, the combination of highly pressurized air and firing after top dead center creates a highly turbulent environment where the fuel and air ignite explosively, producing far more power than conventional engines.

So far, the engine exists only as a computer model. Two real-life prototypes -- one diesel and one gasoline -- are under construction at the Southwest Research Institute, an engineering research lab in Texas, and are due out next year.

While it is possible that engineering problems may yet emerge, those involved in the project believe the prototypes will work as planned. Computer-generated models are universally used in the automotive industry to design new engines and other parts, and are considered extremely accurate in predicting performance.

Those models show the combustion in a Scuderi engine will be not only more powerful than conventional engines; it will also, surprisingly, be cooler. That means it will spew out far fewer pollutants than today's engines do.

The Scuderi engine could even boost mileage by recapturing energy normally lost during braking, as do hybrid cars. "Unlike current electric hybrids which store the energy in a battery, we are able to store energy in the form of compressed air," says Sal Scuderi. That can be done by simply adding a small air-storage tank, which costs far less than the generators and banks of batteries gas-electric hybrids need.

While working models of the Scuderi engine won't see the light of day until next year, the radical design is already attracting a lot of attention in the automotive world. The company is in talks with big automakers, and when it showed off the new engine at a major automotive-engineering conference in Detroit earlier this year, the Scuderi booth was mobbed.

Your Own Windmill

This from Discovery News:

A small, affordable wind turbine available for the first time this September promises to help homeowners fight the rising cost of energy.

The Skystream 3.7, a wind generator from Southwest Windpower in Flagstaff, Ariz., stands 35 to 100 feet tall — depending on the location — and costs about half that of conventional turbines currently available.

Southwest Windpower is planning to mass produce the Skystream and sell it for between $10,000 to $12,000 installed, about half the cost of similar size turbines, which are typically assembled by hand on a much smaller scale.

This windmill could payt for itself in 12-24 years. Not great, but it lessens your dependance on others. Besides: micro generation units are so pricey because so few people include them in their set-ups. Imagine if 1/10 the homes had installed toilets? The prices per unit would be much higher. Let me say this: live off of the grid.

Homebrewing Genes

This is from Wired:

As the tools of biotechnology become accessible (and affordable) to a wider public for the first time, hobbyists are recapturing that collaborative ethos and applying it to tinkering with the building blocks of life.

Eugene Thacker is a professor of literature, culture and communications at Georgia Tech and a member of the Biotech Hobbyist collective. Just as the computer hobbyists sought unconventional applications for computer circuitry, the new collective is looking for "non-prescribed uses" of biotechnology, Thacker said.

The group has published a set of informal DIY articles, mimicking the form of the newsletters and magazines of the computer hobbyists -- many of which are archived online. Thacker walks readers through the steps of performing a basic computation using a DNA "computer" in his article "Personal Biocomputing" (PDF). The tools for the project include a $100 high school-science education kit and some used lab equipment.

Other how-to articles guide readers through cultivating skin cells and "Tree Cloning" -- making uniform copies of plant tissue.

Thacker calls the spirit of his article "playful," but adds that it's entirely possible that hobbyists could be part of the future of important biotechnology.

Take this technology to parts of world where they get mail (e.g. equipment and supplies); and have electricity (to power the doo-dads); and lax regulations with a less puritanical approach to DNA. A team of kids in Mumbai could hack their way into the next technological revolution: desktop genetic engineering. People could literally cook their own critters. The parable from mainframes to desktops could be repeated for genetic engineering: from lab coats to t-shirts.

Gene hackers could publish the how-tos for free and then get a piece of the hardware pie. Maybe they could publish the information on line and use a Google affiliate program to get the cash. I'm sure gene splicing equipment manufacturers out there don't have affiliate programs... yet.

Cool Phones: None Will EVER Cost Less Than $50

This from Silicon Valley News:

What will your mobile look like in 2015? Like a necklace, some specs, or a ring? See the photos here.

Those are just some of the ideas dreamt up by 26 design students from London's Central St Martins College of Art and Design, tasked by phone maker Nokia with coming up with the next must-have device for 2015's users.

As part of the union, Nokia set the designers a brief of creating a mass market mobile - with the winner seeing their design made up by the Finnish firm and receiving an internship with the company this summer.

(the gallery is here)

I think some of these innovations are like food pills. Possible, handy and cool: we may never see them. People sometimes weigh value by the pound. Look at laptops vs. desktop computers. You can put a huge amount of computing power into the space of an LCD monitor. Desktops still rule.
Cellphones will (continue to) be huge. Why? The answer: cellphone dealers. The profit margin has to yield enough dollars for the phones to be worth selling. Too cheap and they're in the realm of disposable cameras. Too much and a predator will come in with a cheap product. By packing features, you can keep the price point stable and keep the dollar flow stable to resellers. Discreet devices will carry little value because of their size.

I'm Thinking Of A Letter...

From http://www.physorg.com/news69039322.html:

"B-O-N-J-O-U-R" he writes with the power of his mind, much to the amazement of the largely French audience of scientists and curious onlookers gathered at the four-day European Research and Innovation Exhibition in Paris, which opened Thursday.

Brunner and two colleagues from the state-financed Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York were demonstrating a "brain Computer interface (BCI)," an astounding technology which digitalizes brain signals emitted as electrical impulses -- picked up by the electrodes -- to convey intent.

While no spoons were bent, this was definitely mind over matter.

Without recourse to nerves or muscles, BCI "can provide communication and control to people who are totally paralyzed" and unable to unable to speak or move, explains researcher Theresa Sellers, also from Wadsworth.

Dr. Sellers estimates there are some 100 million potential users of BCI technology worldwide, including 16 million sufferers of cerebral palsy, a degenerative brain disease, and at least five million victims of spinal cord injury. Another 10 million people have been totally paralyzed by brainstem strokes, she said.

Scientists have been experimenting with ways to translate thought directly into action for nearly two decades, but BCI has only recently begun to move out of the laboratory and into the daily lives of those trapped inside bodies that no longer respond to their will.

Possible applications extend beyond the written word into physical movement -- it is only a matter of time, Sellers says, before the same technology is used to operate motorized wheel chairs. "We can do already. But it is a complex problem, and for now it would be unsafe," she says.

Read more from http://www.physorg.com/news69039322.html

Viral Batteries

This from http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1628408.htm:

Genetically manipulated viruses could replace standard lithium-ion batteries, packing two to three times more energy than other batteries, researchers say. Cool! Battery acid create a chemical reaction. Viruses and bacteria can do the same-- after all, look at the amount of heat and carbon dioxide created by yeast cultures.

The virus batteries could be thin, transparent, and lightweight, according to a US study published online recently in the journal Science by Professor Angela Belcher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and team.

Because less material is devoted to packaging, more of the battery is used just for generating power.

"What we're trying to do is have all of the mass and volume be used for the purpose it is to be used for, which is to power the device," says Belcher.

The researchers say such a battery should last as long as conventional batteries. And it could power anything from microelectronics, including chemical and biological sensors, 'lab on chip' devices, and security tags to larger items such as mobile phones, computer displays and even electric cars.

Building batteries, like building anything, requires assembly. The smaller the battery, the more challenging that is.

Read more...

Robotoriffic : A Digging Robot

This from: National Geographic:
Manuel Salinas, a 39-year-old inventor, claims he has built a machine that has extraordinary capabilities for finding buried objects.

In less than a year, Salinas says, he has helped solve two of the highest profile criminal cases in this South American country. And now that university lab tests seem to confirm that his robot works, mining and oil corporations are flooding him with business plans, Salinas says.

How this machine functions is still an "industrial secret," Salinas said. But ask him for proof that it works and he'll hand you a pile of press clippings on the device, called Geo-Radar or Arturito (a play on the name of Star Wars robot R2-D2).

The first public use of the Geo-Radar technology was in the case of Luis Francisco Yuraszeck, a Chilean businessman who had been missing since March 2004.

In July 2005 Policía Investigaciones de Chile, the local equivalent of Scotland Yard, asked Salinas to help on the case.

Salinas took his robot to a rural farmhouse selected by the police. With reporters watching, the robot scanned the landscape. Within two hours, Geo-Radar provided an exact location of Yuraszeck's body, buried under 12 feet (4 meters) of cement.

Arturo Herrera, general director of Investigaciones de Chile, publicly acknowledged the effectiveness of the Geo-Radar technology in locating the body.

Tiny Metals in the Coolant

This from the Globe and Mail:

Engineers in Britain have created a new type of coolant that could dramatically increase the speed of computers, improve the efficiency of car engines, lower the cost of residential heating and even change the way surgery is performed.

However, when scientists have tried adding millimetre-sized, or even micrometre-sized, particles of metals to water, the metals tended to clump together and damage the walls of their container. Now, they have learned to overcome this limitation by using particles that are only a millionth of a millimetre -- a nanometre -- in size.

One of the more rapidly expanding areas of research today is nanotechnology. Nanofluids could make heating homes much more efficient, translating into cheaper bills and lower greenhouse-gas emissions to boot. The same goes for vehicle efficiency -- engines could use less fuel. Computer chips could become even smaller and faster with small reservoirs of nanofluids connected by thin tubes tracing the circuits.

more...

Sand skiff or Tank?

This tank is totally cool. For only $19,999.95, the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank
from NAO Design can be yours. To me, it looks like one of the sand skiffs from Return of the Jedi. All that aside, this sucker will drive. NAO? If you want to send me one for a test drive, I would consider this task to be a very good cause.

tags: JL421, Badonkadonk, Land Cruiser/Tank,
NAO Design

How to Reduce Third World Poverty and Extend First World Longevity

This article came out a short while ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4719374.stm

Sell off the organs of people in the third world to people in the first world. Callous yes: but if someone in the UK is going to buy a kidney for £23,000 why not let someone in the Kenya (per capita income of $1,100) sell it?
I know, I know. The argument is that if people are motivated by money, they will do things they wouldn't normally do. They'll kill people to harvest organs. They will offer non-human organs in a desperate attempt to grind out cash. The poor will offer up their dead. A century ago, Europeans landed in Africa and took their land and their economic destiny. Now, we're back for their corneas and lungs.
Opportunities come when possibilities butte into conventions. If the North revolutionizes their organ transplant system to presume harvesting, this opportunity will disappear. If research yields the ability to clone individual organs, we will never need a donor organ and again the opporunity will disappear. There is maybe a 10 year window where people need organs and they could be obtained through sales. Take just the UK as an example: of the 400 per year who die for lack of transplants what if 200 could get those organs? Say the going rate for these organs is £2o,000 each. That's £4,000,000 (+/- $7,000,000 Cdn)/year of money that could land in the Third world. Multiply that by the 10 or so nations who have the means to pay for purchased organs and the window of opportunity before technology makes this as viable as the 8-track. $700 million dollars could go to donors in the South in exchange for approximately 5,000 donors who each gave up kidneys, liver, heart, lungs and a grocery list of needed organs. Do you think 5000 people in the South who could serve as viable donors won't die in the next decade?
The best way to end poverty is to cut down on the number of poor people. If you give a poor household 40 years of income, they are no longer poor. More than that, we're talking about $40,000 for a kidney. Multiply the yield by all of the organs up for salvage and a donor could yield a half million dollars. This tremendous in flux in cash could certainly help a local economy as so-n-so down the street now has a house, a car and so do their ten relatives. There will be some fraud. Nouveau Riche will have gunmen show up at their house and drive away with their cars. Hucksters will keep their cash for safe keeping and never give it back. Depsite the chances that the money will end up in the wrong hands, I like the idea that some of the money will end up in the right hands.
Because it will take too long to ship an organ: donors and recipients will have to be brought closer to one another. Hospitals/resorts in the South will pop-up. They will have to be surgically clean and stable (e.g. running water and 24x7 electricity). That stability requires infrastructure. These hospital resorts will need to make that stability for themselves. The side effect is that once you build the system, others can use it. This could almost make for transplant tourism. A Casablanca for kidneys.

3D objects with lasers

According to this site:

Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology uses lasers to project "real" 3D images into the ether. A special projector can cast three-dimensional shapes of white light between 2 and 3-meters into the air -- previous devices only tricked the eyes into thinking the image was 3D. The images are created by blasting the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at fixed points resulting in glowing plasma emissions which hang-out just long enough to etch an ephemeral image.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope...

A Stirling Engine from Pop cans

Stirling engines are super-cool innovation-- well a very old innovation. This project ( http://www.physics.sfasu.edu/astro/courses/egr112/StirlingEngine/stirling.html ) shows how to build a stirling engine from pop cans and powered by a tea light. For the doubting Thomases: here is an MPEG of the Stirling Engine at work.

tags : engineering viridian green engines