Is this woman the subject of a bizarre experiment? Is this a sort of torture? Is this man using a robot to extract something from her throat?
This is actually an image from a Bell Laboratories ad from Life magazine in 1947. This technician is using an elaborate apparatus to film this woman’s vocal chords. This does not look comfortable! It reminds me of the scene from Ghostbusters when Venkman hooked people up to electric shock equipment to test ESP. Haven’t seen it? It’s worth a look. Even if you have seen it, it’s worth seeing again.
Will people in the future look back at our sophisticated scientific apparatus and laugh at how crude and barbaric it is? I can’t even begin to imagine. Considering how much that picture makes me cringe, however, I’m guessing that they will.
So, what kind of images did they get? Here is an example of footage taken by Bell Labs.
As shown in our recent post about weird inventions, technology goes in lots of different directions. In this case, technology will take you somewhere wonderful without every having to leave your chair.
Use your mouse to explore Vietnam’s Son Doong cave
National Geographic has created a stunning interactive tool that will let you explore this wonder of nature, walking through each zone and looking around as though you were there. The 360° views let you look all around and up into the dizzying heights of the cave.
If you like armchair exploring, you’re not just relegated to tours. the PhET project provides simulations for physics, biology, chemistry and other sciencey-wiencey stuff.
Do you know a virtual adventure that we should know about? Share it with us!
There you have it. Based on what we currently understand about cloning, we don’t have any way to regenerate a dinosaur. We’re just going to have to rely on time travel. Of course, there are other historic creatures that are within the reasonable DNA half-life, including Neanderthal Man. In this interview with Spiegel from several years ago, scientist, George Church, discusses the plausibility of cloning a Neanderthal Man and other topics that may shock or delight you. Church denied that he was seeking an “Adventurous Woman,” as some reported, to be a surrogate for a baby Neanderthal. We don’t know if he didn’t get a volunteer or if there were too many. (Can you just imagine the email?)
Alvin, a bearded dragon, is our official lucky lizard, live and on display
Are these places where science dare not go? If someone discovers a way around the half-life issue or wants to explore brining back a woolly mammoth or Neanderthal should we be worried or buy tickets? As host to the one and only Iceman, we would love to have a pet dinosaur. I guess we’ll have to be content to enjoy our lucky lizard, Alvin, on display in the museum.
It’s a shame that some inventions never caught on. Imagine how stylish flying would have been if the Hoop-Skirt parachute idea, described in the January 1911 edition of Popular Mechanics, had caught on. It’s possible that the manly men at the time balked at the idea of being seen in something that could at any time resemble a skirt. It’s also possible that the idea didn’t really work and they would simply plummet to their death… leaving a good-looking corpse.
Portable library, 1920s style
Another idea in the early 20th century was the first book killer. Long before gadgets like computer tablets, inventors already had their sights set on fixing the problem of carrying around cumbersome books. The June 1922 edition of Scientific American shows one solution. The Fiske Reading Machine printed books in tiny print and provided a modified magnifying glass that you could hold up to your eye to read. One can only imagine how this would work on a bumpy carriage ride.
It’s easy to laugh at these things now, but you never know how the next great thing will appear. It might seem like the famous Inside the Egg Egg Scrambler by Ronco. It might end up being sliced bread.
Think that egg scrambler idea is dead? You haven’t been watching Kickstarter. People will do just anything to avoid cleaning that fork and bowl!
You’ve probably heard about the epic battle between inventors, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla about how electricity would be delivered to the masses. If not, this video will catch you up.
As the video shows, Edison’s campaign was pretty grim. He was convinced that AC power was unsafe and publicly electrocuted a number of animals, including an aging elephant, to prove it. AC had advantages for cheaply delivering power over long distances, so it ultimately won out…or did it.
It makes one wonder if their battle may continue wherever they may be, if they might look at what their creations have wrought and continue to keep score.
“The Incredible Bionic Man” makes his debut at the Washington Air and Space Museum.
A first-ever walking, talking “bionic man” built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.
The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was built by London’s Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.
“This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development,” museum director John Dailey said.
I’ve always wondered when and how someone would do this: take all of the existing bionic technology we have today… artificial organs, limbs, etc… and combine it into a single walking, talking being. However, there’s one element that’s missing… the human soul.
Which is why I suspect in this video below Bertolt Meyer, the man who contributed his facial features to the robot, has such intense feelings towards the android upon first seeing it… it is essentially wearing his face. Meyers is experiencing the creepiness of “the Uncanny Valley,” that is, the point where something is close to being human but not quite there yet, which often elicits feelings of fear and repulsion.
The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, “The Incredible Bionic Man,” airing on Sunday.
A “bionic man” was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show “The Six Million Dollar Man” showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.
The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.
“The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today – one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?” said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.
The robot was modelled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.
The UN Human Rights Council will be discussing the morality of “killer robots” at their next meeting in Geneva. A moratorium has been requested on their use until a decision has been made by the Council—this is not a complete ban as some groups would like to see, but it will allow enough time to put to rest the more philosophical dilemmas. The robots in question, which are currently under development in the US, UK, and Israel, are called “lethal autonomous robots” and are designed to be pre-programmed to kill people or take out specified targets in war. However, these robots are also equipped with the ability to think freely for themselves in order to make adjustments when necessary.
Supporters of these machines believe that they will save countless lives in the long run by reducing the number of soldiers utilized in battle. Human rights groups believe that the distancing of the human element from war raises serious moral questions about our approach to combat. They have serious concerns on the robots’ ability to distinguish between targets and civilians, and if civilian casualties occur, who would be held responsible.
“The traditional approach is that there is a warrior, and there is a weapon,” said Christof Heyns, the UN expert examining the use of the robots in an article on the BBC News, “but what we now see is that the weapon becomes the warrior, the weapon takes the decision itself.”
Photo by Thomas ShahanA research development team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a new digital camera composed of 180 individual lenses to mimic an insect’s intricate eyesight. The initial images are low resolution, but display an immense depth-of-field. It is the hopes of the research team that this new technology will eventually be used in surveillance and for endoscopic investigations of the human body. Such cameras could also be used in insect-sized aerial robots. At the moment, while complex, the imaging system is only comparable to that of an ant or beetle.
“The compound design of the fly’s eye incorporates perhaps 28,000 small eyes, or ommatidia,” explained team-member Dr Jianliang Xiao from the University of Colorado at Boulder, US. “That’s the direction we want to move in,” he told BBC News.
According to the report on BBC News, the digital “bug eye” camera is designed to reflect the structure of an insect’s corneal lens with a crystalline cone and light-sensitive organ at the base. Together these sections of the bug’s eye form a “picture” of the world pieced together from the various sensory inputs. In the robotic adaptation, microlenses are positioned above photodetectors. Proprietary software designed for the bug-eye camera is used to sync the information and piece together the signals to form a full image. The initial image is flat and then stretched over a hemispherical shape to give the impression of a 180-degree view.
“Picture the following: a palm-sized micro aerial vehicle uses an artificial faceted eye to navigate autonomously through a collapsed building while other sensors onboard scan the environment for smoke, radioactivity or even people trapped beneath rubble and debris,” the research team reported in the Nature journal article.
A little buzz-worthy news about technological advancements, I’d say!
A human has transmitted a virus between computers.
Here’s more proof that the future is here; a man has infected himself with a computer virus and transmitted it between two seperate computers using his actual body as the host.
Discovery News writes:
As if humans didn’t have enough viruses to worry about, one British researcher has successfully infected himself with a computer virus.
Mark Gasson, senior research fellow at the University of Reading, was able to infect a tiny, radio frequency identification (RFID) chip with a virus before he placed it under the skin on his hand. He uses that chip to activate his cell phone, as well as open secure doors.
Thanks to the computer chip… instead of him swiping an ID card to enter his building, he just needs to wave his hand to gain entrance. The convenience of not taking out his ID and the safety of his phone come with a price, however.
He served as carrier, and was able to pass the virus on to an external computer. The virus was of Gasson’s own design and was not malicious. But he was able to show that computer viruses can move seamlessly between computers within and outside the body. And theoretically, if a person had several computers in his or her body, a computer virus could spread from one to another, infecting them all.
Here's the first 3D printed jaw used to implant in humans.
The day of the Cyborgs is coming, for this is just the beginning!
Now, using metal or even robotic parts to replace and repair damaged human tissue isn’t even close to being something new in science, but creating those parts with a printer certainly is.
A 3D model used to create the jaw bone using the actual dimensions of this person's skull.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re in the future people!
Technology is ever accelerating and I look forward to the fascinating and fantastic future that awaits us.
BBC News writes:
A 3D printer-created lower jaw has been fitted to an 83-year-old woman’s face in what doctors say is the first operation of its kind.
The transplant was carried out in June in the Netherlands, but is only now being publicised.
The implant was made out of titanium powder – heated and fused together by a laser, one layer at a time.
Technicians say the operation’s success paves the way for the use of more 3D-printed patient-specific parts.
The surgery follows research carried out at the Biomedical Research Institute at Hasselt University in Belgium, and the implant was built by LayerWise – a specialised metal-parts manufacturer based in the same country.
Is this woman the subject of a bizarre experiment? Is this a sort of torture? Is this man using a robot to extract something from her throat?
