Category: Sci/Tech

This winter (at the height of flu season), I was using a public kiosk touchscreen and started thinking about how many microscopic monsters there probably were crawling over every square inch o’ that greasy ol’ thing. Now imagine LICKING it. That’s the idea behind the EUI, or Edible User Interface, and the TasteScreen system. A USB-controlled dispenser sits atop a PC monitor. It contains 20 taste cartridges that can be combined to create many different flavors. These flavors then drip down the screen where the user can lap ’em up. And you thought your screen got dirty with dust and fingerprints. Obviously not a serious UI (please, tell me it’s not serious), but a fun proof of concept.

[Via Gizmodo]

As you can see from this market report about the RFID market, there’s a very large silver lining: Printed Electronics.

Keep an eye on companies like Conductive InkJet Technologies developing these manufacturing processes.

From an environmental perspective, there are some big advantages to using an additive manufacturing process like this, particularly the reduction in wasted material. Traditional printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing processes are subtractive – you start with a copper-clad board and remove all the unwanted metal.

From an individual designer/hacker perspective, rapid prototyping circuits at your desk, literally on a piece of paper or mylar, is a very exciting prospect.

Origami robotics, anyone?

Notice anything out of the ordinary in the Milky Way this past December 27? Astronomers did. A neutron star 50,000 light years away had a little event, an explosion so intense, it unleased 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts of energy. That’s more oh-la-la in a 10th of a second than our sun grunts out in 100,000 years! Incredible. And just to give you an idea of how perilous our universe can be: if this star had been “only” ten light years closer to our solar system, it could have been lights out for much of life on Earth. Makes you wonder if any higher lifeforms were caught in the path of this thing. The good news (so you Nihilists can put down your Glocks) is that, there are none of these unusual types of stars (called “super-magnetic neutrons” or “magnetars”) in our cosmic neighborhood. Read more at BBC News.

We’re still feelin’ spacey this week. Space.com is running an exclusive piece about several NASA researchers who claim they have found “strong evidence” of microbial life on the Red Planet. Their full findings will appear in the May issue of the journal Nature. Their evidence is indirect, in the form of methane signatures, similar to those found on Earth and remarkably similar to recent findings of such signatures as they appear in caves. They believe that’s where this life might be found on Mars, in caves and in small pockets of water.

Continuing with our sci-tech history lessons, here’s an amazing site of Soviet space history, specifically, their Venus explorations. It’s amazing to realize just how little media coverage all of these missions received in the US, with three atmospheric probes, TEN(!) landings, four orbiters, eleven flybys or impacts, and two balloon probes. That’s a lot of mission success, in fact, the Soviet Venus missions constituted the largest effort to date to study a single planet. I love the images on this site. The look of Soviet space hardware is so unique and so different from ours. Retro-futurism, dude!

In the grand tradition of “Hot or Not?” image voting sites, Space.com has a series of gorgeous photos taken by the Hubble telescope. These babies are awe-inspiring, and really make you sad over the fact that this device will soon be reduced to space debris.

Stanford has put online the video of Doug Engelbart’s 1968 live presentation of the work he and his collegues at the Augmentation Research Center had been working on since 1962. Besides showing off the computer mouse (seen here on the right) for the first time, an amazing array of technologies are demo’d, including hyperlinking and shared-screen network collaboration with audio and video. A tech demo’d that didn’t catch on (widely, anyway) is the Chord Key Set (seen on the left), a input device that used combinations of five keys to send commands to the computer.

In response to Mr. Bill’s recent getting of religion with regards to software interoperability, Hakon Lie, CTO of Opera Software, hands Mr. Microsoft his hat in this great rant on The Register.

Interesting piece on CNET about the changing approach to the beta test phase of software development (think most recent Google offerings and Friendster for three years). Where beta testing used to be a couple of months process, it can now take years, as developers use general consumers as beta testers and as they obsessively tweak code and features. But what does this do to consumer confidence to use a product that is perpetually under construction?

If you’re interested in keeping developments related to WiMAX technology on your radar, bookmark The WiMAX Weblog.

For those who might not be familiar, WiMAX is a developing wireless network standard that has been described as “WiFi on steroids.” If adopted, it would allow for broadband wireless network access over large areas, up to an alleged (but still unproven) 30 miles, around each deployed WiMAX base station (without need for line of sight). WiMAX would connect to existing WiFi “hotspots,” and offer wireless extensions to cable and DSL services. WiMAX promises the creation of MANs (Metropolitan-Area Networks), with base stations providing coverage to entire cities, offering anytime, anywhere broadband access to the Internet. Unfortunately, WiMAX may be more vaporware than hardware. There likely won’t be any WiMAX devices until the end of the year and it could be a year after that before WiMAX finds its way into mobile gear.