Category: Sci/Tech

I love some of the insanely great things that people are doing with rapid prototyping technology. Here, members of the Swedish design group FRONT use motion capture tech to record the free-handed strokes of their furniture drawing and then a rapid prototyping machine fabs the pieces they’ve drawn in liquid plastic. It’s something like this which reminds me I’m actually living in the 21st century.

Call me a big goofy geek, but I actually teared up when I heard the news today that NASA has decided to schedule a Hubble repair mission for Discovery, reversing an earlier decision. The mission will likely happen in 2008 and should keep Hubble viable until 2013.

The mission is not a trivial one. It could involve up to five space walks and considerable risk to astronauts. What was so touching to me, besides the reversal of the previous NASA admin’s decision in general, was the petition that was signed by dozens of astronauts saying they were willing to risk their lives for Hubble. On the news tonight, they had one astronaut who said he talked it over with his family and they all agreed that it was that important.

When I was a teen, dreaming of space, thinking that we would have a significant presence there by the turn of the century, this was the kind of pioneering spirit that really fired my boosters. Like being called to military service or the ministry, I, like a lot of other geeky children of the ’60s, felt the call of space. So often, that seems like a future which didn’t happen, at least not yet. So, when a little glimmer of this future shows through the Fundamentalist Terrordom we’re so-far calling the 21st century, you can see where I might feel a little swell of hope.

So, Godspeed, brave Discovery. Polish up our space telescope, we’ve got billions of galaxies and trillions of stars we need to eyeball.

Read full coverage of the announcement, mission, and the Hubble, here at Space.com.

Here’s a pretty nifty YouTube docu-vid of the Hubble Deep Field image. The vid tries to give you a sense of how incomprehensibly immense our universe is. The astronomical mind-bending is unfortunately impacted by a somewhat overly breathy narration and a horrific soundtrack (after the awesome Pink Floyd intro). As one commenter so aptly put it: “78 billion galaxies and we are the one’s stuck with Zamfir flute soundtracks for our short astronomical features.”

“Friends, Host and Parasites.” Sometimes it’s tough to tell ’em apart. Differentiation doesn’t come any easier in this amazing wearable bio-art project of the same name. Explains the designers :

“[It is] A jacket with a printed pattern that is almost seamless when not active and comes to live through the illumination of the different graphics that compose it. The pattern, like a parasite or a wine plant, grows on the structure of the body as time passes until it grows into a fully blooming visual organism. When the jacket is removed, the organism slowly dies out until it disappears completely.

“The printed organism is created using thermo-chromic inks and is electrically controlled through conductive wire threaded directly on the fabric of the jacket.”

[Via we-make-money-not-art]

One of my MAKE Board compadres, Saul Griffith of the splendifferous Squid Labs, Instructables, and HowToons, got a nice little write-up on CNN’s site, as part of their excellent Explorers piece, looking at innovators and their work. Other researchers and innovators covered include James McLurkin, one of the chief proponents of swarm robotics, Henrik Wann Jensen, master of digital skin rendering, and Deborah Estrin, UCLA’s sensor net guru.

This d00d from Cruxy and ionDB read Xeni’s BB post about Wired’s NextFest and the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo mock-up that was there, wandered down to the Javits Center, and ended up making a short viddy about the ship, interviewing the Veep of VG Marketing, and even getting to go for a “ride.” Now, his litttle vid’s gone somewhat viral. Ain’t blogspace and technology grand?

Bill Higgins sent us a link to his LiveJournal pages about the Rocketbelt Convention that just concluded in New York and a link to his Flickr set on the con. The convention was in Niagra Falls (at the Niagra Aerospace Museum) and the conventioneers took a fieldtrip to the site of the Bell plant where the rocketbelt was invented and test-flown. Bill has some pics of that in the set.

Good stuff. Thanks, Bill!

It seems like moments after a manufacturer releases a new security lock for mobile computers and similar devices, a hacker demonstrates how pitifully easy it is to defeat it. The latest security breach comes courtesy of Engadget and their new The Lockdown column, exploring high-tech security issues. It took the column’s author, Marc Weber Tobias, literally seconds to defeat the new Targus Defcon CL lock, using metal from a beer can.

Ironically, this test was prompted after a call from a St. Paul Pioneer Press tech journalist. He was the same reporter who wrote a detailed story on shoddy laptop locks in 2004. Two years later, doesn’t look like much has changed.

How mind-boggling is this? “In a research first that could lead to a new generation of hard drives capable of storing thousands of movies per square inch, physicists at Rice University have decoded the three-dimensional structure of a tornado-like magnetic vortex no larger than a red blood cell.”

Read the full item here on PhysOrg.

Ars Technica has a nifty piece that runs through the various DRM techs, how they’ve been cracked, and a look at the future of the tech, and future attempts to overcome it [Cue: “We Shall Overcome” and side-to-side protest swaying]. The piece begins:

“Like a creeping fog, DRM smothers more and more media in its clammy embrace, but the sun still shines down on isolated patches of the landscape. This isn’t always due to the decisions of corporate executives; often it’s the work of hackers who devote considerable skill to cracking the digital locks that guard everything from DVDs to e-books. Their reasons are complicated and range from the philosophical to the criminal, but their goals are the same: no more DRM.”

Amen, brothers and sisters. Read the rest of the piece aquí.