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Debugging Your Blood

According to a piece on Popular Science, Aethlon Medical, a small biotech company in San Diego, is developing a pen-size device that can filter viruses from your blood. Blood would flow into the “Hemopurifier” from one artery, get pumped by the user’s heart action through a series of toxin filters, “like a colander,” and then flow back into the body via another artery. The device is designed to filter out smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, and other viruses. Aethlon has already tested the Hemopurifier on animals and hopes to begin human trials by the end of this year. Sign me up.

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Still Kickin’ Bot

For those who only knew combat robotics through the short-lived cult hit Battlebots on Comedy Central, you may be surprised to know that robot wars are still prosecuted in battleboxes all over our Big Blue Marble. One can only hope that, in this IPTV world, fans of bot-on-bot action can find more ready access to this 21st century take on the contact sport. (Hey TiVo: How about deep sixing that unwatchable Rocketboom and give us BotBash instead!?)

One recent event was tthe 4th Annual National Championship of the Robot Fighting League and the ComBots Cup, held at that mecca for robotic combat, San Francisco’s Ft. Mason. Robot magazine has some really nice photo essays and a report on the event on their website. Also be sure to check out the Combots site for additional coverage and video of the event.

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Net Journalist Busks for Story

Here’s something interesting. Blogger Josh Ellis, of Zenarchery, wants to go to the Trinity test site in New Mexico the next time they make the site open to the public (in early April). And he wants US to send him there to write a story about it. He’s taking donations via PayPal and BitPass. He’s looking for US$500. If he gets it, he’ll go and do a story. If he gets less, he’ll donate the money to Witness, an international human rights org. For the money, we get a minimum 2500-word essay on the site, the Manhattan Project, the Bomb, etc. from an “award-winning journalist,” many photos, maybe some video, all posted on his site under a Creative Commons license. He’s already up to $205. I love this. I hope it happens.

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Neuro-Chips Grow Ever Closer

When I wrote The Desire to Be Wired for Wired 1.04 (in 1993!), a group of biomed engineers at Stanford had recently managed to grow rat brain nerve bundles into a silicon array. It was an amazing feat, but it was a passive interface. The next step was figuring out how to get the hardware and the wetware to talk to each other, to exchange usable signals. Thanks to researchers at the University of Padua in Italy, we’re a step closer to this kind of man-machine interface, a technology that holds promise for things like the treatment of neurological disorders.

The Italian science team was able to grow rat brain cells onto a silicon chip with 16,000 transistors and hundreds of capacitors on it. And most amazingly, they were able to pass electrical signals from the neurons to the silicon array’s transistors and to use the power in the capacitors to stimulate the neurons. That’s communication, baby! Now that’s a long way off from hardware and wetware really understanding each other (we’re sort of at the level of caveman grunting), but there are some nearterm applications, such as using neuro-chips to test the effect that new drugs have on brain function.

Thanks, Alberto!

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Two-Tuner Series 2 TiVos

Zatz is reporting that two new Series 2 TiVo models have surfaced on Amazon and other e-tailers that sport two TV tuners and Ethernet capability.

The 80-hour model (TCD649080) will retail for US$249 and a 180-hour unit (TCD649180) for $349. No High-Def or CableCARD in these, we’ll have to wait for the Series 3, due this fall, for that.

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Improving The Glue Gun

I LOVE my glue gun. It’s one of those tools I always appreciate when I’m using it, but don’t use it nearly as much as I have uses for it. Why? It’s kind of a hassle to round it up, plug it in to heat it, and then to deal with the inevitable drooling that it does. It’s messier to work with than it should be.

Cold Heat to the rescue. These are the same folks who gave us the instant-on soldering iron, and they’ve applied the same heating technology to glue guns, creating the Freestyle (US$30), a cordless gun that heats up in under a minute and doesn’t drip like traditional guns. I’m definitely buying one of these babies as soon as I have some mad money to blow.

[Via Kevin Kelly Cool Tools]

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Best. Electronics. Tutorial. Ever.

Think you know how electricity flows through a circuit? Think you know how transistors work? Well, in the immortal words of Firesign Theater: Everything you know is wrong. Or at least slightly off; less than accurate. This article, on an amateur science website, will help clear things up. Here are a few choice tidbits:

…you must abandon the idea that CURRENT travels in transistors or flows inside of wires… Current does not flow. Electric current never flows, since an electric current is not a stuff. Electric current is a flow of something else. (Ask yourself: what’s the stuff that flows in a river, is it “current” or is it called “water?”)

“So what flows inside of wires? The stuff that moves within wires is… is called Electric Charge. It’s the charge that flows, never the current….

[Later]

…Have you discovered the big ‘secret’ of visualizing electric circuits?

ALL CONDUCTORS ARE ALREADY FULL OF CHARGE

Wires and silicon …both behave like pre-filled water pipes and water tanks. This simple fact is usually obscured by the phrase “power supplies create current” or “current flows in wires.” Once we get rid of that word “current,” we can discover fairly stunning insights into simple circuits.

If the two-part piece gets too gnarly for you, there’s a shorter summary article.

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Steve Roberts’s Latest Nomadness

Just the other day, I was wondering what Steve Roberts might be up to these days. As you may recall, Roberts is the “high-tech nomad,” creator of the Behemoth, the tricked out, gadget-laden bike and trailer that used to show up at tech shows back in the day (we’re talking late ’80s/early ’90s). Roberts called the project a “no-holds-barred extravaganza of geek expressionism.” And an extravaganza it was, all 580 lbs of it — that’s how much weight was involved in hauling around the cellphones, laptops, and radio gear of the time.

Things are obviously far more portable these days, but getting together a full spectrum mobile system with phone, radios, GPS, computer, Bluetooth, WiFi, and other communications and data collection tools can still be unwieldy. So Steve’s latest project is the Shacktopus, a sort of deep geek Bond-ian suitcase, a grab n’ go mobile communications center filled with everything you could possibly imagine needing on the well-wired roadtrip. He’s started a new website and blog to document his efforts and is hoping to turn the results into actual product. [Via hack-a-day]