June 13, 2006
X3D
What ever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the web? Back in the late 90s, all the hype was about VRML—Virtual Reality Markup Language—which would turn the web into an immersive environment that you'd maneuver around to get to the information you wanted. We're here to tell you that the reports of the 3D web's death are greatly exaggerated. As evidence, we present three 3D browsers that will use that graphics card for something other than gaming: 3B, Browse3D, and SphereXPlorer.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 11, 2006
Touch sensor
An artificial touch sensor as sensitive as a human fingertip has been developed by US scientists. One day it could let surgeons remotely "feel" tissue through an endoscope and help robots pour drinks without spilling a drop.
The sensor is made from a film of nanoparticles of gold and cadmium sulphide. It is so sensitive that it can easily detect the contours of Abraham Lincoln's head embossed on a US penny, and even make out the outlines of the smallest letters printed on the coin.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 14, 2006
Most realistic virtual reality
More than $4 million in equipment upgrades will shine 100 million pixels on Iowa State University's six-sided virtual reality room.
That's twice the number of pixels lighting up any virtual reality room in the world and 16 times the pixels now projected on Iowa State's C6, a 10-foot by 10-foot virtual reality room that surrounds users with computer-generated 3-D images. That means the C6 will produce virtual reality at the world's highest resolution.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesApril 30, 2006
piSight
The piSight™ virtual reality (VR) system is the world's most immersive 3D virtual reality display, ideal for numerous applications including virtual prototyping, training, data mining and more.
The product of nearly a decade of research supported by NASA and a global car company, piSight uses a breakthrough patented optical design that provides for a 3D wrap-around visual sensation with 150° field of view, 2200x1200 pixels per eye in full color.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesApril 04, 2006
Single-molecule diode
Single-molecule diode may change Moore's 'law' of microchip memory.
Using the power of modern computing combined with innovative theoretical tools, an international team of researchers has determined how a one-way electrical valve, or diode, made of only a single molecule does its job. Diodes are critical components within computer, audio equipment and countless other electronic devices. If designers can swap existing diodes with the single-molecule one, the products could be shrunk to incredibly small sizes.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 22, 2006
Bacteria could power tiny robots
Researchers at Rice University and the University of Southern California have embarked on a project to harness the power of Shewanella oneidensis, a microorganism that essentially spits lightning. Rather than consume oxygen to turn food into energy, Shewanella consumes metals.
The waste product of its metabolic process comes in the form of excess electrons stripped from the metals but not recombined in subsequent chemical reactions. The bacteria lives in soil, water and other environments and can extract its necessary nutrients from a variety of materials.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 05, 2006
Nanotube networks conjured on crystals
The key to instantly assembling intricate networks of nanotubes has been discovered by scientists armed with some of the most sophisticated microscopes in the world. The phenomenon may one-day help create tiny nano-circuits that let electrons pass through nano-pipes instead of along silicon wires.
Erdmann Spiecker and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California, US, along with Wolfgang Jäger at Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Germany, used several high-powered microscopes to study a nanoscale phenomenon previously observed in the laboratory but not well understood.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 01, 2006
Saab Aero-X Concept
A week before its debut at the 2006 Geneva Motor Show, pictures of the gorgeous Saab Aero-X have leaked onto enthusiast websites across the internet. This two-seat siren boasts the sexiest shape ever seen on a Saab. The opening canopy is certainly a head turner, even if it may be a too-obvious attempt to play up the brand’s aircraft heritage. The wheels are killer eleven-spoke beauties, and all lighting, inside and out, is LED. Alas, a sexy new sports car is not in the Saab product plan. But let’s hope the Aero-X signals the design direction for future Saabs.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 11, 2006
Nano Imaging
While a microphone is useful for many things, you probably wouldn’t guess that it could help make movies of molecules or measure physical and chemical properties of a material at the nanoscale with just one poke.
Georgia Tech researchers have created a highly sensitive atomic force microscopy (AFM) technology capable of high-speed imaging 100 times faster than current AFM. This technology could prove invaluable for many types of nano-research, in particular for measuring microelectronic devices and observing fast biological interactions on the molecular scale, even translating into movies of molecular interactions in real time. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, appears in the February issue of Review of Scientific Instruments.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJanuary 18, 2006
Nanobattery
Several researchers from Sandia National Laboratories, led by principal investigator Susan Rempe, are part of a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary team developing a nano-size battery that one day could be implanted in the eye to power an artificial retina.
They are among the recipients of a five-year, $6.5 million grant recently awarded by the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a new center, the National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors. Based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the direction of principal investigator Eric Jakobsson, the center is designed to rapidly launch revolutionary ideas in the use of nanomedicine.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 27, 2005
Gyroscope sets course to fight cancer
Miniaturised gyroscopes more commonly found in missile guidance systems can make sensitive biosensors for fast cancer diagnosis.
Micro-gyroscopes comprise a chip with a vibrating disc the size of a sand grain mounted at its centre. The vibrations are highly sensitive to acceleration, so the chips can be used to detect motion in rockets, aircraft and anti-lock braking systems in cars.
But now Calum McNeil and his colleagues at the University of Newcastle in the UK have created a gyroscopic disc less than 0.1 millimetres across that can be used to "weigh" proteins, which allows it to identify particular proteins produced by cancer cells. The disc targets the kind of protein that binds to a DNA coating on a cross on the disc's surface.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 19, 2005
Eliica
The Eliica, short for Electric Lithium-Ion battery Car -- that can do 0-60 in four seconds is faster than a Porsche 911 Turbo, and accelerates at 0.8 Gs. It's also around 5 meters in length, 2400 kg in weight, and has eight wheels. Yes, it's made in Japan. The 10 hour recharge (and the price, over $300,000) are the primary drawbacks.
Watch a video.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 08, 2005
Shimmering colours which change with temperature
Nail polish and expensive cars can nowadays shimmer in many colours, thanks to progress in the field of colloid chemistry, the chemistry of small particles. The bright colours in modern finishes are created because the light is reflected at layers of regularly arranged colloid particles. Individual colours are either removed or strengthened; the thickness of the layers -- what is known as the "lattice constant" -- determines the colour. Because we can nowadays tailor the spherical shape and the surface of the particles, we can produce optimised crystals with the desired lattice constant in the range of visible light.
The team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, led by Dr Wang, has now produced particles that do not interact with their neighbours in spherically symmetric ways. So they placed a colloidal crystal on a surface (image 2) and bombarded it with reactive ions, reducing the particles in the upper layer to the desired size and expanding the free surfaces between the colloids.
Complete Article
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 07, 2005
Sony super fuel cell film
More good news for those of us still waiting for practical fuel cells for our gadgets; Sony has developed a new technology that it says could help produce the world’s most efficient DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell) yet.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 06, 2005
Nanotechnology's Dilemmas
Nanotechnology can learn much from history. As the biotechnology industry recently discovered, ignoring public policy and social issues – namely, possible heath and environmental hazards from genetically modified foods – invites a public backlash that crippled progress and sent corporate stocks plummeting. If nanotechnology is billed as the "Next Industrial Revolution",1 then it also must raise a host of important social and ethical questions that we need to consider now.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesNovember 01, 2005
Venetian blinds
A molecule that flips its arms like the slats on a Venetian blind might in future find uses in computer displays, computer memory, or even windows that become tinted at the flick of a switch.
Molecules whose shapes or movements can be easily controlled are important for nanotechnology. One kind that promises to be useful are those shaped in a helix that can be made to reverse its direction. When that happens the molecule is said to reverse its chirality.
Researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, were working with a helical polymer called polyguanidine. Polyguanidine actually switched chirality so easily that it was difficult to control. To try to make the helices more stable, the researchers stuck side chains of anthracene along the helical backbone.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 26, 2005
NanoCar
Rice University scientists have constructed the world's smallest car -- a single molecule "nanocar" that contains a chassis, axles and four buckyball wheels.
The "nanocar" is described in a research paper that is available online and due to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Nano Letters. The "nanocar" is described in a research paper that is available online and due to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Nano Letters.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 18, 2005
The Air Car
French company Moteur Developpment International (MDI) has developed a car powered by compressed air. The air expands to push pistons and then the pistons drive a crankshaft in a way similar to the way an internal combustion engine works. The vehicle has a compressor driven from plugging into an electric socket that recharges the compressed air in 3 to 4 hours.
Read more How it works
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Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 12, 2005
Nanohelix structure
A previously-unknown zinc oxide nanostructure that resembles the helical configuration of DNA could provide engineers with a new building block for creating nanometer-scale sensors, transducers, resonators and other devices that rely on electromechanical coupling.
Based on a superlattice composed of alternating single-crystal "stripes" just a few nanometers wide, the "nanohelix" structure is part of a family of nanobelts – tiny ribbon-like structures with semiconducting and piezoelectric properties – that were first reported in 2001.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 11, 2005
Bio Programming
The next step after reading genetic code is writing it. In June, biotech pioneers J. Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith launched Synthetic Genomics, a Rockville, MD-based "synthetic biology" startup aimed at creating custom-made micro-organisms.
The new company's president is Juan Enriquez, former director of Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project and CEO of the Wellesley, MA, investment partnership Biotechonomy, which funds Synthetic Genomics.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 08, 2005
Six Degrees of Separation
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have invented a new algorithm that solves a network-searching conundrum that has puzzled computer scientists and sociologists for years.
The scientists created an algorithm that helps explain the sociological findings that led to the theory of “six degrees of separation,” and could have broad implications for how networks are navigated, from improving emergency response systems to preventing the spread of computer viruses.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 06, 2005
4G prototypes reach blistering speeds
Cellphones capable of transmitting data at blistering speeds have been demonstrated by NTT DoCoMo in Japan.
In experiments, prototype phones were used to view 32 high definition video streams, while travelling in an automobile at 20 kilometres per hour. Officials from NTT DoCoMo say the phones could receive data at 100 megabits per second on the move and at up to a gigabit per second while static. At this rate, an entire DVD could be downloaded within a minute. DoCoMo's current 3G (third generation) phone network offers download speeds of 384 kilobits per second and upload speeds of 129 kilobits per second.
The technology behind NTT DoCoMo's high-speed phone network remains experimental, but the 4G tests used a method called Variable-Spreading-Factor Spread Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (VSF-Spread OFDM), which increases downlink speeds by using multiple radio frequencies to send the same data stream.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesAugust 26, 2005
3D TV by 2020
Japan plans to make this futuristic television a commercial reality by 2020 as part of a broad national project that will bring together researchers from the government, technology companies and academia.
The targeted "virtual reality" television would allow people to view high-definition images in 3D from any angle, in addition to being able to touch and smell the objects being projected upwards from a screen parallel to the floor.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesAugust 25, 2005
Light that travels… faster than light!
A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical computing to the fiber-optic telecommunications industry.
On the screen, a small pulse shifts back and forth – just a little bit. But this seemingly unremarkable phenomenon could have profound technological consequences. It represents the success of Luc Thévenaz and his fellow researchers in the Nanophotonics and Metrology laboratory at EPFL in controlling the speed of light in a simple optical fiber. They were able not only to slow light down by a factor of three from its well – established speed c of 300 million meters per second in a vacuum, but they've also accomplished the considerable feat of speeding it up – making light go faster than the speed of light.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesAugust 15, 2005
‘Fantastic Voyage’ Through the Human Body
Using revolutionary medical imaging technology, researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology are providing a better understanding of the human body and its many secrets.
Led by Richard Doolittle, RIT’s director of the department of medical sciences, and Paul Craig, professor of chemistry, a team of students has created never-before-seen virtual images of the pancreas, detailed pictures of the human skull and DNA-level images of protein molecules. Their findings were presented today in a virtual tour entitled “3D Visualization in Science, from molecules to cells to organs.”
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Home >> Future TechnologiesAugust 08, 2005
FUTURES MARKET
Cars that drive themselves, artificial brains and human rights for robots... it's just a matter of time.
A Technology Timeline compiled by researchers at BT's futurology department has come up with a list of advances it says will change tomorrow's world.
And they should know what they're talking about - in the past they've correctly predicted text messaging, email spam and internet search engines.
According to BT's boffins, most of us will live to 100 while obesity and the dentist's drill will be distant memories.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJuly 18, 2005
Virtual Culture
Virtual computer characters more accustomed to battling deranged alien monsters are about to take part in a unique social experiment.
A society of virtual "agents” - each with a remarkably realistic personality and the ability to learn and communicate - is being crafted by scientists from five European research institutes who hope to gain insights into the way human societies evolve.
The project, known as – or – brings together experts in artificial intelligence, linguistics, computer science and sociology. It is backed by a consortium consisting of the and in the UK, Tilberg and Universities in the Netherlands and in Hungary.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJuly 10, 2005
Big Screen
France Telecom's wireless unit, SA, will soon roll out a new mobile video service that will let cellular phone subscribers view TV, movies, photos, and broadband Internet content with a big-screen viewing effect using Kopin®-enabled video eyewear from U.S.-based . ., the largest U.S. manufacturer of microdisplays for mobile consumer electronics and military applications, has received an order for CyberDisplay® 230K microdisplays from MicroOptical for this application.
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With robots, you can live forever
Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes immortality is ours if we program the human body like a computer. Clint Witchalls reports.
Most people know Ray Kurzweil as an IT boffin. He is a pioneer of flatbed scanners, print-to-speech software for the blind and commercially marketed speech-recognition software. And as if that isn't enough, he is known for his IT predictions.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Marvin Minsky described Kurzweil as a "leading futurist of our time" - so it should come as no surprise that Kurzweil's latest book is about health and longevity.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJuly 02, 2005
Nano-levers point to futuristic gadgets
Billions of tiny mechanical levers could be used to store songs on future MP3 players and pictures on digital cameras.
As bizarre as the idea might sound, researchers at a Dutch company have already demonstrated that miniscule mechanical switches can be used to store data using less power than existing technologies and with greater reliability.
Nanomech memory, developed by Cavendish Kinetics in the Netherlands, stores data using thousands of electro-mechanical switches that are toggled up or down to represent either a one or zero as a binary bit. Each switch is a few microns long and less than a micron wide - roughly one-hundredth the width of a human hair.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 22, 2005
The next generation of prosthetics
Every week, 3,000 people lose a limb. They join the more than 4 million American amputees living in the United States. Prosthetics can help, but they're a far cry from the real thing.
Jay Martin, of Scott Sabolich Prosthetics & Research in Oklahoma City says much has been mimicked in prosthetics, but a few things are lacking. One is the control system. Prosthetics don't allow people to have a varied control corresponding to their environment. Secondly, they don't mimic whole natural biomechanical movements independent of the terrain. Martin says with the most advanced technology currently available, the ankle is positioned at a set angle and has a limited range of motion.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 21, 2005
Further steps towards artificial eggs and sperm
Human embryonic stem cells have been coaxed in the lab to develop into the early forms of cells which eventually become eggs or sperm, UK researchers have revealed.
Work by several groups has shown that a tiny proportion of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) spontaneously develop into primordial germ cells when allowed to differentiate in a dish. In this latest study, Behrouz Aflatoonian and colleagues at the University of Sheffield, produced primordial germ cells which began to express the proteins characteristic of sperm cells, while others resembled eggs.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 19, 2005
Is this the future of air combat?
For 65 years, the Mojave Desert has spawned the fastest, highest-flying and most agile airplanes in the world. This vast expanse of scrub and Joshua tree forests encompasses the U.S. Air Force’s deadly-secret Area 51 in Nevada, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, and, at Mojave airfield itself, Burt Rutan’s sci-fi enclave, Scaled Composites. At the heart of it all is the flight-test center at Edwards Air Force Base—and here is where a very nontraditional confrontation over the future of air combat is beginning to play out.
In one corner of the base resides the USAF’s current star project, the Lockheed Martin F/A-22 Raptor. The Raptor is fast, cruising at speeds other fighters can attain only in short sprints. It’s also agile, heavily armed, and stealthy. In tests last year, the pilots of older F-15s that engaged the Raptors in simulated combat never saw the airplane that “hit” them.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 16, 2005
'Curious' Aibos
Sony has succeeded in giving selected Aibo pet robots curiosity, researchers at Sony Computer Science Laboratory (SCSL) in Paris said last week. Their research won't lead to conscious robots soon, if ever, but it could help other fields such as child developmental psychology, they said during an open day in Tokyo.
More than 50 years ago Alan Turing, considered by many to be the father of computer science, speculated about the possibility of creating synthetic consciousness. Progress has been made with AI (artificial intelligence) systems, which have typically used task-defined learning algorithms that enable programs to define what is good or bad about particular sets of information in relation to achieving preset goals, according to SCSL researcher Frederic Kaplan.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 15, 2005
Japan's robot-led recovery
Ten teenagers huddled over a Transformer-like robot in a humble classroom are pioneers in a Japanese initiative called "super science", a nationwide effort in public education to nurture future leaders in technology.
While fears are growing that Japan is being overshadowed by the clout of China, along with increasingly successful businesses in other Asian nations, hopes are high for the program, which grants high schools money to pay for their own original technology curriculum.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 13, 2005
BIONIC MAN
Researchers at Imperial College London are planning to implant tiny computer chips into patients to monitor their condition.
Trials on diabetics are expected to take place by as early as this Christmas.
The "999 chip" will keep an eye on blood sugar levels, transmitting a signal to doctors the instant there is any dangerous change in the patient's condition.
It is the latest development in the field of cyborg technology which began with the very first heart pacemakers in the 1950s.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 09, 2005
Intelligent Design
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 07, 2005
The machine that can copy anything
A revolutionary machine that can copy itself and manufacture everyday objects quickly and cheaply could transform industry in the developing world, according to its creator.
The "self-replicating rapid prototyper," or "RepRap" is the brainchild of Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the UK.
It is based on rapid prototyping technology commonly used to manufacturer plastic components in industry from computer-generated blueprints -- effectively a form of 3D printer.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 06, 2005
IBM Aims To Simulate A Brain
IBM has embarked on a quest for the holy grail of neuroscience--the far-off goal of creating a computer simulation of the human brain.
When the first mammals evolved from reptiles 200 million years ago, one of the biggest changes was inside their heads. Their brain cells were structured together into columns, an innovation that could be repeated like a computer chip to make larger and more powerful minds-- from mice to cats and dogs to humans.
"This was the jump from reptiles to mammals," says Henry Markram, founder of the Brain/Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland. "It was like discovering a G5 processor or Pentium 4 and just copying it."
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 04, 2005
Next-Generation Memory Chip
A team of international scientists has made a gigantic stride forward to develop next-generation memory chips, which are more progressed compared to the current best 60-nanometer products.
The team, participated by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology professor Kim Sang-ouk, said yesterday that they established a pattern helpful in building the futuristic memory chips.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 03, 2005
Transhumanist Values
Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades. It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities. Other transhumanist themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition. The ambit is not limited to gadgets and medicine, but encompasses also economic, social, institutional designs, cultural development, and psychological skills and techniques.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJune 02, 2005
Magnetic Resonance goes Nano
Researchers from NTT Basic Research Labs in Japan and the Japan Science and Technology Agency have built a nuclear magnetic resonance device that has the potential to overcome the limit because it is small enough to fit on a computer chip. It could also be tapped to allow nuclear magnetic resonance devices used in chemistry, biology and medicine to examine smaller samples, according to the researchers.
Quantum computers use properties like spin to represent the 1s and 0s of digital information. In theory, quantum computers would be able to solve certain types of very large problems, including those underpinning today's encryption technologies, many orders of magnitude faster than today's classical computers.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 31, 2005
Future soldiers ironmen?
The American military is working on a new generation of soldiers, far different from the army it has.
"They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."
The robot soldier is coming.
The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 30, 2005
Hydrogen Cars
Is the world at the tipping point of saying yea or nay to a hydrogen economy, at least, for transportation? What trend or world event will force the tipping point? The crystal ball remains fuzzy.
Ford and General Motors are in dire financial straits. Credit rating agencies saw the automakers' plights as so desperate they cut their credit ratings to junk status, which means it is far more expensive for them to borrow money.
At the same time, both companies are developing hydrogen-powered vehicles, and spending billions to do so. An insider at one company said there's a raging debate about whether the automaker should be spending those billions on technologies that appear to be far in the future. The debate centers around whether those billions should be cut to save money (and maybe the future of the company), or reallocate those billions to new products that will keep the company afloat in the short run.
Dennis Campbell, chief executive of a premier company in developing fuel cells, Ballard Power Systems Inc., based in Vancouver, British Columbia, thinks we're approaching the tipping point toward a hydrogen economy.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 29, 2005
The future is a chip inside your head
Imagine a world where you can never lose your mobile phone because the technology has been implanted in your jawbone; a future where elite football teams play to neurally downloaded tactics and where everything you buy comes with GPS software to help you keep track of it. It may sound like science fiction but, according to a leading academic based in Scotland, it could soon be fact.
Andy Clark, a shock-haired professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, believes his finger is on tomorrow’s pulse. He burst into the academic stratosphere with the 2003 publication of Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. That book explored the way human minds might interact with emerging technology, instantly becoming both a key scientific text and a crossover hit in the United States, casting Clark in the role of scientific seer.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 24, 2005
Digital Immortality - Download the Mind by 2050
The wealthy will be able to download their consciousness into computers by 2050 - the not so well off by "2075 or 2080", claims futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson, head of the Futurology unit at BT.
While it sounds like science fiction, Pearson is serious about his claim. He believes that humans will achieve a kind of virtual immortality by saving their consciousnesses into computers within the next 45 years.
"If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. “If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT."
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 16, 2005
Paralyzed Rats Walk; Humans Next?
Researchers studying embryonic stem cells have published long-awaited data in a peer-reviewed journal, revealing how they enabled rats with crushed spinal cords to walk again. Spinal cord injury patients are hopeful, but they're not all celebrating just yet.
The publication is certainly a step in a promising direction for the treatment of patients with damaged spinal cords. But the study found that the technique worked only on recently injured rats, not those with chronic injuries. The researchers say they hope to begin human clinical trials sometime soon, but the tests will likely study only newly injured patients.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 14, 2005
High-Tech Robot Skin
High-Tech Robot Skin: Goddard technologist Vladimir Lumelsky believes the future of robotics lies with the development of a high-tech, sensor-embedded covering that would be able to sense the environment, much like human skin.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 11, 2005
ROBEA Project
The machine called RABBIT, which resembles a high-tech Tin Man from "The Wizard of Oz," minus the arms, was developed by University of Michigan and French scientists over six years. It's the first known robot to walk and balance like a human, and late last year, researchers succeeded in making RABBIT run for six steps. It has been able to walk gracefully for the past 18 months.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 05, 2005
Penelope: The Robo-Nurse
Meet “Penelope”, the robo-nurse of the future. With nurse shortages becoming a problem nationwide, Penelope’s creators hope that their creation can help reduce the burden put on nurses.
The robot will not be involved with the actual care of the patients – the most important role of its human counterpart. Instead, its main job will be to help surgeons in the operating room with simple tasks.
Her developers, Michael Treat and his team at Robotic Surgical Tech, Inc., endowed her artificial intelligence specific to surgical situations. Penelope uses voice recognition technology to “listen” for the surgeon’s commands. When the surgeon asks for a scalpel, she repeats the word, and using a visual processing capability, reaches for the tool and hands it to the surgeon.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMay 03, 2005
Aerogel
Aerogel is not like conventional foams, but is a special porous material with extreme microporosity on a micron scale. It is composed of individual features only a few nanometers in size. These are linked in a highly porous dendritic-like structure.
This exotic substance has many unusual properties, such as low thermal conductivity, refractive index and sound speed - in addition to its exceptional ability to capture fast moving dust. Aerogel is made by high temperature and pressure-critical-point drying of a gel composed of colloidal silica structural units filled with solvents. Aerogel was prepared and flight qualified at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL also produced aerogel for the Mars Pathfinder and Stardust missions, which possesses well-controlled properties and purity. This particular JPL-made silica aerogel approaches the density of air. It is strong and easily survives launch and space environments. JPL aerogel capture experiments have flown previously and been recovered on Shuttle flights, Spacelab II and Eureca.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesApril 30, 2005
iBOT
INDEPENDENCE® iBOT™ 3000 Mobility System, one of the most scientifically advanced devices of its kind ever brought to market. Power across sand, gravel, grass and other rough terrain…travel easily over curbs…rise to an "eye-level" position where you can reach new heights …climb up and down a flight of stairs -- you can do all this with your iBOT™ Mobility System. Created for people like yourself who want to be more active, this is the first powered mobility system that lets you go more places and do what you love - on your own and with little planning.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesApril 20, 2005
Concept Centaur
Like the mythical half-horse, half-man of Greek lore, Concept Centaur combines the best of several technologies to create an innovative whole. The result of exploration by Segway LLC's product development team, Concept Centaur will challenge the way you think about four-wheeled transportation.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesApril 03, 2005
Sort of human, but not quite
Donald McLellan has a pretty smart computer.
It watches what he reads and writes and can go online for information it thinks he might need. "If I didn't have it, I'd have to hire a research analyst to sit next to me," said the corporate vice president at Motorola Inc.
McLellan uses software called Watson, developed at Northwestern University and marketed by Chicago's Intellext Inc., which is part of a new wave of programs that provide computers with something akin to human intelligence. But these programs do not think for their users.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 29, 2005
Nanofactories
When the notion of nanotechnology first hit public consciousness a decade ago, exciting concepts of molecular-scale nanobots performing miraculous feats of engineering-or, in the nightmare scenario, self-replicating until they dominated the earth-seemed to be within reach. But the vision has since been scaled back considerably, with funded projects looking at the next generation of semiconductor manufacturing and with companies marketing nanocluster solutions for building new materials.
A genuine nanoscale fabrication capability might arrive soon that would transform industrial society, though not in the fashion initially envisioned, according to a study by Chris Phoenix, director of research at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (New York). Phoenix proposes a desktop nanofabrication system that could build industrial components from the molecular level up under programmable control. The concept blends traditional mass-production techniques with an assembler that would use a combination of chemistry and physical mechanics to assemble objects from individual atoms.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 28, 2005
Black holes in production in New York
Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York have created a very short-lived, very tiny black hole, or at least, a fireball that behaved quite a lot like one for a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.
The scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) fired beams of gold nuclei into each other at relativistic speeds, creating a ball of plasma around 300m times hotter than the surface of the sun. According to Metro, a Daily Mail sister publication, some particles were then absorbed by the plasma in the same way that particles are absorbed by black holes.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 21, 2005
Nanoworld
Taking a new approach to the painstaking assembly of nanometer-sized machines, a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has successfully used single bacterial cells to make tiny bio-electronic circuits.
The work is important because it has the potential to make building the atomic-scale machines of the nanotechnologist far easier. It also may be the basis for a new class of biological sensors capable of near-instantaneous detection of dangerous biological agents such as anthrax.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 13, 2005
Scra-Scra-Scratching Thin Air
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard are developing a DJ track-mixing and scratching device they believe to be as significant to music as was the first electric guitar.
HP's DJammer is a prototype handheld gadget DJs can use to mimic the sound of scratching vinyl simply by moving the device around. So, if the operator makes a scratching motion in the air, arrays of internal motion sensors translate movement into music, and the DJammer "scratches" the music as though the DJ were manipulating a record.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesMarch 03, 2005
NIST-UCSB Scientists Entice Superconducting Devices
Two superconducting devices have been coaxed into a special, interdependent state that mimics the unusual interactions sometimes seen in pairs of atoms, according to a team of physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The experiments, performed at the NIST laboratory in Boulder, Colo., are an important step toward the possible use of “artificial atoms” made with superconducting materials for storing and processing data in an ultra-powerful quantum computer of the future.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 26, 2005
The Ornithopter Project
Recently there have been many breakthroughs in “flapping wing” flying technology, particularly at University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, under the purview of Prof. James DeLaurier. Presently the prototypes that exist are mostly remote controlled small scale ornithopter’s. If this continues at the present state of development, major advancement could take numerous years. Professor DeLaurier has found an opportunity where this technology can be advanced in an expeditious and awe inspiring manner. In one year he envisions showcasing this technology at the 2006 Turin Olympics in Italy!
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 25, 2005
The future of the future
bring it up because I've been hearing more references lately to Kurzweil's Law, otherwise known as the Law of Accelerating Returns. Coined by futurist Ray Kurzweil, the theory states that building on past accomplishments, the pace of technological change doubles every decade--leading to a Moore's Law vision of progress.
"Early stages of technology--the wheel, fire, stone tools--took tens of thousands of years to evolve and be widely deployed. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift such as the printing press took on the order of a century to be widely deployed. Today, major paradigm shifts, such as cell phones and the World Wide Web, were widely adopted in only a few years time," Kurzweil wrote in the original essay outlining the theory.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 23, 2005
Grand ambitions
Hugh Durrant-Whyte is building a world where one day he will control the Hunter Valley's mines and robotic expeditionary forces in remote areas from the PC in his Sydney office.
Professor Durrant-Whyte and his team at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems are tackling a "Grand Challenge" of IT research – the fusion of machines, computing, sensing and software to create intelligent systems that interact with the complex real world.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 22, 2005
World's Fastest OscillatingNanoMachines
Nanotechnology leapt into the realm of quantum mechanics this past winter when an antenna-like sliver of silicon one-tenth the width of a human hair oscillated in a lab in a Boston University basement. With two sets of protrusions, much like the teeth from a two-sided comb or the paddles from a rowing shell, the antenna not only exhibits the first quantum nanomechanical motion but is also the world’s fastest moving nanostructure.
A team of Boston University physicists led by Assistant Professor Pritiraj Mohanty developed the nanomechanical oscillator. Operating at gigahertz speeds, the technology could help further miniaturize wireless communication devices like cell phones, which exchange information at gigahertz frequencies. But, more important to the researchers, the oscillator lies at the cusp of classic physics, what people experience everyday, and quantum physics, the behavior of the molecular world.
Comprised of 50 billion atoms, the antenna built by Mohanty’s team is so far the largest structure to display quantum mechanical movements.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 15, 2005
Inside the future
Ian Pearson rattles off future technologies that range from the seemingly magical, such as supercomputers that breed like yoghurt cultures, to using your mobile phone in the mundane act of finding your mates at the pub.
Pearson is the futurist-in-residence at British Telecom's research labs, one of the most hallowed halls of deep research in the world and, along with Bell Labs in the US, a birthplace of early optical-fibre technologies. Pearson says that within a generation, we will grow computers from biological cultures that are faster than those we today construct in silicon, gold and plastic.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 13, 2005
US denies patent for part-human hybrid
A New York scientist's seven-year effort to win a patent on a laboratory-conceived creature that is part human and part animal ended in failure Friday, closing a historic and somewhat ghoulish chapter in US intellectual property law.
The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the claim, saying the hybrid -- designed for use in medical research but not yet created -- would be too closely related to a human to be patentable.
Paradoxically, the rejection was a victory of sorts for the inventor, Stuart Newman of New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y. An opponent of patents on living things, he had no intention of making the creatures. He said his goal was to set a legal precedent that would keep others from profiting from similar "inventions."
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 07, 2005
Self-assembled nano-sized probes
Nano-sized particles embedded with bright, light-emitting molecules have enabled researchers to visualize a tumor more than one centimeter below the skin surface using only infrared light. A team of chemists, bioengineers and medical researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota has lodged fluorescent materials called porphyrins within the surface of a polymersome, a cell-like vesicle, to image a tumor within a living rodent. Their findings, which represent a proof of principle for the use of emissive polymersomes to target and visualize tumors, appear in the Feb. 7 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesFebruary 01, 2005
Nanotechnology, Biotech, and Our Common Future
As befits an information-besotted age, we live amidst buzzwords that, like some species of exotic insect, seem to live and die in weeks. You might think that the acronym “NBIC” (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information and communication technology (ICT), and Cognitive science) is such an infocritter. But the phenomena behind this term are complex and profound, and raise difficult conceptual and operational questions for not just environmentalists, but anyone interested in human futures.
NBIC is not simply recognition of four rapidly evolving areas of research and technological advance. Rather, it also indicates that the four components -- which are probably best thought of as frontiers of knowledge, rather than simply new technologies -- are increasingly converging in many ways. The boundaries between them are growing increasingly fuzzy and fluid -- is building a DNA-based computational system ICT, or biotechnology, or nanotechnology? They also share some important functional similarities -- for example, all of them represent substantial leaps in the amount of information available to humans, and the ability to manipulate and learn from that information. Thus, for example, biotechnology explicates genome after genome, and the patent system and free market economics rapidly commoditize such information as it is developed. They also represent significant extensions of human intentionality into scales -- such as the very small -- that heretofore were closed to human design.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJanuary 30, 2005
RFID-Equipped Robots Used as Guide Dogs
A professor in computer science at the Utah State University (USU) is building robots to help people with disabilities, according to the Utah Statesman in this article. The story, which is more focused on the professor than robotics, carries several anecdotes, such as an embarrassing voice recognition system. After a blind man cleared his throat, the robot misinterpreted the sound as a sign that the man wanted to go to the bathroom. Later, every time a man cleared his throat before speaking, the robot changed directions and insisted to guide him to the restrooms. Even if the article is entertaining, this project at USU is far more ambitious. In fact, they want to design RFID-enabled robots mounted on mobile carts which will welcome blind persons at the entrance of a supermarket and guide them through the store.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJanuary 27, 2005
Battle bot: the future of war?
They've spied on the enemy, sniffed for deadly chemical and radioactive emissions, and sacrificed themselves to detonate terrorist bombs. Now robots are ready to strap on guns and fight the battles too.
This spring, the United States armed forces are expected to deploy 18 Talon robots to Iraq. The semi-autonomous machines will be capable of firing rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and rockets with better accuracy than human soldiers. They're the latest step in a surge of battlefield "bots" that are increasingly shouldering the military's most dangerous jobs.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesJanuary 23, 2005
Best-Kept Secrets
At the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, Charles Bennett is known as a brilliant theoretician--one of the fathers of the emerging field of quantum computing. Like many theorists, he has not logged much experience in the laboratory. His absentmindedness in relation to the physical world once transformed the color of a teapot from green to red when he left it on a double boiler too long. But in 1989 Bennett and colleagues John A. Smolin and Gilles Brassard cast caution aside and undertook a groundbreaking experiment that would demonstrate a new cryptography based on the principles of quantum mechanics.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 28, 2004
Rebuilding Things "Atom by Atom"
Chad Mirkin is a world leader in a field with potential that's near limitless: Nanotechnology. Governments, venture funds, and angel investors are pouring billions of dollars into the area, hoping that the ability to manipulate materials at the atomic level will produce revolutionary medicines, metals, and fuels.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 18, 2004
Technologies for the blind
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are developing new assistive technologies for the blind based on advances in computer vision that have emerged from research in robotics.
A "virtual white cane" is one of several prototype tools for the visually impaired developed by Roberto Manduchi, an assistant professor of computer engineering, and his students.
The traditional white cane is still the most common mobility device for the blind. It is a simple and effective tool that enables users to extend their sense of touch and "preview" the area ahead of them as they walk. But the long, rigid cane is not well-suited to all situations or all users.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 16, 2004
Tomorrow's chips, naturally
Visionaries more than half a century ago imagined machines capable of growth, self-repair and self-replication. By digitally mimicking biological tissue’s properties, European researchers recently demonstrated a platform for autonomous computer systems.
“There are three ways to model hardware on self-organising biology,” says Juan-Manuel Moreno, coordinator of the IST POEtic project. “They are development, learning and evolution – respectively known to biologists as ontogenesis, epigenesis and phylogenesis. All three models are based on a one-dimensional description of the organism, the genome.”
In the early 1990s, computer scientists tested systems that mimic the development of an individual as directed by their genetic code. Then they started to use artificial intelligence to copy the processes of learning, as influenced by an individual’s genetic code and their environment. “But until our project, nobody had succeeded in bringing together all three models in a single piece of hardware,” adds Moreno.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 12, 2004
Wireless network smashes world speed record
A new world record has been set for transmitting data across a wireless network, claim researchers in Germany.
A team at Siemens Communications research laboratory in Munich, have transmitted one gigabit (one billion bits) of data per second across their mobile network. By contrast, the average wireless computer network can send only around 50 megabits (50 million bits) of data per second.
The researchers used three transmitting and four receiving antennas and a technique for boosting the amount of data that can be sent wirelessly, called Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM), to set their record.
"With our experimental system, we've been able to demonstrate how powerful [multiple] antennas can be in combination with OFDM," says Christoph Caselitz, president of the Mobile Networks Division at Siemens Communications. Caselitz estimates that wireless networks will be expected to cope with 10 times as much data by 2015.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesDecember 11, 2004
Robotic pods take on car design
The company's vision for the single passenger in the 21st Century involves the driver cruising by in a four-wheeled leaf-like device or strolling along encased in an egg-shaped cocoon that walks upright on two feet.
Both these prototypes will be demonstrated, along with other concept vehicles and helper robots, at the Toyota stand at the Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, in March 2005.
The models are being positioned as so-called personal mobility devices, which have few limits.
The open leaf-like "i-unit" vehicle is the latest version of the concept which the company introduced last year.
Built using environmentally friendly plant-based materials, the single passenger unit is equipped with intelligent transport system technologies that allow for safe autopilot driving in specially equipped lanes.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesNovember 25, 2004
New Toyota Hybrid Auto Parks Itself
Your hands don't even need to be touching the steering wheel for it to start spinning back and forth aggressively, all by itself _ slowly guiding the car into the parking spot. Parallel parking is designed to be a breeze with the Intelligent Parking Assist system, part of a new $2,200 option package for Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius gas-electric hybrid in Japan. This is a bold and somewhat unnerving concept, a car that parks itself. As a driver, you've got to wonder as the Prius eases back toward the curb: What is this machine thinking? It's also difficult not to be gripped by a "Look Ma, no hands" thrill -- even if the system only partially fulfills its promise. But we'll get to the drawbacks later. First, the logic behind this innovation.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesNovember 21, 2004
Nano Fabric May Make Computers Thinner
Electrons in graphene travel without any scattering over submicron distances -- an important quality for ultra-fast-switching transistors, researchers have found. Smaller transistors mean shorter paths for electrons to travel to switch devices on and off, and faster computers.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesNovember 20, 2004
New Vehicles Will Make Own Decisions Based on Commands
The next war could be fought partly by unmanned aircraft that respond to spoken commands in plain English and then figure out on their own how to get the job done, even dodging enemy aircraft as they carry out their assignments.
This isn't just robotics, in which someone has to be on hand to issue commands to an unmanned vehicle all along the way. This is autonomy at its best, with vehicles that can make decisions similar to the way a human pilot figures out how to accomplish a task and then carries it out.
Engineers and scientists at several institutions and corporations are working on the project, chiefly under the sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They have already demonstrated that the idea can work.
Last June, a Lockheed T-33 fighter jet successfully completed a series of assignments given by the pilot of another aircraft over Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. There was a pilot aboard the T-33, just in case something went wrong, but it turned out that he had nothing to do. Everything went according to plan, even when some assignments were changed at the last minute.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesNovember 08, 2004
Flying cars
An aviation vehicle is currently being developed in Israel that can fly amid skyscrapers and park inside buildings. Its purpose is not to find that elusive parking place in New York City, but rather to become the most effective life-saving rescue feature since the ambulance.
Called the X-Hawk, the vehicle is a "rotorless" Vertical-Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicle. Unlike a helicopter, the X-Hawk's propellers are not extended, but incorporated into the body of the aircraft, enabling it to pull up close to the windows of tall buildings without danger of collision.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesNovember 04, 2004
Redefining Smart
Book Review
Conventional wisdom is a red flag to Jeff "Trip" Hawkins: By defying it, he has achieved spectacular success. As the founder of two groundbreaking technology companies, Palm and Handspring, he virtually created the era of hand-held computers with the launch of the first Palm Pilot in 1996. The wealth he accumulated as a result -- over $100 million -- allowed him to follow a similar iconoclastic approach in tackling his greatest passion: the study of the brain.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesNovember 01, 2004
Three Minutes With Ray Kurzweil
Interview
Technology pioneer, entrepreneur, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, 56, invented the flatbed scanner, developed the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind, helped develop omnifont optical character recognition, and was the first to market large-vocabulary speech recognition technology, among many other achievements. He has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award for invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton. In his latest book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale Books), Kurzweil and coauthor Terry Grossman, MD, explain how new technologies will push human life spans into virtual immortality.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 30, 2004
We’re funny in the brain
A computer walks into a bar ... no, hang on, why did the mainframe cross the road? Please, don’t heckle. IT humour doesn’t work very well. Computers don’t do jokes and the people who understand computers aren’t famous for being a bundle of laughs either. But Dr Kim Binsted, an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), plans to change that. If her project succeeds, your computer of the future could be swapping wisecracks with you faster than a New York cab driver. Her punning program is already helping children with severe speech problems.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 22, 2004
Robots set to get homely by 2007
Seven times more robots will helping us out with the cleaning, security and entertainment in three years' time, as their price falls and they get smarter.
It is not quite the humanoid vision of blockbuster film I, Robot as many of them will be vacuum bots. Two-thirds of the 607,000 domestic robots in use were bought in 2003, says the UN's annual World Robotics report.
As per the data collected and market research that has been done in consumer robotics, it is surely a big market to capture. And a next boom in the technology like software boom. The consumer robotics has no limit of applications; it involves the most advanced technologies like embedded system, AI, Neural Networks, GA. The people entered in this area have great future as a business as well as technology to work in.
The applications possible are like a personal pet, to a personal servant robot like in the movie I, Robot. That day is not too far from now.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 20, 2004
'Knowledge discovery' could speed creation of new products
In the recent science-fiction thriller "Minority Report," Tom Cruise plays a detective who solves future crimes by being immersed in a "data cave," where he rapidly accesses all the relevant information about the identity, location and associates of the potential victim.
A team at Purdue University currently is developing a similar "data-rich" environment for scientific discovery that uses high-performance computing and artificial intelligence software to display information and interact with researchers in the language of their specific disciplines.
"If you were a chemist, you could walk right up to this display and move molecules and atoms around to see how the changes would affect a formulation or a material's properties," said James Caruthers, a professor of chemical engineering at Purdue.
Complete Article
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We're fifty years into the future
On 18 October, 1954, this revolutionary device was announced in America. Fifty years later, it has been blamed for rock and roll, the death of the US consumer electronics industry, the relentless rise of IBM and the shocking state of modern manners. Not a bad score for a transistor radio.
It wasn't just a transistor radio, of course. It was the first. In fact, it was the first transistorised mass-market device, and it symbolised the central role that technology was taking in the post-war world. Never underestimate the power of such symbols – Thomas Watson Jr., head of IBM, gave his senior managers a TR-1 apiece to kick-start the company's transition from valves. That symbolism had a different flavour ten years later as outfits like Sony and Toshiba used the same technology to smoothly wrest control of the market from its inventors. Outsourcing fears are nothing new.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 19, 2004
Connecting the dots
Creating the World Wide Web didn't make Tim Berners-Lee instantly rich or famous. That's partly because the web sprang from relatively humble technologies.
Berners-Lee's invention was based on an information retrieval program called Enquire (named after a Victorian book, Enquire Within Upon Everything), which he wrote in 1980 while working as a programmer at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In part, the lack of riches is because Berners-Lee did the unthinkable when he finished writing the tools that defined the web's basic structure more than 10 years later: he gave them away, with CERN's blessing, no strings attached
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 15, 2004
US science alliance eyes artificial retina
Nine US research institutions, including five of the Department of Energy's (DOE) laboratories, have forged an alliance in a bid to speed development of an artificial retina.
The deal specifies that all institutions involved in the programme will share any intellectual property rights and resulting royalties. In this way, the architects of the agreement hope to encourage free sharing of information, ideas and results. Second Sight Medical Products, the only private company involved in the alliance, will have a limited, exclusive license for inventions that come out of the work.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 08, 2004
Bovine genome completed
Researchers will now have access to the bovine genome sequence as the first draft is made available to the public -- an effort that will fortify the next several decades of cattle research, leaders of the $53-million Bovine Genome Sequencing Project announced today.
Part of the work to complete this first draft of the cow’s genome sequence -- the first mammalian farm animal to have its genes mapped out -- was completed in collaboration with the University of Alberta.
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How 10 top new technologies will help world reach globally-agreed goals by 2015
New medical tools that quickly and accurately diagnose diseases like AIDS and malaria top a list of 10 biotech breakthroughs deemed most important for improving health in developing countries within the decade, science that will dramatically move the world towards its Millennium Development Goals for 2015, according to scientists and ethicists in a major new report to the United Nations.
Newly emerged diagnostic tools detect illness at a molecular level in blood or tissues -- thus improving a patient's chance of survival, conserving scarce resources in poor countries now wasted on inappropriate treatments, and better containing disease outbreaks, according to Genomics and Global Health, being launched Oct. 7 at the 4th World Conference of Science Journalists in Montreal.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesOctober 03, 2004
Biometrics: Are they ready for the office?
UK businesses expect biometrics to play an increasing role in workplace security - with almost half the companies polled in a recent survey saying they expect to implement the technology within two years.
Fingerprint and iris-scanning technologies are currently being rolled out for passports and ID card schemes but are more frequently coming in for consideration within the workplace as well.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 29, 2004
Branch 'Bots' Make Banking Better
The next time you walk into a bank branch, look up and smile ... there may be someone (or something) looking back and watching your every move.
No, it's not the normal security cameras located over the teller window. These new robot eyes track your every movement, from the moment you come through the doors, walk around the lobby and conduct your business, until you leave. In fact, there may be many such robots in the branch, assisting you and the branch during your visit to ensure that the branch is operating as effectively as possible.
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Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 28, 2004
The Grand Challenges of IT
Fundamental research on how to make computer hardware more powerful and software smarter goes back 50 years or more, but many of the traditional methods have nearly reached their limits. Now, researchers moving in bold new directions may be setting the course of IT for decades to come.
There are literally dozens of grand challenges that scientists and economists are attacking, ranging from societal issues to technical advances. Here, we take a look at the challenges in three key areas of IT research: processor performance, chip miniaturization and artificial intelligence.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 08:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 27, 2004
Personal attention, from a computer
Fourteen-year-old Rochelle Brown was close to solving an algebra problem. Yet she stumbled repeatedly on one calculation: -2.3 + 0.5. As she sat at a computer screen, she kept typing 2.8, an incorrect answer. Eventually a hint popped up: "Think about the sign of your answer."
When Rochelle finally typed the correct sum, -1.8, the computer showed its appreciation by allowing her to move on to a new problem. She smiled at her small triumph.
Since January, Middle School 301 in the Bronx, N.Y., where Rochelle is an eighth grader, has been using a software program called Cognitive Tutor to help students learn math. The software, from Carnegie Learning, a 8-year-old company that got its start at Carnegie Mellon University, is designed to give students individualized instruction when personal attention is scarce.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 02:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 22, 2004
Flying cars swoop to the rescue
As motorways become more and more clogged up with traffic, a new generation of flying cars will be needed to ferry people along skyways.
That is the verdict of engineers from the US space agency and aeronautical firms, who envision future commuters travelling by "skycar".
These could look much like the concept skycar shown in the picture, designed by Boeing research and development.
However, such vehicles could be some 25 years from appearing on the market.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 03:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Home >> Future TechnologiesSeptember 13, 2004
Nanotechnology: The next small thing?
Close your eyes and think small. So small that a red blood cell is a whole world, and hydrogen and carbon atoms are as big as baseballs.
Now imagine picking up those atoms and building a machine. A line of carbon makes a wire, while atoms of silver are the teeth on a gear. The finished product is a motor, or a microprocessor, or an entire robot—literally millions of times smaller than any comparable device today.
The promise of nanotechnology is as large as its products are minuscule. Like the Internet, artificial intelligence and atomic energy in their heydays, nanotech has proponents in ecstasy about how it will fundamentally change the world.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 04:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Home >> Future TechnologiesAugust 31, 2004
Domestic bliss through mechanical marvels?
Never mind the humanoid Automated Domestic Assistants walking rich people's pets in the movie I, Robot, or the accordion-armed Robot B9 in TV classic Lost in Space warning of danger on lonely planets.
The real force driving the development of personal robots — and what will eventually create demand for them in the marketplace — is aging baby boomers.
That's the secret among robotics researchers and budding robot companies. As the horde of boomers become old, they increasingly will be unable to care for themselves or their homes. They'll face a social and medical system straining to help them. But they'll be comfortable with technology.
Posted by Vishwakarma C. K. @ 07:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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