Ariel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.

Previously on Movie Gadget Friday, we tapped into the near dystopian future of fear in Brazil. Keeping on that 1980's near-future vibe (but with a slightly more sentient twist), this week we check out Michael Crichton's Runaway, starring Tom Selleck, Gene Simmons, Cynthia Rhodes and Kirstie Alley. Filled with circuitry and hardwired chips, the movie reinforces wholesome family values by featuring warranty voids as the gateway hack to murder.


Leaping Insect Robot

Measuring in around the size of a human head, these six-legged, spider-like, autonomous robots are mechanical in movement but shockingly precise in killing prey. The autonomous insects have the ability to propel themselves up to seven feet in the air, allowing for attacks on unsuspecting victims. Dual-functioning, the legs are able to crawl and grasp a multitude of surfaces, albeit awkwardly and rather slowly. After programming targets into a mainframe, the robots are able to identify and kill victims by injecting them with acid via a probe before short circuiting and eventually exploding into a ball of flames. Sadly, the robots lack any sort of remote control, making human errors in target-programming unable to be edited.

Bill Watkins, the oft-outspoken former CEO of Seagate, has thrown his support behind tech startup Vertical Circuits, who claim to have an uncanny knack for shrinking gadgets with the power of voodoo -- or rather, a patented silver ooze, but we prefer our theories. The goo works as a replacement for gold wires to connect vertically stacked chips, cleaning up the internal cable clutter and leaving more room for better processor, bigger batteries, larger displays, or just a tinier form factor. Right now the focus is on stacking flash memory, but the group says they can use the same technique for processors and other chips. At this stage, there's no product or partnership to show for it, but if they're as good as they say, we hopefully won't have to wait long to see the fruits of their labor.

Forget controlling things with your mind, hands or feet -- how's about your completely underutilized eyebrows? Without any real output in mind, one Robert Carlsen designed the Brauswtich to give wearers the ability to control any number of things with just an eyebrow raise. Fully endorsed by The Rock, this apparatus contains a digital switch that can be activated when an eyebrow movement forces the tiny slit shut. Details behind the magic have yet to be revealed, but you can bet you'll see these infiltrating the likes of Spencer's Gifts, Hot Topic and Loose Lucy's when it's good and ready. Naturally, a demo video is after the break.

[Via MAKE]

Last we heard, IBM was busy extending optical lithography down to 30-nanometers in order to keep Moore's Law intact, and some two years later, the process is still being honed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley. Reportedly, gurus there with IQs far greater than ours have developed a new patterning technique (plasmonic nanolithography) that could make "current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful." Additionally, professor Xiang Zhang asserts that this same technology could eventually "lead to ultra-high density disks that could hold 10 to 100 times more data than disks today." The secret to the madness is a flying plasmonic head, which is compared to the arm and stylus of an LP turntable; the setup enables researchers to "create line patterns only 80-nanometers wide at speeds up to 12-meters per second, with the potential for higher resolution detail in the near future." In layman's terms? That CPU you purchased last month will, in fact, be old hat in due time.

[Via Slashdot]

The latest in nanowire research has a crew at the University of California, Berkeley creating the very first integrated circuit "that uses nanowires as both sensors and electronic components." By utilizing a so-called "simple" printing technique, the researchers were able to create a batch of uniform circuits that could one day serve as image sensors. According to Ali Javey, an electrical-engineering professor at the institution, the goal is to "develop all-nanowire sensors" which could be used in a wide array of applications, and the benefit of using 'em is their exceptionally high level of sensitivity. In due time, the gurus would like to make everything on the circuit printable, though we have this strange feeling we won't be seeing any actual results from all of this for years to come.

Carbon nanotubes may very well kill you (okay, so that's very much a stretch), but you'll have a hard time convincing the dutiful scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to stop their promising research. Put simply (or as simply as possible), said researchers have discovered that "networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes printed onto bendable plastic perform well as semiconductors in integrated circuits." So well, in fact, that the nanotube networks could one day "replace organic semiconductors in applications such as flexible displays." Granted, there is still much to do before these networks are ready for product integration, but you can bet these folks aren't hitting the brakes after coming this far.

It's not like we haven't seen art on silicon before, nor is IBM any stranger to the more bizarre world of design, but the firm is nevertheless "touting one of the tiniest pieces of art ever made." The project, which consists of an "image of the sun made from 20,000 microscopic particles of gold," was reportedly "etched on a silicon chip wafer" with a process that managed particles some 60-nanometers in diameter. Of course, IBM isn't planning on entering the abstract art business anytime soon, but the achievement could purportedly pave the way for "high-performance transistors in molecular-scale chips" while "leading to a nanotech race inside IBM and rival companies."

[Image courtesy of BBC, thanks ssuk]

In order to truly judge the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of a newfangled technology, we all know trial by fire is the only way to go. Hence, it follows logic that about 1,000 printed organic RFID tickets will be tested at the Organic Electronics Conference this September in Frankfurt, Germany. The badges will be converted by Bartsch and are "set to be used to monitor the flow of attendees during the two-day conference and exhibition." Deemed the "first ever printed, low-cost organic tickets," these devices will be trialed in order to judge their data collecting abilities and to show whether or not these would be good candidates for use in "public transportation and logistics" applications. So, for those of you heading over to this here event, make sure you're packin' some sort of RFID jammer when waltzing through the door -- you know, just to give these newb tags an unexpected challenge on their first day at work.

As if there weren't enough "almost theres" in the world of printable circuits, now we've got yet another team developing their own iteration of a printing press for electronics. The group, which includes scientists from DuPont and Organic ID, has reportedly "fabricated a printing plate used to print the source-drain level of an array of thin-film transistors," essentially solving some of the low-resolution constraints seen on prior competition. The goal is to eventually posses the ability to "print large, flexible circuits using machines similar to printing presses," and while it seems to be a ways from commercialization, initial testing and comparisons to more traditionally-created transistors have produced glowing results.

[Image courtesy of HowStuffWorks]

While there's already a plethora of safe, proven methods to monitor your heart rate, there's just no satisfaction in buying an off the shelf BioShirt when you know you possess the skills (and spare time) to craft a system of your own. Interested in making his own mark in biomedical engineering, a crafty individual set out to build his own electrocardiograph for nothing more than fun, but rather than keeping his homegrown work all to himself, he busted out a set of instructions in order for us less inventive souls to replicate the process. Aside from creating an ECG board, reading results with LABView, and having the nerve to actually strap leads to your body and hope that you don't electrocute yourself, there's still a good bit of coding and behind the scenes work necessary to pull this off. So if you never got around to going to medical school, but you know you've got the DIY skills to operate a heart monitoring system in your home office, be sure to hit the read link and read that blurb about "destroying your nervous system" real carefully.

[Via MAKE]

Thankfully, it looks like Sony has come through yet again, and while it wasn't exactly in the timeliest of manners, the high-speed CMOS sensor that it promised would deliver 60fps of video output is finally upon us. The 1/1.8-inch IMX017CQE sensor boasts 6.4-megapixels of resolution and the uncanny ability to "output this resolution at 60 frames per second (a data rate of around 384 megapixels per second)." In layman's terms, this chip has the ability to capture full motion video and grab high-quality stills without dropping a single frame, giving users a seamless transition between the two. Additionally, the 1/1.8-inch size and its ability to deliver 300 frames per second at lower resolutions moves it a bit further from the pack, not to mention the 12-bit A/D converter for each column. No word just yet on when these video-centric chips will hit Sony's CyberShot lineup, but it's an awful lot closer to reality than the last time we caught wind of it. [Warning: PDF read link]

[Via DPReview]