Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.
We think it's fair to say that, we all aspire to a future where robots do the hard work, lost limbs self-regenerate, and kids love science. That's not too much to ask now is it? This is alt-week.
It seems like every day we're getting a little bit closer to having tricorders, and today's no exception. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have designed hardware and software that turns the iPhone into a powerful biosensor that's useful for toxin and pathogen testing as well as medical diagnosis. The package consists of a cradle that contains an assortment of lenses and filters which line up with the handset's camera, along with an app that guides the user through the testing process. At the core of the device is a photonic crystal slide which basically turns the iPhone into a high-resolution spectrometer. While the cradle only contains about $200 worth of parts, it's just as accurate as laboratory equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars, with the added bonus of being hand-held. The team just received an NSF grant to explore other applications for the device and is working on a cradle for Android phones. Hit the break for a demo video and a peek into the future.
Welcome to Growing Up Geek, a feature where we take a look back at our youth, and tell stories of growing up to be the nerds that we are. This week, we have our new associate editor, Melissa Grey!
Sometimes, the formative moments in your life happen when you least expect them. One such moment occurred for me in 1997, as I watched my brother pilot Cloud Strife through the ruins of the Forgotten City while Aerith Gainsborough clasped her hands in prayer. We'd taken turns playing Final Fantasy VII on and off for days. He bemoaned my stubborn inclusion of Red XIII in every party and we both developed gambling habits at the Gold Saucer on the outskirts of North Corel. We argued about the validity of Yuffie Kisaragi's existence and watched in awe as Sapphire Weapon emerged from the sea to attack Junon. We laughed. We cried. We experienced a game unlike anything we'd ever played before, but nothing could have prepared us for what happened next.
As a sword-wielding Sephiroth fell on Aerith like an avenging angel, I felt the Earth tilt on its axis. It wasn't simply the unexpected plot twist that left me reeling. No, it was deeper than that. I realized in that moment that the figures on my screen had transcended the jagged stacks of polygons that made them. They had become real to me. The loss of one of them, fictional as it was, cut me to the quick. It was then that I realized what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to devastate people the way I had been devastated. I wanted to build worlds as fantastical as Midgar and populate them with characters as richly layered as Vincent Valentine. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to be a writer.
It may be the most watched sporting event, but SMI's more interested in how we watch the Champions League final than the game itself. The eye-tracking firm, in participation with the KMRC and University of Tübingen, will observe how 61 fans watch the Dortmund/Bayern tussle using its RED-m cameras. The project aims to discover if supporters of rival clubs perceive matches differently and, by tracking their eye movement, learn how those perceptions are formed. Of course, given our violently hysterical reactions when Didier Drogba sunk the winning penalty in last year's game, the researchers might have difficulty keeping the participants still enough to monitor.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and nowhere was it more necessary than in the case of Kaiba Gionfriddo's life. The infant was born with a condition called tracheobronchomalacia that results in weakened support for the trachea, and his fate seemed all but decided until researchers at the University of Michigan proffered an unlikely solution: a 3D-printed tracheal splint. The splint was custom-made just for the child and designed to hold the trachea in place as the bronchus builds around it, giving it strength. In two to three years, the trachea will be able to stand on its own, and the polycaprolactone biomaterial used to create the splint will be absorbed into the body. After a successful operation, Kaiba was taken off ventilator support -- and he hasn't needed it since. From 3D-printed skull prosthetics to this recent innovation, it's clear 3D printing has a far more noble future than just making pizza.
No, not that One. Or that other One. It's definitely not this One either. Rather, we're talking about this One -- you know, the HTC flagship kind -- and the folks at AT&T have a unit ready for you to win. This particular model is of the 32GB persuasion, and it's currently up for grabs. It's not unlocked to all carriers and doesn't come with free service, so we have to limit this contest to our US readers. Two entries are all yours, and you can snag a third for the price of answering a simple question about BlinkFeed. So head below to the Rafflecopter widget and enter! Good luck.
You can take Amazon out of the jungle, but it'll just create one elsewhere -- at least that's what the company is planning for its inner-city Seattle office complex. A tweaked proposal for Amazon's three-block development, named "Rufus 2.0," was run by Seattle's Design Review Board yesterday, and it now includes a huge biodome structure with the notion that a "plant-rich environment has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting." It's five floors feature places to get work done, "dining, meeting and lounge spaces," a pair of shops serving the general public and, of course, lots of plants and trees. We've included a few more renders of the multi-bubble glass house after the break, and you'll find even more eye-candy in the source PDF. Forget the platform wars -- the competition for the coolest next-gen campus is on.
Last week we had lab-grown burgers; this week it's powdered pizza. NASA's gotten in on the synthesized food action by awarding a $125,000 grant to Anjan Contractor, head of Systems & Materials Research Corporation, to develop a 3D food printer. The first device Contractor plans to build under the six-month grant is based on RepRap's open-source hardware and will be designed to print a pizza comprised of three layers of nutritional powders mixed with water and oil. As the final frontier gets further and further away, NASA's need for a nutritious, long-lasting food supply suitable for space travel grows. Since the powders used in Contractor's design -- potentially sourced from insects, grass and algae -- have a shelf life of about 30 years, his 3D food printer would be well-suited to the task. If your appetite's survived the idea of snacks made from pulverized insects, you can watch the grant-winning prototype print some synthesized chocolate after the break.
Got hordes of old photos you don't know what to do with? Well, if you've got access to a 3D printer, what about blessing them with a third dimension? That's what Instructables stalwart Amanda Ghassaei (of 3D printed records fame) has done using an Objet Connex500, some algorithmic wizardry and a bit of left-field thinking. The images, rather than full 3D renderings, are still meant to be viewed in 2D, but use different thicknesses of print to create a silhouette effect. Ghassaei converts images to black and white, and assigns different printing densities to each grayscale pixel value. The results are surprisingly intricate, and still manage to impart a sense of texture. Fortunately for those interested in doing their own, this is Instructables, so, all you need to do is follow along at the source.
Defense Distributed's plan is to put the power of guns in the hands of every person with access to the internet and a 3D printer. Until now, however, we'd only seen the Liberator pistol built using an expensive industrial-grade printer -- despite the fact that the blueprints for gun have been downloaded by thousands of people who don't have access to such a high-end machine. One of those folks decided to put the Liberator in the hands of the printing proletariat by making it with a consumer-level Lulzbot A0-101 3D printer, a nail and some common screws.
This new version, called the Lulz Liberator, differs from the original in that it's got a rifled barrel and uses metal hardware to hold it together (as opposed to printed plastic pins). Printing it took around two days and used about $25 worth of generic ABS material, and the pistol produced was fired successfully nine times, but its creator claims it could've shot more. It's still a far cry from a Glock or Beretta, of course, as the gun misfired several times, and removing spent shell casings required the use of a hammer. So, it's not quite ready for prime time, but it's one more bit of proof that the age of printed pistols is officially upon us.
[Image Credit: Michael Guslick]
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.
If we're to find a common thread in this week's collection of stories, it'd be nature's guiding hand. How it inspires science, how we seek to imitate it, and how unnatural the future of policing could be. This is alt-week,
Most approaches to capturing 3D models of real-world objects involve multiple cameras that are rarely cheap, and are sometimes tricky to calibrate. The University of Glasgow has developed a method that ditches those cameras altogether. Its system has four single-pixel sensors stitching together a 3D image based on the reflected intensity of light patterns cast by a projector. Reducing the pixel count lowers the cost per sensor to just a few dollars, and extends the sensitivity as far as terahertz wavelengths. Real-world products are still a long way off, but the university sees its invention as useful for cancer detection and other noble pursuits. Us? We'd probably just waste it on creating uncanny facsimiles of ourselves.
If you thought current media-darling Curiosity is where all the martian action is right now, think again. Its elder sibling, Opportunity, is still rolling up there too. In fact, it's just wheeled its way into a little page of NASA history: the longest distance one of its vehicles has traveled on a body beyond Earth. A recent short (by our standards) trip of 263 feet took its total to 22.22 miles covered on Mars' surface since landing in January 2004. The previous title holder was a Lunar Rover, part of the Apollo 17 mission over 40 years ago, that covered (if you hadn't guessed) 22.21 miles. Opportunity's not beat the world galaxy record though. That honor goes to the Soviet Lunokhod rover, which totted up a total of 23 lunar-based miles back in 1973. In relative terms, Curiosity's barely stretched its legs.
Remember CASIS, the folks in charge of granting the public access to the national lab onboard the International Space Station, who were looking for the next great research project to send into space? Well, CASIS is still in the process of choosing the most deserving from among our reader submissions, but in the meantime, it's looking to give away a pair of the mission patches -- signed by their creator, famed designer Shepard Fairey -- from the inaugural orbital experiment scheduled to arrive on the ISS this fall. To enter for a chance to win one of these exclusive bits of space history, you need only venture beyond the break to read the rules of engagement and fill out the entry form. Best of luck folks, may the force of Fairey be with you.
Google. NASA. Quantum computers. Seriously, everything about the new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Ames Research Center is exciting. The joint effort between Mountain View and America's space agency will put a 512 qubit machine from D-Wave at the disposal of researchers from around the globe, with the USRA (Universities Space Research Association) inviting teams of scientists and engineers to share time on the unique super computer. The goal is to study how quantum computing might be leveraged to advance machine learning, a branch of AI that has proven crucial to Google's success. The internet giant has already done some work with quantum computing before, now the goal is to see if its experimentation can translate into real world results. The idea, for Google at least, is to combine the extreme (but highly-specialized) power of the quantum bit with its oceans of traditional data centers to build more accurate models for everything from speech recognition to web search. And maybe, just maybe, with the help of quantum computers your phone will finally realize you didn't mean to say "duck."