Make: Online: News from the Future Archives

Archive: News from the Future

November 20, 2009

NEC announces universal translator … sorta, kinda

NEC announced what could be an early, real-life version of the universal translator -

NEC said the Tele Scouter was intended to be a business tool that could aid sales staff who would have information about a client's buying history beamed into their eye during a conversation.
But, it said, it could also be put to a more exotic use as a translation aid. In this scenario the microphone on the headset picks up the voices of both people in a conversation, pipes it through translation software and voice-to-text systems and then sends the translation back to the headset.
[…]
NEC said the Tele Scouter would be launched in Japan in November, 2010 but would initially lack the translation feature. A version that can provide subtitles would follow in 2011, it said.

Now we just have to see how good that translation software really is (please be good!). Read more over at BBC News.

November 18, 2009

"Bomb-proof" kevlar wallpaper

Very clever idea commercialized as the X-flex Blast Protection System, in which a high-tensile-strength composite film is applied to the inside of a masonry wall to reinforce it against lateral impact. The video embedded above was produced by Popular Science, who included the X-flex system in their Best of What's New 2009.

November 12, 2009

Making UPC barcodes less boring

I always assumed messing around with your product's barcode for marketing purposes was, like, a violation of the Geneva Convention or something. Like if you tried to turn your packaging's boring rectangular barcode into a zebra, or whatever, you'd start to get late-night phone calls from Brussels: "Nice supply chain you have there. Be a shame if something were to, you know, happen to it." Turns out nobody really cares, so long as it scans, and there's now a Japanese firm that specializes in barcode funification (although it seems like any competent graphic designer could probably do it just as well). [via Neatorama]

DVD rack built from VHS tapes

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Alas, old friend VHS - has it really come to this?! Doomed to spend the rest of your media lifecycle supporting stacks of newfangled digital media. *Sigh* … and how much longer 'til we see those same DVD cases supporting a heap of flash drives/etc? I'll keep an eye on farnea's photostream to find out.

November 10, 2009

Layer-additive "welding" 3D fabrication

Electron Beam Free-Form Fabrication (EBF3) is a rapid prototyping technology developed by Karen Taminger of NASA's Langley Research Center. Dr. Taminger is prone to market EBF3 by analogy to Star Trek style "replicator" technology, which is nothing but shameless hype. Still, the basic idea is an interesting twist on extrusion-based 3D printing technologies (although there's not really any "extrusion" going on), and is under development with an eye towards space-based fabrication. Working in outer space would eliminate the system's major ground-based shortcoming, which is the requirement for maintaining a vacuum or inert atmosphere to prevent oxidation of the weld.

November 2, 2009

Radiohead´s Thom Yorke printed in 3D

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Hey, remember when Radiohead released a bunch of 3D data for their music video "House of cards"? Now someone has used that data to print a 3D model of Thom Yorke's head.

$40K DARPA "find the balloons" social networking challenge

Starting on December 5, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will award $40,000 to the first registered team to correctly report the location of ten eight-foot-diameter red weather balloons distributed randomly across the continental United States. From the challenge website:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

Personally, I think 99 red balloons would've been better, for marketing purposes, than 10. I guess that would take way too long. [via Hack a Day]

October 27, 2009

Super cements aka "geopolymers"

Think cement is just cement? Not so. These unlovely mugs are nonetheless very special. Prepared from special synthetic aluminosilicate materials called "geopolymers" (Wikipedia) by members of Dr. Waltraud M. Kriven's research group at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, these mugs were tested in a special "mug drop" event at the 2004 American Ceramic Society (ACeRS) conference, and supposedly "were impossible to break at even 50ft onto bare concrete" (although the photos clearly show an astroturf-covered floor). Danger Room's David Hambling recently posted a nice overview of geopolymer technology with an eye towards defense applications. These presentation slides by Dr. Kriven (.pdf) include some actual formulae.

October 22, 2009

Eternal flame replaced by LEDs

Must. Resist. Yakov Smirnoff. Joke. This is a war memorial, after all, and to a particularly nasty bit of a particularly nasty war, at that. Still, in the same way that Italians can laugh about the fact that, yes, it can be a bit of a pain to renew your driver's license in Italy, or that Estadounidenses can admit that, yes, we have been known to occasionally over-commercialize certain things, even patriotic Russians will see that there is something of the stereotypically Russian in this story.

This memorial was erected in Ukraine shortly after WWII to commemorate the legions of fallen dead. For 50 years its eternal flame burned natural gas piped in under the Soviet administration. Then...well, things fall apart, as everyone knows. With the breakup of the USSR, the flow of free natural gas into Ukraine stopped and it became too expensive to keep the torch lit. I'm sure it was a sad day that finally saw the flame go out.

Apparently it sat unlit for several years until this compromise solution was achieved: The flame would be converted into a cell-phone tower, the antennae concealed by a round facade bearing a pixelated flickering LED-flame image funded by the cell-phone company. One of those capitalistic solutions where everyone wins, but only kind of.

To my eye, this is in awful taste. But the story, I think, is kind of beautiful. If it's really true that the only two alternatives were to leave the flame unlit or to replace it with a cheesy simulation, I think, ultimately, that I would have made the same choice. And as we continue to oxidize the world's supply of hydrocarbons, sooner or later the sensibility of keeping fossil-fuel flames burning "eternally," only for symbolic purposes, may well become an issue in other parts of the world. [via Hack a Day]

October 20, 2009

Man builds machine to treat his own leukemia

Jim Stogdill sent this to the O'Reilly Radar mailing list:

I caught this on 60 Minutes the other night and it struck me as the ultimate MAKE challenge. Guy designs his own RF therapy and machine to try to battle his leukemia. He didn't win, but looks like the tech holds real promise and is being pursued as a real and viable cancer treatment using RF to stimulate tumor-seeking gold nano particles.

[Thanks, Jim!]

The Kanzius Machine

October 17, 2009

Hacked iPhone API takes AR to the next level

From ReadWriteWeb:

An international team of computer scientists has created software that lets anyone perform on-the-fly analysis of live streaming video on the iPhone. Used alongside existing methods of displaying data on top of the camera's view, this new functionality signals a fundamental change in the kinds of Augmented Reality (AR) that iPhone developers can create. Existing AR apps, like Yelp, Layar, Wikitude and others display data on top of a camera's view but don't actually analyze what the camera sees. This new development changes that.

The video is pretty amazing. I can't wait to see where this tech goes from here...

Devs Hack iPhone API for True Augmented Reality

October 15, 2009

Train an army of crows to gather treasure for you

Josh Klein developed a machine that trains crows to trade coins for peanuts. Literally, for peanuts. So you fill this thing with peanuts and set it out, say, in a public park, and the crows will scour the ground for loose change, carry it to the machine, and drop it in a slot in exchange for food. The project, dubbed "CrowBox," made a big splash when he unveiled it back in 2007. Now he's made the complete plans for the CrowBox freely available online so you can roll your own. And there's no reason you couldn't train your fly-monkeys-fly to gather other crow-portable objects. Twenty-dollar bills? Keys? iPods? Human eyes? The possibilities are endless. Set one up at the beach! Train seagulls to trade whole wallets for pre-shucked oysters!

October 7, 2009

Weird front tricycle scooter for sale now

Saw one of these on Burnet Rd. in Austin today. It's a Piaggio MP3. Apparently the front wheels "loosen up" at speed to allow for cornering, but are stiff at idle so you don't have to hold the bike up with your legs. There are, supposedly, other advantages as well. I'm no bike expert, but it seems like an interesting novelty. Glad, as always, of comments from those in the know.

Japanese suit that fights flu

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Big year for flu suit fashion... In Japan -

The company has produced 50,000 of the suits and will start selling them on Thursday, according to a company spokesman. The suit is coated with the chemical titanium dioxide, which reacts to light to break down and kill the virus when it comes into contact with it, according to Junko Hirohata. The chemical is a common ingredient in toothpaste and cosmetics. The suit - which is indistinguishable from any other worn by Japan's legion of "salarymen" - comes in four colours and styles, which are medium grey, charcoal, navy and a grey pinstripe.

September 30, 2009

akiba:F Blood Donation Room

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Steve writes -

Thanks to Danny and Akiyama-San from Good Smile Co. I was able to attend the opening event for akiba:F held today. The official start is tomorrow, but got to look around and see the amazing place today. And they didn't even poke me with needles! It's quite amazing and very futuristic. Looks very much like a medical bay from some scifi tv show. inside you get free wifi, lots of manga and magazines to read, and even an iPod touch powered entertainment center to use while you fluids are drained.

Free wifi, holograms... worth a little blood. This is on the "MAKE" places to visit, I want to live there (more photos).

Hinged transformation of triangle to square

The relatively straightforward swing-hinged dissection of an equilateral triangle to a square in this video is called "Dudeney's dissection" and has been known since 1902. For a gallery of hinged dissections, check out Tse-hsuan Yang's page at Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University.

September 25, 2009

Fancy shmancy Coke can of the future

Never happen! But it's neat looking, and it uses some impressive sounding industrial process called "impact extrusion," and its proving to be a pretty effective advertisements for its designer Dzmitry Samal. [via Gizmodo]

Beetleborg, certified Creep City

Cyborg insects, hybrids of insects and machines, have been under development in military R&D for a few years now (no, seriously). Now, electrical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed an implantable radio-controlled neural stimulating device that allows them to control, with a fair degree of accuracy, the flight of an insect, in this case, a beetle. Says the article on the Neurophilosophy blog:

Electrically-controllable insects have obvious military applications. They could be used as micro air vehicles for reconnaissance missions, or as couriers which deliver small packages to locations that are not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots. The beetles used here (Mecynorrhina torquata) are among the largest of all insect species, and are capable of carrying additional loads of up to 30% of their 8g body weight. But they could also be very useful to researchers who study insect mating behavior, the foraging behavior of insect predators, and flight dynamics and energetics.

I don't know about you, but I find this extraordinarily creepy.

Flight of the remote-controlled cyborg beetle

September 24, 2009

Fascination: Mackenzie Cowell

Mackenzie Cowell is one of the founders of DIYbio.org. He is featured in the most recent of our ongoing series of video interviews with notable makers, sponsored by Dow chemical, over at elementsofhumanity.com. Mac is a big advocate, not just of the fledgling discipline of synthetic biology (or "biological engineering," as it's coming to be known), but of the idea that amateurs, hobbyists, and so-called "citizen scientists" have a meaningful role to play in its development. Check it out.