This is Tech

• Monkey controls robot with mind (Via Gadget for Life)
• Robots and mongooses team up to detect landmines. (Via Hacked Gadgets)
• NewScientist put together a great video of robots inspired by animals (check out the video below for robotic salamanders, fish, and wall-walking geckos)

With the US economy struggling, the news has been especially grim lately. To help balance out this gloomy outlook, a number of MIT faculty and researches comment on emerging technology trends they find hold promise for improving the economy and society in general:

Digital Fabrication

Neil Gershenfeld

Director, Center for Bits and Atoms

The most significant coming technology is the digitization of fabrication, the impact of which will be analogous to the digitization of communication and computation. Like those earlier revolutions, the consequence will be personalization, in this case, allowing anyone to make almost anything, anywhere. Coupled with digital video and digital libraries, this means that the formerly scarce resources (facilities, books, people) of advanced technical institutions (such as MIT) can become much more widely accessible.

(Via EconLog)

Thanks to Ted at Yaicha, for posting this article following up on the recent coverage by Yaicha and others of Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk. Taylor’s speech about her stroke and the vantage it gave her on the inner-workings of her mind is engaging. We posted an embedded video of her talk last month. I didn’t realize that Taylor had written a book, but based on her Ted Talk, I will be picking up a copy soon.

Yaicha article links to a New York Times Article expanding on the concepts discussed in Taylor’s TED Talk, and a link to her book, My Stroke of Insight, at Amazon. If you haven’t seen her original TED Talk, check it out here. And check out Yaicha for this and other interesting posts.

Photo by: Krischall

• Neuroscientist argues that today’s technology may be altering our brain chemistry for the worse
• Engineers at Caltech are developing a technique involving tiny robots inserting and arranging electrodes into our brain tissue to facilitate connecting our brains to computers. (Via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)
• The Brain Loop is a brain-to-computer interface device developed by the Graz Institute of Technology in Austria. Check out the demonstration video below, complete with wonderfully eerie computer generated narration. (Via InsideRIA)

Don a set of video goggles, and drive this RC car from the perspective of the driver. The camera embedded in the car tracks your head movements, so when you look right the camera looks right. There was a video circulating of something similar to this with a RC plane, but this is the first commercial implementation of the concept I have seen.

VTS Camera Car:

Amazingly, the goggles can also track your head’s motion, where the camera on the buggy will respond accordingly, letting you look left, right, up and down. … Such a toy won’t come cheap though, as it retails for a whopping $1,172.

(Via Ubergizmo.)

I used to do a bit of skateboarding when I was in college. Back then, we didn’t have anything like this electric skateboard from Altered Skateboards. With a top speed of 20 mph, and a wireless rc car style controller, these things look like a blast. If you are looking for some eco-friendly personal transportation, this might be a less pretentious alternative to a segway.

My advice to Altered, send one of these to Kevin Rose in San Francisco to ride back and forth to the Digg headquarters. Kevin’s got a huge following, and this kind of thing is right up his alley.

Read on for some more pics and a link to an impressive video of the company’s founder hanging ten on one of these. (more…)

Robotics firm Sarcos Inc. is developing a robotic suit designed to greatly amplify the wearer’s strength. Made of aluminum and electronics, the ‘exoskeleton’ suit is being developed under a contract with the US Army, who hopes the technology can one day be used by its soldiers in combat.

(Via Haute Concept)

A Scottish architecture firm’s award winning ‘lilly pad’ solar panel design is under consideration for use in the city of Glasgow. The city hopes to not only provide clean energy for the city’s grid, but to do so in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The firm said the design of the lilypads was “inspired by nature” and they could be tethered to the river bed.

Integrated motors would then rotate the discs to follow the sun for maximum output.

(Via Clean Technica)

You may have noticed my posts have been a little sporadic the last few days. I am writing from the Grand Hyatt in Kauai, which is amazing. So amazing that I have been spending more time at the pool and less time writing posts. I have, however, been spending some of my vacation time getting familiar with Apple’s iPhone SDK.

Apple’s fifth version of its iPhone SDK includes an interface builder, which for a beginner like me makes all the difference. I was able to fairly quickly create a Hello World application, without any prior experience in xcode. I have found it difficult to move on to writing code that connects to the UI elements, but my vacation is just starting, so I am working to change that.
(more…)

• United Kingdom supermarket chain begins using child face recognition to help prevent selling alcohol and cigarettes to minors
• The New York Times peeks into the emerging world of online social-networking for pre-teens
• The Wall Street Journal’s tech blogger wonders if trends in business IT spending have bottomed out or will continue spiral downward
• The first space lawyer!