Super-Strong Synthetic Muscles Developed 191
Too Hot! wrote to mention a BBC article about extremely powerful synthetic muscles. From the article: "The most powerful type, 'shorted fuel cell muscles' convert chemical energy into heat, causing a special shape-memory metal alloy to contract. Turning down the heat allows the muscle to relax. Lab tests showed that these devices had a lifting strength more than 100 times that of normal skeletal muscle. Another kind of muscle being developed by the team converted chemical energy into electrical energy which caused a material made from carbon nanotube electrodes to bend."
Geek progress (Score:5, Funny)
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Funy PORN videos [slashdot.org] @ Laugh DAILY.
Re:Geek progress (Score:2, Funny)
Just imagine.. "Yeah, that's a nice tattoo. Wanna see what my synthetic muscles and reinforced skeletal structure can do?"
Re:Geek progress (Score:1)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:1)
Call me crazy but wouldnt it be easier just to apply electrical energy to begin with?
Re:Geek progress (Score:4, Informative)
It is referring to the chemical energy of the fuel cells. All electrical energy derived from batteries is converted chemical energy
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Awesome! How about the Battletech universe? If you want to know what advanced strong metallic muscles can really do, consider piloting a 50 foot weapon-clad BattleMaster!
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
If you want to know what advanced strong metallic muscles can really do, consider piloting a 50 foot weapon-clad BattleMaster!
Count me out. Big bots make big targets. Better to be the guy you don't even see until your head comes off.
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
100 lb of armor-eating nanotech goo. Pwnz0red.
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
Re:Geek progress (Score:2)
End of the blue pill (Score:1)
Re:End of the blue pill (Score:5, Informative)
Re:End of the blue pill (Score:2)
Re:End of the blue pill (Score:2)
A very good website on this stuff: http://h [howstuffworks.com]
Re:End of the blue pill (Score:2)
Re:End of the blue pill (Score:2)
Get ready to kiss some shiny metal ass (Score:5, Funny)
I for one welcome our new Bender overlords.
You don't kiss it... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Get ready to kiss some shiny metal ass (Score:1)
Breathing my ass, or rather, out my ass.
Yep, this has Bender written all over it. =P
BALCO? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:BALCO? (Score:2)
Re:BALCO? (Score:2)
If it means that the professional sport will be finally good for something useful, in this case for betatesting new enhancement technologies, I for one don't see anything wrong there.
Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fancy imagining that kind of technology in the hands of some warlord in a third world country somewhere? Or even in a normal army? I'm not sure it's something I really want to envision.
Frightening? (Score:1)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but if we pay any attention to Marvel comics then everyone would be exposing themselves to radiation in order to get super powers.
not so good yet (Score:2)
I'm thinking that until we come up with a good way to reinforce our skeletons, super muscles won't live up to their potential. It's no good having muscles that can pick up an SUV if you snap your bones in the process. The muscles have to anchor to something after all.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just wait, he'll be a third world warlord soon enough.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:1)
Should help the disabled (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah possibly but... (Score:5, Funny)
In the larger interests of mankind perhaps the government should fund sex therapy sessions for all potential mad scientists.
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:1)
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
Well, it's an argument in that there are some people who, due to a lack of understanding or a passionate need to believe their religious texts are literal truth (or both), are vehemently clinging to the idea that life didn't evolve.
From a scientific perspective, there is no real argument... the evidence is inescapable.
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, of course there is no real argument. Mine was an, obviously bad, attempt for a joke. (oops)
If you look at it, man is able to create artificial muscles that are a hundred times stronge
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
Not 'we'. Only the stupid people are arguing about this. Everyone else already knows the answer, more or less.
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
If I drop a handful of marbles on the floor, it'll take some pretty sophisticated maths to calculate in advance where they're going to end up (in fact, IIRC solving the maths for a collision of 3 or more objects simultaneously is not actually possible). But it takes nothing more than stating the bleeding obvious to say "d
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
Rephrase: "Your maths/physics can't solve the problem, therefore this proves that they're going to go wherever God tells them to go." Now *that* would be dumb, and that's the situation we're in...
Re:Should help the disabled (Score:2)
When it really needs augmentation, there is a wide variety of devices to choose from. My personal favorites are motorcycles, cars, and skis, but there are a lot of others to choose from.
Powered by alcohol (Score:3, Funny)
Powered by alcohol? (Score:4, Funny)
wtf (Score:2, Interesting)
skeletal muscle
Whoa. okay.
Fact 1. You know, the human body is so efficient at converting Calorie input into work output that in the world of fitness and nutrition, we practically don't even need to differentiate between Calorie intake and Calorie output! Eating exactly 500 Calories less is almost the same as performing exactly 500 Calories of work! (I think that fairly exact Calorie output testing can be performed in the laboratory, although I don't k
Re:wtf (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:wtf (Score:5, Informative)
First, the human body is indeed effective, but not anywhere *close* to what you claim. The thing is, when you calculate the calorie-need for a certain activity, you typically do so by looking at a table. Say swim a mile in half an hour requires about X calories.
But those numbers are *already* calculated (or more likely measured) including the human inefficiencies.
Ever noticed you get warm and start sweating if you do heavy work ? That's waste heat for you baby.
If you pedal a bike, and generate 100W, you'll use significantly more than 25cal/s doing so (a calorie is about 4 Joule).
Second, producing "450 horsepower pro second" is a completely nonsensical statement. Horsepower (or KW) are measures of *power*, A car migth have 100 horsepower, you can measure it over a second, an hour or a year, it'll still have 100 horsepower.
It's a lot like saying you're 6 feet tall pro second, which makes no sense, unless perhaps you mean you *grow* at 6 feet pro second.
The article is dumb. 100 times as strong as skeletal muscle is a statement with no meaning unless you specify what exactly you mean;
Re:wtf (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with most of your post, but BBC aims their content at Joe Public, it's not a scientific journal. Joe public will read from that that if he replaced his muscles with these artificial muscles, he'd be able to bench-press a lot more than he can now. That's as much as he needs or wants to know, and more importantly, he'll absorb it before his short attention span is exhauste
Re:wtf (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:wtf (Score:2)
I'll happily fall into that category. On a Sunday.
Re:wtf (Score:2)
No, we DON'T expect them to. And thus they don't publish details like that. If people started writing in complaining about the imprecision in scientific articles, they'd improve them.
Re:wtf (Score:2)
Second, does it scale? Maybe one strand of this metal pulls 100x compared to one strand of muscle, but can a big bundle of metal fibers be heated and cooled that way?
Re:wtf (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, there are several caches to using a SMA actuator: First, its operating temperature range is less than 100C, and usually more like 40C, dependi
Re:wtf (Score:2)
What they didn't say in the product announcement (Score:2)
Re:wtf (Score:2)
I'm not sure about the input end, but I'm sure that's much less than 100% as well, unless you're taking in glucose.
I think in the fitness world, the numbers are already adjusted for this. That is, if an activity is deemed to use some num
Re:wtf (Score:2)
The human body takes a large amount of energy simply to keep running - IIRC it's about 1500 calories a day (for a man) if you simply lay in bed and didn't move a muscle.
For hard physical work, it doesn't get much tougher than Arctic expeditions or mountain climbing. They're typically u
We Have the Technology... (Score:3, Funny)
Col Steve Austin is the "6 Million dollar Man."
duhduh taduhhh
Re:We Have the Technology... (Score:2)
Hey! They could get Steven Hawking to play the role of the Six Dollar Man.
Mechwarriors? Bah! (Score:2)
If ya want to imagine coolness, picture Marvel Comic's Iron Man Armor. Now that's a fun toy. Closely related to Heinlein's Marine armor, which Lee probably never heard of. I used to dream of engineering a full suit of powered armor. (Sadly, it'll probably come into initial use intimidating protestors, as usual. We're kind of short on real enemies, s
Re:Mechwarriors? Bah! (Score:2)
Re:Mechwarriors? Bah! (Score:2)
Re:Mechwarriors? Bah! (Score:2)
Ghost in the Shell
A great application for cyborg bodies...
What about our bones? (Score:3, Insightful)
it strikes me that some sort of skeletal reinforcement will be needed before this can be used to its fullest extent.
Re:What about our bones? (Score:5, Informative)
Artificial muscles would definitely require skeletal reinforcement. Although I don't know if anyone has ever worked on this.
I'm not sure if those synthetic muscle can actually be implanted in a living organism either.
Re:What about our bones? (Score:2)
So we're ripping out perfectly healthy flesh, slapping a few rivets and i-bars over the bones, and hooking the whole thing up to some sort of alcohol tank. Why not just eschew all the messy surgery and permanent infrastructure needed to keep you rolling, and just put these muscles in an exoskeleton? Mind you, I don't know how effective these are as opposed to pneumatics, in terms of weight you can lift. Modifying any part of the body to give it superhuman strength however will always require a near total b
Re:What about our bones? (Score:2)
Re:What about our bones? (Score:2)
Bingo. If they were to be used on a human frame at least.
The first thing that popped into my mind when I read this was "Sweet! They created Myomer bundles like they have in Battletech!" For any that are curious, here is the Wikipedia entry for Myomer bundles in Battletech [wikipedia.org].
wow that's scary (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists have developed artificial, super-strength muscles which are powered by alcohol and hydrogen.
This could take bar fights to a whole new level.
BioEngineering (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that I don't have a story there, just a neato idea. Not even characters. That doesn't stop many SF writers, unfortunately.
As they used to say at the start of the auto era: (Score:2)
Get a horse!
Response times seems very slow.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Response times seems very slow.. (Score:2)
Have you thought about water cooling?
wrap a lil' tube around the wire, and pump cold water in it when you want to cool down the thing? I don't know how reactive it would get, but I'm sure you could get b
Re:Response times seems very slow.. (Score:2)
wrap a lil' tube around the wire, and pump cold water in it when you want to cool down the thing?
Then you'd need a way to cool down the water/coolant, which means at least a fan and radiator, which would further degrade its energy efficiency.
Bitch Slap (Score:2, Funny)
Other uses (Score:3, Interesting)
*Puts on shades, and trenchcoat* (Score:2, Funny)
Re:*Puts on shades, and trenchcoat* (Score:2)
Got the attitude right
Got the metal 'neath my skin
Moving faster than light"
-Johnny Silverhand
Obligatory one liner (Score:2)
Weight to usefullness ratio (Score:2)
This new tech would allow for very light weight and form fitting systems that could allow for normal range of movement and speed of movement wh
Weight to usefullness ratio & Efficiency (Score:2)
Then there could be suits for athletics, bringing sports into a whole new dimension.
There could be *silent* airplanes that flap their own wings.
Sheesh. The invention is huge, dependi
Re:Weight to usefullness ratio & Efficiency (Score:2)
Muscle Toner 3 (Score:2)
BattleMechs for Everyone!!! (Score:2)
Giant frickin' robots! Who's with me?
Great! (Score:2)
Muscle Power (Score:2)
Really any tech that can very efficiently capture heat and convert it to useable power, whether stored in chemical bonds, transmitted light or electric current will transform (pun intended
Bones (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing Really New (Score:2)
Shape-memory alloys or "muscle wire" have been around for decades, and are not particularly useful for large-scale robotic motion due to their immense power requirements, short stroke, slow actuation speed, and difficulty of control. This article is pretty lite on new information, but the only innovation seems to be delivering heat via chemical reactions directly on t
How about prosthetics? (Score:2)
I'd like to be able to walk normally again.
While my prosthetic is made of groovy materials (carbon-carbon, carbon fibre and titanium), it lacks even the most basic of control. Sure, there is a small amount of feedback as the carbon-carbon 'foot' flexes, but I have no true ankle control.
I have been waiting for realistic 'active' prosthetics for over ten years now, and hopefully this technology will be available in a relatively reasonable time f
Sounds like Clan espionage to me (Score:2)
Damn, looks like the Clans have caputured our Triple-Strength Myomer [wikipedia.org] technlolgy!
What's next, the C3 Computer?
Soon... (Score:2)
Re:Myomer alloy from MechWarrior! (Score:2)
Re:Heat problems? (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory... (Score:2)
Think more on the Futurama side of things.
Re:Bye bye (Score:2)
Also, this is hardly an implantable product in its current state