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Submission + - Light Play : A Robotic Army Controlled by Your Thoughts (zoness.com)

Submitted by Sarah Petkus
Sarah Petkus writes: The world needs a robotic army. One that anyone can come and experience the awe-inspiring sensation of controlling with their thoughts. That is what I believe. My interactive installation, “Light Play” may be ambitious, but I am setting out to simulate precisely that.

What began as a nerdy girl’s fantasy two years ago, has evolved into an ongoing project involving my close friends and other experts in our maker community here in Las Vegas. Our city’s budding art scene has recently started to take off, having been jump started by creative projects related to the downtown revival. Working from Vegas’s first hackerspace, SYN Shop, I aim to make Las Vegas the heart of art tech, in the spirit of what the city is known for; beautiful gaudy displays of light.

Light Play involves a massive network of hundreds of miniature delta robots which I have designed, all being controlled by the gestural motion and neural input provided by those interacting with them. Though delta robots are stationary, my models each have an RGB LED mounted on their swift moving end effector, making for a dynamic ballet of light motion. So far I have a smaller version of the installation developed which makes use of the Kinect’s motion capture abilities. Anyone who approaches the small collective of ten delta robots can use the angle of their body to control the robot’s motion or the color of the robot’s light.

Though the miniature installation is fun and effective, it isn’t an army. I want a whole room, if not airplane hanger filled from wall to wall with these things, and I need help doing it. To fund my cause I’m Kickstarting my robot’s design as a kit for other DIY enthusiasts to build for themselves. If my financial goals are met when the project launches in mid January, I plan to take my fully realized army and march wherever the wind takes me, leading up to Maker Faire and the like. I want others with the same nerdy fantasy as I to be able to geek out and experience controlling a robotic army of their own.

It’s a large feat to accomplish, but the ride has been exciting. It’s my first time attempting to crowd fund a project, so I’ve been documenting the whole experience as well as the progress on the installation on my tech blog : roboticarts.wordpress.com. I’m hoping that with the faith of the maker community, I can pull this idea from science fiction into reality, and in a BIG way.

Submission + - New Methods Can Halt the Process of Dying

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: It was once thought that after the heart stops pumping blood throughout the body, a person has only few minutes before suffering permanent brain damage caused by lack of oxygen and nutrients getting to the brain cells. Now Discovery Magazine reports that developments in the science of resuscitation have made it possible to revive people even hours after their heart has stopped beating and they are declared dead. "Historically, when a person's heart stopped and they stopped breathing, for all intents and purposes, they were dead," says Dr. Sam Parnia adding that this process "could take hours of time, and we could potentially reverse that." Some insights for how to halt the dying process come from case reports of people who were brought back to life with little or no brain damage after hours of a silenced brain and heart. Studies have found that hypothermia seems to protect the brain by decreasing its need for oxygen and aborting activated cell death pathways. Still, there are limits — although body-cooling techniques have improved recovery in many patients after cardiac arrest, there will be a moment when the damage is too much and it's too late to come back. "When somebody's been without oxygen, we know there’s a whole bunch of signals that are now starting to tell cells that it's time to die. So we have an opportunity to modify that programing just a little bit, to say 'wait put the brakes on,'" says Dr. Lance Becker. However, Dr. Stephan Mayer argues that our knowledge of brain damage and dying is incomplete, and it's not always clear how much injury one has endured, and whether it's reversible. "What we've come to learn is that those notions of irreversibility of brain damage are dead wrong," Mayer said. "If you make those judgments too soon without going fully all the way, you may be actually writing people off."

Submission + - Excel error causes austerity

Submitted by quarterbuck
quarterbuck writes: Many politicians, especially in Europe, have used the idea that economic growth is impeded by debt levels above 90% of GDP to justify austerity measures. The academic justification came from a paper and a book by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. Now researchers at U Mass at Amherst have refuted the study — they find that not only was the data tainted by bad statistics, it also had an Excel error . Apparently when averaging a few GDP numbers in an excel sheet, they did not drag down the cell ranges down properly, excluding Belgium.
The supporting website for the book "This time it is different" has lots of financial information if a reader might want to replicate some of the results.

Submission + - Parasite Inspires Surgical Patch (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: By mimicking a technique used by an intestinal parasite of fish, researchers have developed a flexible patch studded with microneedles that holds skin grafts in place more strongly than surgical staples do. After burrowing into the walls of a fish's intestines, the spiny-headed worm Pomphorhynchus laevis inflates its proboscis to better embed itself in the soft tissue. In the new patch, the stiff polystyrene core of the 700-micrometer-tall needles penetrates the tissue; then a thin hydrogel coating on the tip of each needle—a coating based on the material in disposable diapers that expands when it gets wet—swells to help anchor the patch in place. In tests using skin grafts, adhesion strength of the patch was more than three times higher than surgical staples. Because the patch doesn't depend on chemical adhesives for its gripping power, there's less chance for patients to have an allergic reaction. And because the microneedles are about one-quarter the length of typical surgical staples, the patches cause less tissue damage when they're removed. Besides holding grafts in place, the patch could be used to hold the sides of a wound or an incision together—even, in theory, ones inside the body if a slowly dissolving version of the patch can be developed. Moreover, the researchers say, the hydrogel coating holds promise as a way to deliver proteins, drugs, or other therapeutic substances to patients.

Comment Same here.... (Score 1) 2

by plasticpixel (#41169519) Attached to: The end of Slashdot?

Just like when Digg went feral, I'm increasingly annoyed by Slashdot changes on the iPad. The new hovering advertisements are the last straw for me. I am starting to look for a new source for my nerd news or at least something that scrapes Slashdot and presents it to me in something more palatable.

Comment Homebrew Raid (Score 1) 371

by plasticpixel (#38183804) Attached to: Good Disk Library Solutions?

I struggled with this problem too and ended up building a homebrew raid using OpenSolaris and a large CoolerMaster case full of drives. The ZFS filesystem has been bullet proof on this box since 2005. I ripped all my DVDs to ISO format so that I could preserve the DVD menus on those discs. The box sits on my network and is shared via NFS and Samba.

To play back all those movies on my TV, I put my older Mac Mini on it and have it boot up into a default user and start VLC right away. I use VLC Remote on the ipad to access the library that is NFS mounted on the Mac Mini.

The overall experience has been great! Using the iPad, I can browse hundreds of ISO images, select one and it plays within a few seconds.

The iPad remote solution was the final peice to this puzzle as I was previously using a mouse and keyboard to navigate the movies.

Comment Re:DeVry was no cake-walk. (Score 1) 580

by plasticpixel (#37289716) Attached to: Mr. President, There Is No (US) Engineer Shortage

As a DeVRY grad (EET) I have to agree. Some of the best engineers I ever met came from DeVRY. Next time you look at at a micro controller from Microchip or a SPARC processor from Sun/Oracle, you can be 100% sure that a DeVRY grad had something to do with the architecture.

Also, I've met my share of mediocre engineers from MIT, Brown, Carnegie-Mellon and the like. It's more about what you do with your degree than the degree itself.
Mars

Submission + - Mars Hit By Cosmic Buckshot, Again (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Mars is no stranger to meteorite impacts, it's tenuous atmosphere allows more than its fair share of space rock through to its surface. With the help of the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), objects as small as 1 meter wide can be resolved on the Martian surface, allowing us to see a very recent series of small impact craters. These craters, formed some time between 2002 and 2008 in the Terra Sabaea region, most likely originated from a single meteoroid that disintegrated on entry into the Martian atmosphere."
NASA

Submission + - Flying Saucers are coming, the unmanned kind (suasnews.com)

Submitted by
garymortimer
garymortimer writes: "An autonomous flying saucer for all, get ready for an increase in UFO sightings.

Aerobat Aviation Inc and Attopilot International have teamed up to add for the first time an autopilot to the innovate circular flying wing design. The circular winged craft promises flight performance increases across a wide speed range."
Network

Submission + - US Senator Calls for DOJ Investigation of Sony PSN (ngohq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: US Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) today called for the Department of Justice to investigate all aspects of the Sony PlayStation Network data breach, sending Attorney General Eric Holder a letter urging DOJ “to immediately open an investigation to track down and hold accountable those who have stolen sensitive personal information, and to examine any potential wrongdoing in Sony’s response to this matter.”
Science

Submission + - Sludge in Flask Gives Clues to Origin of Life (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In the 1950s, scientist Stanley Miller conducted a series of experiments in which he zapped gas-filled flasks with electricity. The most famous of these, published in 1952, showed that such a process could give rise to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But a later experiment, conducted in 1958, sat on the shelf--never analyzed by Miller. Now, scientists have gone back and analyzed the sludge at the bottom of this flask and found even more amino acids than before--and better evidence that lightning and volcanic gasses may have helped create life on Earth.
Space

Submission + - Sun produces first cycle 24 X class solar flare

Submitted by radioweather
radioweather writes: The heart of the sun came alive the evening of Valentines day. For the first time since solar cycle 24 began, the sun produced a massive X-class solar flare, the strongest type of flare event. This comes from sunspot group 1158, which produced an M-class solar flare on Sunday.

The EVE X-ray imager on the solar dynamics observatory shows a bright explosion on the sun, so bright it made a lens flare.

The last X-class solar flare was on December 13th, 2006 and was part of solar cycle 23. Look for spectacular auroras in about 2 days as the slower Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) hits earth. This will be a test of how well our newest technology handles stray energy from such solar disruptions.

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