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Submission + - 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Being Developed (openhandproject.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An Engineer from Bristol, UK is trying to make robotic prosthetic hands more accessible to amputees with the Open Hand Project.

Joel Gibbard has designed the Dextrus hand, which is a robotic hand that can be put together for well under £650 ($1000) and offers much of the functionality of a human hand. It uses electric motors instead of muscles and steel cables instead of tendons. 3D printed plastic parts work like bones and a rubber coating acts as the skin. All of these parts are controlled by electronics to give it a natural movement that can handle all sorts of different objects.

The hand can be connected to an existing prosthesis using a standard connector. It uses stick-on electrodes to read signals from the user's remaining muscles which can control the hand, telling it to open or close.

Ultimately, Gibbard's goal is to sell these hands for under $1000. The low price is made possible by the use of 3D printing. Since prices don't scale with volume the cost of a hand in volumes of 10 is the same as the cost in volumes of 1000. Prostheses will always be a low-volume product and mass-production is not feasible.

Gibbard needs £39000 to raise the funds to continue the project, which is being crowd-funded on indiegogo.

Submission + - It's Official: Voyager 1 is an Interstellar Probe (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: After a 35-year, 11-billion mile journey, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft left the solar system to become the first human-made object to reach interstellar space, new evidence from a team of scientists shows. “It’s kind of like landing on the moon. It’s a milestone in history. Like all science, it’s exploration. It’s new knowledge,” long-time Voyager scientist Donald Gurnett, with the University of Iowa, told Discovery News. The first signs that the spacecraft had left the solar system's heliopause was a sudden drop in solar particles and a corresponding increase in cosmic rays in 2012, but this evidence alone wasn't conclusive. Through indirect means, scientist analyzing oscillations along the probe's 10-meter (33-foot) antennas were able to deduce that Voyager was traveling through a less dense medium — i.e. interstellar space.

Comment Re:Duh? (Score 4, Insightful) 245

by Mystakaphoros (#44459889) Attached to: Paper: Evolution Favors Cooperation Over Selfishness

What? Ayn Rand could be wrong? The shock and horror of it!

Seriously though the question is difficult to answer on anything more than a philosophical level. It is a bit vague to quantify and would need to be rephrased to be practically measurable.. Maybe I should put my beer down and go read TFA....

Never put your beer down! Priorities!

Submission + - Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Feds? (theatlanticwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Massachusetts resident Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which begs the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

Submission + - Once you have a SWAT team the only thing to do is kick some ass. 1

Submitted by Nethead
Nethead writes: On Salon.com Alex Halperin talks with Radley Balko, the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop. They discuss [TFA] the rise of police SWAT teams, even in small towns. Balko show the political mechanisms behind why it is almost impossible to stem the tide of militarized police forces and the effects it is having on our communities. Though US centric, I'm sure that these same mechanisms play out worldwide.

Submission + - Mouse cloned from drop of blood (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Ogi_UnixNut
Ogi_UnixNut writes: Scientists in Japan have succeeded in cloning a mouse from a drop blood. From the BBC: "Circulating blood cells collected from the tail of a donor mouse were used to produce the clone, a team at the Riken BioResource Center reports in the journal Biology of Reproduction."

The female mouse managed to live a normal lifespan and could reproduce, according to the researchers.

Submission + - ACLU Files Lawsuit Challenging NSA's Patriot Act Phone Surveillance (aclu.org)

Submitted by stevegee58
stevegee58 writes: File under "Good Luck With That" but still it's good to know someone's rattling the cage of our increasingly intrusive government.

From the ACLU's press release:
"In the wake of the past week's revelations about the NSA's unprecedented mass surveillance of phone calls, today the ACLU filed a lawsuit charging that the program violates Americans' constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy."

Submission + - Macs No More: After Edward Snowden, Time to Come to the Penguin (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: With each new version of Mac OS X, the computer becomes more and more like an iPhone or an iPad — a device designed for controlled consumption, not real creating. (With Windows 8 and the Surface, Microsoft has a head start.) The idea is to turn the computer from a general-purpose anything-machine into a ad-distributing appliance. Your mind is meant to become one too. The personal computer is political. The time for liberation has kind of come.

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