failurite - Slashdot User

Scientists Turn T-Shirts Into Body Armor 213

Posted by timothy on Saturday April 10, 2010 @08:59PM from the will-stick-with-the-regular-kind-for-now dept.

separsons writes "Scientists at the University of South Carolina recently transformed ordinary T-shirts into bulletproof armor. By splicing cotton with boron, the third hardest material on the planet, scientists created a shirt that was super elastic but also strong enough to deflect bullets. Xiaodong Li, lead researcher on the project, says the same tech may eventually be used to create lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts."

Printing Replacement Body Parts 101

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @04:49AM from the portrait-mode dept.

Deep Penguin sends in a piece that appeared in The Economist a couple of weeks back about a developing technology to "print" body parts for transplant. "A US and an Australian company have developed the $200,000 machine, which works by depositing stem cells and a 'sugar-based hydrogel' scaffolding material. (The stem cells are harvested from a transplant patient's own fat and bone marrow, to avoid rejection down the line.) The companies are Organovo, from San Diego, specializing in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. The initial targets are skin, muscle, and 'short stretches of blood vessels,' which they hope to have available for human implantation within five years. Down the line, they expect the technology could even print directly into the body, bypassing the in-vitro portion of the current process."

Code Review of Doom For the iPhone 161

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 04, 2010 @07:42AM from the old-dogs-new-tricks dept.

Developer Fabien Sanglard has written a code review for id Software's iPhone port of Doom. It's an interesting look into how the original 1993 game (which he also reviewed to understand its rendering process) was adapted to a modern platform. "Just like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was rendering a screenframe pixel per pixel. The only way to do this on iPhone with an acceptable framerate would be to use CoreSurface/CoreSurface.h framework. But it is unfortunately restricted and using it would prevent distribution on the AppStore. The only solution is to use OpenGL, but this comes with a few challenges: Doom was faking 3D with a 2D map. OpenGL needs real 3D vertices. More than 3D vertices, OpenGL needs data to be sent as triangles (among other things because they are easy to rasterize). But Doom sectors were made of arbitrary forms. Doom 1993's perspective was also faked, it was actually closer to an orthogonal projection than a perspective projection. Doom was using VGA palette indexing to perform special effect (red for damage, silver for invulnerable...)."

Comment Website that helps people connect with experts.. (Score 1) 539

by failurite on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @08:51AM (#28850473) Attached to: How To Vet Clever Ideas Without Giving Them Away?

I think there needs to be a web site that allows people to post ideas freely. The concept would be that by posting an idea you put it into the public domain which gives you one year (if I understand patent law correctly) to patent it. The website would offer advice and help on getting a patent. You would have an easy way to post your idea, along with schematics or diagrams, and more importantly the fuzzy details that might be missing that require subject matter experts. There would then be a wiki like way for people to add to an idea with their expertise and the idea owner can then accept or reject that feedback and the idea would mature through that feedback. Hopefully it would mature enough to have enough info to patent or prototype. This would also be a good way to find potential partners for a startup, since most startups wonâ(TM)t be successful without subject matter experts. I have a specific ui in mind for this type of site but in general I envision each submittal looking sort of like a light weight patent submittal with affordances to attach videos, diagrams, etc. failurite@gmail.com

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