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Category: mobile phones

A team of researchers with Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and Dong-A University, both in South Korea, has developed an artificial skin that can detect both pressure and heat with a high degree of sensitivity, at the same time. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes how they created the skin, what they found in testing it and the other types of things it can sense.

Many scientists around the world are working to develop , both to benefit robots and human beings who have lost skin sensation or limbs. Such efforts have led to a wide variety of artificial skin types, but until now, none of them have been able to sense both pressure and heat to a high degree, at the same time.

The new artificial skin is a sandwich of materials; at the top there is a meant to mimic the human fingerprint (it can sense texture), beneath that sit sensors sandwiched between . The sensors are domed shaped and compress to different degrees when the skin is exposed to different amount of pressure. The compression also causes a small electrical charge to move through the skin, as does heat or sound, which is also transmitted to sensors—the more pressure, heat or sound exerted, the more charge there is—using a computer to measure the charge allows for measuring the degree of sensation “felt.” The ability to sense sound, the team notes, was a bit of a surprise—additional testing showed that the artificial skin was actually better at picking up sound than an iPhone microphone.

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Think of all the possibilities!

braincontrolMind control has been a topic of many great suspense and science fiction movies until recent. Now, an emotion altering device that will work in conjunction with a smart phone app is now being developed by Thync, and is slated for release to the public in 2015.

Thync announced on Oct. 8 that it’s raised $13 million from financial contributors to develop technology combining neuroscience and consumer electronics.

“This is an avenue for people to call up their best stuff on demand,” says Isy Goldwasser, Thync’s chief executive officer and co-founder. “It’s a way for us to overcome our basic limitation as people. It lets us call up our focus, our calm, and creativity when we need it.”

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These people have got a leg — or an arm — up on the future.

Thanks to the latest advancements in medical science, amputees are becoming part robot, with awe-inspiring artificial limbs that would make Luke Skywalker jealous.

These new limbs come armed with microprocessors and electrodes that sense muscle movement. Others can be controlled by a smartphone app. People missing limbs often tried to hide their prosthetics, but these New Yorkers are showing them off with pride.
Rebekah Marine.

Rebekah Marine had the modeling bug from a young age, playing dress-up as a kid and getting her mom to take her to try out for modeling agencies in New York.

The one problem? She was born without part of her right arm.

“I was just kind of quickly denied from [agencies] based on my quote-unquote disability,” the 28-year-old says.

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Acer might be better-known for its range of laptops, tablets, phones, and similar consumer electronics, but it has quietly lifted the lid on a brand-new product line — an electric, all-terrain vehicle (eATV).

The Taiwanese tech titan unveiled the eATV “X Terran” (presumably that’s not meant to be ‘Terrain’) prototype at the eCarTech conference in Munich last week, but the company didn’t reveal too many details. We have, however, now obtained some photos of the vehicle.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=GbShbMRudUM

InVisage filmed in challenging, bright sunlight conditions to test the dynamic range, and shot fast moving subjects (RC race cars) to show off the global shutter. The resulting footage (below) is surprisingly cinematic, considering that the sensor is smartphone sized. (It’s also a bit soft, which the company chalked up to the sensor being an early prototype.) The tech looks intriguing, though the level of hype in the press release and making-of film is a bit over-the-top. Still, if it can be refined further — perhaps by a sensor company like Sony — it could result in strikingly better smartphone and camera images in the not-too-distant future.

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That was the year she learned to control a Nexus tablet with her brain waves, and literally took her life quality from 1980s DOS to modern era Android OS.

A brunette lady in her early 50s, patient T6 suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), which causes progressive motor neuron damage. Mostly paralyzed from the neck down, T6 retains her sharp wit, love for red lipstick and miraculous green thumb. What she didn’t have, until recently, was the ability to communicate with the outside world.

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Every time you log in to Facebook, every time you click on your News Feed, every time you Like a photo, every time you send anything via Messenger, you add another data point to the galaxy they already have regarding you and your behavior. That, in turn, is a tiny, insignificant dot within their vast universe of information about their billion-plus users.

It is probable that Facebook boasts the broadest, deepest, and most comprehensive dataset of human information, interests, and activity ever collected. (Only the NSA knows for sure.) Google probably has more raw data, between Android and searches–but the data they collect is (mostly) much less personal. Of all the Stacks, I think it’s fair to say, Facebook almost certainly knows you best.

They can use this data for advertising, which is contentious, I suppose; but much worse, it’s boring. What’s long been more interesting to me is the possibility of interpolating from this data, i.e. deducing from your online behavior things that you never explicitly revealed to Facebook–and extrapolating from it, i.e. predicting your reactions to new information and new situations. What’s interesting is the notion that Facebook might be able to paint an extraordinarily accurate pointillist picture of you, with all the data points you give it as the pixels.

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