Israeli scientists help the blind find new vision

At Frank Lloyd Wright's home, a lab for world-class architecture (Photos)

CNET - OAK PARK, Ill. -- Before Frank Lloyd Wright became the most famous architect in the world, he was a struggling employee who had to borrow money from his boss to build his own house.

That house, and the adjoining professional studio, make up the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in this posh suburb of Chicago. I got a chance for a behind-the-scenes tour Monday as part of Road Trip 2013, and as a Wright fan who has toured other favorites like Taliesin West in Arizona, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, and the Marin County Civic Center in California, this was a treat.

 While most Chicago buildings used standard red bricks on their facades, and relegated the use of earth-tone Chicago bricks to the side, Wright favored such tones, and decided he wanted to use the material on the front of his home. He also wanted sets, or bands, of windows that were side by side, rather than separated. And he chose a front door that was much wider than the norm.    More

How The CIA Tried To Turn A Cat Into A Cyborg Spy

PopSci - In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon transformed the furry feline into an elite spy, implanting a microphone in her ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull, and weaving a thin wire antenna into her long gray-and-white fur. This was Operation Acoustic Kitty, a top-secret plan to turn a cat into a living, walking surveillance machine. The leaders of the project hoped that by training the feline to go sit near foreign officials, they could eavesdrop on private conversations.

The problem was that cats are not especially trainable—they don’t have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do—and the agency’s robo-cat didn’t seem terribly interested in national security. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The program was abandoned; as a heavily redacted CIA memo from the time delicately phrased it, “Our final examination of trained cats... convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.” (Those specialized needs, one assumes, include a decidedly unflattened feline.)

Operation Acoustic Kitty, misadventure though it was, was a visionary idea just 50 years before its time. Today, once again, the U .S. government is looking to animal-machine hybrids to safeguard the country and its citizens. In 2006, for example, DARPA zeroed in on insects, asking the nation’s scientists to submit “innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs.”

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28 Glimpses Into North Korea’s Technological… Prowess?

 

Gizmodo - By now you may think that North Korea is only good for nuclear bluster and general insanity. But! Beneath that strange veneer lies actual technology, architecture, and design. Some of it's just a little more polished than others.

View the Pics!

Cellphones Are Changing School Emergency Plans

Once seen as a nuisance, student cellphones now figure into school security plans. Credit: iBjorn/Flickr

Discovery News - In the past, schools and cellphones didn't mix. Teachers saw them as a distraction, and many schools banned their use in the classroom. But in the wake of school shootings over the past 13 years, school districts are beginning to change their policies.

Since the 1999 killings at Columbine High School in Colorado, school districts and law enforcement authorities have worked together on strategies to respond to violence in schools. Plans include how to protect students inside buildings, evacuate them and notify parents. Students and teachers practice lockdown drills, steps to secure the school so that no one can enter or exit.

And technology is a big part of more recent plans, now that cellphone use among kids has grown. While most high school students wouldn't leave the house without their phones, children just starting school have cellphones, too. More than 1 in 10 kids between the ages of 6 to 10 already have their own cell, according to data collected during the first six months of 2012 by YouthBeat, a research firm that focuses on the use of technology by kids from preschool up to age 18.

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Interactive Apparel: Are Those Pants, or Is That a Keyboard You’re Wearing?

 

Interactive Designs That You Can Wear (Sooner or Later)

 

PCWorld - Today, you’re inseparable from your tech. Soon, you’ll be wearing it. We looked across the Internet at what clever designing minds are doing with interactive wearables.

Some of these products are for sale now, while other items are coming soon (according to their creators). And some of these things are great concept designs that live exclusively with their inventors for the moment. Here are some pieces of interactive apparel that we’d love to try out (or on).
Let’s start with a cool jacket intended to protect cyclists.

 

Sporty Supaheroe Jacket for Night Bicycling (Concept)

 

All too often, cyclists are in danger of being run over, especially after dark. Someday, this unusual piece of wearable technology may be able to help.

The Utope Project, a cooperation between designer Wolfgang Langeder and Stretchable Circuits/Fraunhofer IZM, created the Sporty Supaheroe concept jacket, which has a flexible display of up to 64 RGB-LEDs placed in segments on the front, back, and shoulder areas.

The jacket’s lights can generate multiple colors and patterns. On top of that, the garment offers a visual link with a smartphone placed in the jacket’s pocket, and the wearer can tell whether a call is coming in by the way certain lights activate.

Image: Courtesy of Ubergizmo

The “Beauty and the Geek” concept design by Nieuwe Heren integrates a keyboard into a pair of jeans. Note that the mouse is attached, and should reside in your pocket when not in use.
This idea might be carrying the marriage of life and tech a little too far.

Image: Courtesy of Gizmag

When you’re wearing the Click Keypad Watch ($90), just touch a key, and the time will blink in single digits. You can set the watch on the 12-hour system or the 24-hour system. On the latter, if the time is, say, 1:12 p.m., the one, three, one, and two will blink in that order. If you want to know the date, press the pound key.
It requires a bit of thinking–but geeks like to do that, right?               More

Want To Be A Billionaire? Tech May Be Your Best Bet

Forbes - Want to be a billionaire? If you follow our World’s Billionaires list, you know there’s no single way to get the job done–you can get rich on energy drinks or yoga pants just as well as hedge funds.But for those who like to read the tea leaves, we’d point out something that is probably fairly obvious to most: the tech industry is probably the best place to roll the dice.

 Technology is now the second-most common way American billionaires made their fortunes. Fifty-one of the 425 Americans on the World’s Billionaires List (12% of U.S. billionaires) are rich thanks to this industry. (Number one is the hodge-podge category of investments, which includes hedge fund tycoons but also a wide assortment of others like Warren Buffett who have interests in a multitude of industries).

That’s a change from 10 years ago, when tech and software ranked third among industries that produce billionaires. In 2002, 26 of the 243 Americans on the Billionaires List made their fortunes in technology. Today they are almost double. Here’s the list as it stands in 2012:

Top 10 Industries Producing U.S. Billionaires

Navy’s Newest Robot Is A Mechanized Fireman

Danger Room - Add another eerily life-like robot to the military’s rapidly expanding android army. This one is, of all things, a mechanical firefighter. And not only can it climb ladders like its flesh-and-blood counterparts, it’s designed to interact with human handlers in a kind of human/robot bucket brigade.

Developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot — or “SAFFiR”; get it? — will help extinguish fires onboard ships and subs. Those watercraft are particularly at risk from fires, because their cramped quarters can make flames tough to extinguish without posing significant human risk.

SAFFiR, expected to be field tested in 18 months, might mitigate that danger. And it shows off some of the the latest and most impressive breakthroughs in Pentagon-funded robotics technology.

For one thing, SAFFiR is designed to use its mechanized legs and arms like a human would, thanks to sophisticated sensors that provide ongoing environmental feedback and titanium springs that act as “joints” to enable fluid movements. Until recently, most military robots designed for cramped spaces like the quarters of warships or submarines needed to be small. Wheels and treads enabled movement, not pseudo-limbs. (Well, mostly.)

Now, much like a person, SAFFiR will scurry through cramped hallways and climb up and down the endless maze of ladders aboard a ship. The robot will have enough hand coordination to tote fire hoses and throw extinguisher grenades. That kind of precise coordination is also a relatively new accomplishment for military ‘bots. Just last week, Darpa-funded researchers unveiled the first ‘bot capable of performing complex tasks, like unlocking a door, with its own “two hands.”           More

Mercedes’ Invisible Car

Discovery News - Mercedes new F-Cell vehicle is being marketed as a car that’s “virtually invisible to the environment.” That’s because the hydrogen fuel cell electric car, which converts compressed hydrogen into electricity to drive the motor, has only one emission: water vapor.                     More

A Wirelessly Controlled Pharmacy Dispenses Drugs From Within Your Abdomen

Implantable Chip The chip is about the size of an average flash memory stick. Courtesy of MicroCHIPS Inc.

PopSci - In the future, implantable computerized dispensaries will replace trips to the pharmacy or doctor’s office, automatically leaching drugs into the blood from medical devices embedded in our bodies. These small wireless chips promise to reduce pain and inconvenience, and they’ll ensure that patients get exactly the amount of drugs they need, all at the push of a button.

In a new study involving women with osteoporosis, a wirelessly controlled implantable microchip successfully delivered a daily drug regimen, working just as well, if not better, than a daily injection. It could be an elegant solution for countless people on long-term prescription medicines, researchers say. Patients won’t have to remember to take their medicine, and doctors will be able to adjust doses with a simple phone call or computer command.

Pharmacies-on-a-chip could someday dispense a whole suite of drugs, at pre-programmed doses and at specific times, said Robert Langer, the Institute Professor at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who is a co-author on the study.          More

Mobile World Congress 2012: best of show

Mobile World Congress 2012 was a massively exciting show and true to form brought us so much new kit to be excited about in early 2012. From Intel’s Medfield launch, a 41-megapixel smartphone, a new generation of personal hotspots and even engineered metals using micro arc oxidation, there was never a dull moment. Highlighting what was best, most innovative, or interesting is a tough nut but we’ve done our best to point out the highlights using our impressions — and the occasional arm-wrestling match — to chose the finalists amongst the products and our Editor’s more notable achievements. Fly through to the next page and have a look at our takeaways from this, the most intense mobile tech show of the year.

Best Smartphone: HTC One X

HTC’s One line of handsets were impressive from the One V to the micro arc oxidized One S and while they impressed the One X stole the show. While it almost took fisticuffs to pick the winner, the One X came out on top because of its stellar camera, beautiful 4.7-inch 720p Super LCD 2 non-PenTile display, quad-core Tegra 3 processor and the unibody polycarbonate housing. The One X is running Sense 4.0 with ICS and despite that it absolutely flies. 

Surprisingly the usual sluggishness of Sense is all but gone, though we know HTC has lightened and fine-tuned its overlay, the Tegra 3 CPU no doubt does loads to help give it that silky smooth UI feel. The Beats Audio profiles, rendered via both hardware and software were a lot of fun and do add a great twist to one of a handset’s most popular functions. The camera is also very impressive both in image quality and features, though a dedicated camera button certainly would make it even better.

Best Tablet: Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1


We knew that Samsung planned to launch the Galaxy Note 10.1 at Mobile World Congress, but we didn’t know just how huge its presence and push would be at the booth. It is safe to say that between sketch artists, and Adobe’s Touch apps the super Note was Samsung’s flagship launch at MWC 2012 easily taking up 40% of the booth and a lion’s share of the attention.

While not drastically different then the Note we reviewed, the increased screen real estate, perfect scrolling and build quality makes this our choice. Samsung also pushed out two new Galaxy Tab 2 devices — in both 7.0 and 10.1 sizes –, but this second S-Pen toting iteration of the Touch line still won out.

Best Device Design: Panasonic Eluga


Thin? Check. Lightweight? Check. Completely waterproof? Check. A thing of beauty to gaze upon? Absolutely. Panasonic’s oddly named Eluga set was a stand out for the simple reason that we all agreed it was without question simply the nicest looking set of the show. Its 4.3-inch AMOLED qHD 960 x 540 display is crisp and bright, svelte 7.8mm thinness, and curved edges made it really comfortable to hold. Heck, even if it should slip from your grasp and fall in the fish tank it is waterproof and therefore as happy submerged as not. Sure, it didn’t pack ICS or the biggest display but Panasonic’s Eluga somehow finds a perfect balance of style and features.                More

How We’re Creating “Terminator Vision” in Your Future Contact Lenses

“We made a lens that displays a single pixel that can be turned on and off wirelessly. An integrated circuit stores the energy, and a light-emitting diode shoots light toward the eye, but the optics are tricky. You can’t focus on something that’s that close. To correct this, we put a series of tiny lenses between the LED and the eye—imagine holding your finger too close to your eye so it’s blurry; you could bring it into focus by putting a magnifying glass between your eye and your finger.            More

Retinal Implant Brings Eyesight To The Blind

Forbes - About 200,000 people in the United States and Europe suffer from retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that causes the slow degradation of eyesight starting from a young age, and often leads to blindness. The problem is that the genes in the eye are “programmed” to produce the wrong number of proteins that are needed for the cells. Over time, this causes the rods and cones in the eye end up dying, which is what leads to diminished and then lost eyesight.

Right now, there are no approved treatments to either restore eyesight or even slow the progression of the disease, but that may soon change as teams of researchers and companies are working on curing the condition.

One of those companies, Retinal Implant, AG, has developed a new retinal implant that partially restores vision to people who’ve lost their sight to retinitis pigmentosa. A first round of human clinical trials began in 2005 and concluded in 2010. That trial showed extraordinary promise, and the results were published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in November of 2010. The results showed that patients who received the implant had their eyesight partially restored to the point where they could distinguish objects and shapes and even read.

The implant itself is a small electronic chip, only 9 square mm, that’s implanted directly beneath the retina. The chip contains about 1500 electrodes and are powered inductively by transmitter coils placed under the skin. When light coming into the eye hits the electrodes, the chip converts the light into electricity, which then stimulates nerves in the retina. The stimulation is then perceived by the brain as sight. This differs from other implant technologies, which rely on cameras to capture and interpret the images.          More

The Two-Ton Robot That Can Leap Over Asteroids

Gizmodo - Michael Jordan? Muhammad Ali? Joe Montana? Sit down. The world’s most amazing athlete works for NASA. Meet the gigantic, six-legged, tool-wielding robot that can hop around an asteroid. Tiger Woods ain’t got nothin’.

The robot you see in the video is a half-scale model of a vehicle that NASA wants to send on a human mission to the moon. Half. This thing is thirteen feet tall. It’s naked in the video, but when it eventually launches it’ll have a payload on its back. It’ll probably house a ton of tools and gear, and even temporary space for a crew of one or two. It’s the lunar rover’s mutant, roboinsectoid big brother, and it’s incredible.

Athlete’s wheels are designed for benign terrain, which means normal, solid, not-too-rocky moon dirt. Ordinarily, a vehicle this size and weight (it weighs more 5,000 pounds and can carry a payload of over 32,000 pounds… well, earth-pounds) would need big fat wheels to prevent it from sinking in soft sand. Ditto for driving over larger obstacles. But larger wheels need larger motors, which require more weight, more power, and other headaches. The engineers who designed Athlete sidestepped this problem. Literally. By having the wheels on articulated limbs, it can just step over large rocks, or push itself out of soft sand. This means it can have smaller wheels and motors, which makes it far more dextrous. The limbs that drive the robot are the limbs that do detailed work, like drilling and taking samples. The motors that turn the wheels are the motors that actuate the tools. Genius. Or, perhaps more to the point: rocket science.      

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Is It a Ski or a Snowshoe? – Hybrid snowshoe/ski that lets you climb up a hill and glide down it

Discovery News - Love the backcountry, but not sure you’re ready to tackle triple black diamond terrain on skis?


A German company has developed a hybrid snowshoe/ski that lets you climb up a hill and glide down it, promising a more leisuriely snowsport than backcountry skiing and snowboarding.

The snowshoe-skis, made by Hive, have a sliding binding: spikes and toe crampons provide traction on for uphill trekking; then slide back and swing away to provide the downhill glide. The promotional video, featuring two postcard-perfect models trekking up a sunny slope in pristine alpine country, makes the transition from uphill to downhill look simple (but we haven’t seen any independant reviews yet).                   More

Sony Walkman Z – The iPod Touch for Android fiends

CNET - 

The good: The Walkman Z portable media player emphasizes music as the killer mobile app, integrating Sony’s Music Unlimited service, high-quality headphones, and unmatched audio enhancement software.

The bad: Considering its premium price, the Walkman Z has limited video support, a thick design, mediocre screen resolution, short battery life, no memory expansion, no cameras, and is built around a version of Android that’s soon to be outdated.

The bottom line: The Walkman Z is Sony’s iPod Touch for Android-loving audiophiles.

Read The Full Review

S. Korea’s Different Path To Technology Innovation

 

My Korean Quest for Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital and a Silicon Valley
 
Robots, underwater phones, online busses, fast follows and powerful vertical supply chains showed me a different model for innovation.

Forbes - It’s three in the morning in Silicon Valley, or maybe it’s four. I don’t know. I’m exhausted. It’s been a marathon day of meetings, tours, interviews and promotional videos. The clock on my iPhone is telling me numbers that doesn’t seem to mean anything. Whatever time it is back home in Silicon Valley, its dinnertime in Daejon, South Korea.

I’m in Korea to search for entrepreneurship, startups and the conditions that could foster development of a venture capital ecosystem. I wrote about the rise of China, the post-IT future of Israel, the Russian government’s attempts at starting a venture capital industry, how India’s sagging infrastructure weighed on entrepreneurs, and most recently, how a new breed of investors was looking to tap into Africa. And now I was investigating Korea’s potential as an investment destination and its desire to launch a Silicon Valley-style innovation ecosystem.

I set out seeking a new destination for U.S.-style venture capital and small companies poised to grow. I came back from Korea with a greater appreciation for its unique innovation trajectory, technology commercialization process and the big conglomerates that dominate its industry. As much as parts of Korea wanted to be like Silicon Valley, I found myself wishing that parts of Silicon Valley would be more like Korea.

Korea has become increasingly powerful in the past half decade. Samsung and Hyundai have become true industry leaders. The government has actively promoted cleantech, setting aside huge stimuli for wind projects and in-home hydrogen fuel cells. And perhaps most interestingly, the large pools of Korean capital, such as the $250 billion Korean Pension System (KPS) are actively looking to diversify out of domestic bonds and into “alternative assets” such as venture capital and private equity. To put that last piece of data into perspective, KPS is about the size of CalPERS, which has invested in several hundred venture funds over the past decade and continues to be one of the largest supporters of the industry.

Better still, it hasn’t been rocked by a housing bubble and had only limited exposure to the global financial crisis. Seoul is full of new skyscrapers, expensive new cars cruise smoothly paved streets and new infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges dot the countryside.

It looked like a place where venture capitalists might also find success, especially given Korea’s technological prowess. I set off looking for Silicon Valley-style opportunities in the country’s biggest innovation hub.

DAEJEON DAYS & KAIST’S KIDS

Daejeon is sometimes called the Silicon Valley of Asia, though that’s a misnomer. It’s better to think of this region as the R&D capital of the Korea. It’s got 29 national labs, five major universities and 150 research and development facilities. That’s a lot of researchers for the country’s fifth largest city with a population of 1.5 million. A promotional video tells me that “Daejeon is blossoming the flower of its infinite potential.”

The city’s strength is centrally planned and supported with government subsidies. An official from the Korea Innovation Cluster Foundation explained that a section of the city was broken into five zones, each with a focus on some particular part of the technology ecosystem. This section is called “Daedoeok Innopolis.” Innopolis, the official explained, is a portmanteau of “innovation” and “metropolis.” To my mind, it sounded like the name of a Greek shipping magnate.

The R&D activity of the city gave me the same buzz that I’ve gotten from Cambridge, Palo Alto and other places where science thrives. Yet I don’t get the manic vibe of constant self-reinvention that one frequently sees in Silicon Valley, where it’s normal to work for 10 or more companies during one’s career. Many of the mid-level executives I’ve met with in Daejeon wear a golden pin on their jacket lapel advertising the company that they work for.

I asked many there about entrepreneurship and their desire to start their own companies. All acknowledged that entrepreneurship and innovation were important, but no one seemed interested in taking the plunge. Their ambitions, generally, were more focused on the work they were doing in their current positions rather than keeping a constant eye on the exits.

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DiabetesPilot for iPhone: Diabetes management in your pocket (review)

Summary: DiabetesPilot for the iPhone makes sophisticated control of the disease as easy as pulling the phone out of your pocket.

Articles covering mHealth tools are very popular as smartphones can play integral roles in helping manage chronic health issues. Apps for managing diabetes are evolving as primary tools in daily care for many afflicted with the disease. A diabetic spends a significant effort constantly tracking his/her diet, glucose levels, exercise, weight, and insulin usage over time.

The DiabetesPilot app for the iPhone is not the cheapest solution, but it works in tandem with a desktop app to track every facet of the diabetic’s life.

I was previously using the Track3 app for the iPhone (reviewed here), but found it falling short in the reporting area. While a good solution for easily entering information, the app was lacking in the ability to produce detailed printed reports and charts to share with my healthcare provider.

DiabetesPilot is very good at that, and while expensive at $14.99 I find it worth the cost.



This review doesn’t cover the desktop program, but concentrates on strictly the iPhone app.

There are Mac and Windows versions of the desktop app. I use the Mac version ($29.99), and the ability to sync the desktop data with the iPhone via Wi-Fi keeps both apps up-to-date. The sophisticated reporting is compliments of the desktop version, as the iPhone app is only capable of very basic charts and graphs. The iPhone app is self-contained, so even though the desktop app has better reporting it is not required. There is a free trial of the desktop app to test it prior to plunking down the relatively high cost.                More

World’s Largest Game Controller

Discovery News - Some of the best ideas are born in bars, at least that’s how it seemed to work out for Ben Allen and his friends. Allen, a British engineering student, created the world’s largest NES controller and showcased it at London’s Liverpool Street station to kick off the Guinness World Records 2012 Gamer’s Edition.

BLOG: A Video Game that Really Gives You the Shivers

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Evolution of the Solid-State Drive

 

History of the SSD

 

PCWorld - Believe it or not, it has been 35 years since the very first solid-state drive (aka solid-state disk) hit the market. Like all SSDs, that model was designed to appear to a computer like a traditional rotating disk, while storing and retrieving data far faster than traditional hard drives could. Such devices are called “solid-state” because they contain no moving parts, only memory chips.

Over the years, the computer industry’s quest for faster, cheaper, higher-capacity SSDs has driven storage technology in ways no one could have foreseen in 1976, including the use of SSDs as the primary storage component in some consumer PCs.

In the next 15 slides, you’ll witness the evolution of the solid-state drive, from a bulky, obscenely expensive server accessory to a tiny consumer box (with hundreds of gigabytes of capacity) that anyone can buy for $50.              More