When you order a hamburger from a fast food restaurant, what do you think you’re eating? Just meat? Yeah, you wish. The actual percentage that’s real muscle tissue ranges from 2-15%. What’s the rest? Ammonia-treated trimmings, or ‘pink slime’ as it’s been described. McDonald’s recently announced they’ll stop using pink slime, now what about the rest of them? Check out the video below, and for more on this, read this article at Care2.
Thermoelectric devices have been around for a long time, and offer the awesome ability of converting a heat difference (one side of the device cold, the other hot) into electrical energy – or reversing the process and using electricity to create that thermal difference (great for car-powered refrigerators, for example). Now, researchers at Wake Forest University have taken this basic technology and transformed it into a multi-layer, flexible felt-like fabric. Possible applications could include wearable electronics (though the ambient air temperature needs to be significantly lower than body temperature), or simple things like wrapping pipes in this.
Portable electronics have always struggled with their power sources, with design having been a tradeoff between storage capacity and size/weight/cost. Being able to generate energy on the move would be a big benefit.
Read more on this over at Design News.
Quadrotor flying machines are pretty awesome, and this video shows just how far their control and precision has come, as a swarm of them perform the theme from James Bond on a variety of instruments.
I’ve always felt that Augmented Reality (AR) will transform what it’s like to experience the world, but after watching this video about Transcendenz, I find my perspective and vision of AR transformed.
Watching this, I realize that AR has even more potential than I suspected. This technology, if used fully, has the potential to really change what it means to be a person. What does that mean for the future? Will we have ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’? An augmented class of citizen? But more importantly…with some many directions this technology can be used, who will control it? That’s the scary part…
Mazda, you should be ashamed of yourself. To take the timeless Seuss classic ‘The Lorax’ and pervert it to suit your marketing neeeds…this sets a new low. The Lorax speaks for the trees and against mass consumption and consumerism. Early reviews of the movie are equally depressing, with the original environmental message mostly missing. I’ll admit that I haven’t seen it yet…with what I’ve heard so far, I’m reluctant to spend the money to see it in a theater and will wait for it to be available in iTunes instead.
One encouraging sign though, is that on YouTube, Mazda’s commercial has an overwhelming negative review so far (90% negative votes!). This is corporate green-washing at its worst. Don’t fall for it. These 4th graders can see the truth, can you?
The ingredients in processed foods are already a bit of a mystery, but what about that fresh produce you’re buying? Most people assume it’s natural and safe for consumption. Well, apart from the pesticide concern (like bud nip), there’s a growing concern that the produce you buy may be genetically modified (a GMO, Genetically Modified Organism). Why should you care? Because this is being driven by corporate greed, not science. The health concerns have not been adequately addressed by science, but this ‘food’ is put up for sale anyway without its true nature being labeled.
This summer, Walmart plans to sell genetically engineered corn on the cob in the fresh produce section. This engineered corn from Monsanto produces Bt toxin, a pesticide. Feed this stuff to rats and they get organ failure. Which somehow means it’s safe for people I guess?
So, if you care about this stuff, what can you do? First, shop at a store that cares, like Trader Joes or Whole Foods. Second, ask the produce manager in your local grocery store which items they have for sale are genetically modified (don’t expect them to know, but the point here is to raise consciousness and let them know their customers care about this issue). Third, sign this petition to send a signal to Walmart. Oh, and fourth…plant a garden and grow as much of your own food as possible, to at least minimize the scientific anomalies you introduce to your digestive tract.
Scientists have long studied geckos, fascinated by the amazing holding power of their feet and continuously attempting to replicate that with human technology. Well, we’re a step closer now thanks to researchers at the University of Massachusetts, who developed a pad that mimics the pads and tendons of a gecko’s feet, with the result able to hold hundreds of pounds to a smooth wall (~700lbs, to be more precise). The example they showed was a 42″ TV held only by this ‘geckskin’ material. Read more about it over at New Scientist.
The web is abuzz lately with rumors that Google is not only developing augmented reality glasses, but that they’ll actually be for sale later this year! Features are expected to include a camera and small display (obviously), though also a cellular data connection and multiple sensors (including GPS), for under $1k (closer to $500-600 is more likely). Information will supposedly be displayed in an augmented reality sort of view, overlaid into the wearer’s field of view, rather than be shown on a separate display off to the side. So at this point, it’s all just a bunch of rumors but one things for certain, AR is advanced at a fast pace and once the display technologies have reached a consumer level, expect a flood of apps to surface.
Vu1 has developed a new, energy-efficient lightbulb that’s a bit different….not like the LED and CFL bulbs you see on the shelves today. They’re using a technology known as Electron Stimulated Luminescence, or ESL for short. ESL bulbs emit electrons which hit a phosphor coating inside the bulb, which then emits light. Pretty simple in theory, and the result uses around 60% less energy than an incandescent bulb (and contains no mercury, unlike CFLs), at a reasonable price (approaching $10 once production ramps up). Compared to LED bulbs, it uses more energy and doesn’t last as long, but LED bulbs have had challenges getting good color reproduction, and the ESL bulbs might have an edge there. You can read more about it over at Vu1’s homepage, or check your local Lowes if you want to buy one to try out.
So here’s the problem…you want to take a picture of a person in a public space, but all the strangers walking by keep cluttering up the image! The solution? Use a soon-to-be-released app from Scalado to just ‘exclude’ those random people from the picture. I’m not completely certain how the technology works, but believe it’s essentially taking multiple images of the same picture, so once it identifies an area that has changed (a person walking through the image), it has the data already for what should be behind that person. This video is a nice demonstration of how this technology could be used:
It’s easy to see how this can be useful for taking pictures, but think about taking this one step further. What if this technology were embedded in a realtime AR display? Imagine wearing AR glasses, and having a wearable computer essentially ‘filter out’ all the people from your field of view. Or, once you can do that, replacing them with abstracts. Maybe just floating blue misty shapes like ghosts, so you know there are people there but aren’t distracted by the details? At that point, the possibilities are endless and really just a matter of creative software implementation. Awesome.
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