Author: Brian McEvoy

266 Articles

Get Your Tweets Without Looking

December 22, 2018 by 5 Comments

Head-mounted displays range from cumbersome to glass-hole-ish. Smart watches have their niche, but they still take your eyes away from whatever you are doing, like driving. Voice assistants can read to you, but they require a speaker that everyone else in the car has to listen to, or a headset that blocks out important sound. Ignoring incoming messages is out of the question so the answer may be to use a different sense than vision. A joint project between Facebook Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a solution which uses the somatosensory reception of your forearm.

A similar idea came across our desk years ago and seemed promising, but it is hard to sell something that is more difficult than the current technique, even if it is advantageous in the long run. In 2013, a wearer had his or her back covered in vibrator motors, and it acted like the haptic version of a spectrum analyzer. Now, the vibrators have been reduced in number to fit under a sleeve by utilizing patterns. It is being developed for people with hearing or vision impairment but what drivers aren’t impaired while looking at their phones?

Patterns are what really set this version apart. Rather than relaying a discrete note on a finger, or a range of values across the back, the 39 English phenomes are given a unique sequence of vibrations which is enough to encode any word. A phenome phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of speech. The video below shows how those phonemes are translated to haptic feedback. Hopefully, we can send tweets without using our hands or mouths to upgrade to complete telepathy.

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Organic Ornithopter Sensor Drone

December 20, 2018 by 16 Comments

Bees. The punchline to the title is bees carrying sensors like little baby bee backpacks. We would run out of fingers counting the robots which emulate naturally evolved creatures, but we believe there is a lot of merit to pirating natural designs, but researchers at the University of Washington cut out the middle-man and put their sensors right on living creatures. They measured how much a bee could lift, approximately 105 milligrams, then built a sensor array lighter than that. Naturally, batteries are holding back the design, and the rechargeable lithium-ion is more than half of the weight.

When you swap out brushless motors for organics, you gain and lose some things. You lose the real-time control, but you increase the runtime. You lose the noise, but you also lose the speed. You increase the range, but you probably wind up visiting the same field over and over. If your goal is to monitor the conditions of flowering crops, you may be ready to buy and install, but for the rest of us, dogs are great for carrying electronics. Oh yes. Cats are not so keen. Oh no.

Shape Shifting Structures Work With Magnets

December 15, 2018 by 12 Comments

In The Dark Knight, Lucius Fox shows Bruce Wayne a neat bit of memory weave fabric. In its resting state, it is a light, flexible material, but when an electrical current is applied, it pops into a pre-programmed shape. That shape could be a tent or a bat-themed paraglider. Science has not caught up to Hollywood in this regard, but the concept has been demonstrated in a material which increases its rigidity up to 318% within one second when placed in a magnetic field. Those numbers do not mean a lot by themselves, but increasing rigidity in a reversible, non-chemical way is noteworthy.

The high-level explanation is that hollow tubes are 3D printed and filled with magnetorheological fluid which becomes more viscous in the presence of a magnet because the ferrous suspended particles bunch up to form chains instead of sliding over one another. Imagine a bike tire filled with gel, and when you need a little extra traction the tire becomes softer, but when you are cruising on a paved trail, the tire becomes as hard as a train wheel to reduce friction. That could be darn handy in more places than building a fast bike.

A Lecture By A Fun Guy

December 14, 2018 by 9 Comments

Many people hear “fungus” and think of mushrooms. This is akin to hearing “trees” and thinking of apples. Fungus makes up 2% of earth’s total biomass or 10% of the non-plant biomass, and ranges from the deadly to the delicious. This lecture by [Justin Atkin] of [The Thought Emporium] is slightly shorter than a college class period but is like a whole semester’s worth of tidbits, and the lab section is about growing something (potentially) edible rather than a mere demonstration. The video can also be found below the break.

Let’s start with the lab where we learn to grow fungus in a mason jar on purpose for a change. The ingredient list is simple.

  • 2 parts vermiculite
  • 1 part brown rice flour
  • 1 part water
  • Spore syringe

Combine, sterilize, cool, inoculate, and wait. We get distracted when cool things are happening so shopping around for these items was definitely hampered by listening to the lecture portion of the video.

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Cyborg, Or Leafy Sensor Array?

December 12, 2018 by 17 Comments

Some plants react quickly enough for our senses to notice, such as a Venus flytrap or mimosa pudica. Most of the time, we need time-lapse photography at a minimum to notice while more exotic sensors can measure things like microscopic pores opening and closing. As with any sensor reading, those measurements can be turned into action through a little trick we call automation. [Harpreet Sareen] and [Pattie Maes] at MIT brought these two ideas together in a way which we haven’t seen before where a plant has taken the driver’s seat in a project called Elowan. Details are sparse but the concept is easy enough to grasp.

We are not sure if this qualifies as a full-fledged cyborg or if this is a case of a robot using biological sensors. Maybe it all depends on which angle you present this mixture of plant and machine. Perhaps it is truly is the symbiotic relationship that the project claims it to be. The robot would not receive any instructions without the plant and the plant would receive sub-optimal light without the robot. What other ways could plants be integrated into robotics to make it a bona fide cyborg?

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Biology Lab On Your Christmas List

December 11, 2018 by 6 Comments

We hope you have been good this year because we have a list to start your own biology lab and not everything will fit into Santa’s bag (of holding). If you need some last minute goodie points, Santa loves open-source and people who share on our tip line. Our friends at [The Thought Emporium] have compiled a list of the necessary equipment for a biology lab. Chemistry labs-in-a-box have been the inspiration for many young chemists, but there are remarkable differences between a chemistry lab and a biology lab which are explained in the Youtube video linked above and embedded after the break.

If you are preparing to start a laboratory or wondering what to add to your fledging lab, this video is perfect. It comes from the perspective of a hacker not afraid to make tools like his heat block and incubator which should absolutely be built rather than purchased but certain things, like a centrifuge, should be purchased when the lab is mature. In the middle we have the autoclave where a used pressure cooker may do the trick or you may need a full-blown commercial model with lots of space and a high-pressure range.

Maybe this will take some of the mystique out of starting your own lab and help you understand what is happening with a gel dock or why a spectrophotometer is the bee’s knees. There are a handful of other tools not mentioned here so if this is resonating, it will be worth a watch.

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Eyes On The Prize Of Glucose Monitoring

December 6, 2018 by 18 Comments

People with diabetes have to monitor their blood regularly, and this should not be a shock to anyone, but unless you are in the trenches you may not have an appreciation for exactly what that entails and how awful it can be. To give a quick idea, some diabetics risk entering a coma or shock because drawing blood is painful or impractical at the moment. The holy grail of current research is to create a continuous monitor which doesn’t break the skin and can be used at home. Unaided monitoring is also needed to control automatic insulin pumps.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, gave up where Noviosense, a Netherlands company owned by [Dr. Christopher Wilson], may gain some footing. Instead of contact lenses which can alter the flow of fluids across the eye, Noviosense places their sensor below the lower eyelid. Fluids here flow regardless of emotion or pain, so the readings correspond to the current glucose level. Traditionally, glucose levels are taken through blood or interstitial fluid, aka tissue fluid. Blood readings are the most accurate but the interstitial fluid is solid enough to gauge the need for insulin injection, and the initial trial under the eyelid showed readings on par with the interstitial measurements.

Hackers are not taking diabetes lying down, some are developing their own insulin and others are building an electronic pancreas.

Via IEEE Spectrum.