Predicting the future is hard, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. We’re Wired, after all.
Ten years ago, we boldly declared that we’d be living with phones on our wrists, data-driven goggles on our eyes and gadgets that would safety-test our food for us. Turns out, a lot of the things Sonia Zjawinski conceptualized in our “Living in 2013” feature way back in 2003 were remarkably close to what we’ve seen. We even got the iPhone right (sort of).
And so, as we look back on life in 2013 circa 2003, we’re going to spin it forward once again to tell you what life will be like in 2023.
Predicted for 2003 (above):
Apple redefined the desktop, laptop, and MP3 player. The next insanely great thing: an LCD arm cuff that includes a PDA, wireless Internet, a mini iPod, and, of course, a phone. The iPhone bracelet's motion sensor allows you to scroll through apps and files with the flick of a wrist, its clasp holds a digicam for use during video calls, and its wireless ear clip lets you listen and speak to callers. And everything can be done via voice recognition or touchscreen. Talk about the right call. Illustration: Kenn Brown.
Delivered in 2013:
Hey, it turns out, Apple gave us an iPhone after all! We got the name right, and even seemed to know about FaceTime. But the form factor details? Not so much. While you can wear an iPod nano as a watch, or make a call with your iPhone, if you want the watch-plus-phone combination that we teased you with 10 years ago, for now you'll need to pick up a secondary gadget that can transmit to your phone, like this Pebble. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.
Looking ahead to 2023:
Here's the thing, the screen on a watch is simply too small to display lots of data. And as an input device? Forget it. Yet keeping your phone out of sight means you often can't interact with your data on the go. The obvious answer is a variable size display. Samsung has already demonstrated a pretty convincing foldable OLED display prototype. Given 10 more years, we can easily see one screen serving multiple purposes by taking on multiple form factors, depending on whether you wanted to simply glance at it to read a message, or unfold it to write your reply. Illustration: Simon Lutrin/Wired
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired's Gadget Lab and the co-founder of the Knight-Batten award-winning Longshot magazine.
"We made machines for the masses," said Jack Tramiel, the founder of the company that gave the world the Commodore 64. Then he nodded to the man sitting beside him, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. "They made machines for the classes."
The year was 2007, and Tramiel was on stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, a machine that debuted in August 1982 with a price tag of $595 and was soon selling for a mere $199. That made it several hundred dollars cheaper than the Apple II offered by Wozniak and fellow Apple man Steve Jobs — not to mention the IBM PC — and according to Tramiel, Commodore sold nearly half a million machines a month before he left the company in 1984.
All told, Tramiel said that night, somewhere between 22 million and 30 million Commodore 64s were sold, which likely makes it the best-selling home computer of all time. "We sold half that many," said ex-IBM exec William Love, referring to the original IBM PC.
Tramiel passed away this past April at the age of 83, and though he may not have been a household name, the Commodore 64 certainly was.
He was just one of several tech titans who died over the past year. None had the name recognition of a Steve Jobs -- who passed in 2011 -- but they may have moved our world in bigger ways. Among those that passed in 2012 are the IBMer who invented the bar code and the Zenith engineer who devised the first wireless TV remote -- not to mention one of the physicist who helped built the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Click on the images above to remember them all.
Above:
Jack Tramiel was born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1928, and during the war, he was sent to Auschwitz, before he was moved with his father to a labor camp in Germany. He was freed in 1945 and emigrated to the States two years later, and in the mid-1950's, he founded a business called Commodore.
At first, it dealt in typewriters, but then it moved to adding machines, calculators, and, yes, home computers. After he was forced out of Commodore in 1984, Tramiel bought the consumer division of game outfit Atari and reformed it as Atari Corporation, which he ran until the end of the decade.
Many of our most popular posts are image galleries, and this year our readers favorite collections included microscope photos, doomsday scenarios, auroras and lots of images of Earth from space.
The satellite image above of Brasilia is part of the most popular post of the year.
Above:
I think it's safe to say that our readers like looking at images of Earth from space almost as much as we do. Satellite imagery was the subject of four of Wired Science's 10 most popular galleries of 2012, with this gallery of planned cities topping the list.
Bluetooth is good for more than silly headsets and wireless speakers. The city of Calgary, Alberta, is using the technology to give drivers real-time information about travel time during their commute.
The Travel Time Information System along Calgary’s Deerfoot Trail anonymously collects Bluetooth signals from mobile phones, headsets and other devices to estimate travel times and gauge congestion. Travel times are then displayed on electronic signs along the roadway.
All Bluetooth devices contain a unique ID code. According city officials, the Travel Time Information System encrypts and monitors Bluetooth signals without tracking other information and gathers MAC addresses only. The system reads the Bluetooth codes at 15 sensor points along Deerfoot Trail.
A central server at the city’s traffic management center collects the data from 15 sensors and sends traffic info to seven roadside displays. Algorithms sift out signals from drivers, pedestrians and other sources near, but not on, Deerfoot Trail to minimize erroneous data.
The city found the system consistently accurate during a trial in 2010, and it has grown more precise as more people use Bluetooth devices. “Drivers will be able to make informed route planning choices in real time,” Gord Elenko, manager of Calgary’s road traffic division, told Phsy.org. “We believe it will eventually help reduce congestion and decrease driver frustration.”
The system operates during peak travel times — from 6:30 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. — Monday through Friday. After assessing the reliability of the system by monitoring travel times during rush hour, Calgary plans to extend the hours of operation.
The city spent about $400,000 on the system and plans to expand it to include other areas as funding becomes available. It hopes to eventually install 26 Bluetooth detection systems on major commuter routes citywide.
New York City is constantly under construction, meaning the skyline and sidewalk vistas always include cranes and scaffolding. Now, two designers aim to improve the view by making construction a little nicer for pedestrians. Their sidewalk-improving initiative is called Softwalks.
The endeavor comes from Bland Hoke and Howard Chambers, who began working on it two years ago while at Parsons the New School for Design. Their prototype is a DIY kit that allows people to turn any unsightly local scaffolding into a temporary place to hang out. It includes chairs, tables and even hanging baskets for plants.
All elements are easily attached and detached to the exterior parts of build sites — they’re temporary additions that can be added when necessary but also removed with ease.
Right now Softwalks is still a design concept, but the initial tests have won Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award in the student category. Hoke and Chambers are raising money on Kickstarter to begin a pilot project that will see the kit installed in a location for a short period of time. Backer’s rewards include laser-cut business card holders for $20, to the actual seats and planters used for Softwalks for $800 to $1000.
The U.S. military has begun a staged, five-year process that will see each of its three main stealth warplane types deployed to bases near China. When the deployments are complete in 2017, Air Force F-22s and B-2s and Marine Corps F-35s could all be within striking range of America’s biggest economic rival at the same time. With Beijing now testing its own radar-evading jet fighters — two different models, to be exact — the clock is counting down to a stealth warplane showdown over the Western Pacific.
The gradual creation of the U.S. stealth strike force is an extension of the Pentagon’s much-touted “strategic pivot” to the Pacific region, and echoes the much faster formation, earlier this year, of a similar (but only partially stealthy) aerial armada in the Persian Gulf. That team of F-22s, non-stealthy F-15s and specialized “Bacon” radio-translator planes was clearly meant to deter a belligerent Iran, although the Pentagon denied it.
The announcements of new Pacific deployments of F-22s, F-35s and B-2s have come like a drumbeat in recent weeks. Early last month, 8th Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Stephen Wilson, who controls the Air Force’s 20-strong B-2 fleet normally based in Missouri, said “small numbers” of his multi-billion-dollar batwing bombers would begin rotating into the Pacific and other regions starting next year. The rotations would last “for a few weeks, a couple of times a year,” Wilson told Air Force magazine.
For the B-2s, which are being heavily upgraded with new radars and communications, the planned deployments represent a return to form. Beginning in the early 2000s, B-2s frequently deployed to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, occasionally accompanied by stealthy F-22s. But the Pacific rotations were tough on the tiny B-2 force. In 2008 one of the bombers crashed and burned at Andersen; two years later another B-2 suffered a serious engine fire at the remote island base that nearly destroyed the plane.
The Air Force suppressed news of the second incident and quietly pulled the B-2s from the Pacific front line, replacing them with older B-52s. After a period of rest, the stealth bomber fleet is now ready to get back into the habit of operating overseas. “We’re going to put them into the ‘new normal,’” Wilson said.
F-22s, normally based in Florida, Virginia, Alaska and Hawaii, are already regular visitors to Andersen and, more frequently, the Pentagon’s Kadena mega-base in Japan’s Okinawa prefecture. But problems with the pricey, high-flying jet’s oxygen systems resulted in crippling flight restrictions for much of this year. The Air Force believes it has finally figured out how to minimize the choking risk to its (occasionally mutinous) stealth pilots. And in a speech at the National Press Club last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said there would be “new deployments of F-22s … to Japan.”
In the same speech, Panetta announced the first planned overseas basing of the still-in-development F-35. The Defense Department is “laying the groundwork” for F-35s to deploy to Iwakuni, Japan, in 2017, Panetta said. Though he did not specify, it’s likely Panetta was referring to the Marines’ vertical-landing F-35B version of the troubled, delayed stealth attack jet, as the B version will be the first of three F-35 models to be cleared for combat — and since Iwakuni traditionally hosts Marine fighters.
To be fair, the B-2s, F-22s and F-35s aren’t expected to fight alone. Besides the existing Pacific force structure of F-15s, F-16s, A-10s and other warplanes, drones and support aircraft, the Pentagon is planning on sending in the Navy’s new P-8 patrol plane and, eventually, the Air Force’s still-unbuilt KC-46 tanker.
Still, it’s possible that all three radar-evading planes could be flying together over the blue waters of the Pacific as early as five years from now. By that time China might have built and deployed combat-ready versions of its own J-20 and J-31 stealth fighters. That doesn’t mean the two aerial armadas will be fighting each other, of course. Conventional war with China is, and will likely remain, unnecessary and unlikely.
For both sides the planned stealth strike forces are all about showing off, and impressing your rival so much that actually fighting him seems unthinkable. And that’s a good thing.
Django Unchained opens in theaters today, but the big screen isn’t the only way to see the newest work by Quentin Tarantino. The issue of the Django Unchained comic book mini-series from DC/Vertigo Comics is available now in comic book stores (and online), and in advance of tomorrow’s film debut, Wired has a look at the Tarantino’s introduction to the comic, along with the original character sketches by artist R.M. Guéra and a six-page preview of the first issue.
The comic is an incredibly faithful adaptation of Tarantino’s movie script – the first issue is the first few scenes of the film, almost line for line. Drawing on the director’s story, the book’s interior art comes from Guéra, who made characters that hew closely to their actor counterparts but are their own characters entirely. The artist’s Django, the slave that becomes a bounty hunter, has a more steely cowboy vibe than smooth, cool Jamie Foxx; ruthless plantation owner Calvin Candie looks even more maniacal than Leonardo DiCaprio; and Candie’s house slave Stephen looks far more jowly and grizzled on the page than Samuel L. Jackson does on screen.
“Growing up I read the adventures of Kid Colt Outlaw, TOMAHAWK, The Rawhide Kid, BAT LASH, and especially, Yang (which was basically the Kung Fu TV show done as a comic), and Gunhawks featuring Reno Jones (a Jim Brown stand-in) and Kid Cassidy (a David Cassidy stand-in), which for my money was the greatest Blaxploitation Western ever made,” Tarantino says in the first issue’s intro. “And it’s in that spirit of cinematic comics literature that I present to you Django Unchained.”
Tarantino’s version of the story hits theaters Dec. 25.
Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.
In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn’t really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an “antireflective coating or surface treatment process for metals” to absorb stray light “in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared regions.” This, the Army hopes, will boost the quality of high-resolution cameras, while also cooling down sensitive electronics. Or to put it another way: The Army needs the color black to reflect its icy-cold heart.
Another curious thing is that the program is being run out of the Army’s Program Executive Office Ammunition at the Picatinny Arsenal, a main center for the Pentagon’s experiments in all sorts of weapons: from rifles and tank cannons to directed-energy weapons. But the purpose of the solicitation isn’t much more specific than described. “Simply put, it’s too early yet to speculate on where the technology(s) will go,” Frank Misurelli, an Army spokesman at Picatinny said in a statement provided to Danger Room. ”Possibly in a few months, after an contract has been awarded, more information may become available.”
But for whatever the Army wants to fade to black, it seems that regular black isn’t good enough. This is because most black paint will absorb only around 90-95 percent of light, with the other 5-10 percent reflected back outwards. For a high-resolution camera, that stray light can bounce back into the lens and interfere with the quality of an image. It’s even a problem for NASA’s ultra-deep-space sensors. In the extreme coldness of space, black paint turns a silver-y color, which increases heat and can interfere with infrared-detecting instruments.
But wait, doesn’t black get really hot when hit with light, like wearing black clothes during the summer? The answer is: sorta. Black is really good at absorbing heat, but is also really good at radiating heat away. This is why cooling fins, radiators and engines for cars and trucks are often painted black. In 2011, NASA developed a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbed between 98-99.5 percent of light, depending on the wavelength. Nor do the coating’s thin layers of nanotubes change color in extreme cold. They absorb more light, and help radiate heat away from instruments, keeping them cold.
The Army could go another route. A second option uncovered by Britain’s National Physical Laboratory involves immersing an object in a solution of nickel and sodium for several hours, which blackens the color, and then taking it out and dunking it in nitric acid for a few seconds. According to New Scientist, this creates an alloy pock-marked with tiny microscopic craters that prevent light from bouncing away.
Finally, the Army also hopes to expand the materials to “optical glass surfaces” — camera lenses, in other words — while testing to see whether “it will be able to survive in a military environment.” The material should also come in “multiple surface colors” and be able to “selectively exhibit earth color instead of broadband absorption.” And another hope is to use the materials to absorb water to cool down equipment. See, it’s tough out there being goth, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it in comfort.
This Hubble telescope snapshot of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula, reveals that the object has an hourglass shape with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. A planetary nebula is the glowing relic of a dying, Sun-like star.
The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter that accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. According to one theory on the formation of planetary nebulae, the hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud, which is denser near its equator than near its poles.
Image: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA [high-resolution]
Caption: Hubble Heritage site
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Athey Moravetz is doing some tasty work with her 3-D printers.
The video game designer has worked on PlayStation games like Resistance Retribution and Uncharted Golden Abyss. She's also a self-described "jack-of-all-trades," skilled with 3-D modeling tools like Maya, and knows how to design compelling characters with them.
After having two children she decided to work from home, and in addition to keeping active in the computer graphics industry, she also created a wildly successful Etsy shop, where she sells 3-D printed cookie cutters based on nerd culture favorites Pokemon, Dr. Who and Super Mario Brothers.
The iPad’s most spaced-out, most diabolically fun musical instrument app just got a big upgrade.
Moog Music has added dozens of new features and a couple of new in-app purchase options to Animoog, its touchscreen synth for iOS. Updates include numerous new tones and timbres, a built-in multi-track recorder, and the ability to use the accelerometer to modulate the synthesizer by shaking and tipping the tablet.
Animoog v2 for the iPad will be available Friday morning in the App Store. It’s a free update if you have the old Animoog. Newcomers can download it for $15 until the end of the year. On January 1, it goes back up to the regular price of $30.
The latest version of Animoog includes a new way to modulate the sound using the iPad’s accelerometer.
Yes, that sounds expensive for an app, but it’s totally worth it. Every iPad-owning musician I know uses — and loves — Animoog. The app makes all the twisted and funky noises you’d expect from something sold under the Moog name (the company has been making electronic instruments for almost 60 years). Animoog combines a touch-sensitive keypad, analog-style knobs and controls, and an animated screen where the notes twirl and dance around. It’s ridiculously fun to play. Experts will find a direct path to their inner Keith Emerson. And if you know absolutely nothing about music, you can still get lost inside it for hours.
The latest version of Animoog includes a new way to modulate the sound by using the iPad’s accelerometer. As you’re playing, you can shake and rattle the iPad to alter the synth’s tonal qualities. Another new addition makes this even cooler — a note hold button just above the keyboard. Tap the note hold, let the sound ring out for a few seconds, then start moving or shaking the iPad to add squelchy pulses, wobbly vibrato or throbs of distortion.
Moog has also added an in-app four-track recorder, which you can download as an expansion pack — it’s free until the end of the year, and after December 31, you’ll be able to buy for it $5.
The recorder lets you overdub four separate Animoog performances, or you can drop in anything from your iTunes library and jam on top of it. It’s especially fun to plug in a drum track and record melodies over it. It also works pretty well as a sampler — you can grab a sound, make a loop, and build entire loop-based tracks from scratch. The results can be exported to Soundcloud from inside Animoog’s recorder.
The enhancements to version 2 of Animoog are simply too numerous to mention, so we’ve embedded the demo at the top of the post. The video also gives a sneak preview of the new Grateful Dead sound pack, which will be available very soon as an in-app purchase. To access the new four-track mini-studio and the other add-ons, update your Animoog app, then tap on the Moog Store tab at the top, just above the x-y pad.
The needle drops and a series of high, repetitive whines come from the album. Then a crackling sound, and a muffled guitar riff. Finally, Kurt Cobain’s voice — audible, but distant and hollow, like he is singing in a tunnel with a scarf over his mouth.
It’s about the worst version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” you could find. But it is awesome all the same for its totally unique medium. This particular LP is part of the batch of the first records ever to be created on a 3-D printer.
“It’s surprising how much you can deform and down-sample an audio file and still recognize it,” says Amanda Ghassaei, assistant tech editor at Instructables, who printed the record, and several others, including music from the Pixies, Daft Punk, and Radiohead.
Ghassaei used a state-of-the-art Objet Connex 500 printer to generate the disc. The whole process is possible because printing resolution has finally become high enough to create the audio-laden grooves for the needle to track and amplify. For her printed records, Ghassaei sets the machine to its finest setting, 600 dpi, with 16 micron steps, about the highest quality available on the market. But it’s still far lower resolution than on a vinyl LP, by a factor of 10 or so; hence the muddled sound that results in part from the needle responding to the layering of the printed plastic. Ghassaei used an 11 Khz sampling rate — the highest the resolution would allow, around 1/4 what you get from an MP3. Even at that low of a rate, the printer’s deficiencies cut off the song’s high-range tones.
“It’s really stripped down, it’s down to the bare essentials,” she says. “It’s never going to be as good as vinyl. It’s not really set up for that. But it’s cool because you can really be creative with it.”
To create the 3-D model for the record, Ghassaei essentially reverses the process of ripping an MP3. As the groove of a record is a microscopic image of the analog audio, she starts with the digitized waveform, using Python to take it directly from the MP3 file, and renders the shape of it into an STL wireframe using Processing, an open source tool that automates the file generation. She then uses the software to wrap it in a spiral on a 3-D 12-inch disc, varying the depth of the groove to match the waveform. Compared to a normal record, hers have increased amplitude and groove depth to account for the coarse resolution.
While it’s a first for a printed proper LP, others have toyed with simpler forms of 3-D printable music. Earlier this year, Fred Murphy generated “Stairway to Heaven” and three other songs on discs for the classic Fisher Price record player. That toy turntable is different than the common vinyl record player, though; it uses a music-box system with tines that sound as they rotate over the record’s raised bumps. Murphy posted the how-to for his project on Instructables, and offers pre-made versions of his discs through Shapeways.
Ghassaei, like Murphy, has put her project up on Instructables, though it’s not particularly useful unless you have access to a high-end printer in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. She is also limited to the first 60 seconds or so, because of the data- and memory-intense 3-D file. A full song would take up a whole side of the album, and the file size would exceed a gigabyte. But that’s not really the point.
“It’s really cool to kind of push the technology and see what you can get out of it,” says Ghassaei. “I’ve got a bunch more that I want to do.”
Sometimes I feel like Peter Parker. (You know, Spider-Man.) I have real work to do, but then I hear these sirens on the internet and I must go to action.
Well, what about this kid being carried away by an eagle? What can be done with this video? Here is the evidence I will present. Let me just say that I sure hope it’s fake. I would hate to have all our babies snatched away by flying eagles. That would just suck. Although, maybe the eagle is just pumped up about the movie The Hobbit and thinks that kid is actually a hobbit.
Analysis of Camera Shake
This is my first go-to tool when looking at videos. One of the tricks fakers use is to record the video with a tripod. A steady video makes it much easier to add in special effects later. Of course, who records with a tripod? That seems unrealistic. To account for this, the fakers will add “fake shake” to the video.
How do you detect a fake shake? The first step is to use a video-analysis tool like the awesome and free Tracker Video Analysis. With this, I can track the motion of the background in the video to see how the camera moves. Here are four samples of background motion.
Which, if any, of these background motions do you think correspond to a real person with a real camera? Here are the answers:
A: This is the background motion from the Human Birdwings video. In case you missed it, a guy posted a video of his homemade wings that let him fly like a bird. It was fake.
B: This is from the eagle-kid video. Real or fake?
C: This is fake shake from this fake spinning water video. You can see how the camera takes similar pixel size jumps. It’s faker than Sweet ‘N Low.
D: This is a real video recorded from a real person (me). What does this background look like? To me, it looks like a random walk. Maybe that’s just me.
For this eagle video, which case does it look like? It doesn’t look as bad as the other two known fake videos. However, it doesn’t look like my video either. One of the things I haven’t looked at (yet) is the stabilizing video features that YouTube offers for videos.
I would say that this shake analysis is mostly inconclusive.
Acceleration of a Falling Object
Next, let’s look at the part of the video where the eagle drops the kid. The drop distance is small enough that air resistance should be negligible. This means that the vertical acceleration should have a value of -9.8 m/s2 if this eagle and kid are on the surface of the Earth. Here is a plot of vertical motion of the kid after he (or she) is dropped.
I put the arrow to indicate the part of the data where the kid was dropped. Now, I don’t know the scale — but it might not matter. Does this look like constant acceleration? No, it looks like constant velocity. I’m not even going to use the quadratic fit in this case to find the scale.
Instead, let’s look at the time of the fall. From the video, the child was falling for 0.367 seconds. If the child was dropped from rest (or close to it), how high would the kid have to be to fall for this time? Normally, I break down the kinematic equations and show where this comes from, but let me just skip right to it.
Putting in my value for the time, I get a dropped height of 0.66 meters. OK, that’s not as bad as I thought it would be. However, the position function should still be a parabola and not a straight line.
Center of Mass
Here is a shot of the kid while being carried by the eagle.
Look at the angle that the kid is “swinging” back. It could be as high as 30° – but that is just an “eyeball” guess. So what? This actually shows a common misconception. It shows the idea that if something is moving at a constant velocity, there must be a constant force on it. However, at low speeds with no air resistance there wouldn’t need to be a force pulling the kid forward.
If the bird were accelerating, then the kid would swing back. From the swingback angle, you can figure out the acceleration. You can find all the details on how this works in my Iron Man 3 post. Here also is a diagram of a person hanging from something that is accelerating.
The kid hanging back at an angle couldn’t be moving at a constant speed since the horizontal forces don’t add up to zero. If I use an angle of 30°, then the bird would have to accelerate at 5.6 m/s2. That’s pretty high for a bird carrying a kid.
How Much Can an Eagle Lift?
Bigger-mass birds need bigger wings, right? Also, a larger wingspan bird could lift more “cargo”. So how much could an eagle lift? Here is my favorite graph showing the relationship between a bird’s wingspan and mass.
Bigger-mass birds need bigger wings. Seems obvious. So, what about a Golden Eagle? Wikipedia lists these as having a mass of about 6.5 kg and a wingspan of about 2.3 meters. What about the kid? Let’s say the kid is 2 years old with a mass of about 13 kg. That is about double the mass of the eagle! Sure, eagles can pick stuff up — but not something this big.
Autodesk, the industry leader in CAD software, has announced it is partnering with biological printer manufacturer Organovo to create 3-D design software for designing and printing living tissue.
It’s an area of interest to Autodesk, whose software runs the industrial design and architecture worlds, allowing them to expand further into new fields by helping researchers interface with new tools.
Organovo’s bioplotter, one of the only machines that can shape living tissue, works like a standard desktop 3-D printers but uses living cells instead of ABS plastic. It creates tissue by printing a gel base material as a scaffold and then deposits cells which mature into living material that can be used in the process of developing new pharmaceuticals.
Specific details about the system, including pricing and availability, are not yet available. Even with scant details, executives at both companies are excited about the potential of such a system.
“Autodesk is an excellent fit for developing new software for 3D bioprinters,” Organovo CEO Keith Murphy says in a press release. “This partnership will lead to advances in bioprinting, including both greater flexibility and throughput internally, and the potential long-term ability for customers to design their own 3D tissues for production by Organovo.”
Jeff Kowalski, senior VP/CTO at Autodesk, echoes Murphy’s sentiment. “Bioprinting has the potential to change the world,” he says. “It’s a blend of engineering, biology and 3D printing, which makes it a natural for Autodesk. I think working with Organovo to explore and evolve this emerging field will yield some fascinating and radical advances in medical research.”
While this announcement is certainly big news, we’re multiple revisions away from 3-D printing replacement body parts. Even after the technical difficulties of printing organs or even tissue for live human use are worked through, any resulting process will need to be validated through complex clinical trials and a long review by the FDA and international authorities. Still, it will be exciting to see what medical researchers and DIY biohackers will do with these tools.
A student at the Vienna University of Technology uses an iPad to control a robot arm. Photo: TU Vienna
Sigrid Brell-Cokcan and Johannes Braumann want you to make architecture with robot arms.
For decades, robots have been used on assembly lines to do things like make cars and package food. Over a long period of refinement, the iconic robot arm has become a nearly commoditized piece of hardware. You can buy them, and essentially plug then play. Their generalized capabilities make them very flexible in terms of application.
Brell-Cokcan and Braumann are co-founders of the Association for Robots in Architecture and organizers of the Rob|Arch 2012 conference, being held in Vienna on Dec. 17 and 18. Over this past weekend they ran a series of workshops in Vienna, Graz, Zürich, Rotterdam, and Stuttgart to expose architects and designers to the possibilities of utilizing this technology. “We try create a platform that shows the innovative uses of robotic fabrication in the creative industry, and brings together members of industry and academia, as well as architects, artists, and designers,” says Braumann.
Unlike a lot of the machines involved in industrial production, robot arms are generalists. They can be easily reconfigured to do different tasks via software and changing the attachments on the end of the arm. This is why they are ideal for assembly-line work where the shape of the product changes frequently (as with annually changing car models) and, Brell-Cokcan and Braumann say, why they are ideal for architecture. In fact, because architecture generally involves tolerances measured in millimeters or even centimeters — units robotic arms work in — the hyper-precision of tools like 5-axis CNC machines are generally wasted when used for building purposes.
In the lead up to Rob|Arch2012, the team has been collecting example of robots arms being used to build structures. A variety of the submitted photos and videos are shown in the gallery above, ranging from formed concrete blocks to massive structures made from individually glued plastic spheres; more can be found on their Vimeo page.
Beyond the conference and workshops, the Association for Robots in Architecture has been working to make robots more accessible by creating tools to help architects get started. They recently released KUKA|prc in order to encourage the use of robots in architecture. KUKA|prc is a parametric robot controller plugin for Grasshopper, a visual programming tool that works inside the architectural-standard 3-D CAD modeler software Rhinoceros.
Braumann says the use of robotics in architecture has made huge strides since the mid-2000s. On the one hand, he sees a growing number of faculties and firms that are making use of these tools. On the other, he sees a production industry that is moving toward increasingly creative and custom applications.
“Not too long ago, the creative industry looked up toward the large industry players and attempted to duplicate their automated processes,” he says, “We are now at a stage, where individualized and customized products are increasingly important and the sides are switching — as architects and designers often work with such small series of objects, industry is now looking at ways to adapt strategies developed by creative minds.”
Astronomers using data from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, have made an impressive composite of the nebula Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula. The painting-like image shows vast clouds of gas and dust illuminated by the intense radiation from young stars.
The image shows a central region about 15 light-years across, although the entire nebula is even larger, about 40 light-years in total. Messier 17 is in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), about 6000 light-years from Earth. It is a popular target for amateur astronomers, who can obtain good quality images using small telescopes.
These deep VLT observations were made at near-infrared wavelengths with the ISAAC instrument. The filters used were J (1.25 µm, shown in blue), H (1.6 µm, shown in green), and K (2.2 µm, shown in red). In the centre of the image is a cluster of massive young stars whose intense radiation makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow. To the lower right of the cluster is a huge cloud of molecular gas. At visible wavelengths, dust grains in the cloud obscure our view, but by observing in infrared light, the glow of the hydrogen gas behind the cloud can be seen shining faintly through. Hidden in this region, which has a dark reddish appearance, the astronomers found the opaque silhouette of a disc of gas and dust. Although it is small in this image, the disc has a diameter of about 20 000 AU, dwarfing our Solar System (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). It is thought that this disc is rotating and feeding material onto a central protostar — an early stage in the formation of a new star.
Image: ESO/R. Chini [high-resolution]
Caption: ESO
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To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years.
Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures.
Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles. Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate.
Here we have collected 13 stunning images of some of the world’s most impressive and beautiful glaciers, captured from space by astronauts and satellites.
Above: Bear Glacier, Alaska
This image taken in 2005 of Bear Glacier highlights the beautiful color of many glacial lakes. The hue is caused by the silt that is finely ground away from the valley walls by the glacier and deposited in the lake. The particles in this “glacial flour” can be very reflective, turning the water into a distinctive greenish blue. The lake, eight miles up from the terminus of the glacier, was held in place by the glacier, but in 2008 it broke through and drained into Resurrection Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park.
The grey stripe down the middle of the glacier is called a medial moraine. It is formed when two glaciers flow into each other and join on their way downhill. When glaciers come together, their lateral moraines, long ridges formed along their edges as the freeze-thaw cycle of the glacier breaks off chunks of rock from the surrounding walls, meet to form a rocky ridge along the center of the joined glaciers.
Gearheads at Michigan Tech and General Motors have developed three-wheelers specifically designed for wounded veterans who compete in marathons and other endurance events.
The three-wheeled handcycles were designed by students at the university’s medical engineering program and engineers from Chevrolet. They’ll be used by the Achilles Freedom Team of Wounded Veterans in races nationwide.
“This is the most rewarding assignment I’ve ever worked on,” Brett Jenkins, a Michigan Tech senior who led one of the five student teams tasked with building the bikes, said in a statement.
GM’s Military Discount Program has long supported the Freedom team, but not all were pleased with the machines on the market. Students at Michigan Tech felt they could do better and set out, with GM’s help, to design handcycles that are more durable and comfortable.
Five teams set to work on the project, designing bikes that riders propel with their arms. The teams combined their best ideas into two prototypes, the Tomahawk and Keweenaw Kruiser. They feature durable steel alloy frames for strength and restraints that enhance the safety and comfort of the rider. The handcycles also were designed for easier transporting — a pivoting attachment connects the frame to the fork, allowing the front wheel to fold into the seat, making it easier to move and less likely to be damaged in transit.
General Motors said it will build 10 handcycles for the Freedom team, which was founded in 2004 to help returning veterans train for and compete in races nationwide.
“I loved working with the students and seeing their energy and passion,” GM engineer Alexa Ellswood said Ellswood. “This isn’t their last class. It’s their first job.”
When you think of speakers, if you think of them at all, you probably think of something black, boxy and not terribly big on style. There are exceptions, of course, and People People’s cool transparent speaker, launching on Kickstarter today, is one of them.
The speaker’s mostly transparent enclosure is tempered glass and aluminum, making it a cool audio addition to your home. It blends seamlessly and unobtrusively with your decor, a very slick effect indeed, and perfect for someone who wants to add some boom to their room without clunky cubes dissing their design aesthetic.
“We’re trying to make a timeless design in a way,” designer and founder Per Brickstad said. “We’re simplifying it so much, taking away anything unnecessary. We’re emphasizing what we think is really important, which is people’s music.”
The speakers feature dual 3-inch full-range drivers and a 6.5-inch woofer, and they can handle 80 to 100 watts — enough to fill Wired’s spacious lunchroom with surprisingly robust sound even at low levels. The speakers also provide bass, treble and volume controls so you can tweak the sound to suit your taste.
In back, it’s got a “toaster slot” where you can slide in an Airport Express (not included) to control the speaker via WiFi with Apple’s AirPlay. Brickstad said he wanted to develop a product that will last a long time, so most of its components are recyclable and modular, which means you can replace any parts that break or become obsolete.
All this comes at a price though: An early-bird kit version of the speaker, which you’ll have to assemble yourself, starts at $360, while the full, assembled version starts at $460.
You can support People People on Kickstarter or pre-order yourself a speaker here.
Viddy, the popular social video app that wants to be “Instagram for video,” is finally available on Android. Its arrival this morning in the Google Play storefront comes about a year and a half after it hit iOS, and it couldn’t come at a better time.
Although the iOS version claimed the “most downloaded” spot at the App Store earlier this year and the company brought in $30 million in investments from the likes of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, singer Shakira and Roc Nation, Viddy has seen its daily unique visitors decline. Still, the number of registered users has grown from 10 million in April to 40 million registered users as of this month, suggesting there is a whole lot of growth potential.
“We don’t look at it like the stock market,” co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien said of Viddy’s user base. “We don’t look at the macro trends. We look at the fact that almost every smartphone nowadays has an HD camera on it. And people are getting more and more used to sharing video, socially. We’re just heads down, continuing to innovate and iterate with the product, expand across more platforms and expand internationally. I look at the category and it’s still one of the fastest-growing categories on the internet.”
O’Brien said he believes that, over the next few months, Android could deliver double the 40 million registered iOS users the company currently has. But making Viddy the next Instagram or even the next Twitter can’t be done on iOS alone. After all, about 480 million Android devices have been activated over the last five years. Another 1.3 million are activated each day.
“Being on Android is hugely important for us,” O’Brien told Wired. “It’s a major opportunity for us — it’s the other half of the smartphone world, really. And, if you look at our competition, there’s really nothing like this on Android. There are a bunch of video apps and social apps on iOS, but nothing like Viddy on Android.”
Indeed, a look through Google Play shows that no social video apps quite match the polish that Viddy’s Android iteration delivers. Viddy on Android is just as good as it is on iOS. It looks and works great. Helping Viddy’s case, is the fact its biggest rival, AutoDesk’s Socialcam, last updated its Android app Aug. 15.
While Socialcam allows for unlimited video uploads and the ability to share videos of any length, Viddy’s app is stocked full of filters that add a vintage and filmic look to videos that are confined to 15-second clips. Now, Viddy will find out whether or not Android users will show up and take to Viddy.
“We’ve spent the last six months building our Android app and we’re really proud of it,” O’Brien said. “We wanted to do it right, and doing it right required a lot of time to pull off the same special effects, to maintain our UI, our user experience.”
Part of the reason it took Viddy so long to land on Android was a push to make it work with consistency across across 735 different Android smartphones and tablets, he said, adding that “Android has a lot of technical challenges because of all the different form factors and hardware variation, but it we think we’ve done right.”
