Recent News
Carl Hayden Community High School 1 / MIT nothing
Check out this Blue Jean (Gene)...
While the DARPA Challenge folks struggle...
You know it's gone mainstream when...
And you think you have problems
Not sure if your date is having a good time?
Archives
- November 2007
- October 2007
- April 2007
- November 2006
- October 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
March 2005 Archives
March 4, 2005
So if you can power your cell phone with a wind turbine how about a hand crank for your iPod Shuttle?
Check it out
Continue reading "iPod Shuttle can benefit from alternate power source to"Mother Nature has had a long time to work on packaging design problems. Some times her solutions turn out to be quite good. Engineers at the University of Florida have found Shark skin was a great inspiration for a new coating design for ocean-going ships. Conventionally finished ship hulls can suffer from algae and barnacle growth which increases drag and increases energy usage and maintenance costs. The UF engineers have developed a new coating based on learnings from studying shark skin that can prevent the fouling from algae and possibly barnacles. So what can you learn from mother nature that will help you eat up the competition? The answer is you never know until you try.
Continue reading "What can you learn from Mother Nature?"In another take on learning from Mother Nature, MIT researchers are working on a biological computer. Thomas Knight of MIT is doing pioneering in creating logic circuits using biological building blocks he calls BioBricks. These BioBricks are made using DNA and are capable of performing Boolean operations such as AND, NOT, NOT AND much like logic gates do in electrical circuits. As microprocessors have continued to get small they are pushing the limits of silicon based devices. These BioBricks provide one possible direction for overcoming those limitations.
MIT researcher Thomas Knight holds vials of BioBricks
Continue reading "It's Alive!"March 11, 2005
Call me old school,..but every now and then I get this feeling that I need some one to poke me in the eye, please!!
Usually if I have to read another article by a journalist who in a fit of cathartic euphoria, discovers that great design can be had by regular folks... ok now wait for it,... without having to pay a lot of money!
Like some modern day version of Prometheus*, designers are forced over and over again to nod politely, suffer the witty observations and acknowledge anew the eventual epiphany that some companies, by using the skills of industrial designers, can create really good pproducts.....
Continue reading "New School"an engineer can't have his head in the clouds!...
way to go Graham!
Continue reading "Who said?????"March 14, 2005
What does the internet, cell phones, ATMs, fiber optics and the space shuttle have in common? They all made the list of the top 25 non-medical innovations of the last 25 years. A Panel of technology leaders prepared the list as part of a Lemelson-MIT program for promoting inventiveness in teens. Check out the entire list. It is amazing all the things todays teenagers take for granted that the boomers didn't have when they were growing up. What did the world do without Cell phones and PCs. Now go out and start working on your contribution to the list for the next 25 years.
Continue reading "Top 25..."A team of British scientists are working on robots that will help make significant improvements in the accuracy of biopsies. Needle biopsies taken for screening for prostate cancer are traditionally performed using ultrasound to identify suspect tissue. Unfortunately the quality of the images with ultrasound makes this a difficult process. Dr. Alex Zivanovic of Imperial College is working on robot that will perform the same procedure using MRI for targeting the needle biopsies. MRI provides significantly better images but the confined spaces of the MRI machine makes it difficult if not impossible for a human doctor to perform the procedure. So step in the robot. So where can your product of process benefit from some robotic help? What can a robot do for you customers that a human cannot?
Continue reading "Where man cannot go..."March 15, 2005
Ok, what about users with special needs? Imagine for a minute the frustration experienced by a person suffering from hand tremors trying to use a computer. So how do you deal with the mouse. The tremors these people experience can make next to impossible to do something as simple as pointing and clicking. Watching his uncle struggle with this problem prompted Jim Levine to develop the Assistive Mouse Adapter. This device uses technology similar to that used in a "steady cam" to filter out the tremors and enable these individuals effectively use the computer. Jim is a researcher with IBM. IBM is planning on partner with Montrose Secam of the UK to make these devices. So how can technology help you make your products accessable to users who would be otherwise excluded?
Continue reading "How user friendly are your products?"Well in this case they come from all over the world to arm wrestle a female San Deigo high school student. That is right, robots from Virginia Tech, from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research and from Environmental Robots of Albuquerque, NM are going to San Diego to arm wrestle Panna Felsen. Panna is straight A high school senior. This competition was suggested by Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2003 Business Week named Yoseph one of the five top technology gurus who are "Pushing Tech's Boundaries". Sounds great but Panna does not sound like your average arm wrestling champ. Perhaps the idea is to start small. So good luck to all the teams.
Continue reading "Robots come from all over the world to..."March 16, 2005
How can we learn from what mother nature has been doing since the beginning of time? Well as we seek to make computers smaller and smaller how about learning from the original computer builder. Would it be possible to create a DNA strand that would build a computer instead of a person? This is the very question that researchers at Duke University, Rambus Inc. and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been asking themselves. The answet they came up with is "we think so". The size of these computer structures could be so vast that it may be possible to have the answers to all the possible questions you ask already stored within the structure. "We call this kind of computer an oracle because, like the oracles of ancient times, the computer is ready to answer your question as soon as you ask," said Chris Dwyer, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Duke. As we all search for sources of new ideas sometimes it is helpful to look at the oldest source of ideas, those created by nature.
Continue reading "More biological computers"March 17, 2005
Siemens would like you to tell your house what to do. At CeBIT 2005 Siemens introduced the "Wearable Hub". A pin like device that the wearer talks to and commands their house. Using a combination of voice recognition and Bluetooth wireless technology the user can control the home master locking system, communicate with a visitor at the front door or command other automated systems in the house. So are you making the most of wireless and voice based technology in your products. Just another way to make the user experience more seamless.
Continue reading "Have you talked to your house recently?"
Continue reading "foam follows function...."March 18, 2005
Out on a first date not sure if it is going well. Then inventor James Larsson has the product for you. Larsson has developed a knife and fork that have sensors embedded in the handles that can provide feedback on the emotional state of their user. So when your date is cutting her steak you can find out if they are enjoying themselves. The concept is targeted at geeks who Larsson charaterizes as having "...major challenges dating". I wonder how he knows? Since the current version of the device involves a large monitor and lots of wires I do not think you should plan on purchasing one of these any time soon. For the record Larsson is the same inventor who made a clock using a prawn sandwich and a BBC micro.
Continue reading "Not sure if your date is having a good time?"The new issue of New Scientist lists 13 things in nature that scientist are currently unable to explain. Things like what is dark matter, why some Japanese scientists are measuring cosmic rays which are at energy levels that defy explaination and can cold fussion really exist. So when you wonder what happened to that other sock just remember that you are not alone. Somewhere there is a scientist that is trying to explain the unexplainable.
Continue reading "And you think you have problems"March 22, 2005
With a new technology trend you know it has gone mainstream when the government has adopted it. Well it has happened to Pod-Casting. For those of you not in the know, pod-casting is to broadcast radio what blogs are to print publications. Still not clear? Well here is a link that covers it in more detail. Basically Pod-Casting is individuals or organizations producing what amounts to talk radio shows, recording them on a computer and then publishing them on the web as mp3 files. People can download these mp3 files and listen to them on their iPod. Instant talk radio for the masses. There is lots of material out there on every subject you can imagine. Well now there is one more subject. NASA has now announced that they are in the Pod-Casting business. Well there goes the neighborhood. It used to be that NASA was the definition of innovation. Not any more but maybe they can change. They are trying. So check out NASA's Pod-Casts and let's see.
Continue reading "You know it's gone mainstream when..."March 28, 2005
This September the DARPA Grand Challenge competitors will again try to demonstrate the viability of autonomous land vehicles. You will recall that the first DARPA Grand Challenge ended with the best finisher only completing about 10 miles of the 200 mile course. This is obviously a difficult task. Meanwhile the folks at Woods Hole have been making much better progress with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). Their AUV, named Spray, was just sent on its second adventure. On March 23, 2005 it was launched from a location near Bermuda. It will be roaming the Gulf Stream until sometime in July when it will be retreived at another location near Bermuda.
Continue reading "While the DARPA Challenge folks struggle..."March 30, 2005
I have to say that the world of supercomputers sure is getting interesting. IBM's Blue Gene/L just broke its own speed record. IBM just announced that Blue Gene/L has now reached 135.5 teraflops. This is twice what it was able to achieve last fall when it took the title of "Worlds Fastest Computer" from NEC's "Earth Simulator". So 134.4 trillion calculations per second. Boy that is a lot of zeros. And Blue Gene/L is still in development. When it is finally delivered to Livermore Labs later this year it is projected to be capable of 360 teraflops. To do that it will use 65,536 individual processors. Supercomputers have come a long way from the circular shaped Cray-1 from 1976 whos shape most people equate with supercomputers.
Continue reading "Check out this Blue Jean (Gene)..."Here at the Innovation Blog we have had other posts about how you never know where the next great idea will come from. But I would say that this story makes this point better than any other I can think of. The venue is the 2004 National ROV Competition for High School & College Students. Organized by NASA and the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center this is a competition where students conceptualize, design and build an underwater remotely operated vehicle and compete in a series of tasks and on the basis of their technical approach and their presentation. What makes this competition unusual is who was competing, who won and the basis for that win. This years winners were four students from Carl Hayden Community High School. Carl Hayden is located near Phoenix Arizona (not exactly a hot bed of marine activity) and the four students who were four undocumented Mexican emigrants. What makes the story even more interesting is that these four high school students beat the team from MIT in the final primarily on the basis of their written report and their presentation. Oh yes their vehicle did quite well also, but what actually won if for them is their ability to present their ideas. Now for the down side of the story. Since the four students are undocumented there is a very good chance they will not be able to go to college. The way the laws stand right now the best they can hope for is to pay out of state tuition at an Arizona univeristy which none of them can afford. So read about their story in this article in Wired, read about the details of the competition on the official site and then consider sending a donation to the scholarship fund for Cristian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Luis Aranda, and Oscar Vazquez. When what we hear so much negative in the news it is great to hear about 4 young students who have overcome significant odds to achieve a remarkable success.
Continue reading "Carl Hayden Community High School 1 / MIT nothing"