HackingTheUniverse

1822 – Mendel – bio

Omar Fink — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:48:07 +0000

Born in 1822 in Austria, Gregor Johann Mendel founded the science of genetics. Mendel grew pea plants and studied variations in them. He conceived of pairs of heredity “factors” (which would later be called genes) that create dominant and recessive traits in inheritance. At the time, chromosomes had just been discovered, but there was not [...]

Chip Under the Retina Restores Sight to Blind

Omar Fink — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:18:54 +0000

Retinitas Pigmentosa (RP) causes blindness as the back wall of the eye degenerates. At first, there is some tunnel vision and loss of night vision. Then slowly, the tunnel closes in over many years until there is no sight remaining. RP is a genetically inherited condition which had no remedy until recently. It had long [...]

Open Source Robotics Foundation

Omar Fink — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:47:34 +0000

Willow Garage has announced the Open Source Robotics Foundation, a non-profit group with a mission of supporting research and development of robotics technology. One of their first major efforts will be to participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge – [darpa.mil] Hardware, software, modeling and gaming developers sought to link with emergency response and science communities [...]

Gesture Sensing Uses Sound

Omar Fink — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:50:08 +0000

Doppler shifts in ultrasonic sound waves can be used to detect gestures. Soundwave uses this technology to turn conventional speakers and microphones on computers into gesture control interfaces. Gesture Control System Uses Sound Alone – [technologyreview.com] While other motion-sensing technologies such as Microsoft’s own Kinect device use cameras to sense and interpret movement and gestures, [...]

Touche Object Sensing

Omar Fink — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:07:52 +0000

Touche is a touch interaction technology that uses capacitive sensing in a new way to create a variety of interactive experiences with everyday objects. Using a frequency scanning technique allows it to detect complex touch configurations and create profiles of many contact and gesture forms. These profiles allow many forms of interaction with devices and [...]

Visual Assistant Ring

Omar Fink — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:56:33 +0000

Point this ring at an object and tell it what you need to know about the object. Tell the ring you need to know distance or color or currency or information from a tag. The ring takes a picture of the object and sends it to a smartphone where the image is analyzed and results [...]

1815 – Geissler – bio

Omar Fink — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 03:04:32 +0000

Johann Geissler was born in German in 1815 and is known for the invention of the Geissler tube. Prior to creating his tubes, in 1855, Geissler developed a new way to use mercury displacement in a vacuum pump that was more efficient than previous pump designs. The new low pressure created by the mercury pump [...]

Commercial Asteroid Mining Project

Omar Fink — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:34:00 +0000

A new space exploration company is announcing their intent to create a new industry and redefine “natural resources” by mining asteroids. Planetary Resources plans to launch a small, low cost, space telescope that will discover asteroids and examine them to determine what valuable metals and elements they contain. Ice and platinum group metals are among [...]

Free Online University Courses at Coursera

Omar Fink — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:10:22 +0000

Coursera offers free online university level courses developed by institutions such as: Princeton, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, and more. Coursera About Coursera We offer high quality courses from the top universities, for free to everyone. We currently host courses from Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, [...]

MIT Project to Print Robots

Omar Fink — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:58:20 +0000

An MIT project is developing technology to enable designing and printing customized components for functioning programmable robotic devices. Their goals are to greatly simplify the process and reduce production time from design to operation to a matter of hours. MIT CSAIL Project Could Transform Robotic Design and Production – [mit.edu] The Massachusetts Institute of Technology [...]