Oh supermodels… It’s well known they don’t eat and really only absorb moisture from the air. Kind of like this air moisture harvester that’s so useful it recently won its inventor, Edward Linnacre, this year’s James Dyson Award. Meant to be used in places where the lack of rain brings devastating droughts, the Airdrop (as it’s called) works in the following way:
With a deceptively modest design, Airdrop filters hot environmental air through a turbine, feeding it through a copper tubing system–with copper wool to maximize surface area–and into the earth where it cools and releases moisture. The dry air is then re-released into the atmosphere and the collected water pumped through semi-porous hoses to the plant roots. In his initial prototype, which was much smaller than the current design, Linnacre was able to produce a liter of water per day.
Currently a prototype that is likely to be much smaller than any production model, the Airdrop is able to harvest 1 liter of water per day. The technology used makes it very simple to install and maintain and it’s hoped it will be used by farmers in drought affected areas.
Linnacre will be receiving £10,000 (and another £10,000 for his university) to further development of the Airdrop. As mostly poor farmers would benefit from this, it’s unlikely he’d be able to get any traction on social funding sites like Kickstarter, which are usually visited by people with easy access to tap water.
Ok, so we may be late to the game here, but this little device looks too cool for us to pass on it. It’s basically a lens that allows your iPhone’s camera to shoot in 360 degrees… simultaneously. No stitching images together.
Snap Dot onto your iPhone 4 / 4S, download our free Looker app, and instantly record fully immersive 360° videos right on your iPhone. Going to a concert? You can record the show and the audience. Heading out on a road trip? Leave Dot on the dashboard and record your highway adventures. No matter what you’re recording, Dot sees everything!
Our unique catadioptric optical system is fully AR-coated for excellent color fidelity in all environments. Dot is a lightweight attachment that doesn’t require batteries or external power. Dot comes with a microfiber pouch that doubles as a lens cloth.
Most impressive is when you watch the below video and realize you can pan the camera around, 360 degrees, as the video plays.
Crazy as that headline sounds, that’s pretty much what we’re looking at here. Developed by a Japanese company called Humanix in conjunction with Hiroshima University, the iSAVE-SC1 is supposed to be the world’s safest car. Well… Let’s see now. First off, we’re not entirely sure it fits the description of a car, really, since its top speed is 50km/h. Then, it’s got three wheels. Finally, it’s electric… Quite frankly at this point it sounds more like a glorified golf cart.
Oh and yeah, it has what looks like airbags all over it, ostensibly to soften the blows from a collision. It’s a real product which will go on sale in Japan for US$10,400. Then there is talk of mass-production, though we’re less certain of mass-adoption. We realize that changing energy markets dictate that maybe we should be shifting our ideas and expectations of what our transportation forms ought to look like. And it’s nice to be safe… but have they even looked at it?
The US’s military drones can do a bunch of things, but they aren’t the only drones in town. Currently in development by the Japanese Defense Ministry, the ball-shaped drone you see in the picture (and in the video below) can do some things regular drones can’t. Its spherical shape allows it to roll around the ground and land pretty much anywhere. It can takeoff vertically, but once in flight can deploy wings for forward travel at 60km/h (that’s 37 mph for you Yanks). If it hits an obstacle, it simply keeps on trucking like nothing happened (watch the demonstrator in the video slap it around some).
The prototype you see in the video was made with commercially available parts costing around $1,400. But that also means that it’s nowhere near final specification as production models will likely have parts engineered specifically for it. Consider this a proof of concept, so that 8 minute flight autonomy is more than likely to increase with later iterations. Currently it weighs 350g (12 ounces?) and is meant primarily as a reconnaissance craft.
Seems like everyone is excited about the Lytro, a “light field” camera that was released yesterday. And for good reason as it fundamentally shifts the way pictures are taken. Instead of having to focus on your subject, you simply frame your shot and take it. The Lytro captures “color, intensity, and vector direction of all the rays of light and then assembles that information in post-processing.” The picture below gives you a quick overview of the principle behind it. Once the data is processed, you can then access a “living picture” through software that seems to be available on the Mac only at the moment and lets you choose pretty much any focal point. Yes, after the picture is taken. We’ve embedded a few of these pictures at the end of the post; have fun clicking around and seeing the focus shift.
Seeing as the technology is fundamentally different that traditional cameras, the company doesn’t speak of resolution in terms of pixels, but rather light rays; the Lytro can capture 11 million rays of light. Without delving into science speak, we’re a little confused by this particular terminology since our understanding of physics precludes the existence of a discrete “ray of light”. Instead, a particular point in space will bounce back a nearly infinite number of photons in all directions, some of which will fall on the sensor. But… no science speak! We simply think that “11 mega-rays” is marketing speak.
The camera boots up almost instantaneously and has only one button: the shutter. It comes in 3 colors and 2 capacities: 8GB and 16GB, allowing for 350 or 750 pictures.
Hit the jump for more of these pictures and links.
It’s pretty amazing the amount of data that can be extracted using nothing more than the camera on your smartphone. While there already are a number of applications that are able to give you your heart rate by doing nothing more than resting a finger lightly on the camera, a new application under development could also measure heart rhythm, respiration rate and blood oxygen saturation. A team led by Ki Chon, professor and head of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have engineered algorithms that “analyze video clips recorded while the patient’s fingertip is pressed against the lens of the phone’s camera. As the camera’s light penetrates the skin, it reflects off of pulsing blood in the finger; the application is able to correlate subtle shifts in the color of the reflected light with changes in the patient’s vital signs. ”
Of course this wouldn’t be news if they hadn’t checked to see if the results gathered from the application correlate with those taken with traditional instruments: they do. Professor Chong believes it will also be possible to detect atrial fibrillation (AF), which is the most common form of cardiac arrhythmia. And while the tests were conducted with a Motorola Droid phone, Chong hopes to have his application ported to several makes of smart devices. While not available yet, it is in the final stages of development.
“Imagine a technician in a nursing home who is able to go into a patient’s room, place the patient’s finger on the camera of a tablet, and in that one step capture all their vital signs,” Chon said. “We believe there are many applications for this technology, to help patients monitor themselves, and to help clinicians care for their patients.”
Oh those scientists, always looking out for mankind. Now researchers at the University of California, Davis, have come up with a self-cleansing cloth. They’ve taken regular old cotton and covered it with a new compound called 2-anthraquinone carboxylic acid, or 2-AQC. When exposed to light, 2-ACQ releases chemicals (hydroxyl radicals and hydrogen peroxide) that harm bacteria and break down other organic compounds. More importantly, perhaps, is that 2-ACQ has been shown to bond strongly to cellulose and doesn’t simply wash off like other self-cleaning products. Not that you’d want to wash them. Because we all know what we’re going to be doing with this stuff. And that’s not washing the heck out of it. Just to see…
Better yet, the fabric may not be that far away from hitting the market. Although still at the research phase and “although 2-AQC is more expensive than other compounds, the researchers say that cheaper equivalents are available.”
Researchers at the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan have created a bipedal walking exoskeleton robot that’s completely human powered. The rider simply has to shift their weight around to get the thing to locomote, but besides that there’s no other source of propulsion. Oddly enough, another one of the researcher’s goals was to create an exoskeleton that didn’t walk with the awkward gait that’s typical of the ones you see in films like Avatar or The Matrix sequels. And while I guess their creation tends to ‘walk’ more naturally like a human. If you take a gander at the video I’ve embedded below, its movement is just about the most awkward thing I’ve ever seen.
The exoskeleton’s secret is a zig-zag triangular design on the three-dimensional metal pipe frames that make up its feet. Imagine that if instead of being perfectly round, a rubber tire had a triangular faceted pattern on its outer surface. So when you rolled it forward, it would tend to wobble from side to side as it transitioned from triangle to triangle. That’s basically the same idea here. Apparently the design makes for a walking gait that’s very stable, though, remarkably slow and cumbersome. The researchers feel it could assist those who can only walk with a shuffle, letting them move about more freely, or battle a gigantic alien queen in the cargo hold of a spaceship.
I’m sure its popularity has dropped off, but there are still plenty of people who spend their free time on chat sites like Chatroulette. Even though we’re all aware of the dangers of randomly being connected to a stranger’s video feed. Besides frequent exposures, there’s also the risk of being connected to someone who’s not who they appear to be. And while you might think it would be easy to tell when someone’s using pre-recorded footage, this impressive system actually remaps someone’s face in realtime to look like someone else.
Now granted, in its current state it’s not perfect. But it’s already surprisingly convincing at times, particularly at how well it disguises Arturo Castro’s real face. According to his Vimeo page, the application demo’d in this video was created using “Kyle McDonald’s ofxFacetracker + Jason Saragih’s facetracker library” which is detailed and available upon request here. As to how to put the pieces together to start your random chat reign of terror? Well I’m afraid you’ll need to be a fairly capable developer to do that.
Related Tags: Innovation, rural
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By David Ponce
By David Ponce
By David Ponce
