Building live beings using Synthetic Genome

I’m sure you remember 1982 blockbuster Blade Runner, but, you probably don’t remember the Voight-Kampff device, which is a fictional tool that allow the user to determine whether or not a life form is synthetic, originating in Philip K Dick's science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Spelled Voigt-Kampff in the book, it also appeared in the book's screen adaptation of Blade Runner. Perhaps it will no longer be an instrument of science fiction anymore.

J. Craig Venter built a genome from scratch and used it to make synthetic life. In this week's Science Express, they describe the stepwise creation of a bacterial chromosome and the successful transfer of it into a bacterium, where it replaced the native DNA. Powered by the synthetic genome, that microbial cell began replicating and making a new set of proteins. Now, he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute have a dream that definitely will change the world, as we know it. This is the first step to create a synthetic life form. We are now able to design bacteria that produces biofuel. Or even dinosaurs like in Jurasic Park. In the future we could design our perfect wife with all the attributes desired, or even a “REPLICANT“ able to work in Saturn as we have seen in the film.

Biking safely over the busiest traffic jam

Biking still one of the best solutions in city where streets are still clogged with motor vehicles of every size and kinds. Without proper bike lanes, riding a bike through these streets can be dangerous and intimidating.

Seeking to provide commuters and other urban cyclists a reprieve from asdventuring through traffic jams, Belgian architect Martin Angelov presents a new solution: bike lanes in the sky. The strange bike lane designed by Angelov is basically a high wire that runs above the city streets, avoiding the street-level congestion.

At first, riding a bike on a wire sounds pretty terrifying, but Angelov's design includes a harness for the rider and a pulley system for the bicycle that clips into the upper wire, so there's no fear of tumbling headlong into the havoc below. The bottom wire is also carved out to accommodate the tire.

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From Comics to real life - Iron man could help disabled people

Walking into a robotic exo skeleton that could enhance your strength, keep the body active while recovering from an injury or even serve as a prosthetic limb is no longer science fiction. Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai a system and information engineer at Japan's University of Tsukuba has created a real Iron Man exo skeleton, the so called Robot Suit Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL).

The exo skeleton weighs 50.7 pounds (23 kilograms) and is powered by a 100-volt AC battery (that lasts up to five hours, depending upon how much energy the suit exerts). HAL exoskeleton primarily to enhance the wearer's existing physical capabilities 10-fold. The exoskeleton detects—via a sensor attached to the wearer's skin—brain signals sent to muscles to get them moving. The exoskeleton's computer analyzes these signals to determine how and with how much it must move force to assist the wearer. The company claims on its site that the device can also operate autonomously, based on data stored in its computer, which is key when used by people suffering spinal cord injuries or physical disabilities resulting from strokes or other disorders.

CYBERDYNE (no relation to the "Skynet" in the Terminator movies) a Japanese company responsible for the suit, have started construction of a new laboratory and expect to mass-produce up to 500 robotic power suits in the years to follow.
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Fully Functional Artificial Limb

In the meanwhile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) $80 million program, Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 (RP2009),

nationwide research is underway to develop a fully functional (motor and sensory) upper limb that responds to direct neural control. Physicians at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) developed an intuitive way for amputee patients to control a robotic arm by surgically rearranging the nerves that normally connect to the lost limb. This allows patients to control prosthetic arms simply by thinking about it. While the technique, targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), was first demonstrated in 2007, they reported successful tests among several patients this month.
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There are more realistic prosthesis been developed, the Modular Arm System supplied by RSLSteeper is truly a modular system with many interchangeable parts and the Europeans responsible for the "Cyberhand" have, along with it's scifi-esque moniker, given their creation some scifi-esque capabilities that bode well for amputees and Luke Skywalker wannabees the world over. The bionic hand not only has individually functioning digits, including an opposing thumb for the multitude of actions that require one, but those fingers should be able to feel, yet still only take a relatively small number of nerves to control. It works in much the same way as a real hand; by using synthetic tendons that run through each finger, the artificial hand only needs 6 motors to control motion. So far they've created a touch sensitive prototype, and now it looks like their next task is to attach the hand and fire it up.

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She reached the success just when a pig flew

"When pigs fly" is an idiomatic way of saying that something will never happen. Pigs are heavy animals, without wings, and cannot possibly fly. So "when pigs fly" is a time that will never come -- but not for Linda Herzog.

In 1998 feeling the need to be unique at her painting technique Linda’s creativity choose a realm of realism combined with fantasy. After painting a mural on her son’s bedroom wall full of his favorite things from dinosaurs, cartoon characters, to computer game scenes, all within a connecting landscape, her desire to paint fantasy surfaced.

Since that Linda never stopped. Her work has been featured in galleries throughout Tokyo, Japan, Maui, Hawaii, New York, New York, and southern California. She currently lives in Vista, California, with her husband and two children, and is very happy after discovered near impossible deviantart.

See more http://lindarherzog.deviantart.com/

Give your housekeeper the Day Off - Company offers free Personal Robot

Like the Personal Computer, the Personal Robot could be the next reality that will change the use of robots from being large, expensive, and useless, to being small, inexpensive, and extremely useful.

.Last January 22nd Willow Garage announced “Today, we finished our third milestone! Simply put, ROS has reached 1.0 status…we also recently unveiled the PR2 Beta”.

ROS is the short for the Robot Operating System, which originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs. The PR2 (Personal Robot 2) is based on an open-source hardware and software platform.

Willow Garage, a robotics company is giving 10 of its robots free to researchers in return for a promise that they will share their development efforts with the open-source community.

“The hardware is designed to be a software developer’s dream with a lot of compute power inside and many of the annoying problems with general robotic platforms taken care of,” says Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage. “We have created a platform that is going to accelerate the development of personal robotics.”

PR2 has two eight-core Xeon system servers on-board, each with 24 GB of RAM; a 500GB internal hard drive; and a 1.5TB external removable drive.

The robot has accelerometers and pressure sensors distributed across its head, arms and base. Its head contains two stereo camera pairs coupled with an LED projector, a 5MP camera and a tilting laser range finder. The forearms each have an Ethernet-based wide-angle camera.

The robot’s two arms have almost the same range of motion as human arms, says Willow Garage, and its spine is extensible so it can reach objects on countertops.

PR2 comes with a 1.2 kWh battery pack that has on-board chargers and the capacity for about two hours of run-time.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/willow-garage-free-robots/

Transforming “Favelas” in Rio into a nice “Hotel complex”

Rio de Janeiro won the vote to stage the 2016 Olympics, becoming the first South American city to host the event. “What if part of that investment was used to turn Favelas (shanty houses) into the most fascinating hotel complex? Building the hotel could be a problem

But “Catadores de Lixo” – Trash catchers and Tetra Pack could help with low investment materials

The biggest multinational in food processing and packaging is a Swedish company founded in 1951 in Lund, by Ruben Rausing. Tetra Pack is also the leader in recycling is own trash.

The package basically made of plastic and aluminum is recycled through the process of drying and grinding in a machine called "hidrapulper", a sort of giant blender, and then extrusion and injection molding. The final result is a material that could be used to produce plastic parts such as shovel, broom, collectors and others.

But, the most interesting process is the one that grinds together plastic and aluminum and presses it all in high temperature, transforming the material into a plate similar to plywood that can be used in the manufacture of partitions, furniture, decorative items and tiles.

The plate could be molded in many different forms and the expressive cost-benefit ratio could be more even better if counting on sponsors. Paint manufacturer such as Suvinil would be in the best place to be seen, turning the Favelas into a beautiful place to look at. See more at http://blemyaeng.blogspot.com/2010/01/state-of-art-social-entrepreneurship.html

Trans Global Highway

Large international projects such as the European Channel Tunnel, Suez Canal, Panama Canal, or the Alaska Pipeline represented not only great engineering effort, but also big and challenging diplomacy to ensure that costs and benefits would be shared equitably.. In addition, geological study must be done to ensure that the local plate tectonics would be compatible with the proposed tunnels and bridges.

Imagine the planet Earth in medium distant future in which we have the entire planet linked by roads, trains and individual air transport system (know more http://www.didik.com/highway) . You could leave New York driving your own car and the final destination would be Paris. One of the most charming qualities of the floating island of Atlantis II, a Lilypad city, is the road that leads to it. Riding US Highway 235 from Miami central ring to Key Mango on a sunny day is a memorable experience… especially if you drive a cabrio.

Each of these Lilypad floating cities (know more http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/06/16/lilypad-floating-cities-in-the-age-of-global-warming) are designed to hold approximately around 50,000 people. A mixed terrain man-made landscape, provided by an artificial lagoon and three ridges. To sleep in the first part of the trip you could stay in the Submerged Hilton, about 360 kilometers from New york.

The Trans Global Highway project isn’t even close to happening anytime soon, but there is value in future forward designs like the Lilypad floating city. They inspire creative solutions, which at some point, may actually provide a real solution to the super populated cities, climate change problem. Would generate new jobs, and the effort to create all the technology would be rally useful to colonization of our solar system.