Day: October 7, 2019

Sterling Backus’s son only had one question after he drove a Lamborghini Aventador in the XBOX video game Forza: Can we build one? Most dads would respond with a chuckle and some quip about winning the lottery. But not Backus, whose day job is laser physicist. Backus responded, “Sure,” and he meant it. As of this week, the replica is capable of driving under its own power.

Backus, the chief scientific officer at KMLabs in Boulder, Colorado, and his 11-year-old son dubbed the project “Interceptor,” and the build has a budget of about $20,000. Backus hand-built the steel chassis and pulled an LS1 V8 from a Corvette for power. He found the panel layouts through online design community GrabCAD, and then he modified them for 3D printing. 

But he ran into a problem: The 3D-printed plastic would melt in the sun. So, he decided to incorporate carbon-fiber encapsulation (shown below), in which he wraps the parts and covers them in epoxy. Piece by piece, he assembled the shape of the supercar using a Creality CR-10 105 desktop 3D printer that he got for about $900 from Amazon. The front brake air intake alone is said to have taken 52 hours to complete. Additional cool features include a gated shifter, functioning lights, and scissor doors. 

One of the fun aspects of the whole story is that Backus admits he had some learning to do when it came to the art form of additive engineering. So, he turned to the same place everybody else goes these days: YouTube. The physicist joked that he went to YouTube University and learned by watching videos. 

With the end of the project in sight, Backus says he wants the final product to serve as an educational tool for Science Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) programs. 

“The intent is to take the car to local schools to show kids how cool technology can be,” the project’s Facebook page says. 

In the words of Jesse Pinkman, “YEAH SCIENCE!” 

The news: A paralyzed man has walked again thanks to a brain-controlled exoskeleton suit. Within the safety of a lab setting, he was also able to control the suit’s arms and hands, using two sensors implanted into his brain. The patient was a man from Lyon called Thibault, who fell 40 feet (12 meters) from a balcony four years ago, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down.  

How it worked: Thibault had surgery to place two implants, each containing 64 electrodes, onto the parts of the brain that control movement. Software then translated the brainwaves read by these implants into instructions for movement. The development of the exoskeleton, by Clinatec and the University of Grenoble, is described in a paper in The Lancet this week.

Herculean effort: Thibault trained for months, using his brain signals to control a video game avatar in order to hone the skills required to operate exoskeleton, which was held up by a ceiling-mounted harness. He was able to walk slowly in the suit, and then stop, as he chose.

The future: The hope is that one day similar technology could eventually let people in wheelchairs move them using their minds. It’s an impressive breakthrough, but the device is many years away from being publicly available. For example, researchers need to find a way to get the suit to safely balance itself before it can be used outside the laboratory.

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In a (failed) quest to remove a years-old custom keyboard shortcut from my MacBook Pro, I inadvertently found a handy option in the keyboard settings that makes accessing emojis on desktop much easier.

Open your system preferences, click “keyboard,” then check the box that says “show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar.” This will instantly create an icon in the toolbar at the top of your screen that will let you access emojis at any time. To insert them into a text field, double click the emoji you want.

Of course, you’ve always been able to access emojis on Mac by using the keyboard shortcut “control + command + space bar,” but having a separate window I can open up with a clickable shortcut is a nice option; I personally find the pop-up that appears when you use the keyboard shortcut to be a little janky. And remember, if you want to organize the way your toolbar shortcuts are laid out, hold down “command” while you click and drag to rearrange them however you like.