For everything from family to computers…
The ancient Greeks called the thapsia garganica plant “deadly carrot,” because their camels would eat it and quickly die. The Roman emperor Nero mixed it with frankincense to treat bruises. Until the early 20th century it was used in a plaster to treat rheumatism—the side effects, however, were barely worth the cure. More »
from Gizmodo
Who ever doubted an amazing meal could change your life? Researchers in Singapore have developed a robotic surgery device inspired by the country’s famous national dish, chili crab. The mini crab robot crawls down your throat and into the stomach, where its pincers grab onto a cancerous mass and a hook slices it away.
It could help patients with early-stage gastrointestinal cancer and is far less invasive than other surgical options – since it enters through your mouth, it leaves no visible scars.
Technology, Rebecca Boyle, cancers, crabs, da vinci surgical robot, future of robots, medical robots, robots, stomach, stomach cancer, surgery
Enterologist Lawrence Ho of Singapore’s National University Hospital co-designed the robot and said it has already been used to remove early-stage stomach cancers in five patients in India and Hong Kong, according to Reuters. Other existing methods to excise these types of cancers require cutting a patient open, either through a large-scale invasive surgery or a keyhole surgery, in which smaller incisions can still enable surgical access. But those methods are both quite painful and invasive.
Instead, this device enters through a patient’s mouth and is attached to an endoscope, through which a surgeon can watch and control the robot’s actions. A hook attached to the crab bot is used to remove the cancerous tissue, and it also coagulates the blood to stop internal bleeding.
Ho and Louis Phee, associate professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Institute, decided to build the robot after a 2004 chili crab dinner with a well-known Hong Kong surgeon named Sydney Chung. Chung apparently suggested the crab as a prototype. “The crab can pick up sand and its pincers are very strong,” Ho noted.
The team formed a company in October and hopes to commercialize the crab bot within three years, Reuters reported.
[International Business Times]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
Discoid cockroaches, used in this study, can be up to 3 inches long
From the digestive system that demolishes glue and toothpaste comes the first living, breathing, and yes, digesting cyborg-insect-biofuel-cell. Researchers have created a fuel cell that needs only sugar from the cockroach’s hemolymph and oxygen from the air to make electric energy. As long as the cockroach keeps eating, the fuel cell keeps running.
LiveScience lays out how electrodes inserted into the cockroach’s abdomen hijack its biochemical machinery:
The fuel cell consists of two electrodes; at one electrode, two enzymes break down a sugar, trehalose, which the cockroach produces from its food. The first of the two enzymes, trehalase, breaks down the trehalose into glucose, then the second enzyme converts the glucose into another product and releases the electrons. The electrons travel to the second electrode, where another enzyme delivers the electrons to oxygen in the air. The byproduct is water.
The cockroaches are not much harmed by the electrodes. “In fact,†says lead author Michelle Rasmussen, “it is not unusual for the insect to right itself and walk or run away afterward,†which only further confirms our suspicion that cockroaches can resist anything. …
from Discover Magazine
Additive rapid prototyping in plastic materials is becoming quite accessible to home and hobby users. If you’re a hobbyist on a typical budget wanting to rapid prototype in metal, however, you’re limited to subtractive methods, i.e. CNC machine tools like mills and lathes, and even those are not exactly “cheap.†Professional 3D printing services like Shapeways offer additive metal prototyping in metals like stainless steel and gold, but it’s extremely expensive. The technology their 3D printers use, called “laser sintering,†is fundamentally different from the RepRap-type fused-filament (“robot hot glue gunâ€) 3D printers at the “garage†end of the pricing scale.
In selective laser sintering (SLS), the object is built up in a bed of powder by a scanning laser beam that fuses tiny bits of the powder together, one layer at a time. After each layer of the model is fused, a fresh, thin, uniform sheet of powder is swept over the bed for printing the next layer.
Swarthmore College engineering student Andreas Bastian has developed a low-cost, open-source laser sintering printer design. It uses an IR laser diode on a bed of powder made from a mixture of wax and carbon, and produces fused wax models, which can then be duplicated in metal, for instance aluminum, using a traditional lost-wax casting process. I have written before about a similar process that uses a CNC hot-wire cutter to make Styrofoam models that can then be “metallized†via lost-foam casting, but that, too, is a subtractive process, and limits the possible shapes of the model in ways that the additive SLS process does not. [via Hack a Day]
from MAKE
Wearable fitness trackers are everywhere these days. Everyone has a GPS watch, companies like Jawbone have turned to slightly stranger form factors, while AT&T and Under Armourare putting sensors inside clothing. Students at Northeastern University think the latter have the right idea, and have put an array of electrodes inside a compression shirt. The apparel is part of system being called Squid, which also includes a smartphone app and an exercise tracking site. Unlike other tech that ends with monitoring hear rate and tracking GPS coordinates Squid can actually gauge muscle activity and count reps so you don’t have to. The shirt probably can’t tell the difference between a bench press and push up, but at least its one less task to worry about while whipping yourself into fighting shape. No word on if or when the system might become available to the general public, so you’ll have to make do with the video after the break to see it in action.
Continue reading Squid is a shirt that keeps an exercise journal so you don’t have to
from Engadget
New method could help those incapable of speech
Seismologists at the U.S. Geological Survey, the International Seismological Center, and NASA have come to a consensus about last year’s cascading tragedies in Japan that left at least 16,000 dead and half a million homeless. Jim Stone, a self-professed former National Security Agency analyst with an “engineering background,” has a different explanation: the whole thing was a deliberate and dastardly act of nuclear war.
from Wired Top Stories
