Thanks to my brother Bob for pointing this one out to me:
Science has always marched on and left speculative fiction looking like an antiquated throwback, but we never thought this would happen. Apparently researchers in Bristol University in the UK are studying how to use ultrasonic waves to manipulate objects, like say, screws, at a distance.
Just a few Ts here and, really, the Tepper list should be a lot longer and should definitely include her novel Grass. My Tubb books I’ll leave for another post.
SHERI TEPPER:
THE ENIGMA SCORE
THE AWAKENERS
J. R. R. TOLKIEN:
THE HOBBIT
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
THE TWO TOWERS
THE RETURN OF THE KING
WILSON TUCKER:
THE YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN
GEORGE TURNER:
THE SEA AND SUMMER
Well, seeing as after alibaba’s comment about Rex Bionics someone from the company left a comment too, I finally went and had a good look at the site. Excellent stuff. It’s quite surprising to realize we are still in an age when the inventor(s) in a shed can make a difference:
Rex, the Robotic Exoskeleton, is primarily the invention of two men, Richard Little and Robert Irving who have been close friends since they first met at high school over 20 years ago in Fort William, Scotland.
Sharing a love for cars and tinkering with machines, the two friends left school to study engineering and went on to work together at various times and in various climates throughout their careers until they both decided to emigrate to New Zealand in the early 1990s.
With already so much in common, the two friends also had first-hand knowledge of some of the obstacles and access issues faced many wheelchair users. Both have mothers who use wheelchairs, and when Robert Irving received a diagnosis for Multiple Sclerosis himself just over seven years ago, he understood that he might also need to use a wheelchair one day.
That was when the two friends and founders of Rex Bionics decided that they would use their engineering know-how to develop a realistic standing and walking alternative to wheelchairs.
Watching this video my first thought was about how slow these robotic legs are, but then realized that it’s not just about being able to walk, since there’s lots of health issues involved too: blood supply, muscle movement, bladder etc. I then have to wonder about other practicalities, like battery life, but it turns out that ain’t such a probem. Two hours isn’t going to take you along the length of the Penine Way, but the improvements in lifestyle could be huge. Then there are things like unit cost what with these bionic legs having ‘4700 parts and a complicated array of software’ as compared to a wheelchair (with our NHS and NICE these things must be thought about in Britain), but you cannot make comparisons like that. I don’t know if these things are quite well enough developed to enable a paraplegic to go to the toilet, but I’m guessing that possibility is not far away, then just think of the overall savings to society as a whole: no more houses needing to be built with wheelchair access, no more the necessity of toilets for the disabled.
However, they need to move faster, and they need to be designed in such a way that a person can sit and take a dump while wearing them. Sorry to be crude, but that’s reality. Maybe if you’re still checking in, Thomas, you can tell us about this sort of stuff?
Damn but I love this shit:
So (Ju-Hee So) says these quasi-liquid components could one day be used to build bioelectronic circuits to provide connections between living tissue and computers, such as brain-machine interfaces. “People want to put information into the brain and read information out,” she says. Such an interface might, for instance, allow an amputee to control a prosthetic limb the same way he would control his real limb—with just a thought. Similar devices made with conventional technology tend to be rigid and must be encapsulated to protect the electrical circuits from the moisture inherent in biology. So believes the materials her team is working with will be compatible with human tissue. Gallium salts, for instance, are injected into people to improve the contrast in scans of human lungs, and hydrogels have many biological uses. The devices might also be used as components in artificial neural networks, an application to which memristors are already being applied in earnest.
Seems to be par for the course nowadays: notoriety and money first with science coming in a distant second. Here’s a bit more at WUWT about NASAs arsenic bug:
It seems that in their flawed zeal to get some press coverage, NASA again has egg of their faces, reminiscent of the Mars fossil microbe fiasco. It’s more “science by press release” gone wild. Slate.com has a scathing review of the fire that is raging in the microbiology camp over this press release:
“It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado…
Now, when NASA made that announcement, I was hoping for something like this:
“Ultimately the goal is to try to look for biosignatures,” Bean said. “This work is another sort of milestone on this road. We’re going directly towards that.”
Looking at exoplanet atmospheres.
Be even better if they discovered biosignatures on one of these worlds, then managed to focus their instruments in time to pick up on the alien equivalent of Marconi.
When the Air Force launched its secret, robotic space plane this spring, military officials confessed that they weren’t exactly sure when it was coming back. More than seven months later, the X-37B landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it was met with Air Force personnel in SCAPE suits (self-contained atmospheric protective ensemble). They gave the robo-orbiter an initial once-over — and made sure the area was safe for humans, too.
In The Departure I call this Gene Bank.
Seeing this, I cannot help but think about the Wallace and Gromit ‘The Wrong Trousers’. However, this sort of thing is seriously cool and is only going to get better. Reminds me of a piece I did for Nature Magazine in which I had a guy going to a museum to see one particular exhibit there: a wheelchair. Let’s hope that sort of thing happens in the near future. I wonder if, in my lifetime, it’ll cease to be compulsory to have wheelchair access to new-build houses?
An Israeli entrepreneur has invented robotic ‘trousers’ that can help paraplegics walk again.
Amit Goffer was paralysed in a car crash in 1997 and immediately set out to invent a device that could replace the wheelchair.
He has invented ‘ReWalk’: robotic trousers that use sensors and motors to allow paralysed patients to stand, walk and even climb stairs
We finally gave up on ‘Any Human Heart’ last night. This series was given big star ratings and really hyped beforehand and each time a new episode is shown we’re told it is a ‘powerful drama’. It has some excellent actors, great camera work and the sets are good too. However, it’s something we kept watching in the hope it was going to get interesting, and the problem is, at this point, in the third episode, it really should have been getting there. It isn’t; it’s boring.
This is the life story of a self-indulgent loser who is only interesting because of his setting and the people he met. He’s actually the kind of person you’d like to give a slab and tell to get his thumb out of his arse. The role , in fact, rather stretched Matthew Macfadyen’s full ‘drippy’ repertoire. This was supposedly a gripping big-budget adaptation that had all the grip of a pair of rubber tweezers.
So we turned over and watched ‘The nation’s favourite Abba Song’, which was an order of magnitude more enjoyable and interesting. I wanted to see ‘Fernando’ near the top though I did not expect it to win. Unfortunately it came in at number seven. Caroline then waited in the hope that ‘Dancing Queen’ would be the winner because when it was a hit she was precisely as the chorus describes. Her bottom lip was sticking out when it came in at number two, beaten by ‘Winner Takes it All’.