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He describes the tech as a totally new concept that 'will essentially give memory some brains.

Computer memory combined with logic gates.

Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.

But the classic Canary Trap requires someone to modify the document manually, which is hard to do on a large scale. Here it is being done automatically by an algorithm.

However, I am aware of published methods for this problem dating back to 2001 by Mikhail Atallah at Purdue. In fact Atallah received a patent for followup work in 2007, a year after the Amazon patent was filed.

Here are a few hundred papers on the subject, via Google Scholar. Some adjust whitespace, some modify images of the text, and some attempt fairly sophisticated syntactic analysis and restructuring of selected sentences.

I apologize that I haven't read the Amazon patent, or read the prior literature carefully, or gone to law school, so I can't comment on whether the patent seems valid or not.

People are seriously working on the 3D printing of human organs using living cells

Well, not completely.. If you would enhance it with sometype of protective layer then no problem...
And for an airplane it could be a bog gain. The wings could be in one single large sheet where the inside is covered with some type of protection from the fuel and outside with some type of lightweight material that protects it from rain.

Just a few things i can think of for this:
- Cables (if it has the same electric properties as nano-tubes)
- Wires (embedded in some type of protective layer)
- Reinforcement of pressure-pipes, just add a protective layer..
- Reinforcement of protective-gear like bullet-proof vests..
- Reinforcement of gas-tubes (higher pressure = more capacity)
- Have a look at this too.. http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/111704/Nanotube s_tune_in_light_111704.html

Dont know all the properties of it, but even if it only have some of the properties of nano-tubes there would be a massive amount of uses for it, even if it's sensitive to water.

• Molecular hydrogen (H2) physically sticking to a porous storage medium, such as a metal organic framework, without chemically reacting.
• Chemically storing atomic hydrogen in a compounds, such as metal hydrides, where it can reversibly react to form H2.

The reason the weight percent numbers seem small is that H2 has a molecular weight of ~2 AMU and any material with the capacity to adsorb lots of hydrogen or store it chemically is going to be made of much heavier atoms. In this way, mass percentage is deceiving but it is the most common measure of storage capacity. My wild guess is that the 6.5% cutoff is in the ballpark of the energy output to mass ratio of gasoline. Luckily, neither fuel requires the automobile to haul around all the oxygen necessary to for the reactions.

If people aren't happy with single digit weight percentages, they could suggest using a heavier hydrogen isotopes to double or triple the numbers!

There was a story on here a little while back about Improvements to improve solar cells.

This by no means solves the problem. But using your optimal figure of 3.6KWH/day or 1/3 gallon of gas, doubled * a few million people = a noticeable reduction overall in grid requirements to keep those cars charged. Even 1/5th of that with a few million people would help.

Solves the problem? No. Helps it? Yes.

I skimmed the posts and didn't see anyone posting http://www.trnmag.com/. Just take a look at the front page and a few of the previous issues and you'll know if it's for you or not. I love this site.

This inkjet printer mod was done over a year ago and accomplished the same thing as far as I can tell.

You are quite right in saying so, and it was entirely my intention to make that point. As I said, the industry has quite some time before growing beyond its infancy. However, the main point to be made is that people are attempting to be forward thinking and, indeed, pragmatic enough to realize that the requisite infrastructure for the elevator must be established. Only then may genuine progress be made towards making what today remains science fiction into reality.

As for current realities: many promising, potentially useful applications are developed every year.

Tell that to the Kangaroos! They have one of the most efficient bidepal locomotion stratagies because as they land they stretch two massive tendons and store all the kinetic energy, which they then use to bounce themselves aloft once more.

From the linked page ...
Running is a strange means of locomotion that involves bouncing up and down, as well as moving forward. This bouncing is aided by the elastic nature of the Achilles tendon at the back of the foot, which acts like an elastic band, stretching when we put our foot down, and then pulling back to its relaxed length to propel us upward. This conserves a considerable amount of energy during running, raising the energy efficiency from 25 to 40 percent or more. And training increases the elasticity of the tendon, whereas aging decreases elasticity, making running less efficient. Kangaroos are the ultimate masters of this pogo stick effect, which enables them to increase from 5 to 20 kilometers per hour without using any extra energy -- just more bounce.

I, for one, welcome our robotic bouncing kangaroo overlords.

This article immediately reminded me of research on how to control DNA remotely using radio waves I read about a few years ago. Adding gold nanoparticles to the "DNA staples" of the current work should allow the creation of I/O devices to get from our human scale to this nanoscale to build true supercomputers.

His personal page is promising more details by last thursday... (oops). He's out to lunch right now (OK: Supper), so It'll be at least a couple of hours before he gets the update installed (he has been given the heads up).

Found this article with a picture.

It's really old though.. probably advanced beyond the basic "it works" stage.

This is nothing new at all

I'll grant you that yes, prices have come down recently but surely every geek wants our scientific research budgets spent on a much worthier use for nanotubes.

how's it violating the second law of td?
heat-exchangers have been in use for quite some time.

As for the one-way thermally conductive materials ("heat valves" as they seem to be called)....it doesn't violate the 2nd law of TD as it can't move "heat" from where there is none, it just blocks the heat going back.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/061202/One-way_ heat_valve_possible_061202.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/08/012724 0&tid=126

I've seen figures of around 0.5-1.0 seconds per pixel full addressing for these type of displays.
Whilst not quick enough for movies (as you point out), would be perfectly acceptable for virtual paper :)

heres a link to an article mentioning the 1second refresh
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/052301/Prototype_sho ws_electronic_paper_potential_052301.html

"In addition, although the transistors allow a switching speed of about 2.5 milliseconds, the total time for an image to change smoothly is about one second; typical LCD's pixels are refreshed 70 times a second. "Currently the electronic ink, and not the transistors, limit the speed,"

...kinda cool I suppose. Does limit the sorts of thing you can walk on - pretty difficult to simulate stairs, for example.

I always though that some sort of moving tile system with lots of small, tilting variable height tiles would work pretty well for simulating walking on undulating terrain, as well as being able to cover stairs etc.

Maybe a large spherical room with walls covered in shifting variable tiles of this sort, that way you could have overhangs etc as well. Go rock climbing up a virtual Eiger, with only a few feet to fall if you slip :)

Don't embed your editorial and navigational content in image files like this. Your design should accommodate the content, not the other way around...

Here's an excerpt from a TRN interview with NYU's Nadrian Seeman:

TRN: Sports, commerce, crime fighting and warfare are glamorized in our society. Can science be made sexy? What would it take?

Seeman: I don't know if sexiness is the way to sell science. Our educational system is pretty successful at stifling the natural curiosity with which we are all born. That would be a place to start.

...if this works back-projected, combined with the automated moving floor tiles and some sort of haptic glove device, we'd be a damn sight closer to a holodeck than anything else I've seen lately.

For those who don't want to stuff ad revenue in Roland's pockets, here is the copy and pasted article which he plagiarised anyway. Can't we just either make him an editor so we can filter him, or stop posting his crap altogether, Timothy? If we are going to use slashdot simply to pimp his site, let's at least continue reposting his articles in the comments to avoid stuffing his wallet.

Eastern Ink Painting on a Computer

Traditional Oriental ink painting is more easily done with real brushes than with a computer program because you need to model how the ink is flowing into an absorbent surface such as paper. In this brief article, Technology Research News writes that "researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have developed a brush-and-ink-style paint program, dubbed MoXi, that uses a model of pigment particles in water flowing into paper." These virtual Chinese brushes simulate in real time the ink dispersion and could be available on your PC within two years. Read more...

Here is some general information about MoXi provided by Technology Research News.

The software models the gritty details of paper absorbing water and pigment moving through water, including the way pigment concentrates at ink boundaries as water evaporates from drying ink. The technique promises to make computer paint programs with more realistic and could also be used in computer animation packages, according to the researchers.

The simulation is based on mathematics -- the lattice Boltzmann equation -- that physicists use to model the complex behaviors of fluids. The model simulates more complex effects than previous work, and is also fast enough to deliver ink dispersion simulations in real-time on a reasonably large canvas, according to the researchers.

Below are two images generated with MoXi, the first one being called "Lotus leaves" and the second one "Planet" (Credit: Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)

Lotus leaves generated with MoXi

Planet image generated with MoXi

Here are two links to larger versions of these images, the "Lotus leaves" (1.30 MB) and the "Planet" (1.47 MB).

The researchers behind the MoXi project are Chiew-Lan Tai, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and Nelson Siu-Hang Chu, her Research Assistant.

For more information about their projects, you can read these two pages about the Virtual Chinese Brush and about MoXi. On this page, you'll have access to several videos and images. The two pictures above come from this page.

The MoXi project will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2005 under the name "MoXi: Real-Time Ink Dispersion in Absorbent Paper." Here is a link to the paper submitted by the researchers (PDF format, 1 page, 145 KB). Here are an excerpt from the introduction.

Our paint system, MoXi, allows users to paint in the spontaneous style of Eastern ink painting, on a computer. The simulations of both brush and ink are essential for a successful extension of this traditional art into the digital domain. For real-time performance, we have implemented our ink flow model entirely on the GPU, leaving the CPU for the brush simulation.

According to the researchers, this technique "could be used practically in one or two years." But is this possible that this technology can be sold under the name MoXi? There alre

Here is some general information about MoXi provided by Technology Research News.

The software models the gritty details of paper absorbing water and pigment moving through water, including the way pigment concentrates at ink boundaries as water evaporates from drying ink. The technique promises to make computer paint programs with more realistic and could also be used in computer animation packages, according to the researchers.

The simulation is based on mathematics -- the lattice Boltzmann equation -- that physicists use to model the complex behaviors of fluids. The model simulates more complex effects than previous work, and is also fast enough to deliver ink dispersion simulations in real-time on a reasonably large canvas, according to the researchers.

Below are two images generated with MoXi, the first one being called "Lotus leaves" and the second one "Planet" (Credit: Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)

[Link to image in article]

[Link to image in article]

Here are two links to larger versions of these images, the "Lotus leaves" (1.30 MB) and the "Planet" (1.47 MB).

The researchers behind the MoXi project are Chiew-Lan Tai, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and Nelson Siu-Hang Chu, her Research Assistant.

For more information about their projects, you can read these two pages about the Virtual Chinese Brush and about MoXi. On this page, you'll have access to several videos and images. The two pictures above come from this page.

The MoXi project will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2005 under the name "MoXi: Real-Time Ink Dispersion in Absorbent Paper." Here is a link to the paper submitted by the researchers (PDF format, 1 page, 145 KB). Here are an excerpt from the introduction.

Our paint system, MoXi, allows users to paint in the spontaneous style of Eastern ink painting, on a computer. The simulations of both brush and ink are essential for a successful extension of this traditional art into the digital domain. For real-time performance, we have implemented our ink flow model entirely on the GPU, leaving the CPU for the brush simulation.

According to the researchers, this technique "could be used practically in one or two years." But is this possible that this technology can be sold under the name MoXi? There already is a Digeo service named Moxi which offers High Definition TV (HDTV). And Digeo claims in its press releases (check this one for example) that Moxi is one of its registered trademarks.

Why, a 3D mouse of course. But really, something like a mouse with a scroll wheel to add a third dimension would probably be satisfactory.
I'm still waiting for 3D projections I can couch, though. This is close, but I heard of another that supposedly uses "temperature differential" in the air. I guess it projects on steam, and it can detect the position of anything that passes through it.
The ability to reach right inside the projection and manipulate things far outweighs the drawbacks for this kind of display (they're transparent, and interrupting the air messes up the image). I can't find that one, though.

Well, /. submission FAQ warns about such a thing and asks me not to get pissed but to blame my stars, so I was mentally prepared for this.. but this Ronald unmasking brought an interesting thing..

what if one constantly sees a site like freshnews, would it not increase the probability of a story getting posted.. I mean it has all sites from cnet to techdirt to porn-tech site like madville, you name it they have it..

and then there are tech mags like nature, newscientist and trnmag, which have good articles.. so how can such a situation be tackled? or how does accepting of articles get streamlined and give a fair chance to all? I agree that it also depends upon the way the article is submitted instead of just sending the link and a line..

Stuff like the shifty floor seen a while back here on /. (http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/081104/Shifty_ tiles_bring_walking_to_VR_Brief_081104.html are helping advance the non-graphics side of things, anyway. Lots of work on haptic interfaces seems to be working on the feedback side, not sure what the current state of that art is though.

I suspect the questioner is actually looking for a holodeck though, we're still quite a ways from that ;)

...funded by DARPA. A search of the TRN archive returns 235 stories from the last five years that include the word DARPA and the phrase "computer science." The same search of Google Scholar turns up 18,200 research papers.

is that they require a surgical procedure which makes it risky at the moment and hard to reverse. While it's good for disabled patients (until we can biologically fix neural damage) it's still not the magic neural link that some geeks want it to be. The more interesting research with alternative interfaces comes from tech like subvocalization and other virtual input that NASA is working on. This includes movement recognition where sensors on the surface of the skin (no surgery required) can pick up subtle gestures that would be invsible to others. That would allow you to work your wearable computer without anyone noticing since all of your motions would be subtle.

--
Want a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof

Even at 30% a lot of applecarts are going to be overturned. Hang on, it's going to be interesting.

... like the story we reported, wrote, edited and produced over at TRN.

I have been known to make a few anti-Roland posts in the past. When I first started paying attention to Roland's posts, I couldn't understand why many people hated him, either. But, now, I understand why. On one hand, Maybe part of it is overexposure. However, I think more of it has to do with his neverending spam and questionable approach to copyright law.

If you look here, you will see the T's & C's for using information from the source of Roland's story. If you read the fine print, you will see a sentence that reads "Use of this material for commercial purposes without explicit, written permission from Technology Research News, LLC is strictly prohibited".

Roland's blog is purely a commercial enterprise. He uses the ads on his blog to collect money. By copying and pasting entire paragraphs from the Technology Research News article, he is breaking the copyright.

Of course, maybe he does have 'explicit written permission'. But I doubt it. Why do I say this? Look at how he writes the article. Where is isn't copying and pasting, he is purely summarizing what was originally written by anybody else. Now, look at this link. Look at how he writes. No new information. he just collects information from dozens of web sites and either plagiarizes those sites or points to them through his blog. He must be collecting dozens of RSS feeds and picking and choosing what he thinks are the best.

Even worse, some of his posts are nothing but advertisements for products.

Now, let us say Roland DOES have legal explicit permission from all of those sites to copy and paste articles for his personal profit. I could live with that, IF he was adding additional insight into technology. Unfortunately, he isn't. His blog adds nothing to society.

No insight. No thoughts on where technology is heading. No review of how technology has come this far. He is just parroting what somebody else has written. The only logical explanation for him even having a web log is for the hope that you will be dumb enough to click one of his revenue-generating ads.

check out my blog, where i post comments interesting stuff related to robotics...

My post on this topic is here and below.

Flexible sensors make robot skin. This could have a number of applications. The first two I imagine are a richer interface between machines and humans and advanced manipulation.

If cheap enough, the machine can understand the precise location and posture of a human. Mentioned in the article are car seats. Imagine a bed which adjusted itself to minimize pressure points.

I should mention a project out of CMU by Chris Atkeson and Daniel Wilson, where he put only a few cheap accelerometers in the floorboard of a house. The algorithm processing these sensors could localize humans in the rooms with remarkable accuracy. The challenge then becomes sensor fusion and system integration, in using this information to boost performance of the entire system. For instance, a human tracker using vision alone would be dwarfed by such a system which had a reasonable seed guess from pressure sensors.

The second application is for rich manipulation. A robot grasping a glass must do so with enough pressure to not drop it, but also enough sensitivity to not break it. I doubt humans use significant higher reasoning in this process, unlike the advantage humans have over computer vision programs. Rather, robots could sense the weight fairly easily, but also the type of surface, and learn how brittle such a surface is.

In recent years, lots of efforts have been made to give robots the ability to hear and see. But what about the sense of touch? Unlike us, robots don't have sensitive skin. But this is about to change. By using organic, or plastic, field-effect transistors as pressure sensors deposited on a flexible material, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created an artificial skin which will give robots the sense of touch . The prototype has a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter, far from the 1,500 of our fingertips. When this density increases and when the problem of the reliability of this kind of transistors is solved, the researchers say this artificial skin will also be used for car seats or gym carpets. Expect to see them in four or five years. Read more...

Here are selected excerpts from the Technology Research News article.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo have devised pressure-sensor arrays that promise to give objects like rugs and robots the equivalent of one aspect of skin -- pressure sensitivity.

The researchers' pressure sensor arrays are built from inexpensive organic, or plastic, transistors on a flexible material. This allows for dense arrays that can be used over large areas.

The arrays could be used in pressure-sensitive coverings in hospitals, homes, gyms and cars to monitor people's health and performance, and eventually as skin that would give robots the means to interact more sensitively with their surroundings, said Takao Someya, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Tokyo.

The sensor skin works even when rolled around a cylinder as small as 4 millimeters in diameter, said Someya. The researchers' prototype is an eight-centimeter-square sheet containing a 32-by-32 array of organic sensors -- a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter. In contrast, humans have 1,500 pressure sensors per square centimeter in the fingertips, though far fewer in most other places.

And what are possible applications?

The active-matrix design allows the arrays to be smart enough to enable specific sensors at certain feedback points to, for instance, monitor the heart and breathing rate of a hospital patient who has fallen to the floor, said Someya. The skin could measure whether an elderly patient is just taking a rest, or needs help, he said.

The skin could also be used in car seats to monitor drivers' mental and physical conditions, Someya said. "Our large-area pressure [sensing abilities] would be helpful" in obtaining information through drivers seats, he said.

And, of course, we'll see home robots able to pick an egg in the fridge.

The research work has been published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 6, 2004, under the title "A large-area, flexible pressure sensor matrix with organic field-effect transistors for artificial skin applications." Here is a link to the abstract .

Absolutly right, according to the article on the Evolution Train Robot Teams it is the combination of both method : "After several hundred generations, the neural networks had evolved well enough to play the game competently and were transferred into real robots for testing in a real environment."

The article mentions a different fuller version of the story.

If anyone knows where to find it; a link would be appreciated. I would really like to read that version.

The article mentions a different fuller version of the story.

If anyone knows where to find it; a link would be appreciated. I would really like to read that version.

... with a few more details: Nanoparticle dyes boost storage

Umm .. that's been done. I remember reading about it a few years ago. You use the human body as the physical transport layer of the network. Given just enough power you can establish a connection when you physically touch someone.

Here is a related article from last year.

... of this TRN story is here.

... about this a few weeks ago. "Nanowires make flexible circuits" TRN Oct. 22/29

Yep. This is old news. The oldest reference I have come across is 1999 (near the bottom).

Small picture in second page of pdf file.

Bit more info

Paper writen on technology used (reg required)

The same guy has also been involved in wearable keyboards which uses finger rings to detect finger movement and 10Mb indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables. Masaaki Fukumoto is a busy man.

... full story, which is available at Newsstand. (It will also be posted on the TRN website on Wednesday.)

In future, we might be using light in fibre loops instead of sound waves in mercury delay lines, to act as computer memory. I googled for light loop memory --- look what turned up:

Fiber loop makes quantum memory

I also covered this subject today on my blog where I gave some additional references, including an illustration of a face reconstruction process.

And remember that this software was shown during last Siggraph. New Scientist published "Animation lets murder victims have final say" on this work about two weeks ago with a nice illustration, "How the dead can express themselves."

In "Skulls gain virtual faces," Technology Research News didn't give much more information.

...paper a couple of years ago. Programming goes quantum, TRN March 28/April 4, 2001

... a couple of years ago. Here is our story from then.

Vector subtraction implemented neurally: A neurocomputational model of some sequential cognitive and conscious processes

Artificial synapses copy brain dynamics

Computing and Learning with Dynamic Synapses (1999)

Computing at the Tissue / Organ Level

From neurobiology to silicon

Principle of Neuroinformatics and Neuroinformation Coding


In short. The synapse is a computer in it's own right.

The idea of using diamond as a semiconductor has been kicking around for years with quite a bit of research being done world wide.

Technology Research News has an article published in September that discusses this.

Among other things they mention that diamond's charge carrier mobility is three times better.

Diamond transistors could in theory deliver one watt of power at 100 gigahertz, or billion cycles per second, said Isberg. This is five times faster has been achieved using the semiconductor Gallium Arsenide.

Diamond-based electronics would also be better than existing semiconductor materials for high-temperature applications, said Isberg. Diamond conducts heat 15 times more efficiently than silicon, and therefore cools faster.

etc. etc.

Not unusual, but in one paragraph they call it a "polymer molecule actuator" and in the next they say it works "when the water inside the plate expands in response to electric stimulation".

A better article on artificial muscles can be found a MIT. There is enough information there to actually build one, including sources for the materials.

The MIT work is most likely quite different from the work done at Eamex, as there are a number of approaches to making artificial muscles.

Another article describes yet another approach, but also gets some of the science wrong.

Oh, well...