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Intelligent Scalpels Through Touch Technology

DullTrev writes: "The BBC News site is running a story about touch technology. Basically, haptics is the science of incorporating a sense of touch into technology. Scientists at the University of Tokyo have developed a sensor which can feel. So you could have a surgeon operating with a scalpel incorporating this technology, the scalpel could push back against the surgeon when he tries to slice and dice an artery. I'm sure there could be loads of applications for this technology - most uselessly the test these scientists have been doing - stopping cutting a hardboiled egg when you get to the yolk..."

9 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. I love by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Space exploration! And Katy!

  2. can't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    touch
    this

  3. poster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    FIRST POST!!
    can u dig it??

  4. Quickly! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    To the balloon pants!

  5. Name this tune! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    With the suitcase on the rack

    Thats all you get.

  6. People are dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    people are dying
    Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered people community when last month IDC confirmed that people are accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that people have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. people are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [sysadminmag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict peoples' future. The hand writing is on the wall: people face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for people are because people are dying. Things are looking very bad for people. As many of us are already aware, people are continuing to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreePeople is the most endangered of them all. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. OpenPeople leader George W. Bush states that there are 7000 users of OpenPeople. How many users of NetPeople are there? Let's see. The number of OpenPeople versus NetPeople posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetPeople users. People/OS posts on Usenet are
    about half of the volume of NetPeople posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of People/OS. A recent article put FreePeople at about 80 percent of the people are market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreePeople users. This is consistent with the number of FreePeople Usenet posts All major surveys show that people are has steadily declined in market share. people are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If people are to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. people continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, people are dead.
    people are dying

  7. Eels - Woman driving, Man sleeping by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I remember it was the fall of '83 and I was just a struggling writer trying to make it in New Orleans and I had been to visit my parents up in Shreveport and I didn't have much money then so I was trying to conserve what I had and I had left my old beat up chevy and had taken the bus up to see them and now I was on my way back on another bus, all full of my Mom's good southern cooking and my suitcase, which I had tied up with a cord because it was so full, too stuffed with clothes, now starchy clean, that I had left behind on previous visits and food that my mom put in there to make sure I didn't starve in the city, was up in the rack opposite where I was sitting. It was hot, its what they call down there an indian summer and the bus's air conditioning wasn't working and everybody was trying to get their windows open, but you know the way those bus windows work, they are so afraid someone like a kid might fall out, so they just open a tiny couple of inches and you can only get just a whiff a air. But I was just fine, I like the warm southern air and I was happy, besides I had on shorts and a t-shirt and a pair of sandals and I was just starting to read one of those Saroyan novels when the bus made one of its stops, and when it stopped it wasn't any kind of a gentle easy you don't notice it kind of thing, but this driver made a production out it, he had called out every damn little town we had pulled into three or four times, miles before we actually got there and then with hissing of air brakes and a stop so abrupt you had to brace yourself, he would bring that monsterous contraption to a screeching halt. So there was no way you weren't fully aware of each new tiny town bus stop cafe. I think it was right around Shongaloo where we picked up that girl. It had been another production stop and I was alert and watching the new passengers struggle on with all their suitcases and cardboard boxes and maybe a guitar and a jar of jam and then she came up those stairs at the front of the bus holding her little plastic suitcase out in front of her and she looked like a vision of lovliness, a picture of sweetness and gentleness and grace with the smoothest creamiest skin and raven black hair coursing all the way down to her waist. I was sitting about half way back, but I could see those piercing, azure blue eyes all the way from where I was sitting and I could feel my heart just thump right then and my throat tighten just a bit, she was just so darned beautiful. She made it up to the top of the stairs and began looking around like she was trying to find someone she knew glancing from one side to another from the front down the length of the bus and then she looked my way, she looked me right dead in the eyes and with a kind of toss of her head, like she had found an acquaintance, she came down the aisle and stood right by my seat and began to put her suitcase in the rack over the seat and I look up at her and her head was looking up putting up the suitcase with arms upstretched, and I just stared at her amazing form. She had the most beautiful body like something I had seen in magazines or maybe dancing somewhere and she was dressed in one of those summer calico dresses that just seems to cling in all the right places and there was not one part of her that didn't seem wonderfully luscious and succulent, and then she sat right down by me like this was where she was supposed to be. And right then I smelled the most phenomenal fragrance, the most wonderul aroma, it wasn't just a smell it was like a whiff of heaven itself and it filled my nose and my lungs and my head and it was like the most wonderful perfume I had ever known, she radiated it, I wanted to just breathe it in again and again I couldn't get enough. The only smell I could compare it to that I had absolutely gone crazy for before this was the smell of fresh baked bread when ever I had passed by the Mrs. Bairds bakery late at night and they filled the air with that marvelous golden aroma of bread baking in those ovens, I used to stop and just breathe it in and imagine those beautiful loaves and what it would taste like. Of course the bread never tasted that good but oh that smell was the most delightful experience that my sense of smell had ever known until now. And now this little beautiful southern gal who sat down beside me, who picked me to sit down beside, was radiating the perfume from heaven, and it was every bit as wonderful and luscious and delicious as that baking bread but it was sensuous and sexy and I looked and her and breathed her in and I wanted her more than anything in the whole world. And I suddenly realized that I was just staring at her full on and she was looking back at me right into my eyes like this made perfect sense like that was the way people would normally greet each other and so I kind of stammered out some words and I said the only thing I could think of which was, "That is the most amazing perfume you are wearing. What is that?" and she just responded to me slowly like something else was going on in her mind while she looked right into my eyes like she was looking for something, something she could read inside my brain maybe inside my soul. "I'm not wearing any perfume. I jes been workin' outside all mornin'. I guess Im a little sweaty." And my body just trembled, Im serious it trembled, because I knew that I was in the presence of one of God's perfect creations, I knew I was experiencing the real stuff, the manna, the ambrosia, the essence of heaven itself. Oh my goodness, I was smelling her, I was breathing her sweat, her body odor was like the most exciting sensuous perfume any swiss or french chemist working away twelve hours a day in some cramped laboratory with tubes and bottles and bubbling retort condensers could come up in five lifetimes. And her voice triggered something inside me like an old, old memory, maybe like when I was a tiny baby and I heard my mother cooing me to sleep, gently rocking me against her breast in that great big rocking chair, or maybe like some kind of past heavenly existence where only gentle angels talked to me in kind assuring voices, but in any event it was a voice I loved, and I knew and I wanted to hear again and again. I wanted her to just keep talking, i wanted that voice to bathe me with its wonderful dulcent tones. And then...

  8. The International Brotherhood of Mimes by Tugar · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    The Mimes claim they own a copywright on typing on things that aren't there and are filing a lawsuit.
    They say it's a job security thing.

    1. Re:The International Brotherhood of Mimes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      They tried to file the lawsuit, but the court wouldn't accept a bunch of invisible pages with invisble ink, written on a typewritter that wasn't there. The mimes are claiming descrimination. Well we think they are. Either that, or their trying to escape from an invisible box.