Alchemy - Drawing but not as we know it

Alchemy is a cool open source drawing application which is aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new ways.

Watch this video of Andrew Jones showing off its capabilities

Blood vessels for lab-grown tissues

Researchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have broken one of the major roadblocks on the path to growing transplantable tissue in the lab: They’ve found a way to grow the blood vessels and capillaries needed to keep tissues alive.

Scientists find evidence for ‘chronesthesia,’ or mental time travel

Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future.

In their fMRI study, the researchers asked subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.

The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times.

Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.

Now I See You

Weill Cornell Medical College researchers have built a new type of prosthetic retina that enabled blind mice to see nearly normal images. It could someday restore detailed sight to the millions of people who’ve lost their vision to retinal disease.

They used optogenetics, a recently developed technique that infuses neurons with light-sensitive proteins from blue-green algae, causing them to fire when exposed to light.

The researchers used mice that were genetically engineered to express one of these proteins, channelrhodopsin, in their ganglion cells. Then, they presented the mice with an image that had been translated into a grid of 6,000 pulsing lights. Each light communicated with a single ganglion cell, and each pulse of light caused its corresponding cell to fire, thus transmitting the encoded image along to the brain.

In humans, such a setup would require a pair of high-tech spectacles, embedded in which would be a tiny camera, an encoder chip to translate images from the camera into the retinal code, and a miniature array of thousands of lights. When each light pulsed, it would trigger a channelrhodopsin-laden ganglion cell. Surgery would no longer be required to implant an electron array deep into the eye, although some form of gene therapy would be required in order for patients to express channelrhodopsin in their retinas.

Headphones Built Into Your Hoodie N other Tech Clothing

A phone built into the sleeve of a dress. Gloves that enable you to swipe a touchscreen on the ski slope. Solar-powered backpacks. Here are nine examples of apparel that blurs the line between clothing and tech gear.

You Tube Time Machine takes you back in Time

While YouTube has only been around for just over five years, video and moving pictures date back to the late 1800s, and some of those hundred-year-old videos are available on YouTube to view. At the same time, it's a little difficult to just go searching for all YouTube videos that were created in 1912. That's where the YouTube Time Machine comes in. If you're looking to just take a trip back in time and see some notable videos from a specific era, or you're just curious about the evolution of motion pictures over the years, YouTube Time Machine can help you see.

Simply drag the scroll bar at the top of the page to the year you'd like to travel back in time to, and you'll get a YouTube video that was made in that year. Of course the videos themselves have been uploaded much more recently, but you can, for example, watch the 1944 trailer for the movie Going My Way, or footage of the Titanic docked in Belfast from 1912, or even a 2005 Welsh's Grape Juice commercial.

This is where the YouTube Time Machine is both a time-suck and a useful tool for history buffs. While the collection of videos can't compare to a purely educational and reference site like CriticalPast, the YouTube Time Machine is useful for people who are curious about what types of videos were made in different time periods, and even see some notable footage from the years they select.

The YouTube Time Machine is fun, without a doubt, especially if you want to see, for example, what may have been news, popular movies, or hot music the year you were born. The trouble with it though is that once you've done things like look up your birth year or the year you graduated high school or something, you'll be there forever just scrolling around for interesting things to watch.

Future Food for Cities

Within the next decade you will be able to grow all of your vegetables in a box barely larger than your refrigerator. This surprising statement is the result of a class project at Singularity Universitythis summer. Here’s how they came to believe that this is true.
Click here for full post.

Wireless 'thought-to-text' cap

LONDON — A team of researchers from IMEC, the Holst Center and the lab of neuro- and psychophysiology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven has presented Mind Speller, a thought-to-text device intended to help people with motor disabilities.

A number of research institutes are working on similar devices which make use of electro-encephalogram (EEG) brainwaves and positive biological feedback so that individuals can use thought processes alone to control a cursor or a computer action.

The Mind Speller,uses a portable device, the size of a matchbox, connected to a cap that contains electrodes located at specific positions on the head to capture the relevant EEG-signals. The electronics in the matchbox are developed by IMEC and the Holst Center. It contains IMEC's and Holst Center's proprietary eight-channel EEG-chip to process the EEG signals, a commercially available microcontroller that digitizes the EEG signals and a 2.4-GHz radio that transmits the EEG signals wirelessly to a nearby PC. The data is interpreted on the PC by signal processing algorithms developed by the team of Professor Marc Van Hulle at the lab of neuro- and psychophysiology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

"The Mind Speller is a generic device that can be easily adjusted to different users. Therefore, it could be a cost-efficient communication solution for people with temporal impairments for whom the existing solutions are too expensive. Moreover, the Mind Speller may help those patients that are not helped with the existing devices driven by motor activity, as the Mind Speller is based on a different principle, using P300 EEG potentials to read people's thoughts," said Professor Van Hulle.

IMEC is adapting the electronics to allow it to work with dry electrodes, thus making the system less difficult to use.

Bing Maps kicks Google Maps

Bill Gates talks on Energy

Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything

Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

The liquid glass coating is breathable, which means it can be used on plants and seeds. Trials in vineyards have found spraying vines increases their resistance to fungal diseases, while other tests have shown sprayed seeds germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds, and coated wood is not attacked by termites. Other vineyard applications include coating corks with liquid glass to prevent “corking” and contamination of wine. The spray cannot be seen by the naked eye, which means it could also be used to treat clothing and other materials to make them stain-resistant. McClelland said you can “pour a bottle of wine over an expensive silk shirt and it will come right off”.

Read more.....

Multitouch 'Skin' Transforms Surfaces Into Interactive Screens

A new large-format multi-touch technology launched today by DISPLAX, a developer of interactive technologies, will transform any non-conductive flat or curved surface into a multitouch screen.
The DISPLAX Multitouch Technology, believed to be the first of its kind, has been developed based on a transparent thinner-than-paper polymer film. When applied to glass, plastic or wood, the surface becomes interactive. Significantly, this new multitouch technology can be applied to standard LCD screens as well, making it an attractive choice for LCD manufacturers. The new technology will also be available for audiovisual integrators or gaming platforms to develop innovative products.

Read More.....

Farewell Michael Jackson

This will bring a smile

HOW CUTE IS THIS WEE LITTLE THING!

Transcendent Man

Douglas Smith mechanically stretches living nerves to grow resilient transplants

In a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, a plastic dish holds two rows of tiny black dots, pairs of them connected by dozens of thin, hairlike filaments. Each dot is a cluster of thousands of neurons, explains Douglas Smith, who is a professor of neurosurgery and the director of Penn's Center for Brain Injury and Repair. The fibers that stretch between them actually comprise thousands of axons, long, slender projections that conduct electrical impulses away from each neuron's central body. These bundles--each one a lab-engineered nerve--represent physical bridges that Smith hopes will help researchers like him mend previously irreparable injuries.

To make the long nerve transplants, Smith and his team first collect sensory neurons--­cells that transmit information to the brain--from the spinal cords of fetal rats. Research technician Kevin Browne then pipettes a gelatinous pink protein called collagen onto two adjacent films in a specially built chamber. About the size of a shoebox, it houses a stretching apparatus made up of a vertical block attached to metal rods. One of the small, clear films, called the towing membrane, is suspended at one end by the block and curves down almost to the base of the chamber, where it overlaps the second membrane. Browne places one set of neurons in the collagen on the towing membrane and another on the bottom membrane. At this point, the two groups are less than 100 micrometers--two hairs' width--apart. He puts the whole setup into a humming incubator that runs at 37 °C, mimicking the internal temperature of a rat.

Depeche Mode, O2 Dublin, December 2009

Went to see the fab Depeche Mode in concert last nite in the O2 Dublin - first visit there this year and gotta say it lives up to all its promises, the old Point was a shed but the new O2 is a Proper Venue. Dave Gahan is still girating his hips and his voice is great and the rest of the band are top notch. Enjoy a bit from last nite!

ABBA have been partially reformed

ABBA stars Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus are set to premiere their first newly written pop song in 15 years.

The song, called 'Story Of A Heart', will be released on July 6. It is available as part of a 14-track album by Andersson's 16-strong group The Benny Andersson Band.

Vocals on the track have been translated into English, and are sung by Swedish star Helen Sjöholm. As well as the Andersson/Ulvaeus song, 'Story Of A Heart' takes in Swedish folk music, polka, waltzes and Celtic folk.

The Benny Andersson Band have also announced their first UK performance, to take place at London's Hampstead Heath on July 4 as part of the Sweden On Stage festival. No tickets are required for the event.

Banjo Playing Chicken, Pink Monkey on the Standing Base, Blue Monster on the Xylophone

Any chance you guys could come to Grafton Street?

Star Trek XI

At long last for all you Trek Fans The new Star Trek Movie