The future, now.

Let’s play God!

Pau — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:51:17 +0000

Yuhuuu! Researchers have stated demostrating that we can print live tissues… next step is to print people!!! Why not a “mini-me“??

From POPSCI:

One of PopSci’s favorite regenerative medicine specialists, Anthony Atala, printed a biocompatible model of a human kidney on stageat the 2011 TED conference Thursday, in a technique that could someday be used to create new organs from a patient’s own tissue rather than relying on donated organs.

“It’s like baking a cake,” Atala said.

Printing Solar Cells

Pau — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:39:09 +0000

Well, it looks like these days we can “print” virtually anything!!! These MIT researchers are developing a technique to print solar cells! What about printing textiles with a solar cell to recharge your smartphone? What about covering your house with fabrics so that they are sustainable? What about…Possibilites are endless!!

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/mit-researchers-are-printing-solar-cells-on-sheets-of-paper-20110713/

Let’s build a house

Pau — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:46:30 +0000

I’m so glad spanish constructors don’t have access to this technology yet… but how about having a big printer build your house?? Building houses is still a very manual and costly process, and the automatization proposed by Prof. Khoshnevis can certainly do some good!!

Out-of-the-box imaging media

Pau — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:40:37 +0000

As we commented earlier, printing — and imaging in general — does not need to happen in regular surfaces. Any kind of media, like food, is possible, like in the following interesting video where the authors have built a latte art printer:

It is amazing the number of custom devices to build custom objects that people built. We are smoothly advancing towards personal fabrication…

Unlimited Design

Pau — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:51:57 +0000

Watch out this cool video on designing furniture on the fly. A nice combination of 3D capture, rapid prototyping and great sales video — from inventorspot.

A very nice way to start personal fabrication…

Unlimited imaging

Pau — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:55:14 +0000

As frontiers among disciplines and devices fade out, we are more likely to see natural interactions arising from many more different objects than we expect. The following example has little to do with technology (well, besides the relationship with customized toast images proposed by boldlentil), but I think it is very mind-opening:

Yammy!

device-less web navigation

Pau — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 10:56:10 +0000

In the path of making computer interfaces more natural, the Publicis & Hal Riney website proposes a very interesting method: navigate throught their website only with the webcam, without the need of a mouse. It suffices to stand at a certain distance of the camera and wave your arms to select the right and left directions.

Check it out, soon computers will be able to understand our signs, speech, body language…

Natural names for natural colors

Pau — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:56:11 +0000

In the information society we live in, sometimes we loose original names and concepts by dehumanized incomprehensible codings. In this line, the post “An online color thesaurus” permits to specify colors in natural language and to find out which is the corresponding RGB webcolor.

And you can also collaborate enlarging their database!

video resume

Pau — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 00:36:15 +0000

Oh, my God… It looks like BS is severely spreading to video resumées!!

Check out Esquire’s post on The Worst Video Resumes Ever for some pearls. You can’t miss it!

Pens ‘n’ Pencils

Pau — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:46:01 +0000

For some reason, engineers tend to value more complex solutions than simple ones.

You might have probably read the rumor of the space pen. In short, NASA developed a pen that could write in zero gravity, spending $12M and thousands of hours of work, while Russians used pencils instead. Although the story is simply a hoax, it well illustrates a principle seen in many engineering decisions: simple solutions are undervalued. High-tech, high-complexity solutions are seen as the correct ones by whole communities of experts, even if simple solutions might be just better.

I have heard in professional contexts: “Solution A is the one that works the best, but… it is too simple. We’d have a hard time justifying our job.”. Seriously. Sad but true. Simple ideas can save millions of dollars, not only because they are cheaper, more robust and perform better, but also because you can get rid of personnel that complicates things…

So here’s an history of my own. In a robot contest, which goal was to get out of a maze, we presented a radically simple design. It turns out that the kind of maze proposed can be solved by always going to the right. This was our proposal: a single wheel robot, that would turn in circles if left alone, but that sticked to the wall in its presence, and would just follow it straight ahead. Whenever there was a right turn, it would do the right turn as it turned in circles in absence of wall. A small curved arm was set to the front so that when it found a wall in the front, it would do a left turn. The results? Five times faster than any of the other competitors. And we were disqualified, of course. That was not a robot. It didn’t have chips, nor LEDs, nor IR sensors. And yet it solved the problem better than anyone else…

So, which are the stories of your own? Which are the pencils that can be used instead of pens?