Hasta La Gadget!

NASA is finally looking to dump rockets. Yes, rockets did some impressive things–back in the day. But now everyone is using them to get to space. The Chinese. The Indians. Even some Danish yahoos with spare parts they found in their garage. NASA is correct. Rockets are officially lame. So, what is a fashionable national space program with a multi-billion dollar budget to do?

How about hitting the rails?

That’s exactly what NASA’s new Advanced Space Launch System program (which will hopefully get a sexier
name at some point) is looking to do. Railgun technology has been around for nearly a century. It works by creating a strong magnetic field that accelerates a projectile along a set of horizontal metal rails, like train rails. And it can generate some real power. In 2008, the US Navy tested a railgun that launched a projectile 2.4 km per second.

That’s seven times the speed of sound.

We’re not yet at the point of development that we can railgun it into orbit. Not yet. But NASA is looking to tweak these existing technologies to see if they can make a feasible prototype. The ASLS has created a 10-year plan that would begin launching drone-like vehicles, followed by more advanced models that would eventually be able to launch a small satellite into orbit.

Choo choo to where no man has gone before.

Starting this month, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) will begin the long process of matching each of its billion-plus citizens with a unique ID number. The number will be tied to three pieces of biometric data: fingerprints of all 10 digits, iris scans of both eyes, and facial recognition software. The system will be under the brand name “Aadhaar.”

The plan hopes to ID 600 million people within the next four years. Citizens will not be required to be digi-tagged (my word, not theirs), but you will need the ID number to sign-up for a growing array of state services.

Aadhaar is largely being sold as a means to empower the vast swath of the Indian population living below the poverty line. While to the western eye, this is a huge expansion of centralized power, the official website makes the contrary argument, that Aadhaar empowers the poor by using new technology to bypass traditional economic infrastructures to sync millions more into the new Indian economy.

The Unique Identification number (Aadhaar), which identifies individuals uniquely on the basis of their demographic information and biometrics will give individuals the means to clearly establish their identity to public and private agencies across the country. It will also create an opportunity to address the existing limitations in financial inclusion. The Aadhaar can help poor residents easily establish their identity to banks. As a result, banks will be able to scale up their branch-less banking deployments and reach out to a wider population at lower cost.

An efficient, cost effective payment solution is a dire necessity for promoting financial inclusion. The Aadhaar and the accompanying authentication mechanism coupled with rudimentary technology application can provide the desired micropayment solution. This can bring low-cost access to financial services to everyone, a short distance from their homes.

If the service becomes anywhere near ubiquitous (keeping in mind, even a fraction of India’s billion-and-growing population is far larger than the population of most countries), the service will inevitably evolve to facilitate other interactions including payments, marketing, and–possibly, frighteningly–tracking.

via Singularity Hub

MIT’s Media Lab creates all sorts of neat stuff. Futuristic robot sort of stuff. Jetsons stuff. And now the program is combining the technology of the future with a cue from the past when they premiere their first opera, Death and the Powers.

The one-act opera, which was 10 years in the making, will make its premiere September 24-26 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. Composer and Media Lab professor Tod Machover, who has created technology-infused instruments for Yo-Yo Ma and Prince, conceptualized Death and the Powers as a way for technology and music to compliment each other. The production features a human cast alongside an animated multi-media set design which includes nine life-sized singing “OperaBots.”

The story is straight Singularity mythology. (If you didn’t know, The Singularity is the hip new geek religion, if you’re reading GearLog, you’d probably be interested in joining our cult. It’s run by Google. Really.) Death is the tale of a plucky mad scientist who uploads his memories and personality into “The System.” The actor portraying the scientist disappears after the first scene and is thereafter represented by various robots, lights, and assorted fixtures that make-up the on-stage “System.” Off-stage, the singer’s performance is captured by software that monitor’s his volume and pitch, as well muscle tension and breathing patterns and reflect those attributes into on-stage mechanisms of The System. Machover doves this use of technology as “disembodied performance.” It’s like if T-Pain had an unlimited budget and a dedicated staff of research grads.

It sounds amazing. I can’t wait to check it out. It’s going to be the Avatar of the opera world. In the meantime, I hope Professor Machover will next use technology to improve upon ballet, which is awful. Just awful.

Some video of the production after the jump.

Remember that movie The Shining? Well, now it’s completely true. More or less. Researchers at the University of Utah have created a way to use electrodes to read human thoughts (which is basically telepathy–sort of). Redrum, alas.

The research team is working on giving severely brain injured patients the ability to communicate. By placing 16 microelectrodes underneath the skull, but above a brain area known to process speech, the team has managed able to decipher words directly from brain activity. Which, in effect, means reading thoughts.

Right now the tech has only been able to decipher 10 basic words: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more, and less. And, as of now, it only correctly guess the words between 76 and 90 percent of the time. This is not practical by any means, but a very promising proof of concept. This is a huge first step on the way to helping people with severe brain trauma and other maladies communicate with the world.

It should also be noted that, down the line, this will inevitably lead to other tech-fueled ramifications. In the future, this technology will allow humans to interact with their phones, TVs, and other assorted electronic whoozy-woos using only their thoughts. In a way, we will all be psychic. Let’s just hoping we all turn out to be nice, wholesome psychics like Sookie from True Blood rather than that head-exploding crew from Scanners.

via Medical Daily

Okay, this is some freaky sci-fi robot nonsense going on here.

Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab has a whole program entirely dedicated to creating robot snakes. These freaky reptilian go-bots can slither along floors, climb trees, swim (!), move along vertical pipes, and even sit up like a cobra.

Robot engineers often taken cues from nature, which has several million years on modern robotics to develop and tweak its designs. And nature’s done an admirable job with snakes: the original fall of man, that whole dust-up with Rikki Rikki Tavi, going on that plane with Samuel L. Jackson. Good stuff. But, given some development, I think man will one-up evolution on the snake front. According to the website for the Robot Snake School, the slithery Wall-Es can be used for a variety of practical means such as search and rescue operations, surgical procedures, bomb disarming, and bridge inspection. Basically all the things that lazy real snakes refuse to do.

Videos of why you should never sleep again after the jump.

via singularityhub