The researchers at the University of Washington have created a prototype of a bionic contact lens.  It is said that the flexible plastic lens is a platform for applications like “the Internet on a virtual screen, immersing gamers in virtual worlds and monitoring patients’ medical conditions.”  The group working on the prototype also equipped it with an antenna, tiny metal wires for an electronic circuit and red light-emitting diodes onto the lens surface.

Initially when I saw this, I thought it was a little silly, now that I have read a little more about it I believe that this will pave the way to technologies seen in movies.  You know those cool virtual floater screens in Minority Report; imagine riding the bus or being in a taxi reading the news on a screen only seen by you.  Now that has its appeals and it does not.  I am sure that if I saw someone poking around the air like Tom Cruise, I would think that they were barkin’ mad.  But who knows, in 10 years that could be completely normal.

At the moment they are testing the lenses on rabbits, but, “contact-wearing rabbits won’t be able to tell researchers when they’ve hit upon the right angle to produce a crisp image.” 

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Ray Kurzweil is a guy I would love to sit down with, over a Guinness and just listen.

He is one of those guys that might just be mad enough to be right about things in the future.

You can read more at his site, kurzweilai.net

He is planning for The Singularity.

The technological singularity is the predicted imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

This event is thought to be of major importance by its promoters because of the acceleration of technological progress that is likely to follow as a consequence.

Futurists give varying predictions as to the date, the cause, the consequences and even the likelihood of the event.

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According to a speech given by Ray Kurzweil at last week’s SCO6 supercomputing conference, humans will have the technology to live forever in about 15-30 years. 

Quite a bold claim.  And as much as I want to live for a millenium or so, I usually disregard such claims as just kinda stupid.  Don’t get me wrong, we’re going to get there, but it just doesn’t seem likely that it’s 15 years away.  However, Kurzweil isn’t exactly a nut job.  And his new book that documents how our biologies will seemlessly merge with GNR*, , has been endorsed by MIT profs, physicists.. even Bill Gates.

Kurzweil says he measured the progress of computing and tech over the past 25 years and projected it into the future.  A couple of his predictions:

- Doctors will be doing a backup of our memories by the late 2030s

- By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young

- Scientists will be able to rejuvenate all of someone’s body tissues and organs by transforming their skin cells into youthful versions of other cell types

So, I guess what I’m driving at is this - you better make peace with all those annoying family members you’re sitting across the Thanksgiving table from today, because you may be dealing with them for a loooong time.

* For you Trailer Park denizens that happen to be reading this, I regret to inform you that “GNR” stands for “genetics, nanotechnology, robotics”.  I am afraid you will not have the opportunity to merge with Guns ‘n’ Roses anytime in the near future.  So please put away your Bic, cover your tits, and get off your boyfriend’s shoulders.  —Thanks, Dhadmin

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The best channel in the world, Discovery Channel, just brought us the human-machine hybrid, Robo Sapien.

It was part of the Big Science programming the other night.

Truly amazing technology and a glimpse into the future.

It’s a long clip but worth the wait if you are into robotics and what the future will bring.

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We finally have to admit it.  We’ve been duped by the nanotech industry.  “Follow us,” they said, “we’ll give you self-mowing lawns, houses that can change color at the flip of a switch, and self-assembling goods of all kinds.  Microscopic robots will scrub cholesterol from your arteries, and cotton candy and ribeye steaks will grow on trees.” So what do we get?  Droplets that move slightly to the left, and bathrooms that clean themselves.

(No, this isn’t some kind of desperate bong; it’s the Toilet Snorkel)

So here’s the deal — there’s a new surface coating being developed at the University of New South Wales which will kill microbes when it is exposed to UV, and the surface is superhydrophilic, so water just sheets right off taking dead microbes with it.  They don’t quite have it working with indoor light yet, so Britney will need to keep her shoes on in the bathroom for a few more years.

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Researchers at Cardiff University have used electrical discharge machining to drill a hole 22 microns in diameter, smaller than a human hair.  This could have amazing impact on the development of micro-electro-mechanical systems.  MEMS fascinate me, especially these videos of spider mites crawling over moving parts half their size. 

(image source)

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A biotech team at UC San Francisco has succeeded in genetically modifying E. Coli to change color when exposed to light.  They proved the technology by making high resolution low contrast images of everything from the director of DARPA to Laetitia Casta, but the real use will be as sensors for genetically engineered microbial machines.  The only pictures I could find are in the first PDF on this page. 

(image source)

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Conductive polymers that contract when conducting current have been around for awhile, but they contract too slowly to be of any practical use as actuators.  New research from MIT shows that, theoretically, polymers could be made that contract about one thousand times faster than human muscles.

I’m no Lee Majors, but I can’t wait to be the $6.95 man.

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Now that’s ubiquitous computing!  This author makes the case for an interface that is implanted just under the skins surface that can give health stats like blood pressure, heart rate, lung capacity, cell health, etc.

It could go right below your national identification barcode tattoo.

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Nanotechnology still hasn’t produced the self-mowing lawn that it promised me, but researchers are slowly making progress in the ten-atoms wide world.

The University of Edinburgh has developed a surface made of molecular machines that can move a droplet of liquid when stimulated by UV light.  While it seems trivial, this incredible breakthrough in the moving-droplets-slightly-to-the-left industry has shown that nanotechnology can be used to do work on a macroscopic scale, which is the scale that my lawn lives in.

Here is a video of a droplet moving 1mm up a 12 degree incline.

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