CITY CAR: The Kobot concept vehicle from Kowa-TMSUK is an idea for an electric vehicle that could ease congestion in a city centre or be used in environmentally sensitive tourist areas. The compact 1-seater ehicle can actually fold up for parking. The idea would be to have fleets of the vehicles available for hire at mass parking lots on the periphery of the city. Or just own your own. Gizmag.
CABLE STRETCHES: As we humans move our skin and muscles stretch and contract to fit. Robots also need to stretch as they move, but the power cables they rely on are a fixed length. Roboden from Asahi Kasei Fibers is an elastic electrical cable that solves that problem as it stretches and contracts as needed. The technology is also available for USB and signal cables. Next: robot yoga. DigInfo News. Video here.
MODEL PHOTOS: Once upon a time a photo used to be able to prove
something. Now images are so easily altered we can't trust any of them. Computer scientists at Dartmouth College in the USA have created software that can indicate just how different an altered image is from an original. The software ignores global changes such as cropping, but instead can show that a person's body shape has been altered, for
example making a fashion model look slimmer. Perhaps it would be easier to just mark images that haven't been altered. Scientific American.
3D BONES: Researchers from Washington State University successfully used a 3D printer to create scaffolding for bone regrowth. A bone-like
material is printed and then new real bone grows around it. Eventually the printed scaffold dissolves away, leaving the actual bone in place. Before long doctors should be able to use this technique to help repair human bones. Printing human body parts seems to be a growth area. WSU has more, and there's video: here.
MEDICAL SMARTPHONE: The capacitive touchscreen on a smartphone is pretty sensitive. Scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute for
Science and Technology hope to use that sensitivity to analyse substances, for example, for medical purposes. For testing they used solutions of DNA from the bacteria that causes chlamydia. The screens were sensitive enough to detect differing levels of capacitance among the various solutions. In the real world there will need to be a way
to protect the screens, so the scientists are also developing a film for the screen that biological samples could be attached to. Imagine being able to do a quick and cheap analysis in countries where larger more expensive technology is very restricted or far away. New Scientist.
