LifeHand restores touch using thought-controlled robotics
Bringing to mind images of Luke Skywalker’s robotic hand in the film Star Wars, an Italian team recently achieved a prosthetics breakthrough that mirrors science fiction. Neurologist Paolo Maria Rossini led a team at Rome’s Campus Bio-Medico, to create a robotic hand that allows the wearer to control the hand with thoughts and feel sensations through the device.
Funded by the European Union to the tune of $3 million, the project marks the first time an amputee has been able to make truly complex movements using a robotic prosthetic. Called the LifeHand, the project is just the beginning as another E.U. initiative called the SmartHand hopes to replace an entire human arm.
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Okay all you fraidycats, you can emerge from your bunkers now, because cellphones aren’t going to kill you after all. The Danish Cancer Society studied just about everyone in Scandinavia over 30 years, concluding there is no “clear change in the long term trends in incidence of brain tumors.” This is the most conclusive study yet of the imagined link between cancer and cellphones.
We’ve heard other credible scientists saying that the “radiation” from cell phones is of a wavelength that can’t possibly have any effect on brain cells. Our take: if you play on people’s fears, you get lots of attention. Attention equals funding. Scare up everybody, profit. Perhaps the same goes for those who dispel fears. Either way, put away your tinfoil hats, hypochondriacs, and be not afraid.
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Folks who are unfortunate enough to have their larynx removed because of vocal chord problems have had to replace their normal speaking voice with the robotic-sounding voice of a mechanical larynx. Now, South African scientists have developed an artificial larynx that approximates the human voice.
By using 118 pressure sensors to monitor mouth and tongue movement, the palatometer uses a speech synthesizer to produce the correct words in a more natural voice. There’s still a 0.3-second delay between you making the motions and the words coming out, but they’re hoping to iron such kinks out before they’re given to people to use.
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NASA’s “deployable energy absorber” may appear to be a couple of oversized sponges attached to the bottom of a helicopter, but you could be looking at a safety system that helps occupants survive a helicopter crash — or even any kind of air-to-ground impact.
It’s a bit like an airbag for helicopters, one that NASA aerospace engineer Karen Jackson, one of the driving minds behind the project, said of the technology that she’d “like to think the research we’re doing is going to end up in airframes and will potentially save lives.”
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HEADLINES
A treadmill developed at NASA Ames Research Center more than a decade ago for exercising in space has seen more athletes than astronauts lately.
NEWS
AlterG, a Fremont, Calif., startup, has sold more than 200 of the “anti-gravity” physical therapy and training treadmills, which are based on the NASA prototype, at $75,000 each. The buyers have mainly been sports teams, college athletic departments and hospitals, but the maker hopes to eventually push prices down to where individuals could own one.
A new model, the M300, costs $24,500 and is starting to be acquired by physical therapy clinics and nursing homes, where they are used for exercise without the risk of falling.
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PhysOrg.com) — What started out as ‘blue-sky’ thinking by a group of European researchers could ultimately lead to the commercial mass production of a new generation of optoelectronic components for devices ranging from mobile laboratories to mobile phones.
Allowing doctors to field-test patients and, thanks to a highly portable laboratory, come up with quick results leading to an immediate diagnosis is one of the medical community’s most sought-after goals.
Projects have been launched all over the world to explore possible ways of doing this, with new methods of miniaturising components very much a key part of developing what is increasingly being called a “lab-on-a-chip”.
This is a preview of Light-generating transistors to power labs on chips-LATEST DEVELOPMENT IN BIOMEDICAL.
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