To get the most out of your home entertainment investment, you need more than a large screen picture and a pile of remotes. Crestron Home makes wireless touchpanel that can automatically dims the lights, draws the drapes, lowers the screen and projector from the ceiling, and even start the popcorn popping to complete the cinema experience. At the same time, the kids can surf the Internet in the den and program music videos from the DVD jukebox. Or you can watch the big game on satellite TV while checking the camera at the front door for late-arriving sports fans. Cool Stuff! More Here
Continue reading… “Total Home Automation”

Home Director, Inc., of Morrisville, N.C., recently won the “cool home” award for all the “hot” technologies it incorporated into a home in Plano, Texas. The company loaded the home up with the very latest digital wiring and components, including the “Intelligent Home” networking systems for Internet, entertainment, and communications applications, along with its structured wiring Network Connection Center. More Here

Continue reading… “Cool Home Award”

Sandia Labs now has a MEMS Cam so you can see one of their latest microengines in action. The gear teeth in this engine are about the size of red blood cells. They have been able to achieve speeds of 500,000 RPMs. The current endurance record is 7 billion rpms, the equivolent of your car driving back and forth to the moon 5 times.
More Little Stuff Here
Continue reading… “Super Tiny Micro Engine Video Cam”

“NASA’s Three-Dimensional Artificial Neural Network processor is capable of recognizing objects in real time and in highly cluttered background scenes. It can process an image and is capable of a certain degree of judgment about the objects, much the same way a person looks at a variety of objects and makes judgments about the nature of those objects.” While this may be a significant step forward, they’re missing the point. The key to replicating human intelligence is to devise ways of capturing it – capturing real intelligence – and filtering it for use in multiple applications. More Here
Continue reading… “Machine Intelligence VS Human Intelligence”

The vision of what air transportation products we’ll be seeing in 2002 is quite interesting. As an example, the PAM (Performance Aviation Manufacturing) Group of Williamsburg, Virginia, has developed a personal vehicle that can transport you via air from your driveway to a nearby parking lot. I’ve known some brands of coffee that can do the same thing.
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Continue reading… “Sky Visions 2002”

Some call this the Dr. Frankenstein of tree research. “Plantations of genetically designed supertrees could supply the world’s wood needs from a tiny percentage of today’s forestlands, deeding the rest to environmental protection and restoration” But the environmentalists don’t think so. A forestry lab at the University of Washngton was recently torched by protesters. More Here
Continue reading… “Genetically Designed Trees”

Dr. Yosinori Kuwabara and his colleagues, working in a small research laboratory at Juntendou University in Tokyo,are developing the first operational artificial womb – a clear plastic tank the size of a bread basket, filled with amniotic fluid stabilised at body temperature. For the past several years, Kuwabara and his team have kept goat foetuses alive and growing for up to 10 days by connecting their umbilical cords to two machines that serve as a placenta, pumping in blood, oxygen and nutrients and disposing of waste products. You just can’t get a good goat these days unless it’s been artificially wombed. More Here
Continue reading… “Artificial Womb Research”

Vanu Bose, son of legendary speaker designer Amar Bose, has a dream of broadcasting software programs wirelessly to portable handheld devices. An example of how this would be used is a cell phone, where once the new program is downloaded, the phone would be loaded with a whole new set of capabilities.
Vanu, Inc is developing a software radio architecture for military radios which will allow each radio to be reconfigured to meet specific mission requirements. Think in terms of future cars with electronic dashboards that could be reconfigured according to individual driver’s wishes. More Here
Continue reading… “Software Radio”

Competing face recognition technologies have been under development for a number of years, but now two are starting to emerge as the leaders: local feature analysis, developed by Joseph Atick, who founded Jersey City, NJ-based Visionics; and eigenface, first demonstrated at Helsinki University of Technology, later developed at MIT, and currently marketed by Viisage Technology of Littleton, MA. It looks like the only way to defeat this technology is with a serious bar fight. More Here
Continue reading… “Chicken Soup for the Face Recognition Soul”