Hacker Friendly

Yesterday was 2nd annual Seattle Power Tool Race & Derby at the Georgetown block party. It was a fantastic day full of speed, danger, and grinding metal. Two 60′ tracks of plywood and two-by-fours were the proving ground for dozens of insanely creative racing machines made from modified power tools.
Hackerbot Labs entered four […]

 

Part of the challenge of designing a man-machine interface at the cellular level is coming up with an electrode that doesn’t damage living tissue. Neuroscientists at the University of Michigan have had some success by pouring liquid conductive polymer directly onto slices of mouse brain tissue, and getting it to set in place by […]

 

Finally, a camera for your esophagus.
The PillCam™ ESO video capsule is specifically designed to view the inner lining of the Esophagus. The capsule is equipped with miniature cameras on both ends and is about the size of a multi-vitamin, which can be swallowed easily.
Three sensor arrays are strategically placed on the patient’s chest and connected […]

 

Eric and I have been talking about building a human pong machine, using a laser beam to project the ball and a camera (or ultrasonics) to track human movement for the flippers.
Looks like someone beat us to it. But rather than using a laser, they’ve got a couple of projectors and multidimensional bipedal tracking. […]

 

Physicists at the University of Utah are developing a way to produce electricity from heat by making sound. Heat is forced through a cylinder or ring, where it heats up the air and generates a sound wave. The sound then comes in contact with a piezoelectric device that produces electricity as it vibrates. They […]

 

xkcd has outdone themselves again. This one will be useful for next year’s wireless school…