Geschichte

Die Zeitmaschine: Fliegen Sie durch die Jahrzehnte - jetzt!

Technology

Segway präsentiert neue Roboterplattform
Segway bietet schon länger den Segway als Roboterplattform für die Industrie an. Was die Entwickler diesmal aber präsentieren, stellt eine völlige Neuentwicklung dar. Dieses Video zeigt die neue Plattform und deutlich zu erkennen sind auch die Akkupacks der Segways, mit denen die Plattform angetrieben wird.

Wirtschaft (A bucks life)

What can you get for a buck today? We step back in time to check some prices and hit some present-day hot spots to see just how far the dollar gets you.

Technology

BIG DOG Watch the Movieclip

The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth
BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.

In separate trials, BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load.

BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with the goal of creating robots that have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).

Technology

Larynx microphones

March 20, 2008 Larynx microphones are ideal for transmitting voice electronically because your voice is directly transmitted from the larynx, with noise suppression of up to 10 dB - meaning they reduce ambient noise to close to zero. They’re used by special ops teams all over the world already, and now they’re available for a mobile phone so you can make calls in a noisy factory, or while jogging, skiing, cycling, and even riding a motorcycle or driving an open top car.

The Pro-idee RoadRunner is worn around your neck, with the microphone next to your voice box. Apart from making you look like a secret agent (and potentially upsetting the homeland security folk at the airport), there are no downsides to the device. So good is the noise suppression that the Roadrunner can be used when driving a convertible or motorcycle and it apparently works trouble free with voice dial activation - the error rate is below 1% compared to ordinary Bluetooth headsets. This means you can relax while phoning and concentrate more on your driving. The communicator kit even fits perfectly under a motorcycle helmet.

The Roadrunner supports all Bluetooth functions on your mobile phone, and offers up to nine hours of talk time and a week of stand-by. The high-quality lithium-polymer cell is charged in just two hours and the unit weighs approximately 28g (1oz). It has a two-year manufacturer’s guarantee.

Technology

Spy-in-the-sky drone sets sights on Miami

By Tom Brown Tue Mar 25, 8:08 PM ET

MIAMI (Reuters) - Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, spy-in-the-sky technology to beef up their fight against crime.

A small pilotless drone manufactured by Honeywell International (HON.N), capable of hovering and "staring" using electro-optic or infrared sensors, is expected to make its debut soon in the skies over the Florida Everglades.

If use of the drone wins Federal Aviation Administration approval after tests, the Miami-Dade Police Department will start flying the 14-pound (6.3 kg) drone over urban areas with an eye toward full-fledged employment in crime fighting.

"Our intentions are to use it only in tactical situations as an extra set of eyes," said police department spokesman Juan Villalba.

"We intend to use this to benefit us in carrying out our mission," he added, saying the wingless Honeywell aircraft, which fits into a backpack and is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, seems ideally suited for use by SWAT teams in hostage situations or dealing with "barricaded subjects."

Miami-Dade police are not alone, however.

Taking their lead from the U.S. military, which has used drones in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, law enforcement agencies across the country have voiced a growing interest in using drones for domestic crime-fighting missions.

Known in the aerospace industry as UAVs, for unmanned aerial vehicles, drones have been under development for decades in the United States.

The CIA acknowledges that it developed a dragonfly-sized UAV known as the "Insectohopter" for laser-guided spy operations as long ago as the 1970s.

And other advanced work on robotic flyers has clearly been under way for quite some time.

"The FBI is experimenting with a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles," said Marcus Thomas, an assistant director of the bureau's Operational Technology Division.

"At this point they have been used mainly for search and rescue missions," he added. "It certainly is an up-and-coming technology and the FBI is researching additional uses for UAVs."

SAFETY, PRIVACY CONCERNS

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been flying drones over the Arizona desert and southwest border with Mexico since 2006 and will soon deploy one in North Dakota to patrol the Canadian border as well.

This month, Customs and Border Protection spokesman Juan Munoz Torres said the agency would also begin test flights of a modified version of its large Predator B drones, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, over the Gulf of Mexico.

Citing numerous safety concerns, the FAA -- the government agency responsible for regulating civil aviation -- has been slow in developing procedures for the use of UAVs by police departments.

"You don't want one of these coming down on grandma's windshield when she's on her way to the grocery store," said Doug Davis, the FAA's program manager for unmanned aerial systems.

He acknowledged strong interest from law enforcement agencies in getting UAVs up and running, however, and said the smaller aircraft particularly were likely to have a "huge economic impact" over the next 10 years.

Getting clearance for police and other civilian agencies to fly can't come soon enough for Billy Robinson, chief executive of Cyber Defense Systems Inc, a small start-up company in St. Petersburg, Florida. His company makes an 8-pound (3.6 kg) kite-sized UAV that was flown for a time by police in Palm Bay, Florida, and in other towns, before the FAA stepped in.

"We've had interest from dozens of law enforcement agencies," said Robinson. "They (the FAA) are preventing a bunch of small companies such as ours from becoming profitable," he said.

Some privacy advocates, however, say rules and ordinances need to be drafted to protect civil liberties during surveillance operations.

"There's been controversies all around about putting up surveillance cameras in public areas," said Howard Simon, Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Technological developments can be used by law enforcement in a way that enhances public safety," he said. "But every enhanced technology also contains a threat of further erosion of privacy."

(Reporting by Tom Brown; Editing by Michael Christie and Eddie Evans)

Wissenschaft

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers say they have coaxed hearts from dead rats to beat again in the laboratory and said the discovery may one day lead to customized organ transplants for people.

"The hope would be we could generate an organ that matched your body," said Doris Taylor of the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair.

Her study, which appeared on Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine, offers a way to fulfill the promise of using stem cells -- the body's master cells -- to grow tailor-made organs for transplant.

Taylor and colleagues used a process called decellularization to wash away existing cells from the hearts of dead rats while leaving the basic collagen structure intact.

They injected this gelatin-like scaffold with heart cells from newborn rats, fed them a nutrient-rich solution and left them in the lab to grow.

Four days later, the hearts started to contract.

The researchers used a pacemaker to coordinate the contractions. They hooked up the hearts to a pump so they were being filled with fluids and added a bit of pressure to simulate blood pressure.

Eight days later, the hearts started to pump.

"I have got to tell you, that was the home run," Taylor said in a telephone interview.

HEALING HEARTS

Like many researchers, Taylor and colleagues had been working on a stem cell therapy to try to heal hearts damaged by heart attacks.

A British team last month said they generated mature, beating heart cells from embryonic stem cells that could be used to make a heart patch.

Others have tried injecting heart stem cells directly into the scarred heart in the hopes of regenerating damaged tissue.

The Minnesota team took another approach.

"We recognized that nature has created the perfect scaffold and wondered whether there is a way in the lab to give nature the tools and get out of the way," Taylor said.

She and colleague Dr. Harold Ott, who is now at Massachusetts General Hospital, knew that decellularization already had been used in making tissue heart valves and blood vessels and decided to try it on whole organs.

They did the process with rat and pig hearts. But they only reported on the regeneration of the rat hearts.

"We hung these organs in the lab and we washed out all the cells. When you are done, you have this thing that looks like a ghost tissue," Taylor said.

The scaffold is made up of collagen, fibronectin and laminin.

The researchers chose immature heart cells because they thought these were most likely to work.

"The hope ultimately -- although we've got a ways to go -- is that we could take a scaffold from a pig or a cadaver and then take stem or progenitor cells from your body and actually grow a self-derived organ," she said.

Taylor said the process could be used on other organs, offering a potential new source of donor organs. It also could lead to organs that, in theory, would be less likely to be rejected by the body.

Nearly 50,000 people in the United States die each year waiting for a donor heart.

"This is an ingenious step towards solving a massive problem," Dr. Tim Chico of Britain's University of Sheffield said in a statement. "This study is very preliminary, but it does show that stem cells can regrow in the 'skeleton' of a donor heart."

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Xavier Briand)

Fitness & Lifestyle

Typgerechtes Training

Was für ein Typ sind Sie? Was für den einen gut und richtig ist, stimmt für den andern noch lange nicht. Testen Sie hier was für ein Trainingstyp Sie sind. Darauf aufbauend lassen sich wesentlich genauere Aussagen treffen welcher Weg speziell für Sie der beste ist. Kreuzen Sie da an wo Sie sich am ehesten wiederfinden. Manchmal wird es mehr als eine Möglichkeit geben. Es gibt keine Schwarz-Weiß-Kategorien. Eher geht es um einen "Chor" von Stimmen. Kreuzen Sie daher immer die Stimme an, die am "lautesten" ist. Es sind 3 mal 7 Fragen zu Anatomie, Physiologie und Lebensstil. Der große Typentest

Wissenschaft

John B.
CarnettSHOCK TRAUMA Diane Hire, shown here in profile and x-ray, is among the first depression patients to receive deep-brain stimulation, a procedure in which two electrodes are implanted in the head.

Happiness is a Warm Electrode
The most promising new treatment for severe depression isn't a pill. It's a permanent implant that shocks the brain. Is this what joy looks like?

By Gregory Mone | September 2007

In the middle of room #11 in the Cleveland Clinic's surgical center, Diane Hire lies on an operating table, the back half of her shaven head hidden behind a plastic curtain. Four pins, one driven into either side of her forehead, the other two in back, hold a titanium halo fast to her skull. An anesthesiologist, several nurses and her psychiatrist cluster around the bed.