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Sunday, July 23, 2006
Verlamde man bedient apparaten met hersenen
BOSTON. De 25-jarige Matthew Nagle kan een computercursor over het scherm bewegen en zijn email openen met alleen de kracht van zijn gedachten.
Nagle, die volledig verlamd raakte na een steekpartij, heeft eind vorig jaar een computerchip in zijn hersenen geïmplanteerd gekregen, die zijn hersengolven vertaalt in signalen naar een computer.
Televisie en robotarm
Ook kan de man met zijn gedachten - via een computer - zijn televisie bedienen en een eenvoudige kunstarm gebruiken. Een belangrijk aspect, zo schrijven onderzoekers van het Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in het tijdschrift Nature van donderdag, is dat Nagle veel van deze taken kan doen terwijl hij een gesprek voert.
Dat betekent dat volledige concentratie niet vereist is. Dat biedt volgens de wetenschappers hoop op het gebruik van deze technologie voor de bediening van protheses die bedoeld zijn voor dagelijks gebruik.
Honderd sensoren
De chip, met zo’n honderd sensoren, is geïmplanteerd in het gedeelte van Nagle’s hersenen die normaal gesproken de bewegingen van de ledematen regelt.
Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves
Kiss your keyboard goodbye: Soon we’ll jack our brains directly into the Net - and that’s just the beginning.
Stu Wolf, one of the top scientists at Darpa, the Pentagon’s scientific research agency which gave birth to the Internet, seriously believes we’ll all be wearing computers in headbands within 20 years.
By that time, we’ll have superfast, supertiny computers that make today’s machines look like typewriters. The desktop will be dead, says Wolf, and the headband will dominate.
"We already know we can trigger neurons mechanically," he says. "You can interact directly with the brain without implanted electrodes. Then the next step is being able to think something and have it happen: Flying a plane, driving a car, operating household machinery."
Controlling devices with the mind is just the beginning. Next, Wolf believes, is what he calls "network-enabled telepathy" - instant thought transfer. In other words, your thoughts will flow from your brain over the network right into someone else’s brain. If you think instant messaging is addictive, just wait for instant thinking.
The only issue, Wolf says, is making sure it’s consensual; that’s a problem likely to tax the minds of security experts.
But just think of the advantages. In the office of the future, the conference call, too, will be remembered as a medieval form of torture.
China “The world’s biggest investor in renewable energy”
Everyone knows that China’s enormous and unstoppable energy consumption is helping make the world hotter. But a cool breeze is blowing. The same week that the G-8 countries looked to nuclear amidst a global energy crisis and PetroChina announced a 6 percent increase in oil production, China not only announced it would spend US$175 billion to clean up its act but also focused on the source, beginning to build its largest wind power farm. Indeed, at an eventual output of 200 megawatts, it will be one of the world’s largest.
It’s another sign that China, which already calls itself the world’s biggest investor in renewable energy is serious about harnessing its enormous wind potential (estimated at 632 gigawatts onshore and 750 gigawatts offshore), and reaching its goal of using renewables to fulfill at least 10 percent of its energy needs by 2010. By 2020, China now aims to have 30 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity, up from just 1 GW last year, providing power to between 13 and 30 million households; the cost of reaching this goal will be around US$188 billion, says the state. Now investors are racing to catch the wind.
Cheap Solar Power From Recycled Auto Parts
Can auto parts make solar power more affordable? That’s what two teams at MIT think, according to an article in the Technology Review, an MIT campus publication. The two groups are each tackling alternative, cheaper ways to solar-base electricity, with the intent to “put the ability to harvest electricity from the sun into the hands of villagers in poor countries and backyard tinkerers alike.” The concept is based on designs incorporating materials that are mass-produced for something else. MIT Graduate student Matthew Orosz’s uses a feed pump and steam turbine, harvested from power-steering pumps used in cars and trucks, for his solar generator. The article gives more of the lowdown on Orosz’s design, which, in simple terms, is a parabolic trough used to focus light on a pipe containing motor oil—ambitious readers could probably build their own.
bron: Technology Review | http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/07/cheap_solar_pow.php#perma