Aside from both being drugs to encourage sexual activity, female desire drugs have very little in common with drugs like Viagra. Photo: baerchen57

A new wave of female sexual desire drugs may soon be on its way to market. Still entrenched in the rigors of the FDA’s approval process, two drugs, Lybrido and Lybridos, should be available by 2016 if they pass their tests. But talking reasonably about these drugs—their risks and benefits and what societal shifts, if any, could stem from them—means thinking about them in the right way.

The pharmaceutical industry has long sought an equivalent of Viagra for women, says Daniel Bergner in the New York Times Magazine, in an in-depth story on the clinical side of female desire. And, most of the time, says Bergner, ““Female Viagra” is the way drugs like Lybrido and Lybridos tend to be discussed.” But that’s not the right way to think about these drugs, he says:

Viagra meddles with the arteries; it causes physical shifts that allow the penis to rise. A female-desire drug would be something else. It would adjust the primal and executive regions of the brain. It would reach into the psyche.

Where Viagra directly creates an erection, female desire drugs are trying to directly modify the balance of hormones affecting a woman’s brain. While Lybrido and Lybridos contain a drug similar to Viagra, one meant to increase blood flow to the genitals, they also attempt to instill lust and desire by modifying two chemicals, serotonin and dopamine. While many chemicals and hormones have a role in feelings of lust, the balance of serotonin and dopamine is one of the most important factors. For many woman (and men) in long-term relationships, the urges of earlier days can wane. Changing the balance of these two chemicals in the brain can drive a sense of desire.

Rising from the ovaries and from the adrenal glands that sit atop the kidneys, testosterone rides the bloodstream to the brain and, by means not fully known, stokes the production and release of dopamine. (Blood-borne estrogen, which derives from testosterone, may also be involved in this process.) And then there’s serotonin, dopamine’s foil. It allows the advanced regions of the brain, the domains that lie high and forward, to exert what is termed executive function. Serotonin is a molecule of self-control. It instills calm, stability, coherence… Roughly speaking, dopamine is impulse; serotonin is inhibition and organization. And in sexuality, as in other emotional realms, the two have to work in balance. If dopamine is far too dominant, craving can splinter into attentional chaos. If serotonin overwhelms, the rational can displace the randy.

Other than their intended purpose—encouraging sexual activity—female desire drugs and Viagra are completely different things. Calling a female desire drug “lady Viagra” draws parallels between the two types of drugs that really aren’t there. One encourages blood flow; the other affects hormone levels in the brain. As the drugs make their way to market, it’s important that each should be thought of on its own terms—both to help people understand the relatively risks and to manage expectations.

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Nom. Photo: British Mum

NASA, those great engineers of tomorrow, just put $125,000 behind work intended to build a 3D food printer—a device that will be able to crank out “nutritionally-appropriate meals” from a mix of oils and powders, says Christopher Mims for Quartz. The money is going to a mechanical engineer, Anjan Contractor, who will build a prototype of the machine. “Contractor’s vision,” says Mims, “would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.”

Laid down layer by layer using a waterless mix of carbohydrates, protein and nutrient, according to Contractor, the device should be able to make meals out of pretty much any source of these essential foodstuffs—plants, bugs, seeds, whatever.

NASA wants the printer for long-distance space flights. Waterless powders don’t go bad, and living in space you’d probably get sick of slurping soup out of a baggie. Pizza sounds much better:

Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.

Finally, the pizza is topped with the delicious-sounding “protein layer,” which could come from any source, including animals, milk or plants.

While a 3D food printer would be able to make food-looking food, the idea isn’t so far off from the mainstay futuristic projections of the early 20th century that said we were all supposed to be eating our food in pill form by now. Against that, we’ll take the “protein” pizza.

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Photo: Racchio

The U.S. military has a non-lethal toy straight out of dystopian science fiction. It is, literally, a pain gun. Known as “Active Denial Technology,” the pain gun shoots extremely high frequency microwaves from a truck hundreds of meters away. When these waves hit your skin, you feel like you’re being cooked alive. Last year, Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman volunteered to get shot by the non-lethal weapon:

When the signal goes out over radio to shoot me, there’s no warning — no flash, no smell, no sound, no round. Suddenly my chest and neck feel like they’ve been exposed to a blast furnace, with a sting thrown in for good measure. I’m getting blasted with 12 joules of energy per square centimeter, in a fairly concentrated blast diameter. I last maybe two seconds of curiosity before my body takes the controls and yanks me out of the way of the beam.

Here’s what it looks like to get shot, as experienced by Ackerman:

Former Navy SEAL Richard Machowicz took a turn, too, for his Discovery Channel show Future Weapons. He didn’t like it much, either.

The Active Denial pain ray is big and scary, sure. But it’s also mounted on a huge expensive truck, and thus, unlike tasers or rubber bullets, is not a thing you’ll likely see in real life right now. But that may soon change. According to New Scientist, Raytheon, the defense contractor behind the pain gun, is working on a portable version:

Raytheon is now building smaller versions for law enforcement or commercial maritime use – designed to be placed inside buildings, such as prisons, or mounted on ships for defence against, say, pirates. And soon there could be handheld versions of the pain ray. Raytheon has developed small experimental prototypes, one of which is about the size of a heavy rifle and is intended for police use.

As a non-lethal weapon, the pain ray is actually incredibly effective. The weapon causes a burning sensation so strong that it triggers “reflexive ‘repel’ reactions.” People just want to get out of the way. And, from the testing done so far, the pain gun has a low chance of doing any real damage. So far, 11,000 people have been shot, and only eight of them got burned. But these were all under proper testing conditions, not out in the field in the middle of a riot.

But as a non-lethal weapon, the pain gun has something rubber bullets and tasers and tear gas do not: it is invisible—people being shot by it will likely have absolutely zero idea what is going on, and in most cases the gun leaves no physical wounds.

This distinction, says New Scientist, got a plan to use the portable version of the device in a California prison shut down.

On the eve of going live, the trial was cancelled. It was not over health concerns, explains Chris Tillery of the NIJ’s Office of Science and Technology… The test was shut down, he says, because of an unexpected outcry in the media and elsewhere about the potential for abuse of the technology.

And this goes to the heart of the moral dilemma raised by a technology that can induce pain invisibly. It may be medically safe if used properly, but in the wrong hands, it could also be a tool of oppression and torture.

For now, says New Scientist, the potential to use the weapon in law enforcement is under review by the National Institute of Justice.

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Image: Harvard University

Robots get smaller, smarter and faster every day. Now that we can 3-D print the little devices, they’re also easier to make. In fact, they’re so easy to make that there’s one robot that can actually assemble itself.

Here it is, assembling its way to world supremacy:

The materials used here are shape memory polymers. They remember certain shapes and, when the right conditions are met, fold into those forms. This robot can bend itself from a flat sheet into a little worm-like thing. Here’s an explanation of how shape memory works from IEEE Spectrum:

Self-folding happens thanks to shape memory polymers that contract when heated. By printing these polymers on one side of a hinged substrate and then heating them, the hinge can be made to bend. The amount of bend is controlled by etching flexible connectors that connect both sides of the hinge, and with enough hinges heated in the right order, it’s possible to create fairly complex folded shapes, including things like interlocking structural elements.

The tricky part of the process is the folding of the robot itself: installing the battery and motor is trivial enough for a human to do, which means that a relatively simple pick and place robot should have no problems doing the same thing. This means that these robots have the potential to scale massively: they can be printed out of cheap materials, they fold themselves together, and another robot can plonk some hardware on them and they’re good to go.

Now, we’ve seen self assembling robots before. Like this one:

And we’ve seen robots that have been 3-D printed before. Like this one:

But this is the first robot to be both 3-D printed and have the ability to self assemble. Next step: teach them to solder.

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Image: CarbonNYC

While blind people can’t enjoy photographs the same way sighted people do, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to take them. Or at least that’s the premise of this new app that helps blind people position their cameras better through sound cues.

Researchers recently asked blind and partially sighted people what the hardest part of getting a photo right was. Armed with the knowledge of exactly what their sampling of blind people wanted help with, the researchers made an app, which solves a few key problems that blind photographers have.

The first is locating the shutter button. In the app, there’s no button—an upward swiping motion on the screen takes a picture. The app also detects the number of faces it sees and speaks that number out loud. It also uses audio to help the photographer move the camera and get the subjects in focus.

To help photographers recognize the shots, the app records sound, too. New Scientist explains:

This is to help with photo organising and sharing – and is used as an aide-memoire as to who is in shot. The user can choose to save this sound file along with the time and date, and GPS data that is translated into audio giving the name of the neighbourhood, district or city the shot was taken in.

While sighted people might not understand why a blind person would want to take photographs, the results can be quite incredible. Take this gallery of photos taken by a blind woman. Sonia Sobertas, a blind woman who paints with light in her photographs, is part of the Seeing With Photography group of people who want to create images despite being blind. The New York Times explained Sobertas’s reason for taking photographs:

For seeing individuals, it may seem bizarre that Ms. Soberats dedicates so much time to an art she cannot fully appreciate. Why not a more tactile pursuit, like sculpting? But Ms. Soberats said she savored her work through the eyes of others.

“The more difficult the photo, the more interesting and the more rewarding when you complete it and it’s good,” she said. “To be able to realize and obtain something that at the end everybody praises, it’s very satisfactory.”

The researchers developing the app want to give their users that same experience and provide one more way for them to enjoy the same activities as everybody else.

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Image: Mark Strozier

The world’s first fully 3-D printed gun was fired this week, and Defense Distributed, the company behind the print-at-home weapon, wants to make the designs for this weapon available to all. But the State Department would rather they didn’t. In fact, the department asked Defense Distributed to pull down the blueprints, saying that the plans could incur arms trafficking violations. As a response, The Pirate Bay, a large bittorrent site, offered to host the plans on its site for anyone who wants them.

Here’s the gun being fired with a remote trigger:

The gun has had a short but steady history of being rejected. Thingiverse, a place for 3D printed blueprints, banned it in 2012. DEFCAD, a place where Thingverse-banned designs go, welcomed the gun. But the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance wrote a letter to Defense Distributed that read: “Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled.”

Cody Wilson, inventor of the gun and head of Defense Distributed, said they would comply. “We have to comply,” he told Forbes. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it from our servers.”

Of course, the internet being what it is, just pulling the designs from DEFCAD is not at all the same from removing it from the web entirely. The plans had already been downloaded 100,000 times in the first two days the file was online. And the Pirate Bay says it won’t bend to any department. “TPB has for close to 10 years been operating without taking down one single torrent due to pressure from the outside. And it will never start doing that,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak. The insider says that he hopes hosting the plans will force America to reevaluate their stance on gun.

“We think that the good thing about the discussion about 3D printers and their gun laws might bring more focus on the double standards that the U.S. is having and hopefully – people will start printing signs to protest against the guns, the corruption and the threats against freedom of speech that the U.S. is pushing on us,” he told Torrent Freak.

The gun and TPB have something in common even—they’ve both been searching for a home recently. The torrent site recently had to move, after threats from local governments to shut them down. And Wilson isn’t totally content with the state departments demands, and hopes to get the plans up again. But at least the two can be nomads together.

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Dawn LeClair, member of the 1975 Wickenburg High School Math Club, sits in front of the paper clip computer. Image: Wickenburg High School

In the 1960s, some strange computers were being tinkered into existence. There was one that operated solely on rolling marbles and gates that flipped open and closed. And in 1967, the manual How to Build a Working Digital Computer—a book that explains just how to build a computer out of paper clips—came out.

Okay, so you need more than just paper clips. Evil Mad Scientist explains:

How to Build a Working Digital Computer is both an introduction to the “new and exciting field of digital computers” and a set of plans to build one.  What’s especially interesting is that the plans don’t call for any specialized electronic components, but instead show how to build everything from parts that you might find at a hardware store: items like paper clips, little light bulbs, thread spools, wire, screws, and switches (that can optionally be made from paper clips).

This isn’t your average paper-clip chain, though. One piece of the computer is made from a juice can and bent paper clips. It works kind of like those little music box rolls, where the cylinder rotates and the bumps on it are struck to make sounds. Except that the cylinder is a juice can and the heads are made of paper clips.

If this all sounds super weird, it is. But, like the very best super weird things, it also actually works. This guy made one:

Apparently so did a couple of 9th graders in Cleveland in 1972. They named their computer Emmerack. Mark Rosenstein, one of those kids, has some photographs of Emmerack that still survive. He writes:

In the summer between 8th and 9th grade, my friend Kenny Antonelli and I built an electro-mechanical computer. We had been lucky enough to use our high school’s HP2114B computer for a couple of weeks when it had been lent to our junior high school. The 2114B had a massive 8k words of core (yes magnetic donuts) memory, of which 4k was reserved for the Basic operating system, and the rest was available to the user via optical mark cards or by typing in via a teletype. The design of our computer was based on the book, “How to Build a Working Digital Computer” by Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips and Allen M. Wolk. The book used paper clip switches, but we used our paper route money to purchase a zillion real slide switches from Radio Shack. We ganged the switches together by drilling a hole in each switch handle and inserting a metal rod through the holes of the switches that needed to be operated together.

Sadly, Emmerack was trashed when Rosenstein went to college. In 1975, the Wickenburg High School Math Club also built one of these home supply computers.

And if you want to try it, you can download the instructions from the Bitsavers.org archive. Mostly, you’ll need a lot of paper clips and a lot of patience.

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This… is my boomstick. Photo: Hjem

When you were a kid, perhaps you had a potato gun—a little plastic toy gun that, stabbed into a potato, creates little starch-based pellets. If you were more of a tinkering and engineering type, perhaps you built a potato cannon, a hollow cylinder stuffed with something flammable and a potato.

This was probably not a great idea. It turns out that potato cannons are incredibly dangerous. And, just because, Michael Courtney, a physicist trained at M.I.T and now at the Air Force academy in Colorado and a colleague have figured out how to make them even more so.

Even your standard potato cannon (usually fueled with hairspray, says MIT’s Technology Review) can be deadly. Recent research found that if you take a potato to the head you have way more than a “50% risk of skull fracture.” Even taking a body shot could do some serious damage and has a good chance of killing you. No bueno.

But that’s with a regular potato cannon, not the one that Courtney put together. In research published on the arXiv the other day, Courtney published a systematic study of which type of fuel packs the biggest potato punch. He tested acetylene, ethanol, methanol, propane and butane. None of these are fancy Air Force-style combustibles—you could theoretically get any of them around the house or at a hardware store. Then, Courtney and his associates used a high-speed camera to track how fast they could send their spuds flying. Propane clocked in at 62 miles per hour. Acetylene at 309 miles per hour.

Courtney doesn’t even try to come up with some heavy-handed justification for the research. He just wanted to see which fuel would make the best potato cannon. MIT:

The Courtneys make absolutely clear that this kind of cannon is extremely dangerous and potentially lethal. “Potatoes launched with acetylene were also destructive to wooden boards and plastic objects initially employed as backstops before transitioning to 6mm thick steel plate,” they say.

How about we all just agree now to cut off this produce-based arms race before it really gets going, deal?

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Powerful, metal-clad robot arms have the potential to cause huge amounts of damage, and engineers normally opt for a “keep your distance” approach to designing robot navigational systems: Grab the thing you need, but keep clear of everything else around it. But that approach, says John Markoff in the New York Times, doesn’t work so well in our incredibly cluttered world, where objects often litter the path between here and there.

Giving robots a sense of touch, letting them feel the pressure between themselves and nearby objects, will let them navigate this busy landscape to grab, say, an object at the back of a shelf, while simultaneously limiting how hard they push against any one thing.

Robots, guided by machine vision, have also been limited by their inability to reach into spaces, the way living creatures can, to pick out an object. They are, in fact, programmed to avoid contact.

“We’re flipping that on its head,” Dr. Kemp said. “Let’s say contact with the arm is fine, as long as the forces are low.”

The new robot arm, with a rudimentary sense of touch equipped, can reach around and pick out a desired object by touch alone.

A sense of touch in robots has been a steadily developing goal. In 2005, says National Geographic, fake skin for robots started us down this path.

The meshwork of sensors laced onto a thin plastic film resembles thickly threaded fishnet stockings. When stretched over an object, such as a robotic hand, E-skin can detect pressure and temperature.

What’s more, the meshwork can bend with a robot hand or other object, however it moves. Experts say this type of all-encompassing sensor system could be a big step toward developing fully functioning, humanoid robots.

There has been a flurry of improvements in the robot-skin department, Popular Science, Discovery and io9 report. Even more new developments, says The Engineer, are racing us towards robots with a human-like sense of touch.

But for now, says the Times, the slightly-clumsy robot seen in the video above is where we’re at: a robot with a cautious touch that doesn’t mind brushing arms. “In a video produced by the lab, a robot arm is shown wiping the mouth of a disabled man and adjusting a blanket,” says the Times. “Volunteers who allowed the robot to touch them said the sensations were not uncomfortable.”

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Image: Library of Congress

In the 1930s, records weren’t played on the radio or at concerts. They didn’t flood people’s homes with music. The first long-playing records, now commonly known as LPs, weren’t for music at all: they were audiobooks designed for the blind.

Record companies hadn’t yet figured out how to make music sound good on LPs. But they did discover that they could make long voice recordings of just someone talking. Which made the technology perfect for blind people and audio books. And in 1932, the American Foundation for the Blind licensed Frank L. Dyer’s “talking machine record” technology for that purpose.

According to the American Foundation for the Blind, the demand for talking books increased dramatically after the war, as soldiers came home with damage to their eyes. After licensing Dyers technology and working with the Carnegie Corporation to develop a disk that could be durable, affordable and easy to listen to, the foundation came up with the first modern LP. Here’s the American Foundation for the Blind:

The outcome of this research and development effort was a 12-inch 33 1/3 rpm disc made out of a synthetic material called Vinylite. The disc was both durable and flexible and therefore suitable for transporting. It had many more grooves per inch than the traditional 78 rpm record and rotated at a far slower speed, allowing for larger amounts of material to be stored on a single side. Regarding the development of a “reproducer” as the Talking Book machines were called, AFB devised two — one electric, the other spring-driven. The former cost approximately thirty dollars and the latter, designed for those without access to electricity, cost twenty dollars.

In 1933, the Talking Books program was allotted $10,000 (worth $175,000 today).

One of the most prominent blind advocates, Helen Keller, was opposed to the Talking Books program at first. She thought that the money would have been better spent elsewhere, writing in Matilda Ziegler Magazine:

Furthermore, I told them [AFB] I thought the blind could live without talking-books and radios at a time when millions of people are out of work and in the bread-line. Last winter in Pennsylvania alone five hundred blind people ate the bread of charity! Will radios and talking-books take the place of food, shelter and clothing? Naturally I am not willing to divert the attention of the public to talking-books while more urgent needs of the sightless demand first service.

But later that year Keller changed her mind. No one really knows what happened, but in March of 1935 she wrote a letter in support of the Talking Books project. Keller was quite an influential person, and after she threw her support behind the program, Talking Books was allotted another $211,500.

So, finally, in 1935, production of the records began. In 1936, the foundation and its partners began producing audiobooks for children. The New York Public Library still has some of the first talking books recorded:

Historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a number of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and a variety of fictional works were among the first talking books issued. In order to meet the public’s hungry demand for a broader selection of reading materials, the Library of Congress came up with a mechanism for obtaining permission from publishers to record printed works “royalty free.”

And the “talking book machines” were distributed across the country. The American Foundation for the Blind estimates that by 1942 they had distributed “23,505 Talking Book machines, 7,000 pickup arms, 69.5 million needles, 130,000 record envelopes and 40,500 record containers.”

You can listen to one of the audio books recorded during the project, called The Blind in Europe, here.

As technology got better, producers found they could record music onto LPs that sounded just as good as the plain speech ones. Eventually, both music and audiobooks became digitized. And, like music, audiobooks have developed their share of copyright issues as well. Pacific Standard reports:

Over the past decade, organizations that control the licensing of copyrighted works in the U.S. have not been particularly kind to the visually impaired. The Author’s Guild has argued that technologies like Kindle’s text-to-speech is a derivative work and thus copyright infringement. The Guild relented when Amazon gave publishers veto power over which works would be allowed to make use of the text-to-speech feature. Amazon’s Paperwhite doesn’t include the text-to-speech feature that came with older Kindles, but it recently purchased IVONA, a sign that Amazon may be taking the experimental feature more seriously in future releases of its various e-readers.

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Image: Touch Bionics

In Star Wars, Episode V, Luke Skywalker gets his hand cut off and replaced with a totally convincing bionic replica. While Patric Kane didn’t have his hand sliced of by a lightsaber, he’s got a bionic replacement that’s one step closer to Skywalker’s eerily lifelike robot paw.

Kane lost his hand when he was a baby, but in 2010, after living most of his life without a prosthetic, he saw a video of a prosthetic made by Touch Bionics and tracked them down to ask for one. That year, he was fitted with an earlier version of what the company calls the i-Limb Ultra, and this year he’s got a new version. Both can be controlled with the iPhone. The Scotsman reports:

The mobile control application, which is compatible with the latest Apple products, including the iPhone, will allow Patrick, 16, to type, hold papers and use a computer mouse via a single screen tap.

He will also be able to cut up his own food and tie his shoelaces for the first time using his new hand, which has already featured in a music video by will.i.am and Britney Spears.

Here’s what the hand looks like in use:

The artificial hand allows users to do things that many prosthetic hands can’t quite do yet, like pick up a piece of paper or grip greasy objects. They’re expensive though, between $38,000 and $124,000 for a new Touch Bionics limb.

For Kane, however, the hand is already a hit with his peers. “The first time I wore it I nearly ran out of batteries with shaking hands with over 125 boys,” he told The Scotsman.

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First, let’s establish the fact that there is something in the United States called the American Kitefliers Association. And there’s something called competitive stunt kiting.

Here’s what stunk kiting looks like:

Now, as you might expect, the people who compete in stunt kiting competitions are interesting folks. At Collectors Weekly, they’ve got a profile of Richard Dermer, pizza shop owner and kite-collector extraordinaire. The walls of Dermer’s pizza joint are covered in kites from all over the world, which is impressive enough. But it’s not his only accomplishment. Dermer worked at Hideaways, one of the first pizza places in Oklahoma in the late 1950s, when pizza was an exotic food. He bought the joint in 1960. He delivered pizzas in these weird Volkswagen Beetles painted like Herbie and lady bugs. Then, in 1970, his game-partner and manager at the Hideaway was the first to market the Japanese version of the game Go in the United States.

It was this game company that lead Dermer to kites, and from there he took off—eventually becoming president of the American Kitefliers Association.

Dermer now has a huge kite collection. He told Collectors Weekly:

“I was very much a novice, but I started learning. And the more we got into going to kite festivals and collecting kites, the more I discovered and the deeper the subject became. My kite-book library now runs over a hundred volumes. I learn stuff new every time I go to an event. And I think the kites out in the garage are multiplying when the lights are out.”

What Dermer’s collection and hobby brings to the United States is an international perspective and history on kite flying. In India, for example, kite flying is a fierce, sometimes violent sport. In Thailand, kite battles reflect the war of the sexes between men and women. Kites were used in World War II, to distract German planes and for target practice.

And when Dermer started stunt-kiting, it was pretty new. All the kits were triangular, they all looked about the same. But soon, Dermer told Collectors Weekly, that changed. “In the ’80s and ’90s, kites went through quite a developmental phase where they were getting better and better as new lighter, stronger materials were being developed. Tubular fiberglass became obsolete when tubular graphite came along.” Dermer, ever the innovator, set up the new rules for judging these stunt kite competitions, which take into account how much control the flier has, the difficulty of the moves, and the choreography. It’s a lot like ice skating or gymnastics, Dermer says.

Dermer’s next arena? Taking these stunt kites inside. He makes kites at schools, for kids and adults alike. He’s even made kites at weddings out of napkins. Really, Dermer sounds like the life of any party.

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Photo: gabrielsaldana

Baby sea turtles are an impressive example of nature’s engineering prowess. (Also, they are adorable.) The beaches on which they are born are plagued with predators looking to snatch up a quick turtle snack, and when the tiny turtles scramble out of their underground nests, their ability to hustle across the sand to the relative safety of the ocean determines if they live or die.

But anyone who has ever tried jogging through sand knows that moving on the shifting ground can be challenging. To make their way, sea turtles evolved a flexible flipper wrist that allows them to skim along without displacing too much sand. Not all of the turtles are expert crawlers, however. Some get stuck in ruts or tracks made by turtles before them.

Inspired by this ability and curious about why some turtles perform better than others, researchers from Georgia Tech and Northwestern University have built the FlipperBot, a bio-inspired robot that can navigate through granular surfaces like sand. ScienceNOW details the robot:

Based on footage of hatchlings collected on the Georgia coast, FBot reveals how the creatures exert a force that will propel them forward, without simply causing their limbs to sink into the sand. The flexible “wrist” of a turtle helps reduce such slipping, and prevents the creature from winding up with a snootful of sand.

Here, you can see the robot in action:

The researchers hope the robot may lend hints about beach restoration and conservation efforts. Discover details this idea from physicist Paul Umbanhowar:

Umbanhowar said understanding beach surfaces and how turtles move is important because many beaches in the United States are often subject to beach nourishment programs, where sand is dredged and dumped to prevent erosion.

“If you are restoring a beach, it might be the wrong kind of sand or deposited in a way that is unnatural,” Umbanhoward said. “In order for this turtle to advance, it has to generate these kind of thrust forces and it may be unable to get their flippers into it. We could say something about that given our models.”

Plus, the robot help explain how our distant ancestors managed to crawl out of the ocean and onto the land. The researchers hope to expand upon the FlipperBot to build a new robot that resembles our distant ancestor, the fish-amphibian hybrid Ichthyostega, ScienceNow reports.

“To understand the mechanics of how the first terrestrial animals moved, you have to understand how their flipper-like limbs interacted with complex, yielding substrates like mud flats,” the researchers said in a statement. “We don’t have solid results on the evolutionary questions yet, but this certainly points to a way that we could address these issues.”

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Image: Ryan Christie

One of the greatest joys of pregnancy for many women is seeing the little blob growing inside on a sonogram—the black and white images of little heads and feet and noses the first of many pictures to make it to Facebook or a privileged place on the fridge. Now, one company is trying to give blind women who miss out on this experience a tactile equivalent, by 3-D printing their fetuses for them.

Jorge Roberto Lopes dos Santos is the man behind the little fetus figurines. He didn’t set out to help blind women; the work comes out of his company, Tecnologia Humana 3D, which focuses more broadly on building 3-D models from sonogram data to help diagnose problems prenatally. Morgen Peck at Tech Page One writes:

Tecnologia Humana designs the models with sophisticated programs that produce highly detailed simulations of a fetus’ anatomy that doctors can examine virtually.

They can swoop through the lungs and explore the cavities of the heart in search of problems that may require intervention. Prior journeys have found Down syndrome and cleft lip, dos Santos said in a recent paper.

It wasn’t until later that he realized that the models could help women who cannot see sonograms, a chance to “see” their unborn babies. It’s not cheap yet. The whole shebang, from the MRI to the CT scan to the printing, costs about $200 for a full model of a 12-week-old fetus, and $300 for just the face once the fetus is 24 weeks old. But for many that’s worth it to get the feeling so many sighted mothers get when they see their little bundle of cells moving about for the first time.

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If all goes to plan, a new deal inked by two of the world’s biggest companies could give rise to a sustainability advocate’s paradise: a resort near the South China Sea that gets all of its power from the heat of the water nearby through a new type of renewable energy.

The deal, says a news release issued by Lockheed Martin, will see the defense giant partner with the Reignwood Group—a massive company that does everything from selling Red Bull in China to operate hotels and golf courses, managing properties and operating a private aircraft service—to develop the first commercial plant for a new type of renewable energy generation system known as ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC).

Ocean thermal energy conversion draws on the natural temperature gradient that forms in tropical oceans worldwide. The surface of the ocean, heated by the Sun, is much warmer than the water deeper down. OTEC plants use the warm surface water to boil a liquid with a really low boiling point in a low-pressure container to form steam. This steam then drives a turbine, generating electricity. Colder water from deeper down is pulled up in a pipe, and by having this cold water pass by the pipe containing the steam, the steam is condensed back into a liquid. The liquid flows around, is heated by the warm surface water, and turns into steam once more—on and on, generating electricity from the temperature gradient in the ocean.

The idea for ocean thermal energy conversaion has been around for a really, really long time. “The concept of deriving energy from ocean thermal gradients was a French idea, suggested in 1881 by Jacques d’Arsonval, and French engineers have been active in developing the requisite technology,” says Marine Energy Times.

According to energy reporter Tyler Hamilton, famed engineer Nikola Tesla even tried his hands at making it work.

While Lockheed has been working on this for four decades, one of the first in-depth discussions of the concept came from Nikola Tesla, who at the age of 75 outlined how such a plant might be built in the December 1931 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics journal. Tesla spent considerable time devising a way to improve the efficiencies of such a power plant, but he determined that it was too great an engineering challenge at the time. “I have studied this plan of power production from all angles and have devised apparatus for bringing down all losses to what I might call the irreducible minimum and still I find the performance too small to enable successful competition with the present methods,” he wrote, though still expressing hope that new methods would eventually make it possible to economically tap the thermal energy in oceans.

So the idea is old, but recent technological developments have driven ocean thermal energy conversion into the realm of possibility. Interestingly, some of the most troubling issues facing OTEC were solved by the oil industry, says the Marine Energy Times:

Ocean thermal is the only remaining vast, untapped source of renewable energy, and is now ripe for commercialization.  The near market-readiness of this technology is largely attributable to the remarkable ocean-engineering innovations and successful experience of the offshore oil industry during the past thirty years in developing, investing in, and  introducing mammoth floating platforms.  That achievement has inadvertently satisfied ocean thermal’s key operational requirement, for a large, stable, reliable ocean platform capable of operating in storms, hurricanes and typhoons.

Consequently, adaptations of those offshore-ocean-platform designs can be spun-off  to supply the proven ocean-engineering framework on which to mount the specialized ocean thermal plant and plantship heat exchangers, turbomachinery, cold water pipe (CWP) system, and other components and subsystems.Those offshore engineering achievements have greatly reduced the real and perceived risks of investing in ocean thermal plants.

Lockheed Martin has been working on the technology behind OTEC, too, and the deal with the Reignwood Group will see them build a test plant. If they manage to pull it off, the work could open the door to increased investment in this new form of renewable energy.

According to Green Tech Media, there are some potential environmental issues to look out for: if the cold water brought up from depth is pumped out into the surface waters, you could trigger a huge algae bloom that is really bad for the local ecosystem. But, if you release the cold water further down, around 70 meters depth, you should be able to avoid this dilemma. Having a small-scale test plant will give researchers a way to learn about any other unforeseen issues before moves are made to implement this new type of renewable energy on a larger scale.

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