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Posts Tagged ‘Video’

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, are the oldest known biblical manuscripts. Five scrolls are currently available on the Israel Museum's website: The Great Isaiah Scroll, The Temple Scroll, The War Scroll, The Community Rule Scroll and The Commentary on the Habakkuk Scroll. They were photographed in up to 1,200 megapixel high resolution, high enough that you can zoom in and see cracks and discolorations in the animal skin the verses are written on.

The Great Isaiah Scroll is divided into chapters and verses, shown on mouse-over, and gives you an English translation of the verse when you click on it. The website also allows you to leave comments, a sort of marginalia for the modern age. Learn more about the scrolls and their digitization in the video below.

With its own theme song to boot

Several of them have been chronicled in these pages — click here for a clip of BigDog scrambling to regain its balance after slipping on a patch of ice, for instance. But the below video has the added bonus of a new bluesy theme song, with a beat seemingly written to match BigDog’s jaunty gait.

BigDog uses a system of hyper-responsive hydraulic joints, sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes to keep it on its four legs. Boston Dynamics says the creature can run at 4 mph, climb slopes up to 35 degrees, walk across a wide range of terrain, and carry 340 pounds. It’s designed to go wherever humans would go, carrying their load without complaint or the urge to sniff the ground every six inches. It’s funded by DARPA, naturally.

In pup mode, it performs a doglike “let’s-play” stretch; later in its life, it gets down to business, leaping like a greyhound and tromping through the snow like an AT-AT walker. Turn up the sound and check it out.

This is the first taste we've gotten of what the study actually produces. Here's a video of the reconstruction in action:

The reconstruction (on the right, obviously) was, according to Gallant, "obtained using only each subject's brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately."

Don't forget to check out our original feature on this work for some more background into what the researchers would really prefer we call "brain decoding" rather than "mind-reading."

When you can print nearly anything, who will say what not to print?

As for musical instruments, the Stradivarius replica isn’t the first we’ve seen--for instance, MIT’s Media Lab presented us with a smooth sounding rapid-prototyped flute earlier this year. But this violin was laser sintered to the unique and complex specifications of a Stradivarius--making it a working replica that closely mimics the hand craftsmanship of the original, even if it is made of an industrial polymer rather than wood.

It doesn’t sound half bad, either.

Perhaps more to the point of 3-D printing pushing boundaries, a couple of posts now up on Thingiverse, a site for sharing fabrication and digital design projects, don’t just challenge conventional notions of craftsmanship or IP ownership, but of the very way we’ve structured our laws. Two separate posts show how one can quickly print both a five-round magazine and a lower receiver for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle--a rifle that is legal to own for law-abiding citizens in the U.S., but that is nonetheless an assault rifle (ArmaLite’s AR-15 rifle became the military’s M16).

That’s not to say there’s anything strictly illegal about any of this. But it does raise some questions about how 3-D printing is going to impact the world as it becomes more ubiquitous. There’s no doubt here at PopSci that consumer grade 3-D printers are going to change the world, as average folks can create things that they need on their own tabletop printers, offering a new way for companies to deliver goods to consumers and for homegrown inventors to create their own objects and implements.

But when it comes to things that people aren’t supposed to have access to--either because they are protected by intellectual property laws, or they are illegal to possess--3-D printing also takes us into a murky area. For instance, there is a legal process one is supposed to go through before obtaining a working AR-15, specifically certain components of the rifle. To quote KingLudd on Thingiverse:

The Lower Receiver is the frame that holds together all the other pieces of the firearm. In the States, all the other pieces can be purchased without a permit - over the counter or through the post. The Lower Receiver is the only part which requires a background check or any other kind of paperwork before purchase.
Typically this part is made of aluminium. A rifle with a Lower Receiver made of plastic can be perfectly functional.

It’s illegal to buy a lower receiver outside of legal channels, but is it illegal to whip one up on your printer (the question of whether a lower receiver made of ABS plastic is actually safe notwithstanding)? A five-round magazine is perfectly legal, but what happens when someone starts cranking out high-capacity magazines that wander into legally dubious territory? (To his credit, KingLudd poses these questions himself on Thingiverse and asks where the line should be.)

Of course, the same questions could be asked of the skilled machinist who simply cranks out all of these components in a machine shop. But 3-D printing makes this sort of thing far more accessible, bringing the capacity to create complex objects to just about anyone. Download a CAD file, click print, have a coffee while your object--whatever it may be--comes together. Right here on this very blog we have mused that the pentalobe fasteners Apple uses to keep people from tinkering with the iPhone 4 will soon be rendered obsolete, as we’ll all easily be able to print out the unique tool that fits them. Of course, we, and our friends at iFixit, like to think of that as a good thing for iPhone hackers who should be able to do whatever they like with an object they have purchased.

But what about the assault weapons hacker, or the forger of IP-protected components? If you can copy the handiwork of the Stradivaris, what can't you copy? What if you could just print all the components of an iPhone from a downloaded file without ever paying for the phone?

Clearly that’s not the same thing, but these are interesting questions all. As 3-D printing moves us, layer by sintered layer, to new highs in tabletop innovation, customization, and manufacturing (let alone dream projects like these), we’re going to have to grapple with such legal (dare we say moral?) issues at some point. And as the technology proliferates, both in terms of the media it can create in and in its availability to the average individual, it’s going to be much more difficult to manage the availability of anything--from an expertly designed musical instrument to an AR-15--at the level of production. Because production can, and will, happen everywhere.

Paraswift, as it’s called, rolls up the main building at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in the video below. It doesn’t need the red carpet, but its builders at ETH Zurich get style points for that touch.

Unlike other wall-climbing tech based on vacuum suction, the robot uses a low pressure gradient to stick to the wall. Paraswift uses an impeller, a rotor spinning in a tube, to create a low pressure vortex like the center of a tornado. This creates a partial vacuum that adheres the robot to the wall, as explained by ETH Zurich. The wheels stay in contact with the surface to be climbed, and the vortex holds the robot to the wall, so there’s no need to create a vacuum seal.

It was built for fun in a collaboration with Disney Research, which has been exploring new robot designs for use in its theme parks. But it could conceivably be used to capture aerial footage or test new robot landing systems.

As the video shows, Paraswift unfurls its parachute before it jumps off, which ensures it has time to position properly for a safe landing. In that sense, it’s not a true base jumper. But impressive nonetheless.

[via Tech Crunch]

In other words, it doesn’t sound easy. But a material like this is necessary if companies like IBM are going to move beyond stacking a few layers of silicon and get down to the business of stacking 100-chip towers that will power the devices of the future.

3-D semiconductors are basically multi-layered chips that can stack computing power, networking, and memory all into one neat system-on-a-chip. Right now companies like IBM can stack a handful of chips, but what they want are silicon towers. That means they need some kind of mortar that possesses these unique properties to hold everything together. That’s what 3M and IBM are striving for: some kind of adhesive that could coat entire silicon wafers, holding them tightly together while still dissipating heat away from heat-sensitive components like logic circuits.

And they want it by 2013--about the same time the first generation of smaller 3-D processors is expected to hit the market in mobile devices. If they get it right, they predict that they could leapfrog today’s existing processor technology, creating a silicon “brick” 1,000 times faster than today’s fastest microprocessors.