Via we make money not art, who seems to have been at O’Reilly’s ETech conference this week:
Adrian Bowyer, from Bath University (England), envisions a make-it-all machine that would enable you to design and manufacture yourself plates and many other consumer goods.
Once they start making and taking their own hallucinogens as in Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis’ truly disturbing prescience will be again confirmed.
Oh, yeah – this is awesome. The particulars (relatively low-res, static images only, monochrome, etc.) betray this as a first generation product, but you gotta start someplace. Polymer Vision has lightweight / flexible / rollable / low-power display technology available now.
Importantly, the displays have a high resolution (85 dpi) and the technology used in the front plane ensures a highly attractive paper-like quality, as well as a far wider viewing angle than even the best LCD displays. So reading is easy anywhere and under any light conditions, even direct sunlight. Rollable displays are ideal for reading-intensive applications such as e-mail, e-books, -newspapers and -magazines.
What%u2019s more, rollable displays offer all these advantages without decreasing the battery lifetime of mobile devices. The display technology that gives these screens their paper-like appearance is %u2018bi-stable%u2019. This means they draw power only when the image changes, so consumption is extremely low.”
Their website has more pictures, too. As this matures it’s going to open up a lot of very cool possibilities.
(via Gizmodo.)
Google has just released their new map service at maps.google.com and, as one has come to expect from google, it’s absolutely awesome.
I’ve been wanting for this for years, but frankly didn’t really think it was coming this soon. Splashpower wirelessly delivers power to mobile phones, PDAs, bluetooth devices, etc., and is expeected to be in stores later this year.
(via Popgadget.)
Researchers at Manchester University are able to print human skin cells!
Tailor-made skin from ‘ink’ printer: “Using the same principle as an ink-jet printer, experts are able to take skin cells from a patient’s body, multiply them, then print out a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to the body. The wound’s dimensions are entered into the printer to ensure a perfect fit.
“
(via we make money not art.)
Awesome:
The devices were formed by ‘growing’ rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials.”
…
via Rich
Old-school netizen Howard Rheingold has written a short manifesto entitled “Mobile and Open”.
The setup suggests, quite reasonably IMHO, that some key elements of the Internet’s development were lucky strokes, and implies that entrenched powers might now be on to the ability of disruptive technologies to, well, disrupt (it should go without saying that this disruption is at the likely expense of the entrenched). Given that, what will make the coming network of massively interconnected and personal mobile communication devices do good for people in general, as opposed to just the aforementioned powers?
I’ll avoid quoting at length, as you should really just go read the manifesto, which outlines four requirements for a “future where mobile media achieve their full economic and cultural potential”:
That people are free and able to act as users not consumers: Users can actively shape media, as they did with the PC and the Internet, not just passively consume what is provided by a few, as in the era of broadcast media and communications monopolies. If hardware can’t be hacked and software is locked away from individuals by technology or law, users won’t be free to invent.
An open innovation commons: When networks of devices, technological platforms for communication media, the electromagnetic spectrum, are available for shared experimentation, new technologies and industries can emerge…
Self-organizing, ad-hoc networks: Populations of users and devices have the power, freedom, and tools to link together technically and socially according to their own inclinations and mutual agreements…
Everybody should have the freedom to associate information with places and things, and to access the information others have associated with places and things…
The original has started a lively discussion, if you’re interested in more.
(via worldchanging.)
Wired News: Jacket Grows From Living Tissue:
“Grown using a combination of mouse and human cells, the jacket is currently quite tiny (about 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide) and would just fit a mouse. Using a biodegradable polymer as a base, the team coated it with 3T3 mouse cells to form connective tissue and topped it up with human bone cells in the hope of creating a stronger layer of skin. The jacket is being grown inside a specially designed bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. The group hopes that once the polymer degrades, a whole jacket that maintains its shape and integrity will be left behind.”
Neat.
Found via Gizmodo’s year-end roundup. (Though I have no idea how I missed this in October…)
Everybody who’s anybody in the mobile phone business has announced plans to build a new high-speed transmission technology, dubbed Super 3G.
This is a lot of bandwidth, by today’s terms:
Super 3G can boost mobile transmission speeds to a range of 30 to 100 megabits per second to match existing land line fiber optic telecom technology, allowing movies, games or home videos to be played on handsets with a much higher resolution, it said.
(If “30 to 100 megabits” isn’t meaningful to you, think of this as somewhere between 15 and 400 times as fast as residential DSL or cable modem access in the states today.)
At least on this hemisphere, we really don’t seem close to hitting bandwidth limits of the not-yet-really-deployed 3G standards. Regardless, this degree of bandwidth delivered wirelessly to individuals has a potential cool-ness that is really difficult to comprehend.
Along with the $500 Mac rumors, makes for a good start to the tech new year.
My name is Josh Heling. I work in technology, and blog here with incredible inconsistency about miscellaneous items of interest to me.
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