Intelligent glasses

Google has developed an amazing set of intelligent glasses that can augment reality if you are wearing them. The requested information magically appears on the glasses—if you need to know the route to a certain place, all that you have to do is to softly ask your glasses to show the map of the relevant street and it will appear on your glasses in a manner that it does not block your view.

Similarly if you see a beautiful sunset, all you have to do is to request the glasses to take a photograph, and it will do that for you. It will book you a theater ticket, tell you where a book may be located in a bookshop or tell you the state of congestion on a particular road. You no longer need to use a smart phone to search for the information that you need—it is all sitting at the end of your nose—all that you need to do is to ask! It even translates a foreign language.

The exciting futuristic device has been invented by Google X (Google’s futuristic technology development lab). According to the New York Times the glasses should be commercially available by the end of this year. A huge amount of work has gone into its development including optimising battery life, network speed, software, and graphics performance. It has intelligent personal software embedded in it so that you have a smooth and seamless experience.

Destroy bacteria—with a torch!

A group of collaborating scientists from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering, the University of Sydney and the City University of Hong Kong have developed a novel plasma flashlight that destroys bacteria instantly. Powered by a small 12 volt battery it releases a plume of plasma at 23 degrees Celsius that is perfectly safe on our skin but destroys bacteria. The exact mechanism by which the flashlight works is not known. It does release weak UV light that may be responsible for the activity or its bactericidal effect may be the reaction of the plasma with the surrounding air. The flashlight is expected to cost under $100, and be useful to surgeons and physicians wanting to clean a certain body area.

Printable robots

Imagine being able to manufacture robots on a 3D printing machine. During the last couple of years there have been exciting developments that allow various inanimate objects to be produced by a 3D printing machine. The machine is computer controlled and various layers of polymeric material can be laid on sequentially to produce toys, spectacle frames, valves, and a variety of other materials. Now even robots may be produced in this manner. A project has been funded by a US $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation involving scientists and engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

The manufacture of various types of robots by 3D printing could revolutionise their use in defense, industry and for household chores.

Neuronal cells—from skin cells

There have been exciting development in the field of stem cells. Such cells were originally obtained from embryonic cells but they can now be extracted from bone marrow and other parts of the body. They can then be appropriately stimulated so that they are converted into other types of cells—heart, kidney, pancreas, etc. This is an exciting fast evolving area of regenerative medicine, opening up futuristic possibilities of repairing damaged hearts, kidneys and other body parts.

Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany, have succeeded in reprogramming skin cells from mice so that they are converted into neurons. A growth factor was used to guide the development of skin cells so that they became converted into neuronal somatic stem cells. The German scientists now plan to extend the work to human cells.

World’s most sensitive radio telescope

The world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope is under construction. Known as, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), it will comprise 3,000 individual ground-based dish antennas, that will be linked to act as one large telescope. The individual dishes will be spread over an area of approximately 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) and it will generate one exabyte of astronomical data per day, twice the amount of data that is handled daily by the World Wide Web. IBM is partnering with a Dutch company ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) to develop computer systems that can process this huge amount of data efficiently.

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