technology

Chris Knight's avatar

With Avatar still breaking box office records (it was #1 in theaters for the fifth straight weekend) and now starting to garner prizes (like at last night’s Golden Globes) James Cameron is talking about the practical application of the technology that he and his team came up with for the movie…

Sure, it’s terrific for turning human actors into big blue alien Na’vis. But the photorealistic CGI technology James Cameron perfected for Avatar could easily be used for other, even more mind-blowing purposes—like, say, bringing Humphrey Bogart back to life, or making Clint Eastwood look 35 again. “How about another Dirty Harry movie where Clint looks the way he looked in 1975?” Cameron suggests. “Or a James Bond movie where Sean Connery looks the way he did in Doctor No? How cool would that be?”

In a way, Cameron has already pulled off this trick: Sigourney Weaver appears to

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Clive Thompson at Wired has written an exhaustively-researched article that should give every software developer and game publisher pause: the twelve-year development cycle that plagued Duke Nukem Forever before the plug was finally pulled on the project this past spring. The tale Thompson relates is one rife with technical obsession, corporate money and motion-captured strippers (for realz, folks). If you want the lowdown on the biggest gaming fiasco since Ion Storm and perhaps of all time, here it is!...

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Markus Haering appeared in court in Basel, Switzerland today. The charge leveled against him: that his company’s activities caused earthquakes, one of which measured 3.4 Richter magnitude. Haering’s firm is researching geothermal-generated electricity. Well, according to court documents his company’s deep-drilling in 2006 triggered the quakes. There were no injuries but $9 million in damages were reported. If the judge finds him guilty of intentionally damaging property, Haering faces five years jail for making the earthquakes happen…

…which is gonna be a heckuva retort when he gets asked “So what are you in for buddy?”

(Seriously though, sounds like it’s gonna be an easy charge to beat. Lex Luthor might have been put behind bars for doing something like this but not Markus Haering. Dude doesn’t even have a nuclear weapon, fer pete’s sake…)...

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My sister is a physical therapist in a hospital that uses Nintendo’s Wii to engage patients in stimulating sports-like activity as part of their regimen. And now another toy of the modern era is finding employment in medicine: Apple’s iPod is helping patients recovering from strokes and suffering from dementia (like that which is symptomatic of Alzheimer’s) to reconnect with memories and emotions…

Listening to rap and reggae on a borrowed iPod every day has helped Everett Dixon, a 28-year-old stroke victim at Beth Abraham Health Services in Bronx, N.Y., learn to walk and use his hands again.

Trevor Gibbons, 52, who fell out of a fourth-floor construction site and suffered a crushed larynx, has become so entranced with music that he’s written 400 songs and cut four CDs.

Ann Povodator, an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient in Boynton Beach, Fla., listens to her beloved opera and Yiddish songs every day on

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Chris Knight's avatar

The photo on the left is an unmanned aerial vehicle (like those drone aircraft that are being used by the military) being tracked and destroyed while in flight by a laser weapon developed by the Integrated Defense Systems unit of the Boeing Company. This isn’t the first practical laser-based weapon to be developed, but the technology is certainly getting refined at a brisk pace. For all intents and purposes, these are full-blown “laser cannons” like something out of Flash Gordon or Star Wars.

Aim your browser here for more, including the next technical goal that Boeing is setting out to accomplish: mounting these laser weapons onto sharks.

(I’m kidding! 🙂...

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Want to seriously protect yourself and your loved ones against flying debris, bullets and bombs? Consider covering your living room in X-Flex wallpaper. Developed by Berry Plastics in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the X-Flex Blast Protection System is touted as wallpaper that will stop a wrecking ball and worse with a single sheet of the stuff. X-Flex is two sheets of polymer wrap with a Kevlar-like material sandwiched in between. It’s self-adhesive and covering an average-sized room takes less than an hour. Berry Plastics obviously had the military most in mind for employment of their product, but the company is already seeing a market for X-Flex in buildings constructed in areas prone to tornadoes and hurricanes.

I’m wondering how ‘spensive this stuff is. X-Flex probably has a hideous price tag. But if nothing else I could see papering your bathroom with it and hunkering down ...

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Startup company Cranberry has unveiled its DiamonDisc: a DVD that stores your data by etching it in stone… literally. The disc is composed of synthetic stone that a high-intensity laser burns the data into, creating a DVD said to be perfectly compatible with all DVD drives and players. But amazingly, Cranberry claims that the DiamonDisc will keep your data safe for a thousand years.

(Whether there will be DVD players in the year 3009 is a whole ‘nother matter.)

You can send your data to Cranberry to have it burned by them. Or you can buy the DiamonDisc recorder for your own use, for the low price of $4,995. But that also gets you 150 DiamonDiscs that currently run $34.95 each when bought separately.

Personally, I think the major studios should adopt this new technology for the home market. And the first movie that gets this “recorded in ...

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Using software he developed and about $10 of standard off-the-shelf parts, a solid-thinkin’ dude named Aydogan Ozcan has converted camera-equipped cellphones into rather powerful microscopes.

When set up with the package, a cellphone like the Samsung model in the photo can image blood cells and bacteria. The phones can then send the data over a wireless network or be connected via USB to laptop computers. The potential for such devices are vast, considering that a doctor equipped with such a cellphone could diagnose malaria or other illnesses in very remote locations. What’s particularly interesting from a technical perspective is that Ozcan’s ‘scope does NOT use lenses for magnification at all! It achieves microscopy by using the phone’s camera to measure the scattering/interference pattern from light-emitting diodes shining on the sample. In other words, the package creates a magnified hologram of the sample being studied.

Very, very cool. Aydogan Ozcan ...

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Fifteen years after it first offered free web space for anybody, GeoCities is shutting down today.

I can’t remember the last time that I went to a GeoCities-hosted page. But once upon the time they glittered across cyberspace like sand on the seashore, mostly for “personal home pages”. Those are dying out now, being supplanted by blogs like this one.

It can’t be said enough though, that a lot of us today took our first steps into that larger world with GeoCities. Mark Milian writes a fine send-off for the service at the Los Angeles Times site and if you want a tribute to just about every GeoCities page that ever got created, click here....

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