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Future Technology Reporting At Its Finest.

Yamaha’s Exoskeleton Motorcycle: The Deus Ex MachinaYesterday

What do you get when you cross-breed a motorcycle with a robotic exoskeleton? A wearable concept vehicle that will make rides on common racing bikes look like a boring afternoon stroll through your neighborhood.

source

New rays of hope for solar power’s futureAugust 28

From five miles away, the Nevada Solar One power plant seems a mirage, a silver lake amid waves of 110 degree F. desert heat. Driving nearer, the rippling image morphs into a sea of mirrors angled to the sun.

As the first commercial “concentrating solar power” or CSP plant built in 17 years, Nevada Solar One marks the reemergence and updating of a decades-old technology that could play a large new role in US power production, many observers say.

“Concentrating solar is pretty hot right now,” says Mark Mehos, program manager for CSP at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Co. “Costs look pretty good compared to natural gas [power]. Public policy, climate concern, and new technology are driving it, too.”

Spread in military rows across 300 acres of sun-baked earth, Nevada Solar One’s trough-shaped parabolic mirrors are the core of this CSP plant – also called a “solar thermal” plant. The mirrors focus sunlight onto receiver tubes, heating a fluid that, at 735 degrees F., flows through a heat exchanger to a steam generator that supplies 64 megawatts of electricity to 14,000 Las Vegas homes.

Today the United States has 420 megawatts of solar-thermal capacity across three installations – including Nevada Solar One. That’s just a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of US grid capacity. But Nevada Solar One could signal the start of a CSP building boom.

Emily Isn’t RealAugust 27

Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.

Emily - the woman in the above animation - was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.

She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as ‘uncanny valley’ - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

Researchers at a Californian company which makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood films started with a video of an employee talking. They then broke down down the facial movements down into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a ‘control system’.

The source has a movieclip you do not want to miss out on.

How Would You Like To Live Forever?August 27

If you think it’s important to cure aging, now would be your chance to act.

A few minutes of your time is all it takes to become a small part of a big solution.

Undergrads Fighting Age Related Disease

From the webpage:

The Methuselah Foundation needs your help. We are supporting a project named “Undergrads Fighting Age Related Disease” (http://www.membersproject.com/project/view/BVVE2C), which has been submitted as part of the Amex Members Project initiative. The Methuselah Foundation has been nominated to complete this initiative and, if enough votes are obtained, could receive a grant of up to $1.5M from American Express towards the project’s completion.

…

It is free to vote and should only take you a few minutes. We need to get more than 2000 votes in the next 2 weeks (by Sept 1, 2008), so please support our cause and vote now.

Here are the instructions:

1. Go to this website:  http://www.membersproject.com/project/view/BVVE2C

2. Log in either as an Amex Card Member or as a Guest Member on the top right side (any US resident can vote)

3. Complete the Registration Form, which will give you your login ID

4. Click the Nominate button at:

Artificial Cat Brain On Pentagon’s To Do ListAugust 26

The Pentagon’s crash program to create an artificial brain is just about up and running. And, if it all goes as planned, we could see an electronic chip that mimics the “function, size, and power consumption” of a cat’s cortex some time in the next decade. Darpa, the Defense Department’s way-out research arm, is in late-stage negotiations with Malibu’s HRL Laboratories to spearhead its Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (”SyNAPSE“) program. The goal: Build a chip with a “neuroscience-inspired architecture that can address a wide range of cognitive abilities — perception, planning, decision making, and motor control,” a company release notes.

The first nine-month phase of the program will focus on designing, fabricating, and characterizing synaptic and neural elements and combining them into a high-density, interconnecting microelectronic “fabric,” which will be incorporated into a more complex system-le