Well, this is certainly one of the most amazing things I have seen in quite some time (and thanks to artist and Facebook Fan, Luanne Meader for sharing). Cathy Hutchinson has been unable to move her own arms or legs for 15 years, but thanks to research out of Brown University, she is able to control this robotic arm to give herself a drink of coffee for the 1st time without assistance. The smile on her face upon success is priceless.
I first heard about this technology several years ago in Monkeys from research conducted by Miguel Nicolelis, MD/PhD, who is professor of neurobiology and co-director of the Duke Center for Neuroengineering. See video below:
The technology basically works by implanting a sensor in the motor cortex of the brain (see below). This sensor reads the brain’s electrical “thoughts” and then sends them to an external computer for decoding. This decoded signal is then transferred to the robotic arm so that it can deliver the coffee (or whatever else the user desires).
It’s pretty breathtaking stuff, and I’m really excited to see where the field of Neuroengineering goes from here. This certainly marks the beginning of a new era of man’s relationship with machine.
Chris Bathgate is a machinist sculptor from Baltimore, Maryland. His work has been featured in galleries all across the U.S. and also in Russia. I think it’s pretty cool that over the years, he has crafted an array of personalized tools for his sculpting: Computerized Numerical Control machines, digitally operated kilns, electroplating tanks and anodizingequipment.
From his website:
[Chris's] body of work is a collection of intricately machined metal sculptures that represent the combination of his unique metalworking style with a traditional approach to sculpture. By combining the math and logistics used in performing the complex tasks of modern machine work with a more emotive and aesthetic problem-solving ethic, Bathgate’s work shows that it is not creativity alone that drives human imagination, but also the need to solve and overcome problems that lead to inspiration. Be it through the necessity of his process or arbitrary guidelines set by the artist himself, each work becomes a creative response to a series of mathematical and subjective visual parameters. The result is a precise and other worldly art object that exudes a creative logic all its own.
His works are all meticulously planned out to the point where even the design sheets have a certain hyper-technical beauty:
For more from Chris Bathgate and his design and fabrication process, take a look at his website. There’s a lot of good stuff there.
The image above represents all of the water on the face of the Earth formed into a Moon-like sphere. First of all, it looks pretty crazy to see the Earth without the oceans, pretty desolate actually. And secondly, I expected all of the water to look like a LOT MORE WATER.
This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth’s water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) , with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.
If you’d like to see how this water is distributed, check out the graph below:
I also expected that biological water would take up a bigger piece of the pie.
