Dr. SeussJuice

we have the best of our brightest working on ways to turn ourselves into a renewable energy source…. in 2005 DARPA established the Energy Starved Electronics program to accomplish what was only thinkable in The Matrix.  from PSFK:

Anantha Chandrakasan, an electrical engineering professor at MIT, and his former student Yogesh Ramadass are exploring how to channel thermal and kinetic energies produced by the human body into electricity. The team discovered that by applying mechanical pressure to “piezoelectric materials,” they could produce an electric current, which could then be stored in solid-state capacitors on a chip a few square millimeters small and discharged when needed. “Thermoelectric materials” also produce electricity when exposed to two different temperatures (i.e. body heat and the cooler air around it), and could also be placed on the chip.

brilliant!  i hope more and more of these sort of things pop up all over the world, in every industry!

i can’t wait to “get my hands on this!”  from TED:

Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak — the real-life version of the film’s eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow’s computers will be controlled?

we knew it would come, but i didn’t realize it would be so soon!  the future of ID cards is nearly here – watch the video to see a rotating 3D image embedded into the person’s ID!

finally, augmented reality used for something better than a lame sasquatch + beef jerky commercial (not worth linking to).  now anyone with a webcam can open your business card in 3D! genius!

i HATE Microsoft and their crappy products… but damn if they don’t have some amazing ideas!!  out of Microsoft’s mysterious new department, Volume Studios.

more Ray Kurzweil… MUST WATCH (all four parts).  from VBS (which is an incredible site of its own):

Ray Kurzweil tells us about his vision of the Singuarlity—a point around 2045 when computers will acquire full-blown artificial intelligence and technology will infuse itself with biology. His theories have all sorts of supporters, detractors, and critics, but do you even remember what life was like before three-year-olds had cell phones and you actually had to remember facts instead of relying on the internet? That was only 10 years ago. If Kurzweil is right, we’ll have supercomputers more powerful than every human brain on the planet combined within a few decades.

Despite being perceived as an extreme optimist, Kurzweil is the first to admit that this technology could very quickly bring an end to the world as we know it. Stuff like gray goo is a concern, but a biological terrorist attack could happen tomorrow that is based on the very same type of technology he touts as the harbingers of the unimaginable future. He believes we’ll exist in a permanent virtual/”real”-reality hybrid.

this… this is quite profound… the implications on society, let alone human beings.  if you don’t know Ray Kurzweil by name, you should.  fromTribeca Film‘s site:

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s foremost inventors. At age 15 he was designing programs that were adapted by IBM and soon after machines that allowed the blind to read. Today he is hailed by some as a modern-day Nostradamus and dismissed by others as a crackpot. The “futurist” and best-selling author is a leading theorist on the “technological singularity”—a time when humans and machines will fuse in the next phase of bio-technological evolution, creating superintelligent, godlike beings that could conceivably live forever. The kicker is, Kurzweil claims that this monumental change is destined to happen in just 30 years.

more on Ray Kurzweil to come….

Warwick Audio Technologies is working on something crazy! Flat Flexible Loudspeakers. from their site:

FFL technology is a special form of loudspeaker with major groundbreaking benefits for audio products. Re-engineering the leading performance of Electrostatic Loudspeaker [ESL] technology, we have developed a flat, flexible loudspeaker laminate, providing linear performance at low cost. Laminate fabrication is suitable for both custom and volume manufacture. And a host of additional features allow you to benefit from our technology in new and innovative ways.

while silly Americans create robots for destruction, the Japanese are working hard on their runway skills!  check it out – a robot on the runway!