http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/mg20126921800-ten-scifi-devices-that-could-soon-be-real
Click above for more details.... Obama Grant Funding Anyone?
Notice that these are not being developed here in the USA.
1. Super-visionThe briefcase-sized Prism 200 from UK firm Cambridge Consultants can detect people through brick walls by firing off pulses of ultra-wideband radar and listening for returning echoes.
2. Technology developed at the University of Tokyo makes people or objects transparent by projecting an appropriately scaled image of the scene behind onto a retroreflective surface.
3. Another "invisibility cloaks". The first functional cloak, in 2006, worked only for microwaves. But by last year a group at the University of California, Berkeley, constructed a material (pictured) that is able to bend – rather than reflect – visible light backwards. A cloak of the material could steer light around an object to make it truly invisible.
4. "Ultra Sonic Saw Bones" Much of our medicine still involves inflicting a fair amount of damage to the body – for example from surgery – en route to healing it. But new forms of ultrasound, already used to look into the body, could change that. Lawrence Crum at the University of Washington in Seattle has shown that high-intensity ultrasound can cauterise bleeding arteries. His company, Ultrasound Technology.
5. Gecko Foot Pads Engineers chasing the dream of scampering up walls like Spider-Man have turned to geckos for inspiration.This robot built by US research firm SRI International has feet coated with material with a structure of grippy microscopic hairs similar to that of the real gecko
6. The Power of You Portable gadgets have a big Achilles' heel – their batteries. But progress is being made towards having such devices harness the energy of their owners. This clear material generates current when bent or squeezed, thanks to the zinc-oxide nanowires grown onto it. Medical implants would also benefit from a reduced reliance on batteries.
7 and 8. They throw this one in because Science is always promising to give us... Jet packs and Jet cars...
A rocket belt like this one was featured in the James Bond movie Thunderball in 1965, but this and later models all suffer from the same problem: they can't carry enough fuel to fly for more than around 30 seconds.
My other car is a spaceshipVirgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo will be will be carried to an altitude of 15 kilometres by a purpose-built launch plane before detaching and firing its rocket to take its eight-passenger crew to 100 kilometres above Earth at the edge of space.
9. This one reminds me of the first time I saw a rat breathing under "water" ... one minor problem ... Breathe underwater Scuba divers have long envied fishes' ability to extract oxygen from water. In 2002, a diver spent 30 minutes in a swimming pool doing the same, thanks to an artificial gill built by Fuji Systems of Japan. It used silicon membranes that allowed oxygen, but not water, to pass into the device. Sadly the amount of oxygen it produces is barely enough to sustain a human. Unfortunately seawater just doesn't contain a lot of the precious gas we need to survive.
10. Babelfish that enables anyone to understand any language. Features translation software, IraqComm, used by US troops in Iraq, is perhaps the closest we have to that today.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment