Watch please.

Remarkable.

Please click on title and see video about the big significance of Blogging.

MIT’s Technology Review magazine featured 10 technoloical trends I'll be addresssing over the coming weeks.

They're interesting in as much as their title, as their content and context.

Peering into Video's Future. The Internet is about to drown in digital video. Hui Zhang thinks peer-to-peer networks could come to the rescue.

Nanocharging Solar. Arthur Nozik believes quantum-dot solar power could boost output in cheap photovoltaics.

Invisible Revolution. Artificially structured metamaterials could transform telecommunications, data storage, and even solar energy, says David R. Smith.

Personalized Medical Monitors. John Guttag says using computers to automate some diagnostics could make medicine more personal.

Single-Cell Analysis. Norman Dovichi believes that detecting minute differences between individual cells could improve medical tests and treatments.

A New Focus for Light. Kenneth Crozier and Federico Capasso have created light-focusing optical antennas that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies.

Neuron Control. Karl Deisseroth's genetically engineered "light switch," which lets scientists turn selected parts of the brain on and off, may help improve treatments for depression and other disorders.

Nanohealing. Tiny fibers will save lives by stopping bleeding and aiding recovery from brain injury, says Rutledge Ellis-Behnke.

Digital Imaging. Reimagined Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly believe compressive sensing could help devices such as cameras and medical scanners capture images more efficiently.

Augmented Reality. Markus Kähäri wants to superimpose digital information on the real world.

Augmented Reality

Click title for video.

Augmented Reality is a specialization of computer vision that attempts to extract the 3D structure of a scene from video and then insert with high precision virtual or 3D objects into the scene. AR can be useful in many applications including entertainment, heads-up displays, tourism and surgical visualization.

Consider for example visiting a foreign country and not having a map. If you want directions to your hotel from any location in the city then you can just take a photo with your cell phone camera and using the phone’s build-in AR software determine your location; the AR software would then retrieve directions wirelessly from a large database and present them to you by annotating the original photo. Another application would be retrieving information about a historical monument that you are looking at. An example of AR is shown in the following video from related research at the University of British Columbia.

More on Hyperinnovation.

Click on title to review a paper on Hyperinnovation's impact on the speed, cost and prototyping of global products.

I ALSO HAVE A DREAM

MIT continue to impress.

I'm both heart and hard felt that hardly any breakthroughs in theripies for serious psychiatric illness have emerged in the past half century.
My mentor and friend Edward Scolnick lays blame for this dismal situation on barriers to understanding the genetic basis behind such illnesses.

However, the research drought may be over, as the current revolution in human genetics opens wide a door into the molecular biology and brain physiology behind diseases like Schizophrenia and Bipolar disorder.

These common, chronic and disabling mental illnesses are complex, involving abnormal behaviors that vary in expression. They have also lacked the kind of quantitative tests that enable precise diagnosis.

While science has demonstrated that the single biggest risk factor for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is genetic, it has not been able to design tools for exploring how the genetics relates to the evolution/development of the disease in people. But the instant in the last two years, with the sequencing of the human genome and maps of human genetic variation, ignorance has given way to major findings.

In bipolar disease, researchers have discovered that gene deletions and duplications (called copy number variants) cause significant brain circuit mischief. They’ve also learned there are gene variants common to both diseases, as well as clusters of genes that malfunction. Scolnick describes diverse research at MIT, proceeding at a “breakneck pace,” that uses this genetic information “to delve into the malfunctioning of brain circuits.”

Scientists have applied functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brains of ordinary people and schizophrenia patients, and discovered that the schizophrenic’s brain in a resting state is hyperactive. Other researchers found that schizophrenics generate the gamma brainwaves involved with higher mental activities in a different manner than control subjects.

Another MIT lab has begun to manipulate specific brain circuits using optical technology -- shining different wavelengths of light at special interneurons that regulate the firing of other neurons, and which are postulated to have a critical role in the malfunctioning of schizophrenics’ brains.

Two other MIT labs are examining the biochemical disruptions due to altered genes, and developing “safe, specific chemical inhibitors” that might yield potential treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar illnesses. In Japan, researchers are growing stem cells into brain cells, which may lead to precise experiments that relate genetic problems to malfunctions in brain wiring. Indeed, adding up this research, a central biochemical pathway central to the pathogenesis of psychogenic illness seems to be emerging, knowledge that “can be exploited to understand illness and to find drug treatments.”

Click on title to view lecture.

Making Power Light Work.

How much energy does it take to turn on a lightbulb?

Way too much! Where 22% of all electricity gets channeled into illuminating homes, businesses and thoroughfares. My old friend Vladimir Bulovic wants to end the exorbitant use of power for lighting, and simultaneously brighten our lives more pleasantly, with the application of nanostructure materials called quantum dots.

Click on UKW?

MIT's Up Date on Nano Fabrication.

In a lecture that dips into both the anatomy and history of the semiconductor, Grant Willson offers some provocative thoughts on whether industry can continue improving on this most useful of inventions.

Click on above title to see vid. He's missed a big point though. See if you can spot it?

Some body just asked me where I live.

Well.

Base-one (B-1) London.

(B-2) Brighton.

(B-3) NY NY.

(B-4) Perth.

(B-5) Most hub Airports.

I don't understand why I was asked the question, as the person who asked has only left B-2 a few dozen times in her life.

Live - these days - means where does one eat, sleep, work, etc.

However my 'Home' will always be with the ones I love.

And that's Saltdean.

Looks as though I'm gonna be spending a lot more time in NY! Was a bit perturbed. As journy time from my B-2 home is realy frustrating.

HOWEVER:

Word on the street is that New York City may be getting a new addition: The Manhattan Airport. And what better place to develop it than on the largest piece of undeveloped land in New York City -- Central Park?

New York City is THE cultural and financial capital of the world. Not London. Not Tokyo. Not Rio.

Yet surprisingly, New York City has no viable airport.

JFK, La Guardia and Newark work for people who live in certain outer boroughs. But they are not an acceptable option for people like me and New Yorkers, requiring travel through some of the most congested traffic arteries in the nation.

A journey which by train takes nearly two hours and by automobile can take up to three sweating hours. For a place which purports itself to be the greatest city in the world, this is not a workable model.

What I’m drawn to is the Central Park turned-airport concept.

Quote of the Week:

An economist is someone who, on being shown something that works in practice, wonders if it would work in theory.

Erm! Well. Where'd I get this from?

3000 of the leading economists gathered last week. Spent a collective 30,000 hours talking/thinking about how to get the economy going.

Not one of them spoke of new ideas for product or service that people desperately want now or in the future. Fucking egg-heads haven't a clue about what you and I face everyday in our business and personal lives.

Here's 3 ideas from me (a bloke that spent 20 years in the Design Lab):

1.For consumers, anything practical and useful will go down well in more austere times, while anything that speaks their language (and thus ultimately shows that a brand cares about its customers' interests) will be reciprocated with appreciation and goodwill. Which in today's harsh business climate is like, well, gold dust.

2.For businesses, adhoc-attributes can often be imagined and introduced at very low costs (which doesn’t hurt when budgets are tight); the only resources needed are creativity and a good feel for the consumer trends that matter most over the next 12 months.

3.Most important of all: ultimately this is not about gimmicky fingerless gloves: it’s about integrating the 'now' into your activities this year, achieving relevance for and goodwill from your customers, in an environment that has never been more about the 'now' than, well, now

Hubble, Bubbles, Toil and Trouble in Space!


IT LOOKS like a soap bubble in space, but the image at right is a newly discovered planetary nebula.



Planetary nebulae, which got their name after being misidentified by early astronomers, are formed when an ageing star weighing up to eight times the mass of the sun ejects its outer layers as clouds of luminous gas.



Most are elliptical, double-lobed or cigar-shaped, evolving after stars eject gas from each pole.

US Marine Cpl. Mike Jernigan blinded in Iraq, Begins to See VR.

BUT... And YOU Know Me By NOW... 5 years on he been given a llipop kind-a-device, where he uses his tongue to stimulate his visual cortex and send sensory information to his brain??????

Called the intra-oral device, or IOD, the lollipop is an inch-square grid with 625 small round metal pieces. It is connected by a wire to a small camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses and to a hand-held controller about the size of a BlackBerry. The camera sends an image to the lollipop, which transmits a low-voltage pulse to Jernigan's tongue.

With training, Cpl Jernigan has learned to translate that pulse into pictures. He can now identify the shapes of what is in front of him, even though both of his eyes have been removed.

See Ray Kurzviel's Videos by Clicking on the either of the 2 titles below.

Ray's Story: Transcendent Man Film Trailer

Singularity Vid!

Netflix prize claimed by international research team.

In the span of 3 years, some 40,000 teams from around the world took up Netflix's challenge of improving movie recommendations by 10% over the company's Cinematch engine. And just a day ago, one of these teams has claimed the top prize and the $1,000,000 that go with it. This team consists of the 2007 and 2008 progress prize winning team BellKor from the USA, Austria's Big Chaos team, and Canada's Pragmatic Theory team.

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Until recently, the teams were competing against each other unable to reach the 10% improvement threshold but they put an end to the competition when they joined forces.Other teams now have 30 days to submit their solutions and outdo the top team for a chance to claim the top prize for themselves; keep an eye on the official leaderboard.

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Can others do it? Well, you never know so it will be an interesting 30 days.I have to admit that a couple of years ago I really didn't think that this day would come. I was certain that the 10% improvement had been selected by Netflix to prevent people from ever claiming the million dollar prize. I guess, I was wrong after all.That said, I am currently reading Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams' best seller Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and I think the Netflix competition would make for a great story for this book.

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It is yet another example of how computers and the Internet allow thousands of people across the globe to collaborate effectively and efficiently to solve problems at a fraction of the cost of a single corporation doing the work in house. I don't know how much money in Research and Development Netflix will save from this competition but I suspect they stand to make a lot of money from the 10% improvement in recommendation accuracy.

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They will certainly make back the prize money in no time (if they haven't already considering that improvements over 7% have been achieved by many teams over the course of the last 2 years). Kudos to the teams for their achievement and kudos to Netflix for taking a chance most corporations would never dare take.

Knowledge Management book review by Wilma Garvin

Title: Hyperinnovation.

Author: Chris Harris.

Publisher: Palgrave.

Macmillan ISBN: 0-333-99438-8.

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Chris Harris' thesis in Hyperinnovation is that the business world is interconnecting in every conceivable dimension from ideas to technology to markets and even entire industries. As a result, the boundaries between once disparate business concepts are increasingly multi-dimensional.

This demands a complete rethink in terms of strategies, cultures, organisations and methodologies to bring about innovation. He goes on to discuss how uncertainty is not just an occasional deviation from predictability. It has become a common feature of the business environment.

Complexity is an underlying theme of the book and the definition of complexity science is given as the understanding of how a collective of large numbers of interrelated agents behave as a whole.

In Hyperinnovation, he has put forward three principles of hyperinnovation. The first principle is that the potential for hyperinnovation is proportional to the number of the meaningful interconnections between agents. He explains this with an equation that says that the number of possible (meaningful or otherwise) interconnections is half of the square of the sum of agents in a network so that 10 agents in a network would have 45 possible interconnections. Chris Harris describes the payoff as being the increase in the number of innovation possibilities.

Watch Video

Brain Wave of The Future.

What If You Could Move Objects With Your Mind? Well, That Time Has Come.


You slip the wireless headset on. It looks like something a telemarketer would wear, except the earpieces are actually sensors, and what looks like a microphone is a brain wave detector. You place its tip against your forehead, above your left eyebrow.

A few feet away is a ping-pong ball in a clear tube called the Force Trainer. The idea is to use your thoughts alone, as recognized by the wand on your forehead, to lift the ball. Your brain's electrical activity is translated into a signal understood by a little computer that controls a fan that blows the ball up the tube. Levitates it. As if by magic. It's mind over matter.

All you have to do is concentrate. On anything, it doesn't matter. The harder you concentrate, the higher the ball goes. A musician says he played a song in his head and focused on a particular chord change. A former high school tennis star focused on his 120-mph serve. One woman brought the image of a candle flame to mind. The ball rose.
Concentrate. Concentrate.

A sound erupts -- first a groan, then a woooo, WOOOO -- like a Halloween ghost.
The ball spins, slowly at first, then faster.

Concentrate, concentrate.

And then the ball rises inside the tube. Up it lifts, two inches, four inches -- a foot!
You giggle and your concentration is broken; the ghostly sound fades and the ball drops back into its nest with a gurgle.

You have just controlled a physical object with your mind.

Competing mind-over-matter toys from Mattel and Uncle Milton Industries are coming this fall to a store near you. They are the first "brain-computer interfaces" to enter the consumer mainstream.

Toys, but so much more. They embody a dream of the ages: controlling the world with your thoughts. Telekinesis. The stuff of the gods.

TEDxBrighton.

I’m thinking about organising a TEDx event in the near future. I’m talking to TED people about getting an official licence to hold a day of live Speakers, Entertainers and TED archive videos.

Perhaps a small get-together in October 2009, and maybe a larger event in May 2010?

It's branded: 'TEDxBrighton.'

The theme most probably – at this stage - will be around ‘Treat the world as you would like to be treated.’

For one example talk, large scale dance events (raves) are often not given a licence because of noise pollution.

There is a growing number of Wi-Fi technologies that enable so-called silent discos. 2000+ ravers don Wi-Fi headsets with multi-channel connection direct to a number (2, 3, 4, etc) of DJs playing at the same time. Simply select the DJ you want to hear.

Most people don’t talk when they dance either. So noise pollution is drastically lowered.

I'm talking to a company that hires out such equipment, with view for them to do a 10 minute talk on the future of this new silent disco trend.

As above: ‘Treat the world as you would like to be treated.’

Future Files: Innovation Timeline

Click on title to view Innovation Timeline.

Predicting the future is a dangerous game — the future is never a straight, linear extrapolation from the present.

Unexpected innovations and events will conspire to trip up the best-laid plans — but it’s still better than not thinking about the future at all.

Future Files is a new book filled with provocative forecasts about how the world might change in the next half century.

It examines emerging trends and developments in society, technology, economy, and business, and makes educated speculations as to where they might take us.

Future Files will prove indispensable to business planners and strategists, and anyone else that is curious about the future or needs to stay ahead of the game.

Mind Over Wheelchair Matters.

A research team of the University of Zaragoza has developed a prototype of a brain-actuated wheelchair.

During May 2008, five subjects, only using their thoughts, successfully carried navigation and manoeuvrability tasks with the wheelchair in the University.

The non-invasive method to record the human neural activity was normal EEG signals and a robotised wheelchair equipped with laser sensors.

Artificial Telepathy Technology.

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Click on above title and watch this video. You'll be amazed!

Cheap, reliable and fast artificial telepathy. Just put on the neck band, and think in your inner-voice.

Called 'Audeo' technology, it's being developed to create a human-computer interface for communication.

When a person intends to speak their brain sends muscle instructions in the form of electrical signals through the nervous system. These electrical signals stimulate the muscles to, under normal circumstances, produce the desired speech.

In many cases however, disease or disability can prevent the muscles from responding to this stimulation. The Audeo gets around this by directly utilizing the electrical activity itself, which even in severe cases can still be present.

This is not just ground braking technology. It is a meta-transformation technology.

'Space Cube' could be world's smallest PC.

Measuring just 2 by 2 inches the ‘Space Cube’ is a tiny PC developed by the Shimafuji Corporation in Japan.

It’s designed for space communication with NASA, ESA, and JAXA space agencies. Its tasked to control various electronics and manage an interstellar computer network.

The Space Cube´s titanium chassis is rock solid to withstand cosmic encounters. It has very low power requirements, just 5 watts running a 300 MHz CPU, 16 MB of on-board flash memory, Linux OS from a 1GB Compact Flash card, a 64MB SDRAM hard drive card, and quipped with a LAN, USB and Ethernet port, with a VGA monitor connector.

Although the Space Cube isn´t currently available outside Japan, a company called Star Dundee plans to start selling the device after making some improvements. When it goes for sale, the Space Cube will be priced at around £1,500.

In the future, everyone will have 15 nanoseconds of privacy.

‘In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.’ Is the well-known expression coined by the American artist Andy Warhol.

It referred to the fleeting condition of celebrity that grabs onto an object of media attention, then passes to some new object as soon as people's attention spans are exhausted.

Warhol's comment grew out of his interest in fame and celebrity. His view of the media was that it could enable any person to become famous. The age of reality television, internet blogging, mobile multimedia technology and the general obsession with fame has seen this vision true.

Ultimately however, a reverse affect will emerge as we move deeper into the 21st century.

In the future everyone will have 15 nanosecond of privacy!

It’s inevitable as security concerned move up the political agenda, and as personal information become evermore a premium commodity.

There are well over 2 million CCT cameras spying on the public in the UK (2008). Biometric ID cards will be in place by 2012. Personal data collection, collation, mining and dissemination technology is becoming evermore ubiquitous.

Ergo: In the future, everyone will have 15 nanoseconds of privacy.

Star Trek XI Priview.

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'The Future Begins.....May 2009'

(Click on title)

Rapid Emergence of Holographic Technology and Applications.

I know people that still say it'll never happen. Only....

From product design to architecture to entertainment to communications to education holographic kit is about to rear its head and smash more technological paradigms per unit time than any other.

Along time in the pipeline, 'High Definition Holographic Projectiors' (HDHP) that are at a marketable price point, practical weight and size, and acceptable reliability are now hitting the market.

There are well over 100 R&D programmes, with dozens of companies launching commercial, and soon consumer HDHP systems. Not to mansion the multiple service providers ranging from marketing communications to entertainment to design.

Holograms in your pocket!

One exciting example is the research going on at the Photonics and Sensors Group at the University of Cambridge. Developing breakthrough holographic technologies, which will power a new generation of pocket-sized holographic projectors.

Holographic projections are in fact surprisingly simple, requiring only a few components, which means they can be made very small. In the near future, holo-projectors will be integrated into laptops, PDAs, even mobile phones.

So why has this not been done before?

(1) Holograms are extremely complex objects mathematically, and calculating them fast enough for video applications is very difficult; even the most powerful computers of - in real-time - the past would take minutes to calculate, generate and project even very a simple holographic video frame.

(2) The projected images produced by early holographic technology tended to be speckled and of very low definition quality.

(3) The lasers that are required to illuminate the holograms have, until very recently, been very expensive and limited in availability.

But this is now history.

Several major breakthroughs have been made, together making possible the generation and display of high quality holograms at video frame rates, using just a single custom chip.

So how does it work?

A hologram pattern, which to the naked eye looks like a collection of random dots, is displayed on a small liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) microdisplay - a tiny, very fast liquid crystal display built on top of a chip.

The hologram patterns are calculated by a custom ‘holo-chip’ so that when the microdisplay is illuminated by laser light, the light interferes with itself in a complex manner through the physical process of diffraction, which when carefully controlled, results in the formation of a large, high quality projected image on, for example, a screen or a wall.

Musionmedia Real Time Hologrphic Telepresence Demo

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Telstra - the Ozzy Multimedia Corp - used the Musion Eyeliner System to beam a live holographic image of senior staff member, between Melbourne and Adelaide, in what has been billed as world first.

Telstra’s chief technology officer Dr Hugh Bradlow, based in Melbourne, appeared at a business function in Adelaide as a real-time holographic effect and interacted with members of the audience for around 15 minutes.

The real time hologram of Dr Bradlow was made possible by the company's high-speed networks and the Musion Eyeliner holographic projection system.

We've all seen this sort of thing in sci-fi movies, but the reality is here, now and demonstrated.

(Click on title for Holo Vid).

Kate Moss as OB1-Wan Kenobi: is she our only hope?

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Click on title to see Holographic of KM.

Roll-Up, Roll-Up: Get Your Flexible LCD Display Screens Here!

I like large displays on mobile devices for reading e-mails, e-books, and viewing detailed pictures. But I also like to tuck those devices into my pocket. Only the bigger the gadget’s screen the more it outgrows my pocket size.

Now a hallmark feature of these screens — their rigidity — is changing. New technologies are developing that make displays flexible, foldable or even as rollable as newspaper, so that large screens can be unfurled from small containers.

One new mobile device, the ‘Readius,’ is designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display.

The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger.

The market for flexible displays is likely to grow rapidly. Flexible displays are the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices. Flexible displays offer the advantages of easy, relatively inexpensive and safe shipping and handling, compared with conventional rigid screens.

'The future isn't what to used to be.'

World’s First E-Book

Amazon's Kindle is an e-book reader, an embedded system for reading electronic books (e-books) launched in the United States by prominent online booksell Amazon.

It uses an electronic paper display, also called e-paper, is a display technology designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper.

Unlike a conventional flat panel display, which uses a backlight to illuminate its pixels, electronic paper reflects light like ordinary paper and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity, while allowing the image to be changed later.

E-paper is considered more comfortable to read than conventional displays. This is due to the stable image, which does not need to be refreshed constantly, the wider viewing angle, and the fact that it uses reflected ambient light.

Kindle downloads content over Amazon, and can be used stand alone without a computer.

On the release day, the Kindle had more than 88,000 digital titles available for download, but that number has steadily increased.

Amazon's first offering of the Kindle sold out in five and a half hours and the device remained out of stock until late April 2008.

At launch, the device retailed for $399; Amazon subsequently lowered the price to $359.

It’s Health Span Stupid.

Some very nice mice were subject to studies in health and longevity.

A mouse gym was built, which held a miniature exercise machine that tested the rodents’ ability to balance on a rotating bar.

Near nearby a water maze, were the nice mice recalled visual cues to swim to safety on a hidden platform. A test of their powers of nice mice memory.

There reason of the nice mice Olympic stadium?

A company called ‘Sirtris’ has two drugs in clinical trials.

One is being tested against Type 2 diabetes, one of the many diseases of aging that the company’s scientists hope the drugs will avert. With success against just one such disease, the impact on health “could be possibly transformational.

The new drugs are called ‘Sirtuin Activators,’ meaning that they activate an enzyme called Sirtuin. The basic theory is that all or most species have an ancient strategy for riding out famines: switch resources from reproduction to tissue maintenance.

A healthy diet but with 30 percent fewer calories than usual triggers this reaction in mice and is the one intervention that reliably increases their life span. The mice seem to live longer because they are somehow protected from the usual diseases that kill them.

But most people cannot keep to a diet with a 30 percent cut in calories, so a drug that could activate the famine reflex might be highly desirable.

The Sirtris drug being tested in diabetic patients is a special formulation of resveratrol that delivers a bloodstream dose five times as high as the chemical alone. This drug, called SRT501, has passed safety tests and, at least in small-scale trials, has reduced the patients’ glucose levels.

The other drug is a small synthetic chemical that is a thousand times as potent as resveratrol in activating sirtuin and can be given at a much smaller dose. Safety tests in people have just started, with no adverse effects so far.

The hope is that activating sirtuins in people would, like a calorically restricted diet in mice, avert degenerative diseases of aging like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s.

There is no Food and Drug Administration category for longevity drugs, so if the company is to submit a drug for approval, it needs to be for a specific disease.
Nonetheless, longevity is what has motivated the researchers and what makes the drugs potentially so appealing.


Dr. Christoph Westphal, the chief executive of Sirtris, said of the potential of the drugs, “I think that if we are right, this could extend life span by 5 or 10 percent.” He added that his goal was to develop drugs against specific diseases, with the extension of life being “almost a side effect of our medicine.”

In initial tests in mice, resveratrol has doubled muscular endurance, lowered the bad form of cholesterol, protected against various bad effects of a high-fat diet and suppressed colon cancer. New reports are confirming some of these benefits, but others are ambiguous or puzzling.

The frontiers of science are often turbulent, and it can take years for clarity to emerge from confusion. Dr. Westphal said the decision to ignore the academic debate about exactly how resveratrol may work was one of two principal reasons for Sirtris’s quick success. The other was to focus the company’s limited resources on developing just two drugs.

There’s a much greater chance of a drug that can treat disease than of extending life span. The goal is not the extension of human life span; rather, the prolongation of health is the aim.

First Solar Pannels Meet Price-Performance Parity with National Grid.

It’s easy to make a small pile of money off photovoltaic cells but very hard to make a big one. The reason is one of the most fundamental in free-market economics: the larger the market you aim for, the more competitors you’ll have to face.

If you just want to power a billion-dollar space probe, almost any price per watt is acceptable. If you are selling to lonely farmhouses, you just have to charge less than the cost of running a power line to the national grid.

In some parts of the world, competing with grid electricity itself may be an easy game during peak consumption hours. But if you want the off-peak market, you’ll have to price your cells at about US $1 per watt (a 1000 watt solar array would obviously cost $1,000)

That price is called grid parity, and it’s the holy grail of the photovoltaic industry. At least 80 firms around the world, from Austin to Hayward’s Heath, are in the chase.

Surprisingly, at the moment no company is closer to that grail than a little start-up called First Solar, which until very recently had been known only to specialists.

It’s located in Tempe, Arizona USA., and analysts agree that it will very likely meet typical grid-parity prices in ­developed countries in just two to four years.

It’s got a multibillion-dollar order book, it’s selling all the cells it can make, it’s adding production capacity as fast as it can, and its stock price has rocketed from $25 to more than $250 in just 18 months.

The product has three massive cost benefits:

(1) Its active element is just a hundredth the thickness of the old standby, silicon.

(2) It is built on a glass substrate, which enables the production of large panels.

(3) Manufacturing takes just two and a half hour, about a tenth the time it takes for silicon equivalents.

Of course, it’s not enough that First Solar match the costs of fossil-fuel generation on the grid; it must also maintain its economic edge over other photo­voltaics.

There are additional nascent technologies, including cells based on copper indium gallium silicon (CIGS) on glass; and the combination of germanium, gallium arsenide, and gallium indium phosphide.

Even conventional silicon technology, which has dominated the market since its commercial launch in the 1950s, seems to have a lot of kick left in it.

Currently, though, it’s suffering from its own success, as an insatiable demand for silicon cells has led to a scarcity of raw material.

However, if the silicon shortage disappears by the end of the decade, as expected, the sale price should drop substantially from recent levels, which have fluctuated between $3 and $4 per watt.

Now You See It. Now You Don't.

My first view of an 'Invisibility Cloak' was @ the NextFest 2004, in San Francisco.

However, things are thundering ahead.

Researchers at Toyama University announced that they have formulated a ‘Perfect invisible cloak.’

The invisible cloak generates no reflection or phase delay at all even when an electromagnetic wave passes through it. It was developed with the use of an artificial dielectric material called ‘left-handed metamaterial, which has a negative refractive index.

It is predicted that the use of left-handed metamaterials makes electromagnetic control devices available. Some examples of such devices are a lens that reflects no light and a lens that can provide a perfect focal point.

They are believed to be difficult to produce with the existing materials. The latest development relates to one of these control devices.

Here, an invisible cloak refers to a block object with a void in the core or centre, which is designed such that a plane electromagnetic wave with a certain frequency irradiated at this object goes around the void and reaches behind the object.

In particular, the object may be called ‘the perfect visible cloak’ when the electromagnetic wavefront becomes planar again after passing through the object and the amplitude and the phase of the resultant plane wave completely coincide with those of the wavefront obtained when there is no object.

The Coming Clash.

Will the law of unintended consequences rear it’s head in the coming age of marvel cure medical technologies?

Recall the heartening breakthrough treatment for server spinal injury in the blog post below?

Well, it suddenly occurred to me (not in this kind of detail of below course):

‘What if soon one day people with once horrific spinal injuries start to breath, move, walk, and even run normally down to the local once again. But had been comprehensively and quite heavily covered by life and accident insurance before the disaster?’

Then I thought:

‘What if they had been given a truly substantial payout. Say £3 million plus, for instance.’

Then I thought:

‘What if they’d bought a substantial and specially designed property to live in. With 100s of 1000s of pounds of living space adaptations and special needs equipment (a swimming pool, a physiotherapy gym, a special layout kitchen, a specially adapted car, and so on)?’

The question remains - and I’m no lawyer - what will be legal position be for both assuror and claimant?

Of course the big assurance houses will be in litigation terra incognito. They’ve paid out £billions world wide in insurance claims to severely debilitated paraplegic people (and rightly so).

But, will the claimant have to pay back all or a major share of the monies?

And with the myriad of revolutionary medical breakthroughs going on; it makes one wonder what other conclict of interest awaits over the legal-technological horizon?

Q.E.D: The Coming Clash!

Significant breakthrough in the treatment of spinal injuries.

A University of Cambridge team is close to a breakthrough treatment which could potentially allow damaged nerve fibers to regenerate within the spinal cord.

It may also encourage the remaining undamaged nerve fibers to work more effectively.

Spinal injuries are difficult to treat because the body cannot repair damage to the brain or spinal cord.

Although it is possible for nerves to regenerate, they are blocked by the scar tissue that forms at the site of the spinal injury.

The Cambridge team has identified a bacteria enzyme called chondroitinase which is capable of digesting molecules within scar tissue to allow some nerve fibers to regrow.

The enzyme also promotes nerve plasticity, which potentially means that remaining undamaged nerve fibers have an increased likelihood of making new connections that could bypass the area of damage.

In preliminary tests, the researchers have shown that combining chondroitinase with rehabilitation produces better results than using either technique alone.

Lead researcher Professor James Fawcett said:

'It is rare to find that a spinal cord is completely severed, generally there are still some nerve fibers that are undamaged.

Chondroitinase offers us hope in two ways; firstly it allows some nerve fibers to regenerate and secondly it enables other nerves to take on the role of those fibers that cannot be repaired.

Along with rehabilitation we are very hopeful that at last we may be able to offer paralyzed patients a treatment to improve their condition.

Dr Yolande Harley, of the charity Action Medical Research which funded the work, said:

'This is incredibly exciting, ground-breaking work, which will give new hope to people with recent spinal injuries.'

In the UK there are more than 40,000 people suffering from injuries to their spine, which can take the form of anything from loss of sensation to full paralysis.

How to Effectively Target Your Most Profitable Customers.

If you have that great and highly differentiated idea, then targeting your customers should your next step.

This exercise will also reveal if there is actually a market for your brainchild, whether a radically new gadget, originally themed book, or extraordinarily novel service.

However - and this is important to note - this is where many inventors/authors/marketers fail!

To be sure, attempting to be ‘all things to all people’ by marketing your product to all-and-sundry will lead to a diffused, and an often confused marketing campaign.

Instead, go out and discover the specific Demographic and Psychographic factors of your biggest market. Then market to that audience more than any other and as often as possible.

Demographics are the basic attributes and quantitative characteristics of your market: including the customer sector’s age, gender, profession, culture, employment, industry, income level, marital status, location, and so on.

Psychographics are made up of the emotional and behavioural qualities of your market: including the customer sector’s emotions, reasoning, history, psychology, and thought processes behind their decision to buy your product.

A demographic example might be the number of Workman between age 25 and 55 working in the City area runs to a population of 2,500. A survey shows that 40% of this group might buy a new pair of Work Boots every 9 months.

A psychographic example might be a young girl about town, choosing a new pair of shoes not because she necessarily needs them, but because she wants to look fashionable or sexy or/and in the crowd.

To gather the demographic numbers and psychographic priorities, conduct a survey, which is split into 2 sets of demographic and psychographic questions.

Demographic questions:

Who are your customers?
How many customers are there?
How many customer groups by gender, spending, profession, etc?
Where are each group?
What is the total value of each group?
What is the total volume of each group?
What is the largest customer group by value and volume?
How often do they purchase?
Where do they purchase your product?
Why would (or otherwise) your customers chose to buy yours over the competition?
Why would they buy from you at that specific point in time?

Psychographic questions:

What are your customers motives to buy?
Why do they need or want your product?
In fact, do they need or want your product at all?
What characteristics would they need or want in the product?
What, thus, characteristics need to designed into your product?
Why would your customers buy right away (on impulse) or take their time?
If they shopped around, why would they?
Where would they go and what can you learn?
What do they like the most and the least about the product?
Would they refer your product to others?
If not, why not?

My book Hyperinnovation (see near top side bar) goes into all this much further in part 5 of the book, with a systematic end-to-end methodology.

I told you so!

University of Oklahoma researchers have investigated a new variant of multidimensional hypercubes as computational elements of nanocomputers: the 'M-hypercube' which could provide a higher-dimensional layout to support three-dimensional integrated circuits and the quantum properties of nanocomputers.

The unique structure of hypercubes provides a massively parallel, distributed processing architecture with simple, robust communication linkages, able to count single electrons, and allow for parallel computing, reversibility, locality, and a three-dimensional architecture.

M-hypercubes contain two types of nodes: state nodes, which are embedded on the vertices of the M-hypercubes; and transmission nodes, which are embedded in the middle of the links between state nodes. Each node can be turned on or off; the transmission nodes can isolate parts of the cube from other parts when in the off state.

A Brief History of Time-Based Strategy.

The ‘speed thing’ - whether time-to-market, production cycle-times, or delivery lead-times, et al - isn’t new. It goes way back before it became vogue in late 20th century business strategy. Competition through swiftness goes back millennia in fact.

The Great Wall of China and Rome’s straight cobbled roads where constructed to deploy troops and ordnance at pace. Empires would fallen like dominos if it were not for these engineering super-highways.

When the first prototype model of the K5054 (Type 300) Spitfire was assembled in 1936 it took almost 28 days of 24 hour shifts. By the end of the Battle of Britain in October 1940 it took a mere 9 hours to put the Mark-V (type 331) Spitfire together…. And hay, who said the Japanese pioneered Kaizen type continuous improvement?

Lockheed (now merged as Lockheed-Martin) also as far back a the World-War-II and through the 1970s continued to amaze the Pentagon by the speed at which they designed and built advanced tactical jet aircraft. In fact, one-tenth of the time compared to the competition. The driving force behind this stupendous rate of productivity was one Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson. He set up an organisation with all the processes in one giant hanger to cut across red-tape to get things done without fuss. Two of his most celebrated projects was the U-2 and SR-71 (Blackbird) spy plans. They went from rough sketch to airborne prototype in under 21 weeks (that’s 144 days).

In 1979 a client of the Boston Consulting Group revealed the conclusions of a benchmarking programme he carried out between his US factories against his Japanese affiliate’s factories. The findings were stark. The Japanese plants had substantially higher productivity, better quality, less inventory, less space and much faster throughput times. However, they were baffled as to how they achieved such competitive advantages? And after the best part of a 4 year study the cause of these effects were delineated. ‘Time’ was at the essence.

During these investigations many closely held assumptions as to how costs and customers behave were altered. Instead of costs going up as run-lengths are reduced; instead of costs going up as greater investment in quality; instead of costs going up with increasing variety and quicker response times; costs came down. Further, instead of customer demand being only marginally affected by expanded choice and better responsiveness, it proved astoundingly sensitive to better service.

After these conclusions were drawn, they began to leak out into the technical media, and so time-based strategy began to take off. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s speed became a big issue. In Japan Sony, Casio and Sharp adopted the temporal approach to new products. Six months for new platform digital watch, camera, phone, PDA, or forget it! State-side, the likes of Xerox, AT&T, H-P, Intel, and Motorola begun to see the benefit and implement time-based strategies and organisations. Eventually, in some cases, new product introduction went from many tardy years to months.

And so it was set. Manufacturing, and many a service industry was ablaze with buzz terms like ‘Simultaneous Engineering, ‘Integrated Design and Manufacturing,’ ‘Process Reengineering,‘ and ‘Time-to-Market.’

Today, arguable, Formular-1 racing hold the batten of speed across new product introduction and production cycle-times. Making use of ultra-fast design and manufacturing technologies, and highly talented, skilled and integrated teams of engineers and designers. Racecraft models go through significant adaptations week-to-week during race season.

Life Expectancy Revisited.

A friend just asked me if I had any data on the evolution of increasing human life expectancy.

‘Afraid not’ I said, and explained that expanding human life-expectancy has little to do with evolution at present, at least in the Darwinian sense. Genetically, and therefore anatomically speaking, humans (homo-sapiens) haven’t changed for about 130,000 years (modern humans appear in the fossil record in Africa about 130,000 B.C.).

But I do have data on the average human life expectancy which has increased as a result of improvements in technological culture.

The reason is that cultural developments operate many orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. Advances in medicine, diet, and labour productivity have happened in the blink of an eye, and have had dramatic impact in life spans.

Here’s the data:

Average Life Expectancy (Years)
-------------------------------
Cro-Magnon Era: 18
Ancient Egypt: 25
1400 Europe: 30
1800 Europe: 37
1900 USA/Europe: 48
2008 USA/Europe/Japan: 79

If this exponential growth curve continues for even as little as the next 20 years, average life expectancy in the developed west will hit 98 by c.2030.

But, as my blog post of Tuesday, 6 November 2007 reports (blogsearch: 'de grey'), even this forecast is ultra-conservative.

18 Reasons for the Need for Speed.

In 1988 I was tasked to shrink the new product introduction cycle-time at the much acclaimed, design lead firm, Concord Lighting. 20 years later, now in 2008, time-based competition can still give strategic advantages. In fact, time compression has become an industry in itself. But why still the need for speed?

Here’s 18 reasons:

Leave Competitors Behind and Disadvantaged: Companies with relatively slow processes are by definition slower to change, and as such are left behind as faster competitors innovate new business models. When slower companies do respond they do so from a disadvantaged position, and so incur all the costs of becoming more responsive without securing many of the benefits.

Move Ahead of the Industry: If the competitive environment develops faster than a firm is developing, then the writing is on the wall. If a firm is developing ahead of the market, then that company will eventually breakthrough a competitive wall.

Time to Insight: As the number of competitors that recognise the same opportunity goes up, so the value of that opportunity fall to wards a commodity proportionally. Hence, the time it takes to recognise an opportunity is key to sustaining value.

Accelerated Learning: Shorter-cycles enable faster feedback for learning. This greater and deeper understanding at a faster rate facilitates better project control; delivers better quality outputs; and ultimately gives more advanced solutions ahead of the competition.

Risk Reduction: Such accelerated learning also reduces risk and uncertainty. Learning is number one route to reduce the risk of anything. The faster one learns, the faster one understands the details of a risk.

Time Value: Show me a market that doesn’t have collapsing windows of opportunity and I’ll name a dozen that do. Thus, in markets with shrinking life-cycles ‘value’ is not only finite, it is time dependent. In as much as the earlier a firm can launch a new product the more share of that finite value is gained.

Rapid Return On Investment: One of the most evident challenges for new product introduction is that there’s no residual value until the new product reaches break-even point in the market. This can be a strain on both a company’s capitalisation and cash-flow. In sum, get faster to the break-even point, and ROI comes back faster.

Rapid Attack: The traditional attack strategy is the cut-price/add capacity stance. However, a time-based attack is about surprise, as competitors often get confused, don’t understand what happening, and therefore cannot intelligently respond. Such a surprise can gain much market share. Surprise the competition with rapid introduction of radically innovative goods and services, super-fast delivery, then wow them by delivering more than expected faster.

Fast Following: Copying something that moves faster than a firm can copy isn’t a good business to be in. Faster-cycles than the competition enable a firm to track close behind the leader, but with the benefit of lowered risk.

Fashionising: It’s a fickle, down right ephemeral world. Cellphones, laptops, MP3 players, DAB radios, palm-top assistants, training shoes, and robopets aren’t just functional items anymore - they’re fashion accessories. Fast new product introduction cycles are a significant part of setting and leading trends.

Technological Leadership: It’s said that a slower pace of innovation allows for refinement of technologies. But there is counter point here. Whilst slower competitors hone their wares in the lab, faster competitors are learning in the real world with real products at two and more time the speed. But more, because learning happen twice as fast, technological development is compounded and thus the leader can pull away.

Market Preemption: Fast-cycles mean that you can get to market first. And that means that such a preemptive strike can allow you set the industry standard, in turn lead and gain greater market share.

Premium Prices: Leading the market whether through technological leadership, setting fashion trends, or being in a position to gain a preemptive strike means that your product or service will command a premium. First to market with a new product that satisfies customer demands above and beyond the competition will put a firm in a premium value position.

Reduces Rework: Lengthy cycle-times can give way to loss of information, as data, ideas and learnt knowledge is lost in the drawn out gap between start and finish. This, in turn, may increase error rates and rework. Fast cycles give faster communication feedback, thus less gets lost, and hence less rework.

Increase Productivity: As time-to-market or production cycle-times get faster, throughput naturally increases. But more, accelerating cycle-times mean more time for process performance improvement, so setting up virtuous circle of increasing productivity.

Increased Customer Responsiveness: Speed gets a firm closer to the customer, in turn, customers become more dependent on the firm. Fixing a problem quick is close to the customer. Fastest and reliable delivery leadtimes is even closer.

Increase Variety Whilst Reducing Costs: Time’s money of course. Traditionally, the costs of an organisation, whether it be a product or service business, can be very sensitive to the amount of variety that company is attempting to manage. On-the-other-hand, speed subverts the rising cost dilemma. Rapid cycle-times enables a firm to increase product variety, whilst at the same time lower overheads and indirect costs.

Increasing Returns. Who is first with most, gets! You don’t even have to be the best technologically speaking. Recall the old Sony Betamax Vs VHS video cassette tape war. VHS won because VHS were out in the market earlier with more product in the market, even though Sony’s system was better! Today, Sony have learnt that lesson, and have won the Blue Laser CD as standard competition for exactly the same reason. Who is first with most, gets.

Breakthrough Technologies for Peering into the Brain.

Temporal and spatial resolution of brain - tomographic - scanning technologies are doubling each year.

What was a pipedream a mere 15 years ago - scanning and seeing the brain at the mol level - is in fast becoming eclipsed by even more sensitive instruments today.

New breakthroughs in scanning technologies now enable reduction of mol drift and noise in the apparatus to such an extent that such kit can see the tiniest motions of brain molecules and their connections to a distance less than the molecules own diameter.

Here’s the chronology:

In 1970 the best available scanning resolution was 2.0000mm in 1000 second graphical rendering, via Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

By 1980 it was 1.2000mm in 80 second graphical rendering, via Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).

By 1990 it was 0.7000mm in 8 seconds graphical rendering, via Positron Emission Tomography (PET).

By 2000 it was 0.1000mm in 0.01 seconds graphical rendering, via Magnetoencephalograpy (MEG).

And by 2006 the best available scanning resolution was 0.0200mm in 0.004 seconds graphical rendering, via more advanced MEG.

Today, at the beginning of 2008, a breakthrough at the University of Pennsylvania Neuroengineering Research Laboratory is enabling spatial resolution high enough to image individual neurons, at 1 millisecond time resolution. This is a dramatic leap forward, as this is sufficient to record the firing of each neuron (a designation for the technology has not been announced yet).

As for the near future, there’s much excitement and activity.

One approach called ‘two-photon laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM).’ This creates a single point focus in 3D space which detects intracellular activation of individual synaptic receptors and dendritic spines at one millionth of a billionth of a second (10-15).

This steady march toward nano scale resolution (spatial and temporal) means greater elucidation of such dreadful neurological problems as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and stroke.

'The public at large are blind to what's happening at the cusp of technological innovation... Governments are even worse... But what frightens me is that the average engineer working on the front line, doesn't have clue to what's happening at the edges of science and technology either...

On my walkabouts around US and EU factories I ask what on the CEO's mind. Mostly it's procedure, organisation charts, and next quarters financial report and cash-flow... I ask questions about quantum computing, nano-scale engineering, and what radical projects are being worked on?; and it usually draws a blank...

This is what's at the centre of the economic down turn. The average CEO has forgoten how to radically think.'

Bill Gates (pissed off) @ Davos, January 2008.

Breakthrough Brain Interface Telecom Technology

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

A video (click on above title) shows the system being used to place the first public voiceless phone call on stage at a recent conference held by microchip manufacturer Texas Instruments. Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation, which developed the neckband, demonstrates the device, called the Audeo.

Users needn't worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires "a level above thinking". Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.

The system demonstrated at the TI conference can recognise only a limited set of about 150 words and phrases, similar to the early days of speech recognition software.

At the end of the year Ambient plans to release an improved version, without a vocabulary limit. Instead of recognising whole words or phrases, it should identify the individual phonemes that make up complete words.

How to Accelerate Your New Product Processes in 5 Easy Steps.

Believe it or not, you don’t have to employ a £2000 an hour management consultant to reengineer you new product processes to get faster to market.

Here’s 5 things you can 'begin' do this quarter to get significant gains without upsetting the apple cart (to much).

Eliminate Bottlenecks: Where’s the number 1 bottleneck in your process? Obviously, look for the longest job queue. The reason for such a tailback is that there’s a linear and quite often single sub-process on the critical path to cope with a multitude of sub-projects waiting in series (e.g: one piece of major test kit, or lone mould M/C, etc). The solution? Multiply into a number of smaller pieces of kit, so that each project or sub-process can take place in parallel.

Reduce the number of projects by a half: This is about ‘results over time.’ Although there are less projects being worked on at any one time, the focus enables more projects to hit the market in much less time. The other issue here is what’s known as the ‘Bird Cage Effect.’ If there’s a heavy load of projects, the weaker projects (less perceived value or status of the engineer) will fall to the bottom of the cage. Half the number of projects and watch productivity boom.

Work a on small number of sub-systems at a time: Furthermore, working on a umpteen projects simultaneously will increase aggregate complexity. The danger here, is that this seemingly flexible approach is very wasteful and misleading. Why?… 2 reasons: First it causes so-called ‘Organisational Entropy.’ A multitude of people working on multiple projects, attacking several issues, sets up high and unnecessary levels of turbulence. Second - and as a result of the first - is something called the ‘Wait-State Trap.’ An endless string of stop/go situations. And a project on stop, is project on stop. Take all the wait-states situations and total organisational entropy, and it ends up in gross project time delays. The secret? Work on a small number of sub-system projects at a time, bring them up to specification, then move on to the next. In the long run, it’s is faster and more efficient.

Reduce the size of the team: Large organisations cause their own problems. We know that. Furthermore, product innovation is not a linear process, like counting the number of books in a library. Here, for every agent added (people counting the books) the faster the books are counted. However, product innovation is an acutely uncertain and highly interactive process. Where for every agent added, so the number of communication passes there are, in turn slowing the proces, that it was intended to speed up. QED: Small team are faster, more nimble, and efficient.

Give senior engineers multiple hats (but train in the skills): I know a very major hand tool OEM where senior engineers are designers, engineers, prototypers, testers, marketers and customer supporters all at one and the same time! And here’s the test. Have you seen the raft of innovative tools in the shops of late? Go look, you'll be surprised.

Watch Out for Internet TV Sets.

Apple Computers and Microsoft are joining the Hyperinnovation game, interconnecting the PC & TV set. For example, the ‘Windows Media Centre Internet TV’ is a living-room-ready system capable of playing DVDs, accessing websites, downloading internet data like digital movies and including a digital TV tuner all-in-one box.

Broadband access to homes is now a widespread reality, the problem that Apple and MS are attacking is the use of internet technology to deliver high-definition video to TV.

Desktop Factory Launch First Consumer 3D Printer

Regular vistors to my blog may recall the interveiw with Cathy Lewis, CEO of Desktop Factory.

She said the first version of the designed for 'businesses, schools and the home' 3D printer will be launched to market by end of 2007.

And Cathy and her team have done it!

The Jetsons-esque technology of fabricating three-dimensional objects is finally available for the home workshop, kitchen or den; and at a fraction of the cost of industrial machines.

Create your design on a PC, press 'print,' and voilà: you’ve got a new coffee cup, or washer for that darned dripping tap, or temporary whatever just to get you through the night — or just about any 'hard' plastic object that will fit inside the 5x5x5-inch chamber.

The 90-pound, microwave-size machine swaps the typical expensive printing materials for affordable nylon-based powder, which is hardened by a halogen lamp instead of a pricey laser and deposited in 0.01-inch layers onto a platform to build the final object.

Price: a mere $4,995; and expected to come down to less than $999 c.2011!

Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule.

Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA (an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants to help the plants ward off insects for example).

Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of brand new life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Scientists have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome: a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

This year they intend to transplant it into a cell where it is expected to ‘boot itself up,’ like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding.

And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

This will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial; and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.