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01 Feb
0

Great Computers Never Die – VCF East 2016

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They’re alive! At the Vintage Computer Festival East, fans keep the great machines of the past running.   VCF East took place April 15-17 at the InfoAge Science Center in Wall, New Jersey. Computers on display included a fully restored and working Apple 1, an Altair 8800, and a host of 8- and 16-bit machines, including a collection of (mostly unlicensed) Apple II clones from around the world and an array of Commodore 64s upgraded to do things like control the lights in your home. Speakers included the legendary Ted Nelson, the man who invented the words hypertext and hypermedia,…

01 Feb
0

Effortless Biking With the GeoOrbital E-Wheel

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A bicycle retrofitted with a GeoOrbital, electric-powered front wheel demands a light thumb: Touch the throttle lever on the handlebar a little too hard, and you lurch ahead.   “You catch on in half an hour,” says Michael Burtov, the founder of GeoOrbital. I rode around for just 10 minutes, so I never quite caught on. But it sure beats pedaling.   It took Bartov less than a minute to fit his wheel to the bike and a few seconds more to slip the 3.4-kilogram (7.5 lb.) battery pack into its holder, which hangs where the spokes would be, if…

01 Feb
0

Prosthetic Hand Restores Amputee’s Sense of Touch

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Igor Spetic lost his right hand in an industrial accident. Then he started working with Dustin J. Tyler, a researcher in human-machine interaction, to help develop an experimental haptic prosthetic that lets Spetic feel sensations in his missing hand.   To make the prosthetic work, Tyler tapped into Spetic’s nervous system. Implanted electrodes in the right forearm make contact with three nerves at 20 locations. Stimulating different nerve fibers produces realistic sensations: When one spot is stimulated, he feels a touch on his right palm; another spot produces sensation in his thumb. Thin-film force sensors in the device’s index and…

01 Feb
0

The Bitcoin Blockchain Explained

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Forget the currency; it’s the protocol behind it that matters. Blockchains will mutate and take over everything we do on the Web.   Trusting strangers with your digital information may sound silly, but it’s actually a revolution in distributed computing. And one day, systems like Bitcoin could be the future of all secure digital transactions.  

01 Feb
0

A Cyborg Stingray Made of Rat Muscles and Gold

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A team of researchers have found a way to meld bioinspiration with robotics and cybernetics with the creation of a fully controllable robotic ray that uses light-activated rat muscle cells to swim. The research has just been published in Science, and it’s impressive. And also adorable.  

01 Feb
0

Tackle This: Football’s Newest MVP is a Robot

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A robotic tackling dummy created by Dartmouth College engineering students could turn out to be the most valuable player on the field this football season. Short for Mobile Virtual Player, the MVP robot is designed to take a beating during football drills, sparing players from an accumulation of the kinds of impacts known to result in concussions and long-term brain damage.  

01 Feb
0

This Water Jet Cutter Can Slice Through Anything: Steel, Glass or Steak

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The phrase “desktop fabrication” has for the most part meant 3D printers and laser cutters. There are also small computer-numerical-control (CNC) mills and routers to be had, but until now you’d be hard pressed to find a small computerized machine hefty enough and flexible enough to cut complicated patterns in, say, steel. And you’d be totally out of luck if your material of choice was glass or ceramic.  

01 Feb
0

Build an Air Theremin (For Dance Parties!)

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IEEE Spectrum’s own Stephen Cass has been on a several-month-long quest to make groovy electronic music—in spite of a complete and utter lack of any musical talent whatsoever. So when he stumbled across the TeraRanger One range finding sensor, the wheels in his head started spinning.   The sensor uses reflected infrared pulses to determine distances of up to several meters. Cass quickly realized that with the help of an Arduino Mega, he could translate different distances into musical notes on his 1980s vintage Casio SK-5 keyboard, creating an instrument you can play with your whole body. The result is…

01 Feb
0

High-Speed Classroom: Building an Electric Racing Motorcycle

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Ohio State University’s Buckeye Current Electric Motorcycle Team is no ordinary after school club. Unless, of course, your version of ordinary includes breaking land speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats and taking home racing trophies from the Isle of Man. In about six years, this all-student team has gone from cobbling motorcycles together from whatever they had on hand to competing against professional motorcycle racing teams on some of the world’s toughest courses. The challenge of building an entirely new electric motorcycle from scratch has turned out to be a fantastic testing ground for these soon-to-be minted electrical engineers….

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