San Francisco artist Tanya Vlach lost her eye in 2005 in a car accident and had to wear an acrylic prosthetic eye. Now she wants to do something that has attracted the attention of engineers — to build a mini video camera into her prosthetic eye.

“There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I’m sort of a sci-fi geek,” said 35 year old Vlach. “With the advancement of technology, I thought, ‘Why not?’”

She issued a challenge on her blog — for tech experts to construct an “eye cam” for her prosthesis that can dilate with light changes, and zoom, focus and turn on/off with a simple blink.

Dr. William Danz, Vlach’s doctor, states: “I’d always given thought to using cameras to restore sight to the blind. This is a little different, more like James Bond stuff.”

Tanya Vlach claims that she has “a lot of ideas floating around” including sync’ing the video feeds wirelessly to a smart phone or even record her entire life and shoot a reality TV show from her perspective.

“It is possible to build a wireless camera with the dimensions of the eyeball,” said Want, a senior principal engineer at Intel Corp. “You can find spy cams or nanny cams designed to fit into inconspicuous places in the home…. In a world where eye cams are common, they might serve as a kind of computerized backup to people’s memories.”

When we think about mind blowing speed, lets be honest, we tend not to think about electricity. Maybe because of all of the propaganda out there about electric cars, or maybe because electricity conjures up so many other images first, like the lights that go on at home or giant bolts of lightning, which by the way are actually pretty fast. So, it probably should not be a shocker (OK I promise no more puns) that electricity just helped to break a new world speed record.

In order to drive these rotary applications directly, efficiently and in a controlled fashion, there must be electrical drive systems with the appropriate rpm and engine power. Up to now, industrially-deployed motors have normally reached 250,000 revolutions per minute. Now, however, researchers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Power Electronics have developed a drive system in cooperation with its industrial partners that can achieve over 1,000,000 rpm.

Of course, this speed record was set in a lab, not on a track and it’s more to do with revoltions than it is with MPH, but still, you may at some point find it driving down the street next to you, or even in the sky above you. In future it can be expected that the drill used in material processing will become even faster and the compressor used for vehicles and airplanes even more compact.

Of course, you may end us seeing it used to make the technology in the palm of your hand too. Based upon the results of this research, Christof Zwyssig and Martin Bartholet, also a post-graduate in the same department, founded the spin-off company, Celeroton, in August 2008. It will make the lab partners industrially viable with a view to providing ultra-high revolution electrical drive systems for different branches of industry and areas of application. Celeroton is set to become a supplier for manufacturers of, for example, fast-spinning drill or milling machines.

The trend towards increasingly smaller cell phones and other electrical appliances means that increasingly smaller holes have to be drilled for the elec-tronics. This is only possible using a drive system that boasts a high rotational speed. “In my view, a spin-off company is the most direct way of transferring research results to industry. Our findings will rapidly be converted into concrete applications and products,” explains Johann Kolar, Head of the Department of Power Electronics.

Now you are wondering how big this thing that it can drill tiny holes in the cell phones of the future. The new drive system, which generates an output of 100 watts, is barely bigger than a matchbox.

As for construction, the recipie goes a little something like this, The rotor construction has a titanium shell that is able to withstand extreme centrifugal forces and the ball bearings are optimized for extremely high speeds. Ultra-thin copper wire is used for the windings which are inserted in a cylinder made of special iron previously unused for machines. In addition, the machine is fed by electronics specifically designed for such engine speeds.

Have you ever wondered what you would look like if you could be as beautiful as a super model? It is only human nature, at least for those of use who were born without the perfect genetics, to try and figure it out.

Well researchers at the Tel Aviv University may just give you the chance to find out, without the amazingly high bills and associated risks of getting plastic surgery. They have built a computer designed to enhance the human face, a kind of instant beautifier for your photos.  How does it do this, why with that most sexy of fields, math.

Beauty, contrary to what most people think, is not simply in the eye of the beholder,” says lead researcher Prof. Daniel Cohen-Or of the Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences at Tel Aviv University. With the aid of computers, attractiveness can be objectified and boiled down to a function of mathematical distances or ratios, he says. This function is the basis for his beauty machine.

Of course, these type of things always come with a debate.

Beauty is, after all, a quality that has captivated artists since time immemorial, and its definition has eluded even the world’s greatest philosophers. Prof. Cohen-Or sees things more scientifically.

“Beauty can be quantified by mathematical measurements and ratios. It can be defined as average distances between features, which a majority of people agree are the most beautiful,” says Prof. Cohen-Or. “I don’t claim to know much about beauty. For us, every picture in this research project is just a collection of numbers.”

I bet that you are wondering how they made up that algorythm after all turning personal preference into hard data is no easy task. Well, I will tell you how it was done:

In a study, recently published in the journal Siggraph, for  computer graphics, Prof. Cohen-Or and his graduate student Tommer Leyvand  together with two colleagues  surveyed 68 Israeli and German men and women, aged 25 to 40, asking them to rank the beauty of 93 different men’s and women’s faces on a scale of 1 to 7. These scores were then entered into a database and correlated to 250 different measurements and facial features, such as ratios of the nose, chin and distance from ears to eyes.  From this, the scientists created an algorithm that applies desirable elements of attractiveness to a fresh image.

While this technology is not on the market yet you could end up seeing it in a lot of different places like:

- The offices of plastic suregons who want to develop more natural guides for working on their patients.

- In the offices of magazines, where cover models are often used.

- In your next digital camera. Imagine looking like a model in all of your family photos.

I know what you are thinking, “Is this really a breakthrough? I bet I could do the same thing at home with photoshop.”

While you can enhance your images with photoshop there is a difference between the two methods. Unlike heavily processed Photoshop images that can make magazine cover models and celebrities unrecognizable, Tel Aviv University’s “beautification engine” is much more subtle. Observers say that the final image it produces retains an unmistakable similarity to the original picture, unless, as it turns out, you happen to be a celebrity.

“We’ve run the faces of people like Brigitte Bardot and Woody Allen through the machine and most people are very unhappy with the results,” Prof. Cohen-Or admits. “But in unfamiliar faces, most would agree the output is better.” Of course, if you are a celebrity, you could just pay for a team of professionals to air brush you, then you won’t need the software.

So do you want to:

- Find out how if your girlfriend really will flirt with your best friend when you back is turned?

- Outwit your enemies as they plot against you in the dead of the night?

- Find out just what will happen to your boss if you were to lock him in his office at 5pm with a wedge under the door?

- Just find out how many people it really does take to make your nervous co-worker feel claustrophobic.

Well, you can’t do those things right now but you might also be able to do that in the future thanks to new and improved computer behavior modeling techniques.

Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology department has created a computer model that can predict how people will complete a controlled task and how the knowledge needed to complete that task develops over time.

Frank Ritter, associate professor of IST and psychology, and his research associates, used the Soar programming language, which is designed to represent human knowledge, on a 20-trial circuit troubleshooting task most recently done by 10 students at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Each participant was to identify faults in a circuit system after memorizing the organization of its components and switches. This process was repeated 20 times for each person, with the series of tests chosen randomly each time. Their choices and reaction times were recorded and compared with the computer model’s results.

Much like the students, the computer model, called Diag, learned as it went through each test and developed the knowledge for completing the task quickly and efficiently.

“The model does not merely accurately predict problem-solving time for the human participants; it also replicates the strategy that human participants use, and it learns at the same rate at which the participants learn,” Ritter said.

In most cases, the model came within two to four seconds of predicting how long it would take each participant to solve the problem and it fit eight out of the 10 participants’ problem-solving times very well.

“The project shows we can predict human learning on a fine-grained level,” Ritter said. “Everyone thinks that’s possible, but here’s an actual model doing it. The model provides a detailed representation of how a transfer works, and that transfer process is really what education is about.”

So, you may have to get your potential victim to spend some time with the machine, but once that happens you can predict with comfort and ease.

Some of you may already be familiar with the concept of Eink, a new way to make digital readers for all kinds of publications, and a way to make all of the publications more cost effective endeavor for the consumers.
You may have already seen Eink and not even known it. In September of this year in celebration of its 75th Anniversary, Esquire Magazine and the new Ford Flex made the first-ever digital magazine cover released to the public.

New prototypes have been released that will show how the Eink technology can be brought to the markteplace at a reasonable cost thanks to the ability for effective advertising on the site. The prototypes shows a video of an interactive ad on the front page of the New York Times, similar to what you may see on many websites currently.

These new generation of readers can help to reduce the costs of readers and of subscriptions to Eink publications by adding these ads to the page. Which means that Einks may not just show up on the front pages of magazines, with plenty of glossy space inside to pay for the technology but in a wider range of applications as the cost model shifts.

This change of costs will, over the long run, make the devices more cost friendly for the general public.

The head of the Design Team and former world record holder Richard Noble (Project Director of The BLOODHOUND Project) are working to develop the first land speed vehicle that breaks the 1,000 mph barrier and will have its design underpinned through world-class research from some of the UK’s top laboratories.

The team worked with the scientists at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) and Fluid Gravity Engineering (FGE) to advise the world-record bid team on two of the most high-risk aspects of the world record attempt.

Many materials were considered for the wheels including a choice of metals and composites that could be used in the design, providing reports on titanium and aluminium alloys, and metal composites.

Those two aspects are the wheel and rocket designs. To reach 1,000 mph they need to be able to rotate at 10,500 rpm without being damaged by the road surface or any stones that may be in the road. In addition they need to be able to need to be as light as possible to minimise steering and suspension forces, absorb all of the weight, down force loads and stresses and distribute this pressure without causing damage to the vehicle or the surface.

The vehicle will have the first ever mixed powerplant of a hybrid rocket motor and a jet engine that is currently used on the Eurofighter Typhoon. It uses cutting edge jet technology to provide the initial thrust and the novel rocket impulse to achieve the 1,000 mph target. The hybrid engine is being tested by a scale model that is only 6 inches long.

What do they think of the progress so far?

Well Brian Chapman, who is the Project Leader for NPL, said:

“When you’re travelling at 1,000 mph you don’t want to be worrying about your motor holding out or whether your tyres are up to it. That’s why NPL – with FGE and AWE – have spent the last year looking at every eventuality for both the wheel and the rocket motor designs. We have been closely examining the effect that materials properties will have on the rocket performance, the size and weight the wheels need to be to sustain the speed, and environmental effects such as a high speed impact with a small piece of debris could have. We’re confident that our work will help to ensure that Richard and Andy are able to safely oversee another successful world record attempt for the UK, and go faster than ever before.”

OLO Computer has introduced a conceptual design where a clamshell notebook computer will be powered solely by a socketed iPhone.  The computer looks much like a normal laptop, except there will be a slot for your iPhone on the palmrest. The iPhone will then double as a trackpad and as the brains of the computer.

According to OLO’s conceptual image on its website, the system seems to be running Mac OS X, although this may not be exactly accurate. Their website shows no actual specs, description, or pricing other than a message stating “Coming soon… Sorry but your PC is out!”

We are not sure if it will have actual “computer-like” features, or if is just a bigger screen and a keyboard for the iPhone. If the latter, then it will most likely flop like the Palm Foleo or the recent RedFly device.