One Step Closer to the Jetsons

Sci fi worshippers and Jetsons fans the world over have long been dreaming about the reality of the jet pack. In fact, for years many of us have been left feeling bitter and disenchanted, due to the fact that the Jetsons clearly lied to us. Not only do we not have any jet packs, we don't have any flying cars, either. Quite the contrary, you can't even take the frigging train now without being crammed in beside the other passengers like sardines and suffering through a nine hour trip with someone breathing questionable breath into your face as they attempt to sleep on your shoulder. Unless of course you have the riches required to get a sleeper car or bedroom.

Of course, if you have an extra hundred grand lying around, now you actually can buy a jet pack. Yes! They are coming into existence! The Martin Aircraft Company of Christchurch, out of New Zealand, is one of many companies perfecting the art of jet pack travel. Currently, their version -- which runs on two turbojet engines instead of a rocket engine -- is at the head of the pack. The way things are going, it might be affordable for the rest of us somewhere around 2030, so hey! Start saving!

The Memorial Diamond

So, today I have what some folks may consider a morbid bit of technology for you. This picture features a memorial diamond, though it is just one style of many.

What is a memorial diamond? Basically, it is a diamond made from the ashes of your loved ones, should they choose to get cremated.

Death is a touchy subject for a lot of people, especially when it is the death of someone you love. I, for one, am ridiculously close to my parents, both of whom have expressed an interest in being cremated. Usually in such cases, ashes are either buried or placed in an urn, which is in turn put in a place of pride in your home.

With the LifeGem Memorial Diamond -- and with other companies which do similar work -- you can still do that, but you can also take a portion of your loved one's remains and have it made into a diamond, which is then set into a ring -- or a necklace, or bracelet, or any other piece of jewelry you fancy, I would imagine.

This may not be a piece of technology made to help humankind, it may not be the most helpful invention. However, there are a lot of people out there who dread the thought of being parted by the people they love most, and I just think that something like this gives you a way to memorialize them and keep them close to you forever. And I, for one, quite fancy that idea.

Tattoo Removal Goes Ultrasonic

So ... let's say you get a stupid tattoo -- or one which could potentially get you sued by the nose-less, baby-dangling King of Pop. Of course you can get tattoos removed these days, but it's something of an ordeal. Time was, it could also cause serious scarring, but technology just keeps getting better.

The latest news in tattoo removal involves ultrasonic measures. Getting tattooed is rather simple. The ink contains carbon particles, which are suspended in water. That water diffuses when the ink is introduced to your skin through the needle. The ink itself then spreads into the surrounding tissue. It is literally embedded in your skin, which makes removing it quite difficult.

These days, abrasion, surgical removal, and laser treatment are the most commonly used techniques. However, even as advanced as they are, infection is still a high risk, as is scarring. Recently, however, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh has come up with what he says is a completely non invasive technique for tattoo removal. Specifically, ultrasound is used to collapse the particles of pigment, thus removing a lot of the ink.

Medical Center Implements New Technology

Vanderbilt University’s Medical Center’s Center for Experiential Learning and Assessment is implementing some exciting new technology which promises to be groundbreaking for medical students and physiologists. A new, twelve thousand square foot lab has just been constructed – at the cost of five and a half million dollars.

The new lab contains two programs: the Program in Human Simulation and the Simulation Technologies Program. The former will allow students to go through clinical practices, which will lead to improvements in their interpersonal skills.

Mannequins will be used to simulate human patients. They are computer based and, as such, are physiologically similar to humans. The individual mannequins will be used to portray individual patients, not to mention family members, doctors, nurses, and any other people students will be in contact with during real time and real life situations.

Cisco Unveils New SAN Technology

My precious computer geek, l33t brethren, rejoice – Cisco is unveiling some new technology. Specifically, they’ve developed a new Storage Area Network, or SAN, which they promise will improve the performance and scalability of SAN systems. As well, the management of the systems will be much simpler, the date will be safer, and the SAD services on virtual machines will be better. The premise behind this new technology is to help users create, from design to construction, the next generation of data centers.

The new SAN is part of an expansion of the Data Center 3.0 series of Cisco’s products. They expect it will make data centers respond better, in addition to making them more resilient and efficient. The SAN technologies include three new modules from the MDS 9000 line as well as new features found in their SAN OS. Its new name is the NX-OS. The new switch modules has eight gigabits. You can use them in any combination, and they will increase both port density and performance, by into a preexisting Cisco chassis. The bonus is that this will not require any major upgrades.

MBI Breast Cancer Technology

There’s some brand new technology out, beneficial to women. It’s a new screening tool, designed to detect breast cancer. The clincher is that it can work three times better than the typical mammogram, thereby finding tumors faster and earlier. Furthermore, it can find tumors in women who have very dense breast tissue, which mammography has had problems with for years.

A mammogram is essentially an X-ray of a woman’s breasts. In comparison with the new technology, the old standard was found to find less than one third of the tumors discovered by the new technique.

The technique is called molecular breast imaging – MBI for short. It promises to make the process of finding breast cancer tumors faster, easier, and less invasive. For instance, patience will no longer need to be injected with the radioactive agents, which are absorbed by the tissue and used to make the tumors themselves show up in the X-ray. Instead, MBI uses cameras. It has a very low risk of radiation, but the makers are working to make even that small risk a non issue.

"We can rebuild him. We have the technology."

Well ... kind of. See, Nike made this. It’s the PreCool vest. The way it’s made, it’s supposed to take longer for the core temperature of your body to heat up to the point where you start getting exhausted. Right now, it’s being used during the Olympic Games over in Beijing – just as a prototype, of course.

You fill the vest up with cold water, which adds about 8 pounds onto you. The fabric keeps you from freezing, there’s insulation, and even a layer of aluminum that will reflect heat.

Naturally, it’s supposed to help you when you’re out on the playing field. Supposedly, like you’re the Six Million Dollar Man, it will make you faster, stronger, healthier – just better, basically.

And a little known fact: it’s actually styled after the mini dresses that were popular in the 60s.

You know, my birthday was Sunday...

...and if any of you awesome readers that I don't really know would like to get this for me, I'll ... well. Write a post on your piece-o'-technology-o'-choice. Okay?

Seriously, I don't even really have anything to say. I just think this is beautiful. It's the diNovo Edge from Logitech. Mind you, up to this point, I've really only thought of Logitech as a good product that I looked for when I wanted to get something useful but basic for, you know. Cheap. Like, I've got 9856 of their optical mice, one wireless optical mouse, one wireless keyboard (they came in a set, don'cha know?), and two webcams. Why? Because I needed them at the time, they were moderately cool in the tech department, and more importantly, I could afford them.

I cannot afford this. Well, I can, and I'll probably by it eventually because my GF got one for frigging FREE, and I saw it up close and touched it and admired my reflection in its shiny, shiny surface ... and then I had to leave it. And my soul still weeps.

Also, typing is a dream, it is hot as hell, and it's got what they call "backlit stealth controls" and I'm sorry, but that just seeps of awesome like an infection and I want one.

I sing in praise of getting 5 bars on my cell phone.

Good news for us poor shmucks who still don’t have decent cell phone service in our homes. I live in central New York and my cell phone only gets bars in, like, three rooms of a nine room house – only a third of the whole frigging house!

..but anyway! Sprint’s offering up this thing called the Airwave, which is made by Samsung. Essentially, it’s a miniature cell phone tower that works through your broadband. It covers up to five thousand square feet and as many as three cell phones can be used at the same time within its range. Admittedly, T-Mobile’s @Home is similar to this, and it may or may not be cheaper ... and I, for one, have T-Mobile, but whatever, teeny little home based cell phone towers in general are super neat, and considering all the snarking I do about cell phones in general and coverage in particular, it gets a couple of stars from me.

And now, couch potatoes rejoice!

Thanks to a new technology known as WHDI, or Wireless Home Digital Interface, the world of television is changing. This comes as all televisions – or at least television channels – are going to be undergoing brand new make overs, with all of them set to change over to digital in 2009. With Wireless Home Digital Interface, you will be able to mount big screen monitors right on the wall of your living room, bed room, et cetera, as well as surround sound speakers – without a great big mess of unsightly wires. Housewives all over the world are going to be rejoicing right along with their television watching husbands and children (that is a huge bit of generalization, but I’m sure you guys know what I mean). These little boxes will work with high definition TVs and they, too, are set to be available by 2009. Amimon Ltd., a company operating out of Israel, developed these little beauties. Companies like Panasonic, LG, Toshiba, and others are now planing to follow suit and develop their own wireless systems.

Wii enhancements: Wee!

There’s good news for gamers, yet again. The Nintendo Wii is possibly the greatest gaming system ever in life (warning: the preceding was a completely biased opinion and no, the author does not care), and Nintendo has plans to make it even better. Hot on the heels of the wildly popular Wii-Fit, which is has revolutionized the lives of fat-bottomed (warning: the preceding was a Queen reference, who caught that?) gamers everywhere, Nintendo intends to enhance the standard Wii-mote with a wee, teeny box called the Wii MotionPlus. It’s supposed to enhance the Wii-mote’s response and precision, and to make playing games on the Wii an overall more intense experience – namely because it is much more motion sensitive. Nintendo’s also introducing Wii Music, which lets gamers play fifty different instruments, just the way they are really played. The balance board is going to double as part of a drum kit – it will be the bass drum. Ba-dum ching, baby.

Gamers, geeks, and Internet fr33ks: rejoice!

Experts in Australia have apparently created a new technology that is supposed to allow people to surf the Internet one hundred times faster than they do now. For that matter, a professor working with the product says that this probably won’t cost users anything.
The new technology evidently works to increase and improve the performance of optic fibers; the professor involved likened it to a scratch on a piece of glass, wherein the circuits will use the glass as a kind of path that the information will follow.
It’ll be a while before this technology reaches the market, but right now tests have conclusively shown that, in its current stages, this new technique has made surfing the web sixty times faster. Researchers on the product believe that with some more development, it can easily be one hundred times faster.

Eco-friendly washing machines ftw!

When you stop and think about it, it’s really about time that the overall design of washing machines get a new make-over. Xenos is taking a huge step in that regard – they have created an economically friendly washing machine. It is completely water efficient – namely because it uses plastic instead of water. It has been proven that a combination of friction and the cleaning solvent used are what ultimately gets clothing and fabrics clean. Keeping that in mind, Xenos uses a mixture of those factors and only 2 percent of water to get the job done. Apparently, you’ll be able to use one cup of water, a bit of your detergent of choice, and a butt-load of plastic chips that are used over and over again, all of which will work together to basically beat the dirt out of your clothes and get rid of stains. That’s right, the plastic chips will actually absorb stains.

This machine isn’t on the market yet, but the tests done on it thus far are showing some real promise. Not only is it water efficient, for instance, but the process of actually washing clothes followed by the way the chips themselves are extracted so they can be reused (for about one hundred times) leaves the items in the washer pretty dry, so you either won’t need to use your dryer at all, or you’ll only have to use it a bit for thicker fabrics.

Text messages are officially taking over the world.

PhoneTag – and various other companies – have this new thing now, in the ever widening world of telephone technology. Voice recognition software in cell phones isn’t all that new, but this looks awesome. They have services that can convert your voicemail messages into text messages; they will transcribe your voicemail, and then send to – well, anywhere, really. You can get it sent to your email and/or your phone, plus you can sign into your account on the company’s web site and retrieve your messages. Different companies offer different services, like the ability to have people send you silent messages, so your phone doesn’t even make a sound or anything, plus there are some features that will let you play an MP3 as sort of a soundtrack to your message. Most of them will let you put these services on home and business phones as well as cell phones. I had occasion to read about a lot of the companies offering things like this, and from what I saw, people were digging places like SpinVox, PhoneTag, and VoiceBox, more than companies like CallWave, mostly because the latter makes you change your voicemail number. Anyhow, people seem to like them because you don’t have to take down messages before and you can read through them even in places where you’re not supposed to have your cell phone switched on, like the movie theatre and malls and things.

Go iGoogle yourself.

Google’s upping the ante and it looks like they’re seriously attempting to compete with social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook. They’re all about supporting OpenSocial now and they are finally – finally – reworking that bland homepage. I guess they’ve finally started listening to people’s complaints about it. These new improvements to iGoogle are an answer to public opinion as well. They plan to incorporate some of the elements and features already implemented in Gmail to spice things up a bit. iGoogle will have chat functions similar to Gmail and there will actually be real gadgets. The tabs are going to run up and down on the left side rather than on the top and you’ll soon be able to see what your friends are doing, via news feeds similar to what you can find on MySpace. Another social networking site ... I don’t know though. Google might be asking for trouble, throwing themselves into the ring with MySpace.

Invent an engine, win $3 million!

You guys may have noticed (or maybe you haven’t – I haven’t really been around long enough yet for all y’all to know my habits) that I stay the crap away from politics around here. That’s partly because I don’t want to get my butt spammed off, but also because I’ve got absolutely no clue about I’m voting for yet. That being said ... let’s talk about John McCain. He’s making me think of Al Gore lately, and I kind of like him for that. Then again, Dana Carvey’s Gore-theories on a recent comedy special sort of make me want to write in the guy’s name, for President of the World, so he can rule over global warming. But anyway...

Johnny’s put this offer on the table, see, and it really makes me wish I’d paid more attention in chemistry and physics and ... you know, whatever. Three million dollars, folks, for being able to come up with a battery for hybrid or electric cars – but not just any battery, oh no. It has to be able to actually work – I mean, really make it worth buying a fuel-saving car. Power, size, cost, and capacity – they’ve all got to be aces. And how does he propose to fund that giant reward? Everyone in America, every adult and child, gives one dollar. You know, I could get down with that. Dang, I’d donate a butt load more than that, if someone proposed a similar idea to get the country the crap out of debt.

Pitch-Perfect Technology

So. Good news and bad news, all in one package. Celemony Software, a Munich based company, has come out with some new recording technology. Direct Note Access is a computer program which can create digital recordings in which each note is perfect. It can change the individual notes of a specific instrument, for example, without it being necessary to touch any of the other notes. Everything can be entirely pitch perfect with little to no effort – because, yes, it is possible to perfect a singer’s pitch as well. So why is this bad news, too? Because I imagine that it means there will be tons more singers of the Ashlee Simpson/Brooke Hogan/et cetera variety, who can’t really carry a tune but get a record deal anyway, because they look good and computers can make them sound good, so hey, why not? I’m a music snob, ergo it’s bad news to me. Of course, that’s likely Ashlee’s problem already: her real problem on that SNL debacle was probably due to the fact that her studio made her sound so perfect that lip-synching was her only option for a live performance.

XP Becomes Extinct

It’s happening. It’s really happening. XP is going the way of the dinosaur and the Commodore 64, according to CNET. I’ve got a secret for all you cool cat techs, computer mavericks, and technology miscreants out there – I’m not superbly computer savvy. I know, big shock – but I’m not completely computer illiterate either; I know enough to like what I like and hate what I don’t. Windows XP works for me – and Vista makes my soul cry. Windows Vista makes a lot of people’s souls cry, but that doesn’t mean much to the bottom line. Dell’s already let go of Windows XP, setting it free like the proverbial true-love butterfly, but it’s pretty clear that XP was never meant to be for a lot of us. Folks who prefer Windows as an OS just got kind of screwed without either lube or the courtesy of a reach-around. Dell’s just a step of ahead of the game; other computer manufacturers are due to start phasing out their XP machines, and they should all be out of the way by 2009.
Windows in general and XP in particular have a lot of problems and get a lot of crap; I bitch about them myself often enough. But it’s still sort of disturbing that despite the majority’s rabid hatred for Vista, it’s getting the nod as Windows supreme. It happens, though. It’s quite akin to the way AOL is now basically AIM.

New Advances in Lasik Surgery

There’s good news for people with bad eyesight and about four thousand dollars burning a whole in their pockets.
More and more people are wearing glasses and/or contacts these days – we’re probably going to evolve that way. A couple hundred years from now – if the whole joint hasn’t burned up and burned out by then – babies will probably get fitted for glasses as soon as they pop out of the womb. It’s a technological hazard. We spend a heck of a lot of time looking at computer screens. On an average day, I spend at least nine hours staring at WordPerfect (shut up, I know it sucks but I like it) or web pages while I research the effects of green tea or specs on a 2005 Benz.
Lasik eye surgery is becoming a popular alternative to glasses and contacts, especially since people are having to get bifocals and the like earlier in their lives than ever. The FDA has improved a new, very advanced machine used in laser eye surgery, though. It’s called the Allegretto Wave Eye-Q and it can cut into or shape the cornea in half the time other, older machines take. It even nixes the worry most people have about lasik – that they’ll move during surgery and end up playing Captain Jack Sparrow for Halloween for the rest of their lives. If the eye happens to move, this machine stops. Use of this machine also makes it possible for patients to recover faster.

Tales from an iPhone Convert

I have seen the face of the Second Coming, and it is the iPhone 3G. All right, that’s a little hyperbolic, but considering the fact that I have long been anti-Apple and anti-iPhone (this is mostly because until, oh, now, most cell phone service – including AT&T wireless – in my area has been non-existent; plus I cannot use a Mac to save my life. No matter!), it’s still a big deal. This phone is beautiful. The other day I was doing something that required me to read a TIME article on Steve Jobs’ new baby, and before I was halfway finished, I became a complete convert. If Apple or AT&T would take an IOU for the promise of my first-born child, I’d be right there in the thick of the frenzy that’s sure to take place nationwide on July 11, when the 3G’s set to go on sale.

Apparently, this thing can load up graphic-heavy web sites in 29 seconds (whereas the original iPhone takes nearly a minute). That’s all thanks to the 3G network. It’s got honest-to-goodness GPS tracking and navigation (and the demonstration, Jobs showed the audience real-time footage of a 3G user going down San Francisco’s famously twisting Lombard Street – and evidently they actually cheered for it) and there are going to be tons of applications for it. Among them are games so awesome that they rival the graphics on the PSP.

What’s seriously awesome, though, is the price. According to TIME, the 8GB iPhone 3G is supposed to start out at $199, and at $299, the 16GB 3G is still one hundred dollars less than the price of the original iPhone’s 8GB model.

So I’m not saying that I’m going to rush right out and buy one in July – but I am thinking about it, and I will covet anyone who has one. I will covet them sharply, with brand new #2 pencils.