Is this a Good Idea? Air-Conditioned Clothing?

July 20, 2009

What if you could beat the summer heat by donning clothing with a built-in air-conditioning system? I’m envisioning a complete temperature-controlled ensemble that would keep you cool from head to toe. Think of how advantageous climate-controlled attire would be for people who live in desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. In the summer, instead of frantically rushing from your air-conditioned car to the front door of your air-conditioned house or office building to avoid melting into a puddle, you could take a nice leisurely stroll, or maybe stop at an outdoor café to sip an iced cappuccino. People who have to work outdoors no matter how scorching the temperature is—construction workers, landscapers, soldiers on patrol, furry sports mascots—would no longer run the risk of succumbing to heat exhaustion or worse. Air-conditioned clothing would promote tastefulness as well, since everyone’s favorite Austrian fashion maven, Brüno, no longer would have the weather as a justification to strut around in hot pants and a midriff-baring top.

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Is This a Good Idea? Antigravity Devices?

July 10, 2009

In the tsunami of media hype triggered by Michael Jackson’s demise, one significant achievement in the Gloved One’s career has been largely overlooked (except, thankfully, by blogger Stephanie at Mediabistro.com where I saw it). In addition to winning 13 Grammy awards and selling 750 million records worldwide during his career, the late Jacko apparently also was an inventor. As Stephanie reports, he’s listed as one of three inventors on a 1993 U.S. Patent for a "Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion," which the document explains is

A system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface. The shoes have a specially designed heel slot which can be detachably engaged with the hitch member by simply sliding the shoe wearer's foot forward, thereby engaging with the hitch member.

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Is This a Good Idea? A replacement for Google?

May 10, 2009

In ancient times, the Greeks sought guidance from the trancelike ravings of the ethylene-snorting priestess Pythia at Delphi. Today, we’ve become similarly enamored of the wisdom spewed forth by Google, the dominant search engine on the Web.

The human race now does about 235 million Google searches per day, in search of information on vital subjects ranging from Oprah Winfrey’s fried-chicken giveaway to the truth about bird-eating spiders. But just as the Greeks were dependent upon priest intercessors to translate Pythia’s streams of gibberish, so are we reliant upon our own ability to come up with search terms that suitably cajole Google’s all-powerful PageRank algorithm into summoning forth pages of links to Web sites where, hopefully, we’ll be able to find the information we are seeking.

But what if there were an easier, more direct way? What if we simply could ask the Web a question, and receive an answer?

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The Toyota I-REAL?

April 09, 2009

    This concept is a little, ah…tricky to explain, so bear with me.

You know that comfy La-Z-Boy you have in your living room?  Imagine if it had three wheels, joysticks in both armrests that allowed you to steer right or left, a plug-in electric motor that would propel you on the sidewalks at walking-jogging speed and then gear up to speeds of up to 20 miles per hour on the streets, perimeter monitoring sensors that would alert you to other vehicles or pedestrians who might stray into your path, a wireless Internet connection, and an LED screen on the back of the chair that can both serve as a set of turn signals/brake lights and display the message of your choice to the rest of the world.

    What I’m describing is a Toyota i-REAL, a concept that the automaker describes as a “personal mobility vehicle,” a single-person conveyance designed for trips that are just a little too far for walking, but close enough that driving there in your conventional car seems excessive.

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Should Scientists Try to Prevent Hurricanes?

September 08, 2008

I know all of you out there are as relieved as I am that the city of New Orleans was spared this time by Hurricane Gustav, although we did have to endure a brief disruption of nonstop cable news coverage of the Republican National Convention . (Btw, for those of you who were deeply disappointed by the delay of former New York mayor and failed presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s keynote address, maybe this video clip of him discussing his views on readiness for a possible attack by space aliens will help fill the void.)

Even so, it’s truly scary to think about what might have happened, had Gustav lived up to its advance billing as the “storm of the century.” Here’s some footage of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina that is the stuff of nightmares.

I’m not knocking the crucial importance of hurricane preparedness. But in truth, there’s only so much you can do to prepare for an onslaught of water and moving air powerful enough to lift up a car and throw it into the lobby of a hotel. Which leads me to wonder: What if we had a way to prevent hurricanes or at least lessen their severity?

Al Gore's Energy Challenge

August 08, 2008

Full disclosure here. While I am indeed extremely concerned about global warming and what we can do to avert a climate catastrophe in the too-near future, there’s an ulterior motive behind this week’s essay as well. I’m hoping, albeit improbably, that my favorite Futurama talking-head-in- a- jar, former Vice-President -turned- Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, will somehow stumble upon this page via Google Alerts and actually deign to post a comment on my blog. As you can see from this picture of his Nashville office, he’s got a few things on his plate right now. But hey, Mr. Vice-President, if you do happen to be reading this, it wouldn’t take too long to pound out a few words of encouragement or wisdom, would it? And while you’re at it, sir, please feel free to weigh in on the recent controversy in this space regarding the relative merits of Survivor vs. Night Ranger when it comes to 1980s Lite Metal mullet-rock. We all could benefit from a statesmanlike resolution of that question.

                     

Floating Cities?

July 18, 2008

If you want to have some disturbing dreams tonight, check out this YouTube video. And I’m not just talking about the Eighties retro theme music by those mullet-coiffed lite-metal gods Night Ranger. 

No, what I’m obsessing about is the potential impact of coastal flooding from rising sea levels due to global warming. (By the way, for the handful of you climate-change skeptics out there who may get the urge to flood my email box with angry, hyper-detailed refutations, please instead refer to blogger Coby Beck’s excellent FAQ on the subject.) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is pretty worried about the effects of rising sea levels on U.S. coastal areas, as this online briefing paper details. But other nations ought to be even more worried. Take a look at this 2007 report with the ominous title, "Ranking Port Cities with High Exposure and Vulnerability to Climate Extremes: Exposure Estimates," by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  Here’s the upshot:

By the 2070s, total population exposed could grow more than threefold to around 150 million people due to the combined effects of climate change (sea-level rise and increased storminess), subsidence, population growth and urbanization. The asset exposure could grow even more dramatically, reaching US $35,000 billion by the 2070s; more than ten times current levels and rising to roughly 9% of projected global GDP in this period. On a global-scale, for both types of exposure, population growth, socio-economic growth and urbanization are the most important drivers of the overall increase in exposure. Climate change and subsidence significantly exacerbate this effect although the relative importance of these factors varies by location. Exposure rises most rapidly in developing countries, as development moves increasingly into areas of high and rising flood risk.

Indeed, the top two coastal metropolises on the endangered list are Calcutta and Mumbai in India, and of the remainder of the top 10, eight are also Asian cities. (Miami, Fla., in the U.S., which ranked ninth, was the only city from a developed nation on the list.)

Iron Man Suits, for Real?

May 16, 2008

I confess that I haven’t yet seen the box-office smash Iron Man, but when I was a kid, I was an avid fan of the Marvel comic book adventures of inventive industrialist Tony Stark and the powered armored suit that he used to battle the Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man and other nefarious agents of the international communist conspiracy. (For millennials out there who may be puzzled by the last reference, this was back in the days of the Cold War, before the NHL was filled with Russian hockey players and the Chinese began manufacturing iPods and running shoes.) What scrawny pre-adolescent wouldn’t want to be incredibly strong, bulletproof and able to smash through walls without even breaking a sweat? It was a tantalizing fantasy. Judging from the movie’s $100 million opening gross, it still is.
But what about having one of those Iron Man suits for real? What we’re actually talking about is a powered exoskeleton, a mobile machine with a skeleton-like framework and a power source that augments — or even replaces — the biochemical processes of the human body to move its mechanized limbs. Since 2000, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding research to develop such devices. As a recent article in Popular Science reports:

DARPA’s ambitious wish list read like something from a comic: a machine that would let the average soldier lug hundreds of pounds and hike for days without fatigue, handle weapons that normally require two people, and whisk the injured off the battlefield by tossing one or two men on his back. They asked for the suit to support more armor, rendering men impervious to enemy fire. They even wanted it to make soldiers jump higher. They wanted Iron Man.

To that end, Sarcos Research Corporation, whose robotics operations were recently acquired by defense giant Raytheon, has created the XOS exoskeleton, whose capabilities you can see in this video:

In Japan, a company called Cyberdyne has developed the Robot Suit HAL-5, which it hopes to put into production later this year. Unlike with the XOS, HAL-5’s user doesn’t have to work controls; sensors pick up signals sent by the user’s brain to his or her muscles, and use them to direct the exoskeleton’ s mechanical limbs. Here’s a YouTube video of HAL-5 in action:

Besides creating a generation of military super-soldiers, powered exoskeletons could have a wide range of useful applications, such as enabling rescue workers to venture safely into burning buildings or toxic disaster sites. A company in Israel has developed an assistive exoskeleton called ReWalk that promises to allow paralyzed people to walk and perform other tasks.

That all sounds wonderful. But as any comics reader knows, powered exoskeletons have the potential to be used for enormous evil as well. A dictator backed by cyborg soldiers, for example, could easily crush any ordinary non-enhanced citizens who dared to oppose him. (Would the Second Amendment apply to Iron Man suits?) And if the technology got into the hands of criminals or terrorists, who knows what awful uses they might find for it? No wonder Tony Stark is such a tormented soul.

So, what do you think about unleashing powered exoskeletons? Express your opinion below.

RFID Tags Tracking Everything (Including You)?

April 18, 2008

What do graduate students, faculty and staff in the University of Washington’s computer-science and engineering department have in common with cases of air freshener at Wal-Mart? All are being tracked continuously, everywhere they go in the building, by Radio Frequency Identification tags.

In case you’ve been living in a cabin in a remote part of Montana for the past few years, RFID tags are electronic devices that store information and then transmit it whenever they pass within range of one of the receivers in a network. (That’s the simplistic explanation; for all the nuances, check out this RFID primer from HowStuffWorks.com.) RFID has been around for a while; the basic concept, in fact, dates to the “identification friend or foe” transponders developed to protect Allied airplanes from being shot down by their comrades on the ground during World War II. But RFID has mushroomed in recent years, as the devices have become progressively tinier — Japanese electronics manufacturer Hitachi has created “super micro” tags that measure just one-twentieth of a millimeter in length and width — and their applications have become increasingly sophisticated. 

Considering how easily we all misplace our stuff, and how much government and corporate bureaucracies relish the ability to verify who people are and access data on them with instantaneous ease, it’s probably not that surprising that RFID technology is rapidly becoming the 21st-century electronic equivalent of kudzu. RFID tags are showing up on everything from Levi's blue jeans on clothing store shelves to surgical sponges, in an effort to thwart their alarming tendency to remain inside operating-room patients. Retailers and banks clearly are enthralled with the notion of  a cash-free future in which consumers pay for purchases via RFID credit or debit cards, without even having to sign their names to a credit card slip (or even open their wallets, perhaps). The State Department puts them inside U.S. passports. RFID system maker Verichip markets a device that can be attached to newborn babies’ legs  in maternity wards, to avoid accidentally giving a mother the wrong infant. And here’s a YouTube clip in which former Bush administration Health and Human Services secretary and failed presidential aspirant Tommy Thompson, who for a time served on the board of Verichip’s parent company, even touts the advantages of having one of the company’s identification chips imbedded under your skin, in order to make it possible for emergency room doctors anywhere to access your medical records online.

But participants in the University of Washington’s RFID Ecosystem Project are taking the technology even further. They’re voluntarily carrying personal RFID devices that allow them to be tracked by 200 receivers scattered throughout the school’s computer-science building (with the exception of a few off-limits spots, such as the restrooms), and to receive and exchange information as well. The system can track who goes where in the building and who meets with whom, data that the study participants themselves can access and use in a variety of ways. As this video illustrates, it’s possible for an impatient participant to see whether a colleague actually is on the way to a scheduled meeting, or to amass a precise log of all the casual hallway encounters that he or she has in the course of a week. It’s even possible to walk into a room, overhear music that another participant is listening to, and automatically capture a Weblink to the same MP3 file so you can download it later. Here’s a pretty good ZDNet article on the experiment.

Though the project demonstrates innovative uses of RFID, its real purpose is to predict and measure the impact of a future RFID-wired society upon the humans who’ll live in it. As the study’s FAQ explains:

Our hope is that the qualitative and quantitative data we collect in our user studies will help us to: 1) Acquire an in-depth understanding of the blaring privacy issues; 2) Uncover and study more subtle privacy issues; 3) Evaluate and iteratively improve the effectiveness of our feedback and control mechanisms, data privacy techniques, and methods for detection and prevention; and 4) Finally, to inform the wider community (including businesses and policy makers) of the privacy-utility trade-offs inherent in emerging RFID systems before such systems become commonplace.

But we may find out a lot sooner what an RFID culture looks like in reality. In China — which spends $5 billion a year on RFID technology, the most of any nation on the planet — the government is creating what in effect will be the world’s largest RFID network, a milieu in which a projected 900 million Chinese citizens will carry RFID-equipped, personal identity cards by the end of 2008. As the New York Times reported last year, scanning a card would give police officials access to an extensive amount of information on an individual:

… work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

It’s not too hard to imagine how the Chinese government might also utilize RFID to keep a billion people under what would amount to pervasive 24/7 scrutiny, especially if RFID data is synched with the massive video-surveillance networks being built in the high-tech metropolis of Shenzhen and other Chinese cities. But privacy advocates warn that our own government — or the private sector, for that matter — could someday be nearly as invasive. As the Electronic Privacy Center warns:

… the ability to track people, products, vehicles, and even currency would create an Orwellian world where law enforcement officials and nosy retailers could read the contents of a handbag — perhaps without a person's knowledge — simply by installing RFID readers nearby. Such a fear is not unfounded. Currently, some RFID readers have the capacity to read data transmitted by many different RFID tags. This means that if a person enters a store carrying several RFID tags — for example, in articles of clothing or cards carried in a wallet — one RFID reader can read the data emitted by all of the tags, and not simply the signal relayed by in-store products.

In the state of Washington, legislators were so aghast at the prospect of corporate RFID spying on consumers that they recently enacted a law barring the remote collection of personal data without prior consent. Other states are considering similar legislation, though it would take nationwide restrictions to really make a difference. So far, Congress seems a bit slow on the uptake.

But there are other, potentially devastating, RFID-related problems that might arise. Security experts have demonstrated how easy it would be for RFID identity hackers to clone the passports and other documents of unwitting travelers, or for terrorists to program a RFID-enabled explosive device that would wait for an American citizen to walk by before it went off.

And finally, there are those Biblically-minded naysayers who suggest that RFID tags may actually be the mark of the beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

No wonder that some people are so nervous about having the various RFID tags they carry around with them hacked that they’re resorting to wrapping them in signal-blocking aluminum foil, though those with more fashion sense are opting for metal-lined designer wallets. Dutch computer-science assistant professor Melanie Rieback, has come up with an even more technologically sophisticated countermeasure — the RFID Guardian, a portable battery-powered personal firewall with the ability to selectively block RFID receivers.

So, what do you think? Should we put aside our skepticism and privacy fears and eagerly embrace the ease and convenience of an RFID-enabled global culture? Or should we all stock up on aluminum foil? Express your opinion below.

Personal Jet Packs?

April 11, 2008

I’m hearing complaints that I tend to blog too much about bleak, scary hypothetical end of the world  scenarios.  As a result, I’m going to put aside my previously planned topic — the pros and cons of various strategies for dealing with a global onslaught of flesh-eating zombies — and instead focus on a subject that inspires a tad more bonhomie: The personal jet pack.

If your only familiarity with the personal jet pack comes from the James Bond flick Thunderball, in which Agent 007 relies upon the gadget to escape some pistol-wielding bad guys, you may be surprised to discover that the jet pack — or rocket belt, as it’s sometimes called — actually is a real, functioning technology that’s been around for more than 60 years. During World War II, German scientists developed the Himmelstürmer (in English, “sky stormer”), a pair of what essentially were miniature V1 missiles  attached to a harness. The device was designed to enable Wehrmacht combat engineers to leapfrog distances of up to 75 yards over minefields, barbed wire and bombed-out bridges. A prototype was captured by U.S. forces and sent back home for study. After the war, the Pentagon wanted to develop a more powerful version, which it dubbed the Small Rocket Lift Device, for use in reconnaissance and amphibious landings.

The first functional personal flying device was the Bell Rocket Belt, invented by engineer Wendell F. Moore in the 1950s and early 1960s, which used nitrogen and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide to power twin jet nozzles that sprouted from behind the wearer’s shoulders like angel wings. In 1961, a week after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, an extremely brave individual named Harold Graham made the first unassisted jet-pack flight at an airport near Niagara Falls. He reached an altitude of just 4 feet and traveled about 30 yards, but it was a start. Eventually, Graham managed to elevate to a height of 30 feet and cover slightly more than the length of a football field. That year, he gave a demonstration for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Nevertheless, the military was underwhelmed by the original Rocket Belt, because it had one severe limitation: users could only stay in the air for a maximum of 21 seconds. In the late 1960s, the Pentagon took another stab at the concept, investing $30 million to develop Bell’s Individual Mobility System, which employed a gas-turbine jet engine powered by kerosene fuel. The IMS could stay aloft for 20 minutes and cover much larger distances than the Rocket Belt, but it too had drawbacks. The system weighed a hefty 170 pounds and was loud enough to make it useless for surveillance. The project eventually became a victim of budget cuts.

From then on, other than the jet-pack pilot who made a spectacular landing at the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and an occasional appearance as a prop in science fiction movies, the concept was pretty much relegated to the dusty corner of oblivion occupied by the likes of the Amphibicar, the Dymaxion House and the Picturephone.

That is, until recently, when two companies — U.S.-based Jetpack International and a Mexican competitor, Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana — began marketing personal flying devices to civilian thrill seekers who happen to have $150,000 or so to spend. Both are developing next-generation gadgets that promise to break through the previous time and distance limitations. According to a 2007 story in Popular Mechanics, Jetpack’s upcoming $200,000 T73 model, scheduled for release sometime in 2008, will burn jet fuel instead of using hydrogen peroxide, and will remain aloft for 19 minutes with an 11-mile travel range. Meanwhile, TAM is working to develop its own Jet Belt, whose single titanium jet engine will be capable of delivering 490 pounds of thrust.

So will jet packing become the next hot extreme sport? As this YouTube video suggests, it must be incredible fun. The downside: As the manufacturers readily admit, personal flying devices are pretty dangerous and require lots of careful training. Is the prospect of a careless adrenaline junkie running out of fuel and plummeting to Earth — or crash-landing on the roof of your house — simply too great of a risk? Express your opinion below.