The History of the Yo-Yo

One of my favorite pastimes is reading about inventions. About.com has a good, short article on the surprisingly long and colorful history of the Yo-Yo. Enjoy!

They have been around for over twenty-five hundred years... Around 1800, the yoyo moved into Europe from the Orient.

...

It is a Tagalog word, the native language of the Philippines, and means "come back". In the Philippines, the yoyo was used as a weapon for over 400 hundred years. Their version was large with sharp edges and studs and attached to thick twenty-foot ropes for flinging at enemies or prey.

...

[Modern inventor Donald] Duncan's first contribution to yo-yo technology was the slip string, consisting of a sliding loop around the axle instead of a knot. With this revolutionary improvement, the yo-yo could do a trick called "sleep" for the first time.

Cool.

Robots to Receive Artificial Skin

I'm not a fan of UC Berkeley. The town setting is filthy and filled with creatures you'd never want over for dinner. Much of the campus architecture is revoltingly 'modern' and most of the professors — even in the sciences — are so left wing they belong in another country. But on rare occasions, the odor of genius arises from that swamp.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new technology that may help robots feel, give the sense of touch back to those with prosthetic limbs, and ultimately help robots do the dishes without breaking them (and while they're at it, maybe make a sandwich without turning it into land of the flatlanders).

Amazing.

Also, once they start grafting that stuff onto damaged humans there's just no telling where the future will lead. And that unpredictability about limits is part of the glory of invention.

Artificial Eye from Elastic Electronics

Technology comes in different types: "cool," "fantastic," and "world changing" (though, admittedly, there are shades in between). It would be difficult to know exactly where to put this one, but I lean toward the last.

[Researchers at] the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have taken artificial vision to the next level by designing a fully artificial eyeball, which could one day "plug in" to the optic nerve for a vision replacement or enhancement.

[Professors Huang, Cummings, and Rogers] teamed up to create a naturally curved array of silicon detectors and electronics that can make in essence a curved camera sensor, which mimics the human eye's design.
...
One critical challenge is that brittle semiconductor materials typically crack under the stress of curving. To overcome this Professor Rogers and Professor Huang created an array of electronics so tiny it was unaffected by the curvature.

Kudos to Drs Huang, Cummings, and Rogers and their grad students.

[Via Jason Mick at Daily Tech]

UCLA Researchers Develop Wearable Kidney

Researchers at UCLA have developed a wearable kidney-like device that would eliminate the need for dialysis. Unlike dialysis, though, the device functions continuously, avoiding the buildup of toxins that occurs in between traditional treatments.

UCLA–VA has also signed an exclusive licensing agreement with the Singapore-based company AWAK Technologies Pte. Ltd. to develop [the] commercial wearable kidney based on the design by Martin Roberts, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a dialysis consultant with the VA Healthcare System, and David B.N. Lee, a professor of medicine at the Geffen School and a consultant nephrologist at the VA.

...

The design for the peritoneal-based artificial kidney — which is "bloodless" and reduces or even eliminates protein loss and other dialysis-related problems — is summarized in an article published in the current issue of the journal Clinical and Experimental Nephrology...

Amazing. What's even more amazing is that, according to the story, the two funded the research that led to the invention out of their own pockets.

Bravo to doctors Lee and Roberts.

[Hat tip: Levi Beckerson, Daily Tech]

Another Medical Wonder

Dr. Karen Wooley and her colleagues at Washington University are developing chemo-toxins delivered by nanoparticles to combat brain tumors. (The blood brain barrier makes it difficult to effectively deliver many compounds inside the brain. Nanoparticle technologies promise a way to get around that.)

Some of the properties of the nanoparticle important to Wooley's group are its carrying capacity and the way it releases the cancer toxin into the body. Most polymeric based nanoparticles have at best a three to four percent drug capacity. Wooley's group's particles boast an up to 19 percent loading, five times the typical delivery vehicle's capacity. While the large increase in toxin is beneficial, not all of the toxin in these particles will be released.

Another difference is the rate at which the drug is released into the patient. Most cancer-targeting nano and macroparticles verily explode a cancer cell in one way or another. The WU group's particles are designed to release the toxin more slowly over time. The group is working to tune these properties further, allowing a tailored particle delivery vehicle.

Kudos to another hero of medical science.

[Hat tip to Daily Tech]

Choose The Future: Embryonic Screening

Couples in the UK can now choose to have a baby free of certain genes that increase the propensity for select diseases. Through a method called embryonic screening:

The couple produced 11 embryos, of which five were found to be free from the gene. Two of these were implanted in the woman’s womb and she is now 14 weeks pregnant.
...
Doctors screened out from the woman’s embryos an inherited gene that would have left the baby with a greater than 50% chance of developing [breast] cancer.

While the risks of developing cancer are often overstated (reporters sometimes overemphasize the genetic factors), this is nonetheless fantastic news. Here again we see a technique that applies to a specific problem that could be adapted to many others.

The story doesn't specify who developed the technique [researchers at Guy's Hospital in London], but hats off to the couple's physician, Dr. Paul Serhal, medical director of the Assisted Conception Unit at University College London hospital, for his courage in electing to use it.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Engineering Titan

I've published a brief biographical article outlining some of Brunel's spectacular achievements in 19th century Britain.

Here's an excerpt:

In 1843 another Brunel first took to the sea: the SS Great Britain. It was so mammoth it had to be fastened together with over three million rivets, used to connect 30,000 wrought iron plates. The ship was so large the engineer had to invent new methods of launching a ship from drydock. It took 21 hydraulics over three weeks to get it into the water.

But the real innovation lay in its method of propulsion. It was the first ocean-going iron ship with a screw propeller. Brunel’s propeller design was a feat of genius. It was so efficient that even contemporary designs, aided by supercomputers working on advanced hydrodynamic equations, have improved upon it by only five percent.

Still, the great engineer was just getting warmed up...

See the full article at Atlasphere

[Note: If required, registration is free and you don't have to supply any personal information.]

If you go there, please rate the article. Comments are also very welcome.

Pig Dust Regenerates Digits

While some of the things discussed in this article are speculative, it does report that regrowth of small body parts has already been achieved. If true (Pop Sci has a tendency to over-promise), the items mentioned would be valuable additions to medical practice.

The day may not be far off, to use the style of the magazine, when professionals can replace limbs as easily as creating auto parts via CAD/CAM machinery.

That would be wondrous, indeed.

Science In the News

There are often tidbits of scientific advances in the news. Sometimes they get more press when it's something spectacular. But often, truly major events go largely unreported.

An example of the first is the recent results from the Mars project that may have discovered ice. While no fan of the space program overall, since it is government funded and often aims at goals that are of little practical value to anyone, I have to admire the superb technical ability that goes into achieving its aims.

Finding, and verifying, that ice (and therefore possibly some simple life forms) exists on Mars is one good case in point.

But for my money, the next item is the one that is truly worthy of unabashed praise.

Researchers reporting in the June 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine say this is the first time a patient's cloned T cells used alone have put an advanced solid-tumor cancer into complete remission.

The man was followed for two years, at which time he was still in remission.

As an ex-student of physics I have a greater emotional push toward the first story. But, objectively, I'm aware of how fantastically complex cancer is and how difficult it is to treat, especially in the way that Dr. Cassian Yee and team have done. Breakthroughs like this do much more than stop a very nasty condition; they lead to larger advances that apply to many areas.

Sincere and massive kudos to the modern day explorers of large and small who show the creativity, rationality, and courage to keep driving the frontiers ever onward. They are the true heroes of our age.

A Paean For Packaging

Sometimes what seem like small things in life are actually of larger significance. Think for a moment about what has happened to packaging over the past 50 years.

The variety alone is stunning. Simple stereo boxes filled with specially shaped foam and bubble wrap keep delicate equipment secure across continents. Soup cans pop open with a light pull on a small metal ring. Frozen orange juice containers open with an easy tug on a plastic strip.

Think of the advances in food safety, weight reduction, and more. A simple plastic mayonnaise jar closes with the twist of a perfectly fitting lid. At the same time, eliminating glass has made them lighter to ship and much less likely to break.

The examples and benefits could be multiplied a hundredfold. All this thanks, in large part, due to the ingenuity of a type of engineer who rarely receives any public notice or praise. Not regarded as glamorous, or even notorious, like structural engineers, they nonetheless make our lives immensely better in a thousand ways.

I've found myself in restaurants wanting to shake the hand of and to pay the bill for a returning soldier. If I could so easily identify a package designer, I'd want to do the same.

There are some devils among them, to be sure. Whoever designed those seals on the tops of some CDs deserves jail time. But that was as much a marketing decision by someone with a lack of imagination about theft reduction as anything. One shouldn't blame bullet manufacturers for the scum who use a weapon on the wrong person.

On the whole, though, they deserve all the paeans they almost never receive, except perhaps from their colleagues. (And, knowing corporations as intimately as I regrettably do, not often from them, I'd bet.) It's altogether fitting that the word "paean" was coined to describe a hymn of praise to Apollo, the god of reason.

Package designers, I lift my goblet to your divinity.

Hamilton Ventura, Timeless Timepiece

In 1957, the Hamilton Watch company gave me a present and didn't even know it. They developed and sold the Hamilton Ventura watch. Stylish and full of technological innovations, it remains 50 years later at the pinnacle of timepiece design.

It was the first electric watch, years ahead of its time. Its look is timeless. Though copied many times since (it's still in production in some forms), the originals can readily be found on the vintage watch market, selling for around $1,500-$,2500. (New ones are roughly $650.)

For all you'd want to know about its history, look to Rene Rondeau, one of the world's experts on the subject.

As if that weren't enough, there's even a chronograph version.

Please avoid drooling on the watch, admittedly difficult.

Iconoclasts everywhere are grateful to designer Richard Arbib and the Hamilton Watch company.

IBM Water-cooled 3-D Chips

IBM develops water-cooled 3-D chips.

"Scientists at the firm have shown off a prototype device layered with thousands of 'hair-width' cooling arteries. They believe it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components."

Cool, in every sense of the word. But hot, too.

The heroes at the IBM labs continue to bring electronics engineering into the 21st century. Ever restless, ever inventive, these men and women deserve high kudos for their endless technical creativity. But even more, they've earned the highest moral praise for being among the best representatives of human reason in one of its finest forms.

Too often today, in a world fortunate enough to see these sorts of advances frequently, some greet news of this type with a shrug. But remember what that good fortune fundamentally depends on: the freedom to exercise rational creativity.

That casual attitude may come not from distaste for technology — those people are probably irredeemable — but simply from taking it for granted. Taking that creativity and freedom for granted, though, is roughly the same as taking your loved one for granted. They soon are gone.

Consider some oft-cited statistics:

• Just 50 years ago TVs were uncommon in the home
  
• A mere 30 years ago PCs were barely more than a hobbyist's kit
  
• Only 20 years ago mobile phones were absent from all but a few luxury autos
  
• Little more than 10 years ago the Internet was sparsely populated

So, while the technology is definitely cool, in an era when many are trying to drive us back to the 12th century, let's rouse ourselves to generate some passionate heat for those heroes who create it and the philosophy that sustains them. Otherwise, they too might soon be gone.

Brain-Activated Mechanical Arm Invented

As evidence that good things, sometimes great things, still do happen in the world, I offer the following:

Scientists Create Neuro-activated Mechanical Arm

"Scientists implanted a grid with 100 tiny electrodes (about the size of a large freckle) on the motor cortex in two monkeys.

The grid in each monkey was connected to a neuron with wires from the brain to a computer that analyzed the collective firing of the neurons, translated that into an electronic command and sent it instantaneously to the arm."

What's especially great is that the article's author really understands what has happened here, beyond the advent of a great new technology:

"When science is uncluttered by political agendas, dubious methodology and other junk, every miracle is within the reach of the mind of man."

Bravo to Dr. Andrew Schwarz and his team at the University of Pittsburgh for their achievement. Kudos, too, to the editorial writer at the Tribune-Review for advertising and celebrating it. This is the sort of thing that should (and used to) be front page news. We should never become blasé about things like this, no matter how commonplace they become.