USB prosthetic finger gives new meaning to thumbdrives

This is a story about Jerry Jalava, a Finnish software developer who lost part of his finger in a motorcycle accident last July. According to his friend, Henri Bergius, when the surgeon assigned to work on Jalava's prosthetic finger discovered his hacking history, he made a clever suggestion: Incorporate a USB key into the new digit.

The prosthetic finger contains a 2GB USB key, and Jalava also loaded it with Billix distribution, CouchDBX, and Ajatus to run off the drive, throwing even more geek cred into the mix.

When Jalava needs the drive, he simply pulls it off his left hand, plugs it in, and comes back to pick it up after the transfers are finished. That dispels any parallels to that scene in Robocop when he uses the giant spike that comes out of his hand to transfer data from the OCP criminal database to the computer in his head.

Check out more pictures of Jalava's cybernetic finger below.
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Rent-a-scooter public transportation

Not surprisingly, the "Link" Urban Scooter System was designed by a student since it's hard to imagine one's grannie hopping onto one of these electric scooters that you see kids and those with a refined sense of balance zipping around on. Still, the idea is there and can surely be adapted for something more in tune with public transportation. On its own merits, University of New South Wales' Anton Grimes gets brownie points from us for not only keeping to a green theme here, he's oh-so-cleverly blended his scooter kiosk with the ubiquitous street lamp. It's barely intrusive, plus the lamppost even doubles as a charger. Switch the scooter for a Segway, and we're sold.

Via Australian Design Award site

A new spin on battery technology

Researchers at the universities of Miami, Tokyo, and Tohoku have discovered a new form of battery.

Charged by the application of a very strong magnetic field, the Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) contains a set of nano-magnets--zones some 5 nanometers across in a zinc-gallium-arsenic-magnesium matrix--which absorb energy and then release it over time. Although the effect had been predicted, the size and duration of the result was not.

"We had anticipated the effect, but the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes, rather than for milliseconds as we had expected," said one of the researchers, in a story in ScienceDaily. "That this was counterintuitive is what lead to our theoretical understanding of what was really going on."
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Attack of the killer robo-gardeners

I'm allergic to tomatoes. Also black olives and mushrooms. That means I'm about the worst guy in the world to order a pizza with. But tomatoes are in about everything. Tacos, spaghetti--you name it, it's got tomatoes.
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World's first 3D invisibility cloak

At the rate researchers are going with this obsession to get out a working invisibility cloak, we'll soon have one in our wardrobe. So the next time something goes bump in the dark, that could well be me in my Vivienne Westwood-designed invisibility cloak.

Unlike Duke University's virgin attempt back in 2006, Rice University scientists claim they have developed the world's first 3D metamaterial which works by channeling specific wavelengths of light from many directions into one uniform direction.

There's a lot of scientific mumbo jumbo you can read about here on Rice University's nanoantenna technology which, translated, is really about manipulating light to trick your eyes. Too bad this can't be bottled into a raygun that we can zap at certain folks whom we'd like to make invisible.

Via MSNBC

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