So that’s pretty huge. What we generally hear about when we hear about invisibility is some new trick with metamaterials that allows for cloaking in two-dimensions by bending light around some tiny object. This means that from a single side, the object is concealed. Take a walk around the object, and it reappears. Less like a cloak, more like an invisibility curtain.

The UT team used a different method, known as plasmonic cloaking, to conceal an 18-centimeter cylinder from every direction. This is true “cloaking,” as the plasmonic material is actually coated onto the object to be concealed. These plasmonic materials work by doing the opposite of what normal materials do: reflecting light. When you see an object, it’s because light is bouncing off of it and striking your eyes, which send that info on to the brain for processing. Plasmonic materials scatter light instead, producing what is essentially transparency from all angles of observation.
Ready for the attached strings? This has only been demonstrated with microwaves. In the visible range, the cylinder is still plenty visible. But the UT Austin team thinks that making this work in the visible spectrum isn’t outside the realm of possibility. And if they can pull that off, you’ll know it because it will be leading the news here. In previous studies the team has shown that its plasmonic coating can cloak any object regardless of shape or symmetry. If they can sort this out in visible light, we may someday be able render just about anything invisible.

Recognizing that using a real insect is much easier than starting from scratch to create a device that works like an insect, Case Western Reserve chemistry professor teamed up with graduate student Michelle Rasmussen, biology professor Roy E. Ritzmann, chemistry professor Irene Lee and biology research assistant Alan J. Pollack to develop an implantable biofuel cell to provide usable power for the various sensors, recording devices, or electronics used to control an insect cyborg.

To convert chemical energy harvested from the insect and turn it into electricity, the team used two enzymes in series to create the anode. The first enzyme breaks down the sugar trehalose, which a cockroach constantly produces from its food, into two simpler sugars, called monosaccarides, while the second enzyme oxidizes the monosaccarides to release electrons. A current them flows as the electrons are drawn to the cathode, where oxygen from air takes up the electrons and is reduced to water.

After testing the system using trehalose solution, the team inserted prototype electrodes in a blood sinus away from critical organs in the abdomen of a female cockroach. The cockroaches suffered no long-term damage, which the researchers say bodes well for long-term use.

"Insects have an open circulatory system so the blood is not under much pressure," Ritzmann explained. "So, unlike say a vertebrate, where if you pushed a probe into a vein or worse an artery (which is very high pressure) blood does not come out at any pressure. So, basically, this is really pretty benign. In fact, it is not unusual for the insect to right itself and walk or run away afterward."

Using an instrument called a potentiostat, the team determined the maximum power density of the fuel cell reached nearly 100 microwatts per square centimeter at 0.2 volts, with a maximum current density of about 450 microamps per square centimeter.

The researchers are now working to miniaturize the fuel cell so that it can be fully implanted into an insect while still allowing it to run or fly normally and examining which materials might last for a long time inside an insect. They are also working with other researchers to develop a signal transmitter that can run on little energy and also exploring how to add a lightweight rechargeable battery to the system.

"It’s possible the system could be used intermittently," Scherson said. "An insect equipped with a sensor could measure the amount of noxious gas in a room, broadcast the finding, shut down and recharge for an hour, then take a new measurement and broadcast again."

The teaser video (below) doesn’t offer a ton of information about the computer, but does show off a widget hub in the corner of the desk you can use to launch applications on the screen, and the ability to pull down a timeline populated with news information, tweets, or other alerts from the top corner of the table. Both the widgets and the timeline can be casually swiped away when you’re done with them, and the screen and location of the widgets can be customized to meet your own personal needs. The ExoPC also supports full-screen applications, showing off in the video an app that instantly turns the computer into an electronic piano.

Multi-touch desk computers aren’t really anything new. Samsung for instance recently announced the Samsung SUR40, a 40-inch, 1080p multitouch table running Microsoft’s Surface software. Where the ExoPC stands out, however, is in its price tag. While the SUR40 and other table computers are designed for businesses (and priced that way, the SUR40 is US$8,400!), the ExoPC is instead priced at a modest $1,299 making it affordable for average consumers.

The Samsung SUR40 is expected to be a computer replacement, however, the ExoPC also appears to be something you would use as a replacement for a traditional desk, and a supplement for your actual computer.

The PreVue concept from industrial designer Melody Shiue proposes using 4D ultrasound technology to enhance the bond between a growing fetus and its parents

Checking the health of a baby inside the womb using ultrasound has been going on for a good many years and can be a useful tool for detecting problems early. A new concept from industrial designer Melody Shiue proposes using the technology to enhance the bond between parents and the growing fetus. PreVue would take advantage of developments in e-textile research and advances in ultrasound technology to offer mother and father a live window into the various stages of their little treasure’s development.

Ultrasound scans are often a standard part of prenatal care. Recent advances in technology now offer clinicians and parents more detailed 3D images of the fetus in real-time. Three-dimensional scanning sends in sound waves from a few different angles and a composite still image is produced that shows surface depth and volume. Now another dimension has been added – time. Real-time viewing capabilities have been added into the equation by 4D ultrasound techniques, so that live images of the fetus moving around can be seen on the screen.

As the long-term effects of repeated ultrasound exams on the fetus are still a bit of a gray area, how often such things take place is generally up to the healthcare provider. Shiue looked into the risks and concerns associated with ultrasound scanning while researching her thesis project at the University of South Wales, and told Gizmag that "in compliance with ultrasonic regulations outlined by the British Medical Ultrasound Society, I have proposed limitations on the usage of my device to a fixed frequency (10 MHz), maximum scanning time (20 minutes every 24 hours), and countdown time be apparent on screen with friendly notifications, not ‘warnings’."

The parents themselves, working with their healthcare provider, would be likely to impose their own limits on the use of such a device – one interviewee revealing to the designer that a likely usage window would be 5 to 10 minutes before bedtime, to coincide with a period of high fetal activity.

PreVue would utilize upcoming e-textile technologies to incorporate the viewing screen and electronics into the device. Recent innovations like the bendy micro-LED arrays created by researchers at the University of Illinois and the work undertaken by the STELLA project offer only a glimpse of things to come. It shouldn’t be too long before such things start to make regular military, medical or commercial appearances.

The device would also operate in two image modes – one for general diagnostic purposes and the other with enhanced resolution for more domestic settings. Although its primary use would be as a means of bonding enhancement rather than medical examination, Shiue says that "the user should still seek professional advice if anything is uncertain."

While safety concerns surrounding the use of ultrasound for prenatal care continue to be raised, the fact is that 4D scanning is being offered now and the personal approach offered by a device like PreVue may well be a viable alternative to the impersonal – and perhaps stressful – conditions of an examination room.

In the meantime, PreVue has been entered into the 2011 Australian Design Award/James Dyson Award competition.

This fork, demonstrated at Interaction 2011 and profiled by DigInfo, has an embedded theremin that begins making its unique and oddly unpleasant screeching noises once it touches a person, completing a circuit. But the pitch of the theremin changes based on the feedback from the fork’s tines: The more resistance it encounters, as when you’re gnawing on something particularly tough or chewy, the lower the tone. Oh, and it has a cute name: the EaTheremin.

According to the video’s narrator, "Flexible items like chicken skin can generate vibrato effects as they stretch," so theoretically you could put together a dish that produces a melody, based on the textures you choose. The video above is worth watching if only for the uncomfortably close shots of the spokesperson gnawing sausages and fried chicken. We just hope she made it through the day without feeling too ill.

Someday, This Tree Could Be Producing Its Own Light nauright on Flickr

Taiwanese researchers have come up with the elegant idea of replacing streetlights with trees, by implanting their leaves with gold nanoparticles. This causes the leaves to give off a red glow, lighting the road for passersby without the need for electric power. This ingenious triple threat of an idea could simultaneously reduce carbon emissions, cut electricity costs and reduce light pollution, without sacrificing the safety that streetlights bring.

As many good things do, this discovery came about by accident when the researchers were trying to create lighting as efficient as LEDs without using the toxic, expensive phosphor powder that LEDs rely on. The gold nanoparticles, shaped like sea urchins, put into the leaves of Bacopa caroliniana plants cause chlorophyll to produce the reddish luminescence.

In an added bonus, the luminescence will cause the leaves’ chloroplasts to photosynthesize, which will result in more carbon being captured from the air while the streets are lit. The next steps are to improve the efficiency of the bioluminescence and apply the technology to other biomolecules.

The amazing disappearing concrete block

Clever augmented reality applications are becoming the natural byproducts of our modern computers–computers that are tiny, have eyes and other location-aware sensors, and are able to place a synthetic layer of information on our view of the world around us.

The latest is this "invisible" block of solid concrete dreamed up by artists Daniel Franke and Markus Kison. So how does it work?

When a viewer approaches the fixed concrete block mounted at an angle on a pedestal in the middle of a gallery, a rotating cameras on top picks up his/her face and calculates the viewer’s exact line of site. Custon software (written with the visually-oriented openFrameworks platform) then computes the exact angle and composition of the scene being blocked by the cube and projects it onto the face of the concrete. So, if you’re aligned properly, you see right "through" the block at the uninterrupted forms of the chair and bench on the other side.

The project is called "Durchsehen, Exp. 01 (augmented perspective)" and was displayed at a gallery in Berlin this year.

Lo-Res Lambo United Nude Lo Res Project

This is a Lamborghini Countach. It was created by taking a hyper-accurate 3-D model of an actual Lamborghini (made up of millions of polygons), then gradually decreasing the resolution of the model with 3-D software until the object is lo-resed down to its stealthy essence. United Nude, a shoe company founded by Rem D. Koolhaas (nephew to the Rem Koolhass), is applying this interesting technique (which they’ve dubbed the "Lo Res Project") to its shoe designs.

Here’s one of the first shoes to be designed with the process:

Lo Res Shoe  United Nude Lo Res Project

I really like the effect. It’s a purely modern composition form, taking a medium most often used to create digital objects that are indistinguishable from their real-world counterparts. But here, they’re broken down into newly abstract geometric shapes that out of their very nature preserve notes of the original object; each data point that remains in the simplified form existed in the original, more accurate model. It’s what happens when you tell the software to show you a Lamborghini rendered with 24 triangles instead of 24 million.

The other trick here is that the low-resolution form is then what’s manufactured into a physical real-world object. With advanced 3-D scanners and 3-D printers, it’s even possible to skip the whole process of creating the 3-D model from scratch; just scan your object, render the ensuing model at a lower resolution, then press "print." And out comes your Lamborghini lite.

After a weekend using the iPad, I’ve realized I’m not interested in hedging my reaction to it with careful considerations of its lack of a USB port or webcam. It’s not every day, or every year or maybe even every decade that we’re able to see a piece of technology that takes a familiar human experience–here, using a computer–and fundamentally changes it. But that is what I think the iPad has done.

Maybe this is a honeymoon phase. Time will tell. But I don’t think it is. To support that, and because I know no one wants to read another monolithic 3,000-word iPad review running through every feature, what follows are some assorted notes and impressions from my first weekend of using this machine and how it pertains to the future of using computers. Some may be on the fragmentary side–please jump in the comments if you feel inspired to add to the conversation or would like to hear more.

The Screen

It starts from the moment you pick it up and that obsidian black pool comes to life. On paper it’s not by any means the highest-resolution screen at 1024×768 spread over 9.7 inches of diagonal glass. Many netbooks pack a higher resolution into the same size. But somehow, it manages to be the most breathtaking screen I’ve ever seen. Maybe because there’s basically nothing else–an inch of black glass bezel surrounds it, rimmed by a thin lip of aluminum, but from the front that’s it. All screen. And its saturation and clarity is astounding.

And oh yeah, you can touch it. You can touch everything, and it reacts instantly. It’s fast. The glass feels cool and smooth on your finger, but after a while you’re not touching glass. You’re touching words, pictures, buttons, everything. The Internet. And everything responds.

Plenty of words have been written about the iPad’s touchscreen interface, and I can pretty much guarantee that none of them will mean anything to you until you use it. It just can’t be expressed. On paper it’s just a giant iPod touch. Yes, I’ve heard that a few times, even said it myself. But then it’s in your hand and you’re gliding your finger over your favorite websites, panning around the globe with your pinkie tip in Google Maps, feeling like a CIA analyst manning some future spy satellite terminal. It’s one brainstem-level pleasure after another; it reacts to some base human instinct to touch and manipulate something shiny put in front of us, and well, we can’t really argue with the brain stem, can we?

And that’s why it changes everything. The layers of abstraction are gone, and we’re interacting with graphical information in the most natural way possible. Apple’s unrelenting focus on simplicity means everything but the touch drops away.

Nothing But Interface

Think about it–on your computer, interfaces are stacked inside each other like a Russian doll. The web site you’re looking at sits inside the browser, which sits inside a folder, which sits inside your operating system. Each interface has its own set of conceits and constraints, meaning the resulting experienced is subject to a great many rules dictating what it can and can’t be. But that’s not how it is on the iPad. There, a weather app adopts the perfect interface for browsing weather information–pinch and zoom on the giant world radar map; tap the forecast and current conditions blocks for more detailed pop-ups. You touch and it responds. And that’s just weather.

The Future of Software is Becoming the Future of Hardware

Like the iPhone, the iPad is a blank slate ready to morph into any device with any interface imaginable. It’s a million gadgets in one, with each able to express itself with the perfect interface. The hardware is designed to fade into the background, so in a way, developers are conjuring their software into tangible, concrete things that act, essentially, as hardware. The list of physical real word objects the iPhone has made irrelevant: cheap pocket digital camera, GPS navigator, e-reader, voice recorder, bicycle computer, iPod–the list goes on. The iPad, with a screen four times the size, will only make this list longer.

Using the iPad on the Toilet

Is so, so great. Apple’s case with its wedge-shaped lap stand is an essential tool here.

With a Keyboard

For more proof of how this is the future, connect any Bluetooth keyboard. Immediately, Apple’s Pages (the significance of which I’ve already written about) becomes the coolest word processor I’ve ever used. A word processor? Cool? But with Words and a wireless keyboard, you can enter text just like we’ve been doing for generations, and see it appear on a blank white screen. Then pick up this screen, turn it vertically, and add pictures and other formatting with your fingers. Touch a misspelled word and pick the proper correction. Even after a few days, I already know this is how I want to create anything made of pictures and text in the future.

I’m Typing on the iPad RIGHT NOW

I wasn’t going to honor the cliche of typing a review of a device on the device itself, but now that I paired up a Bluetooth keyboard i had in the cupboard, I can’t help myself.

Going From an iPad Back to an iPhone

Is hilarious. The same interface motifs put back on a tiny screen makes the proportions seem completely out of whack. Making the world’s most advanced smartphone look like a baby’s toy is something Apple can’t be excited about. This, more than anything, lends credence to the rumors of a new iPhone this summer with a higher resolution display.

It’s not Perfect

Believe it or not, a gadget can change computing forever but still have flaws. Shocking, I know! Almost all of the gripes over what the iPad lacks miss the point, but the one that’s spot on? The iPad needs multitasking.

Not the multitasking we’re used to on the desktop computer. No task bar, no ctrl-alt-delete. Just a small, elegant way to tell us when we have a new IM or email while we’re reading Twitter or playing a game. The ability to let apps that play music continue to play it while we do other things.

Without this, one of the internet’s fundamental forms of communication–the instant message–is basically impossible on the iPad. This thing is supposed to replace the laptop you keep open while you watch TV at home, right? Well, what you do on that laptop is keep 12 browser tabs open and four Google Chat windows, responding to them at your leisure. Not possible on the iPad.

Something like Android’s pull-down notifications drawer would work. In fact, the iPad’s interface already hints at this–when a song is playing in the iPod app, you get a little play icon in the ever-present black strip at the top. It’s less than a centimeter thick, but that’s all it needs to be. Apple, open up that area to the SDK and let apps notify you of things there–with the iPad’s increased screen real estate, it’s time to turn the iPhone’s fairly puny background notification system into something truly usable.

Without it, I find myself flying around from app to app at an exhausting pace. Ironically, Apple’s rigid focus on apps performing one task at a time that actually, I think, reduces the focus you’re able to give any one app on the screen. I’d love to read Moby Dick on the iPad for free, but, NEW EMAIL! Someone has to have replied to my wittily provocative tweet on Queequeg’s mark by now, RIGHT? Tap tap tap. Book interrupted.

Do You Need an iPad?

No. As many others have pointed out, it’s just another device. But you/I didn’t need an iPod when they first came out either. But when the iPod debuted, I was content to connect a tape deck to my computer to record the dozen or so MP3s I could suck down from Napster through my 56k modem during any given month. I just didn’t see the need because I didn’t have thousands of MP3s. The content environment was not yet ready.

Do we “need” an iPod today? We still don’t. But MP3s are now a much larger part of our lives than they were in 2001 (which, of course, the iPod is partly responsible for) The buying question has changed from “do you want to listen to your music portably in this new digital format” to “do you want to listen to your music portably.” What will the iPad’s similar commodity be? Until that’s defined, no one needs one. But my guess is that it won’t be long until touch-based apps move from novelty to necessity.

In Closing

The iPad is not without problems, some of which have the potential to make the Internet a less happy place than it is now. Yes, Apple’s well-documented closed system via iTunes. Apple is turning into a monopolistic recreation of the Hollywood studio system in the 1940s: if you need something done right, you work with us and no one else. But even then, there was more than one major studio. Not now.

This is bad. But fortunately for Apple, it’s bad in a way that creates an unbelievably pure and easy user experience on the iPad. (For more on this, see Joel Johnson responding beautifully to the closed system crowd).

The iPad presents a computing philosophy that not everyone agrees with: unrelenting simplicity at the cost of openness. But it’s hard to argue it’s not a perfect execution of that philosophy.

RKS Redesigned Hot Dog, Rendered RKS

According to both common sense and the American Academy of Pediatrics, there are two truths about hot dogs which neither science nor industry can afford to ignore: kids love hot dogs, and hot dogs are the perfect size and shape for a child to choke on. To wit: “If you were to take the best engineers in the world and asked them to design a perfect plug for a child’s airway, you couldn’t do better than a hot dog,” one AAP doctor said.

As such, the hot dog is in need of a redesign. So the folks at Fast Company took a look at California design house RKS’s quest to cook up a completely rethought hot dog, and they did it using a design tool that is decidedly child-approved: the Play-Doh Fun Factory.

The team started with a blank slate but eventually decided that – in a tip of their hats to tradition – they wouldn’t radically alter the hot dog’s essence; a meat product, packaged with a bun, that more or less serves as a vehicle to get otherwise unmanageable condiments from plate to mouth.

Sketching Out the Future of Food: RKS

After experimenting with hollowed-out dogs, dogs with grooves cut into the sides and even some wieners resembling the more complicated organelles of a living cell, they finally settled on the design below.

RKS’s Favorite Design (With Condiments): RKS

While the notion of redesigning foods to make them less dangerous seems a bit over-ambitious to us – a simple pretzel nearly felled the leader of the free world, proving there’s really no telling what size and shape of delectable snack food is really going to do you in – we are fans of this kind of outside the box thinking. And cylindrical foods really do pose a choking hazard, compounded when you introduce children to the equation. Whether the spiral dog is the future of ballpark and backyard fare is uncertain (we’re thinking probably not), but just in case we’re already thinking up ways to capitalize on the new design. Foie gras–stuffed, bacon wrapped slinky dogs anyone?

If you want to see more hot dog schematics and Play-Doh creations, check out RKS’s Flickr page.