Filed under: Government, Heinlein, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, tech
Not quite a year ago I wrote about the Raytheon Sarcos powered exoskeleton, which was a major step towards the Powered Armor of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Well, now there’s some competition:
HULC
Dismounted Soldiers often carry heavy combat loads that increase the stress on the body leading to potential injuries. With a HULC exoskeleton, these loads are transferred to the ground through powered titanium legs without loss of mobility.
The HULC is a completely un-tethered, hydraulic-powered anthropomorphic exoskeleton that provides users with the ability to carry loads of up to 200 lbs for extended periods of time and over all terrains. Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and upper-body lifting. There is no joystick or other control mechanism. The exoskeleton senses what users want to do and where they want to go. It augments their ability, strength and endurance. An onboard micro-computer ensures the exoskeleton moves in concert with the individual. Its modularity allows for major components to be swapped out in the field. Additionally, its unique power-saving design allows the user to operate on battery power for extended missions. The HULC’s load-carrying ability works even when power is not available.
There’s also a video of the thing in action.
Now, this is not Powered Armor. Not even close. In fact, it doesn’t even provide support or enhancement for the arms – just the legs. The “load carrying ability” is nothing more than a extendable arm from the back of the unit, which is worn like a backpack – you could do the same thing with any kind of backpack rig.
That said, this is a very interesting piece of equipment. It is slimmer and more universal than the Sarcos system. It packs into a bag the size of a decent sized backpack, and can be unfolded and put on in about 30 seconds. Without the batteries, it weighs about 50 pounds. (I wonder what the battery load is?) As noted, it is worn like a traditional backpack when in use, the main unit looks to be only 4 or 5 inches thick, allowing for another more normal backpack to be put on over it. It will allow the user to run for prolonged periods at 7 mph, with bursts up to 10 mph, and seems more flexible than the Sarcos system. In fact, it looks like it wouldn’t be much worse in terms of limitations than the metal-sided knee brace I used to wear while doing SCA combat, and a lot better than the armor most people wear for such activity. If it actually works as shown, this would extend the functional exertion period of your average soldier considerably, as well as increasing their capabilities in terms of weight carried and speed of movement.
Beyond the purely military applications, I can easily see this sort of system in use to assist those who are partially disabled, as well as in some employment positions.
I doubt that we’ll see these units on the battlefield anytime soon. But they remind me of the early aeroplanes – those rickety and somewhat jerry-rigged structures which barely flew. They were of only marginal use in WWI. But look how far they developed by the end of WWII.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)
I wrote this the other day:
See, some time back I decided that I needed to watch the 2001 movie remake Planet of the Apes. I’d been on a bit of a Tim Burton kick, and figured that I should see this, even though it had been widely panned and looked dreadful.
It was dreadful. I watched it last night. Muddled plot. Pointless special effects. Sub-par acting. Unrealistic and inconsistent sciency-stuff. Absurd set-up for a sequel which was never made. Technology just 30 years ahead (of when the movie was made) that supposedly would survive for over a thousand years after crashing from orbit. Ballistic ridiculousness. Biological impossibilities.
I could go on – even for bad SF, this was inexcusable. But, since the movie is not exactly current, and they wisely decided not to make a sequel, it’s not worth the effort. I just thought that I should report on my reaction to the thing.
Maybe some more later –
Jim Downey
I just conducted a little experiment. It’s one you can probably try yourself.
See, some time back I decided that I needed to watch the 2001 movie remake Planet of the Apes. I’d been on a bit of a Tim Burton kick, and figured that I should see this, even though it had been widely panned and looked dreadful. But before watching it, I figured that I should watch the original once again, so that I’d have it fresh in my mind for the comparison to the remake. So both movies went onto my NetFlix queue.
I saw Planet of the Apes when it first came out. I remember seeing it, and being just completely blown away by the phenomenal story and really cool ending twist. Hey, I was 10. But while I no longer consider it phenomenal, it is a good movie, and I have seen it probably a dozen times since.
Anyway, the 1968 version arrived yesterday. Since Monday is a holiday, I decided that I’d watch it and get it back in the mail today – no reason for it hanging around. Last night I wasn’t feeling great, and this morning was a little more busy than I had planned. So about 11:00, I sat down to watch the movie, aware that I wanted to be done before the mailman arrived (usually between 1:00 and 2:00 on Saturdays). Feeling a little time pressure, I figured I could maybe zip through some of the opening bits and whatnot at a faster speed, get done more quickly.
I decided to watch the movie on my computer, where I could set the speed at 1.5x normal. It compresses sound in some way automatically, so that things don’t sound too weird. I’d done this previously with parts of other movies I already knew and wanted to get through. And here’s the thing: I was able to watch the entire movie at 1.5x speed, and it seemed just fine.
OK, I slowed down some of the “action sequences” to normal speed. But those were like a total of 10 or fifteen minutes. All the rest of it – all the dialogue, all the traveling, all the plot development – seemed perfectly normal at 1.5x speed.
Hmm.
I was done in plenty of time, so I went back and rewatched the ending at the normal 1.0x speed. It seemed to take forever to get through it.
Hmm.
Now, this could just be due to the fact that I know the movie pretty well, and my mind was able to fill in the emotional development usually tied to visual/spoken narrative without a problem. But I think it has more to do with how we’ve been conditioned to experience movies currently. We expect them to move more quickly, for the information to be conveyed in a more rapid pace.
It could just be due to the style of current film-making, with quicker cuts and More Jam-Packed Special Effects!
Or it could be that our lives really are faster now than they used to be.
1.5 times faster.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Failure, Government, ISS, movies, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Star Trek, Survival, tech, Travel, UFO
This item made the news yesterday:
Scientists eye debris after satellite collision
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites — one American, the other Russian — smashed into each other hundreds of miles above the Earth.
NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.
The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said.
Wow: two satellites have collided in orbit, destroying both. This is the first time such a major collision has ever occurred.
The satellites were Cosmos 2251, a Russian communication relay satellite that’s been defunct for a decade, and an Iridium satellite, one of a fleet of communication satellites launched by Motorola in the late 90s and early 2000s.
* * *
There have been collisions in space before, but never from such large satellites — the Iridium bird was about 700 kg, and the Cosmos was about the same — and never resulting in a total wipeout like this. Again, if I have my numbers about right, the explosion resulting from the energy of impact would have been about the same as detonating a ton of TNT.
I had to chuckle at this comment in that thread at Bad Astronomy:
But wouldn’t the impact have made a new, ever more powerful hybrid satellite? It would have an over-arching need to communicate and would do so in Russian. The only way to make it stop broadcasting a constant barrage at us would be if it mistook someone for its designer at Motorola and then. . . Oh wait, this isn’t Star Trek.
No, not at all. When you have two large satellites, each moving at something on the order of about 5 miles a second hit one another at nearly right angles, then you don’t get any kind of hybrid. You get a mess. As in a debris cloud of upwards of a thousand bits and pieces of space junk, some of it substantial, most of it still moving at thousands of miles an hour, and all of it dangerous.
I’ve written previously about the threat of real ‘UFOs’ to our space exploration. From the quoted article in that post:
The reason is life-and-death. Since Mercury days, NASA engineers have realized that visual sightings of anomalies can sometimes provide clues to the functioning — or malfunctioning — of the spaceships that contain their precious astronauts. White dots outside the window could be spray from a propellant leak, or ice particles, flaking insulation, worked-loose fasteners (as in this latest case) or inadvertently released tools or components.
Whatever the objects might be, they pose a threat of coming back in contact with the spacecraft, potentially causing damage to delicate instruments, thermal tiles, windows or solar cells, or fouling rotating or hinged mechanisms. So Mission Control needs to find out about them right away in order to determine that they are not hazardous.
Right now the bulk of that debris cloud is about 250 miles higher than the ISS. But it will slowly drift closer (the effect of atmospheric drag – even at that altitude, it will slow anything in orbit, meaning that the item in question will drop to a lower orbit). At some point, this could be a real threat to the space station.
And beyond that, it is a further complication to *any* effort to get into something other than a low Earth orbit. Currently we have something like tens of thousands of bits of “space junk” that have to be tracked – and while all of it will eventually fall back into the atmosphere and burn up, it can present a real danger. If we’re not careful, we could encase ourselves in a shell of so much junk that it would basically eliminate the possibility of travel beyond our planet for decades.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Predictions, Reproduction, Science, Science Fiction, Synesthesia
I’ve written previously about synesthesia, and most recently said this:
The implication is that there is a great deal more flexibility – or ‘plasticity’ – in the structure of the brain than had been previously understood.
Well, yeah. Just consider how someone who has been blind since birth will have heightened awareness of other senses. Some have argued that this is simply a matter of such a person learning to make the greatest use of the senses they have. But others have suspected that they actually learn to use those structures in the brain normally associated with visual processing to boost the ability to process other sensory data. And that’s what the above research shows.
OK, two things. One, this is why I have speculated in Communion of Dreams that synesthesia is more than just the confusion of sensory input – it is using our existing senses to construct not a simple linear view of the world, but a matrix in three dimensions (with the five senses on each axis of such a ‘cube’ structure). In other words, synesthesia is more akin to a meta-cognitive function. That is why (as I mentioned a few days ago) the use of accelerator drugs in the novel allows users to take a step-up in cognition and creativity, though at the cost of burning up the brain’s available store of neurotransmitters.
And now there is more evidence that synesthesia is a more complex matter than researchers had previously understood:
Seeing color in sounds has genetic link
Now, Asher and colleagues in the United Kingdom have done what they say is the first genetic analysis of synesthesia. Their findings are published this week in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Researchers collected DNA from 196 people from 43 families in which there were multiple members with synesthesia. They looked exclusively at auditory-visual synesthesia, the kind where sound triggers color, which is easier to diagnose than other possible forms.
They expected to find a single gene responsible for synesthesia, but they found that the condition was linked to regions on chromosomes 2, 5, 6, and 12 — four distinct areas instead of one.
“It means that the genetics of synesthesia are much more complex than we thought,” Asher said.
No surprise there. The article goes on to discuss what may be happening physiologically – researchers are still trying to construct a model of how synesthesia actually happens in the brain, and still tend to see it as something which “goes wrong” developmentally. The supposition, according to the CNN article, is that there is a failure of a necessary “pruning” of cross-wiring in the young brain.
But what if it is instead a meta-cognitive function, something which is emerging as part of ongoing evolution of the human brain? In other words, an enhancement of our current ability to think and remember, by allowing our brains a bit more complexity in the neural connections?
Hmm.
Jim Downey
OK, I’m back from my wanderings. And naturally enough, I have a nasty touch of plague to show for it. Even though I have way too much to do, I will mostly take it easy today and see if I can get rid of the gak, so that I can be more productive later this week.
But I just had to take a moment and post this item, sent by a friend while I was gone:
Klingon sword used in two Colorado Springs heists
A man wielding a “Star Trek Klingon-type sword” robbed two Colorado Springs convenience stores early this morning, police said.
The first robbery happened at about 1:55 a.m. at a 7-Eleven at 145 N. Spruce St., Colorado Springs police said in an incident report. The second robbery happened at about 2:20 a.m. at a 7-Eleven store at 2407 N. Union Blvd.
Witnesses told police that a man wearing a black mask, black jacket and blue jeans entered the stores carrying a sword. The armed robber took an undisclosed amount of cash and fled on foot from both stores, police said.
Officers searched the area but didn’t find the robber or the weapon, which was described as a “bat’leth.”
You have to wonder if that is how it was actually described in the police report. If so, some cop in Colorado Springs is a serious Trek fan. And someone should contact the Department of Homeland Security – this could be an indication of a real illegal alien problem.
Jim Downey
(HT to Wendel Kate. Cross posted to UTI
Filed under: Faith healing, Health, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech
(A time-delayed post while I am off to the urban jungles of the Northeast. Pray for me. – JD)
(Fortune Small Business) — It may sound like quack medicine, but electricity can help cuts and wounds heal faster. Studies published in the journal Nature in 2005 confirmed it: Our cells work like tiny chemical batteries. Wounds short-circuit them, and a jolt of voltage helps heal them.
Now a small medical company hopes to cash in, with the world’s first over-the-counter electric bandage.
Vomaris Innovations, based in Chandler, Ariz., recently went to market with the Prosit adhesive bandage, which uses microscopic batteries mounted on a flexible membrane to pass a tiny amount of current – 1.2 volts – over the affected skin. Though the process isn’t understood entirely, Vomaris founder Jeff Skiba, 55, won FDA approval for use of the Prosit in hospitals after an impressive array of clinical trials showed that it jump-started healing for all patients.
“The process isn’t understood entirely…” Well, I can tell them. It’s obvious.
[Spoiler alert.]
Clearly, what happens is that somehow the mild voltage charge across the skin manages to create a slight weakening of the supression field all around us caused by the alien artifacts surrounding our solar system, thereby allowing our natural psychic abilities to work properly and heal ourselves quickly. It’s all explained completely in the later chapters of Communion of Dreams. I swear, when will these people just simply read my book? It’s all explained in there.
Sheesh.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 