What you smell may be a marker for their slow death. After noticing that professional conservators smelled paper while doing their assessments, researchers from University College London’s Centre for Sustainable Heritage used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to identify and quantify the substances released by old books.
Their report in the journal Analytical Chemistry identified acetic acid, furfural, and lipid peroxidation products in various proportions depending on the types of paper, binding and inks used, and they suggest that a “sniff test” may be useful to identify books in need of the attention of a conservator.
And how does one describe the smell of old books to a non-chemist? The next time you attend a wine tasting, deftly switch the conversation to books and tell your friends that what you love is…
“…a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.”
His friends call him “the man with the bionic bottom.” Ged Galvin permanently lost control of his colon after a motorcycle accident. But surgeons moved one of his knee muscles to his colon and attached electrodes to it. He can clench or unclench it with a remote control that he carries in his pocket:
“They call me the man with the bionic bottom, but that doesn’t bother me. My gratitude to the surgeons is endless because what they have done is a miracle.”
Mr Galvin, who had previously endured the indignity of carrying a colostomy bag, added: “I thought that in these days of modern medicine surely there was something they could do. They’d mended everything else – why not this? Anything was better than a colostomy bag.
“The operation changed my life and gave me back my pride and confidence. Because of the remote control I can lead a normal life again.”
Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnologist at the University of Washington, writes that in the future, biotech innovations could lead to display screens inside contact lenses:
These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.
Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.
This little guy was found with a broken leg, but vets couldn’t convince themselves to put it down, so instead they gave it a bionic leg made with steel pins, nuts and bolts so she could start walking around on her own.
Cathy Jackman, a diver, spotted the tiny blue bird struggling to keep afloat off Brixham in Devon.
She plucked the distressed budgie – nicknamed Captain – from the sea and looked after him until they returned to shore.
She said: “When I first saw him he was flapping and disappearing under the water. He nearly drowned as he couldn’t take off or swim.
Festo, has been shown here on Neatorama several times in the past and each time their robotics and bizarre creations blew our collective minds…our Neatorama Hivemind to be exact…but that’s a story for another time.
In this video you’ll get to see creepy blue LED robotic penguins swimming about in a large pool. Also, you’ll see it’s more lighter cousin who probably is the envy of every penguin in being able to fly/float and much more in terms of various robotic creations. Really fascinating stuff!
The company Second Sight has developed a bionic eye called the Argus II. The eye uses implanted electrodes to replace a malfunctioning retina. So far, the device has been implanted in 18 patients around the world.
It uses a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send captured images wirelessly to a tiny receiver on the outside of the eye.
In turn, the receiver passes on the data via a tiny cable to an array of electrodes which sit on the retina – the layer of specialised cells that normally respond to light found at the back of the eye.
When these electrodes are stimulated they send messages along the optic nerve to the brain, which is able to perceive patterns of light and dark spots corresponding to which electrodes have been stimulated.
The hope is that patients will learn to interpret the visual patterns produced into meaningful images.
The BBC followed a 73-year-old patient named Ron who received an Argus II.
“For 30 years I’ve seen absolutely nothing at all, it’s all been black, but now light is coming through. Suddenly to be able to see light again is truly wonderful.
“I can actually sort out white socks, grey socks and black socks.”
IBM has filed for a patent on technology that would heighten reflexes, making it possible to actually dodge bullets. This body armor continuously scans the area for incoming projectviles. When one is detected the system delivers a shock to the body’s muscles, thus creating a reflexive movement away from the incoming bullet.
The present invention relates generally to the protection of an individual against a projectile propelled from a firearm. More particularly, the present invention relates to a body armor system and its method of use that is capable of detecting a projectile propelled from a firearm, computing the trajectory of the projectile, and moving the individual out of the path of the projectile to avoid being hit.
Biomimicry – The practice of developing sustainable human technologies inspired by nature. Sometimes called Biomimetics or Bionics, it’s basically biologically inspired engineering.
After all, who is a better designer than Mother Nature? See 15 examples of technology inspired by nature, from Gecko Tape, which sticks the same way a gecko’s feet stick to a wall, to planes and spacecrafts that heal their own ruptures, like our skin does. Link -Thanks, Kiltak!
Rob Spence of Eyeborg blog is a filmmaker that lost an eye, so naturally he decided to get an eye-cam!
Priya Ganapati of Wired Blog has the story:
Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it’s a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.
The eye he’s considering replacing is not a working one — it’s a prosthetic eye he’s worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.
"If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?" he asks.
Spence, who calls himself the "eyeborg guy," will not be restoring his vision. The camera won’t connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with
the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a "little brother," someone who’s watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.
Link | More on Rob’s blog: Eyeborg | Not squeamish? Check out the surgery video: Link [Dailymotion] – via ligress
We can rebuild it … we have the technology. Here’s the story of Coal, an eight-and-a-half year old dog whose left paw was amputated because of cancer. Instead of putting him down, his owner Reg Walker spent a lot of money to fit him with a bionic leg:
A beloved pet bulldog has been fitted with a £10,000 bionic leg, which will help advance prosthetic techniques used to help bombing victims. [...]
The titanium alloy used mimics animal hide, allowing the skin and the bone from above to seal the metal implant below without it being rejected by the body.
Hope the Maltese puppy was born without front legs, so orthotist David Turnbill made her a wheeled-device (out of airplane model parts) that lets her skate through life!
Emily Bregel of the Times Free Press has the story: Link – via Scribal Terror
Neatorama had a lot of stories and videos about cats in 2007. Here are some of the more popular ones, in case you missed them or want to see them again.
January
Goliath is a twenty-pound cat who got wedged in a dog door!
Video of what became ubiquitous in 2007: LOLcats.
A family of cats performing to a waltz.
Nora lives with a piano teacher, and loves to play the piano. This was later followed by a video of Nora’s Piano Duets. Nora now has a CD available called Cat on the Keys. $2.00 from every CD sold are donated in Nora’s name to Best Friends Animal Society.
A fourth-grade class raised money to buy the disabled cat Xavier a wheelchair. Agui, the cat who can pronounce his own name!
April
Macavity rides a bus by himself to the chip shop! One Useless Cat makes friends with a rat. Kosh doesn’t want to walk on a treadmill.
May
Smokey owes his life to blogger EMT Tom Reynolds.
Video showing how to vacuum a cat. Tama, the cat stationmaster for a Japanese railway. Pippy, the cat who will beg for anything.
June
Mr. Lee’s Cat Cam shows what the world looks like to a cat. Des, the cat with 26 toes!
Where did they come from, anyway? The history of housecats.
The animation every cat owner can relate to: Cat Man Do, by Simon Tofield.
The Flo Control Project must recognize your cat before he can come in the house! Molly survived the washing machine. Fitzy, the fabulous fetching feline.
November
Scientific proof that cats are liquid.
A cat who loves his horse.
Video of a cat that acts like a dog. Snoopy playing an invisible piano.
Video of a dog, a cat, and a crawfish. With earworm music. Lil’Bit, the cat with two faces.
Two cats having a conversation, plus a remix with an English translation. Baby, the bionic cat with metal implants in all four legs.
A kitten battling a ferret.
To compile this list, I sifted through 25 pages of Neatorama’s animal archives, which took a long time because there are so many interesting stories about all kinds of animals. I highly recommend that you take a look!
Scientists have managed to restore a sense of touch to two patients with prosthetic arms, in what is seen as a step towards creating sensitive limbs.
When heat or pressure was applied to the chest, the patients said they felt as if their hand was being touched. Dr Todd Kuiken, who led the research, said it could pave the way to providing amputees with the ability to feel what he touches with a prosthetic hand as if it were his own hand. Via: BBC News
A six-year-old cat named Baby fell from a third-storey window at her home in London and broke both her back legs. Veterinarians fitted her with metal implants to straighten the legs. But it wasn’t the first time. Baby had fallen from the same height as a kitten and already had metal implants in her front legs! Veterinary surgeon Jess Gower said,
“We were stunned to find it was the second time she had done it. Now she has metal implants in all four legs, staff decided to call her the ‘bionic cat’.
“Amazingly, she has healed extremely well and can already move around very well. We hope that in around eight weeks, when we take off the frame, she will move as normal and you’d never know what happened to her.”
To promote the new Bionic Woman series (anyone think this is going to last more than a few episodes?), NBC has created the Bionic Assessment Test. The test is five very short mini games testing hand-eye, memory, and math skills. Apparently, there’s unlockable content if you score 75% or better. Since I apparently have no hope of achieving that distinction, I offer a no-prize to the first commenter that can describe the unlockable content in the comments below. (More Neatorama bionic posts here.)
And since this is my first Neatorama post, here’s a bit about me: the last three books I enjoyed were George R.R. Martin’s A Feast For Crows, China Mieville’s The Scar, and Peggy Rathmann’s 10 Minutes till Bedtime; last two comic books I enjoyed were Kurt Busiek’s third Conan collected volume (The Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories), and Warren Ellis’s Iron Man: Extremis; and my all-time favorite movies are Get Shorty and The Freshman. Feel free to mock/compliment my taste and/or “bionicness” below, or at my own site.
*Update: Congratulations to Steven for being the first to 75%, and being clever enough to cheat. I’m sure you would have dominated the Kobayashi Maru scenario. Check your email for your no-prize. (I’m glad I didn’t invest a lot of time in attaining 75%, that prize seems a bit lackluster.)
If you ever had a toy microscope as a kid, you’ll probably find this neat: EyeClops is like a handheld microscope that plugs into a TV – it will magnify 200 times and display the image right on the TV screen.
Plus it looks like a cross between a giant eyeball and a squirt gun! Not badly priced, around $50. Link – Thanks John!
Advances in bionics, transportation, and other technologies have put comic book superheroes a little closer to reality. This collection of videos looks at a few ways we can achieve “super powersâ€. Link -via Reddit
DARPA, the mad scientist arm of the Defense Department, is working with research institutions to create a bionic arm that is on par with the real thing … by 2009. While not quite there yet, the newest creation by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is pretty amazing: it allows its owner comlete control over all fingers, to feel the sensation of grip through external electrodes, and to walk more naturally due to its ability to swing freely.
The next prototype is even neater – it will be stronger, faster, more flexible, and can sense temperature. It comes at a small price though – rather than external electrodes, the owner will need to have the device surgically connected to nerve endings.
Will the next Steve Austin, please stand up? Link [Popular Mechanics]
German researchers have created a microchip that shows promise to restore limited sight for some forms of inherited blindness. The device contains 1,540 photodiodes (similar to pixels in a camera) that connect directly to the optic nerve to provide some sight.
The technology still has a long way to go – the resolution is approximately 100,000 times worse than normal eyesight (and 300 times worse than a poor cell phone camera), but it’s still a big step towards restoring sight and interfacing with other nerve cells.
Link [Economist] – or see our earlier story on an upcoming bionic eye.
I stumbled across this list of the twelve “top” skyscrapers in the world. I’d assume that by “top” they mean by height. They’re also including a few skyscrapers that have yet to be completed.
The list doesn’t name the structures, so let’s try to do it here:
1. Eiffel Tower, Paris
2. Burj al Arab, Dubai*
3. Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai (thanks Fargus!)
4. Sears Tower, Chicago
5. Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur
6. World Financial Center, Shanghai*
7. Taipei 101, Taipei
8. Twin Towers of Canton, Guangzhou (Canton), China*
9. Freedom Tower, NYC
10. New Tokyo Tower, Tokyo*
11. Burj Dubai, Dubai*
12. Bionic Tower, Shanghai*
That’s all I can name off the top of my head. Anyone? Link
US researchers are finally testing a bionic eye, called Argus II artificial retina, that can restore sight to the blind. If tests are satisfactory, it can come to the market within two years. Link
Advances in prosthetic science have allowed a man in Scotland to be fitted with a bionic hand with individually-powered fingers. Donald MacKillop, who lost his right hand nearly 30 years ago, is pleased with the new hand, saying “The fact that the fingers can wrap round things, makes life much, much easier.” The BBC news story has a video of the hand in action. Link -via Arbroath
Jesse Sullivan lost both of his arms in an industrial accident, but thanks to modern technology, he now has a thought-controlled bionic arms:
The motions are coordinated and smooth because his left arm is a bionic device controlled by his brain. He thinks, "Close hand," and electrical signals sent through surgically re-routed nerves make it happen.
Doctors describe Sullivan as the first amputee with a thought-controlled artificial arm.
Andrew Martin from the Institute of Technical Zoology and Bionics in Germany, and colleagues, discovered the secret to a spider’s climbing ability:
Martin said:
"We found out that when all 600,000 tips are in contact with an underlying surface the spider can produce an adhesive force of 170 times its own weight. That’s like Spiderman clinging to the flat surface of a window on a building by his fingertips and toes only, whilst rescuing 170 adults who are hanging on to his back!"
Led by Prof. Paolo Dario, the Cyberhand consortium (a collaboration of 6 universities and institutes in Europe) is perfecting a robotic hand that hooks up to the body’s nervous system.
What you smell may be a marker for their slow death. After noticing that professional conservators smelled paper while doing their assessments, researchers from University College London’s Centre for Sustainable Heritage used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to identify and quantify the substances released by old books.
His friends call him “the man with the bionic bottom.” Ged Galvin permanently lost control of his colon after a motorcycle accident. But surgeons moved one of his knee muscles to his colon and attached electrodes to it. He can clench or unclench it with a remote control that he carries in his pocket:
The company Second Sight has developed a bionic eye called the Argus II. The eye uses implanted electrodes to replace a malfunctioning retina. So far, the device has been implanted in 18 patients around the world. 
ueue
Rob Spence of Eyeborg blog is a filmmaker that lost an eye, so naturally he decided to get an eye-cam!
We can rebuild it … we have the technology. Here’s the story of Coal, an eight-and-a-half year old dog whose left paw was amputated because of cancer. Instead of putting him down, his owner Reg Walker spent a lot of money to fit him with a bionic leg:
Hope the Maltese puppy was born without front legs, so orthotist David Turnbill made her a wheeled-device (out of airplane model parts) that lets her skate through life!
Scientists have managed to restore a sense of touch to two patients with prosthetic arms, in what is seen as a step towards creating sensitive limbs. 
If you ever had a toy microscope as a kid, you’ll probably find this neat: EyeClops is like a handheld microscope that plugs into a TV – it will magnify 200 times and display the image right on the TV screen.
Advances in bionics, transportation, and other technologies have put comic book superheroes a little closer to reality. This collection of videos looks at a few ways we can achieve “super powersâ€. 
Scientists have finally designed electric bionic hands that can crush soda cans like puny little insects! Bwahaha!
US researchers are finally testing a bionic eye, called Argus II artificial retina, that can restore sight to the blind. If tests are satisfactory, it can come to the market within two years. 
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