Wind Powered Robotic Sculptures

The artist, Theo Jansen, creates very lightweight kinetic sculptures, clearly based on a fine knowledge of mechanical engineering. They are beautiful and they move using wind power alone.

Theo Jansen:

"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds"

"Always, I strive to push the boundaries of what we know ... and what we think is possible at this time."

Please take a minute to look at this wonderful video. It makes me think anything is possible. The wind is everywhere on our planet. Let's make use of it.

More info on the artist and DVD at: http://strandbeest.com/shop/

Fiber Stronger Than Steel from Transgenic Goats

A phrase from the future: Recombinant dragline spider silk from transgenic goats
[I couldn't make that line up if I tried]

...The company, Nexia Biotechnologies, is focused on fiber development and nano-scale fiber applications for spider silk.

After injecting spider genes into a goat, a silk-like material, dubbed BioSteel®, is extracted from the goat's milk. Because of its compatibility with the human body, BioSteel appears to have some remarkable real-life applications (artificial limbs, tendons and ligaments). It is stronger than steel with a breaking strength of 300,000 pounds per square inch.

Robot Walks On Water

More progress in the technology of very small robots based on biomemetics:

" Researchers Yun Seong Song, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, and Metin Sitti, assistant professor in mechanical engineering, both from Carnegie Mellon University, have recently built a robot that mimics the water strider's natural abilities. The first water striding robot, with an appearance and design closely resembling its insect counterpart, doesn't ever break the surface tension of the water, and is highly maneuverable."

"Citation: Song, Yun Seong, and Sitti, Metin. "Surface-Tension-Driven Biologically Inspired Water Strider Robots: Theory and Experiments." IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 23, No. 3, June 2007. "

Reference: Robot Walks on Water

MetaMaterials: First Demonstration of an Invisibility Cloak

A team from Duke University has successfully demonstrated the ability of a material - a "metamaterial" to warp specific wavelengths of light around an object.

"You cannot easily warp space, but you can achieve the same effect on electromagnetic fields using materials with the right response," Schurig continued. "The required materials are quite complex, but can be implemented using metamaterial technology.

While the properties of natural materials are determined by their chemistry, the properties of metamaterials depend instead on their physical structure. In the case of the new cloak, that structure consists of copper rings and wires patterned onto sheets of fiberglass composite that are traditionally used in computer circuit boards."

Invisibility Cloak Demo

Super Paper!

If you want to see what the future will be like, watch what is happening in materials technology. "Researchers have developed a remarkably simple way to convert ordinary graphite particles into very thin but superstrong sheets that are tougher than steel and as flexible as carbon fiber but can be made much more cheaply. The discovery could spawn entirely new types of materials for applications as diverse as protective coatings, electronic components, batteries, and fuel cells."

Reference: Its Super Paper! -- Berardelli 2007 (725): 2