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This post was originally published on Mashable.

A new video game system from Sega takes playing video games while you’re in the bathroom to a whole new level. Called Toylet, the urinal-mounted game system not only has you play games while you’re in the bathroom, it’s powered by urine.

Rather than use a traditional controller, the gaming system has a sensor that measures the volume and pressure involved in your…flow, and uses that to control a game.

Games are less than a minute and are displayed on a small eye-level screen. Not exactly a video game system for the kids, games involve doing things like filling a coffee can or blowing wind up an animated reporter’s skirt.

The system can only be used on urinals – so there’s no option out there for the ladies – and equipment reportedly starts at 140,000 yen (roughly $US1750), with individual games running 10,000 yen ($US125). Costs are for the gaming system, and not the actual urinal.

An optional box can be purchased to accept payment from potential game players, turning the urinal into pay-to-play bathroom arcade. Advertisements can also be sold for and displayed on the Toylet after each completed game.

Sega initially tested the gaming systems in Tokyo last winter, and received enough positive reviews that it has decided to roll out the gaming systems across the country. According to the company people using the Toylet make less of a mess while they’re taking care of business, and the businesses that advertise on the Toylet sell twice as much.

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Research currently underway at MIT’s Distributed Robotic Laboratory (DRL) could lead to an innovative replicative manufacturing technique with the disruptive potential equal to that of 3D printing. Imagine a sand-like material that could autonomously assemble itself into a replica of any object encased within. Incredible though this may sound, the DRL researchers have already managed to build a large scale proof-of-concept, with 10-mm cubes acting as the grains.

Before we go into how these cubes – or “smart pebbles” – work, let’s sketch out the general concept. The idea is to create objects using a subtractive method, where excess material is removed just like when carving in stone. Each grain of smart sand would be a self-contained micro computer. These tiny machines would use an elaborate algorithm to communicate with the neighboring particles in order to establish the exact position and shape of the input object so that it can be replicated.

The already mentioned smart pebbles demonstrate this principle in a more easily understandable 2D setting. First the pebbles establish which of them border on the perimeter of the object to be replicated. Once identified, these particles pass on a message to their neighbors, and effectively specific particles selected by the algorithm are notified that an identical (or scaled) arrangement should be recreated a safe distance away, so that the two shapes do not overlap.

Once the perimeter of the copy is identified, the pebbles within that area bond to each other, while the redundant material simply falls away. The resultant object would be solid, but it could be easily deconstructed simply by putting it back into the heap of smart sand. The constituent grains would detach from each other and the whole process could be repeated with an entirely new shape.

Each smart pebble cube used for testing was equipped with a set of electro-permanent magnets on four sides. The magnetic properties of such magnets can be switched on and off using electrical impulses, but unlike electromagnets, they do not require electricity to sustain these properties over time. With each particle neighboring on eight other particles in a 2D scenario, the magnets allow for selective bonding with any of the neighbors. However, the magnets also play a role in communication and power sharing.

Each smart pebble was also fitted with a rudimentary microprocessor capable of storing 32 kilobytes of code and boasting two kilobytes of working memory. With such limited processing power at the disposal of a single unit, the main computational heft had to fall on the distributed intelligence algorithm that constitutes the core of the current DRL endeavors.

“How do you develop efficient algorithms that do not waste any information at the level of communication and at the level of storage?” asks Daniela Rus, a computer science and engineering professor at MIT. The answer to that question is likely to be found in a paper that Rus co-authored with her student, Kyle Gilpin, and which is going to be presented in May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

The algorithms developed at DRL have already been shown to work robustly with 3D scenarios, where the bed of smart sand would be divided into layers, each constituting a separate 2D grid. Now the only thing that stops smart sand from joining 3D printing in revolutionizing the world of rapid manufacturing is getting the scale right.

But according to Robert Wood, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University, this is not an issue. Wood reckons recreating the functionalities of the smart pebbles in smaller scale is feasible. Yes, it would require quite a lot of engineering, but the goal is well defined and reachable. “That’s a well-posed but very difficult set of engineering challenges that they could continue to address in the future.”, he says. If Wood is right, the future of subtractive manufacturing is bright.

Watch the video below to find out more about the algorithm behind smart pebbles.

Source: MIT

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Wouldn’t your latest generation tablet be way cooler if it ran on live crabs? Thanks to Yukio-Pegio Gunji and his team at Japan’s Kobe University, the era of crab computing is upon us … well, sort of. The scientists have exploited the natural behavior of soldier crabs to design and build logic gates – the most basic components of an analogue computer. They may not be as compact as more conventional computers, but crab computers are certainly much more fun to watch.

Electricity and microcircuits aren’t the only way to build a computer. In fact, electronic computers are a relatively recent invention. The first true computers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were built out of gears and cams and over the years many other computers have forsaken electronics for marbles, air, water, DNA molecules and even slime mold to crunch numbers. Compared to the slime mold, though, making a computer out of live crabs seems downright conservative.

The scientists at Kobe university didn’t just pop down to the market for their crabs. They focused their attention on a particular species: soldier crabs (Mictyris longicarpus). These are found in on the beaches of Australia and surrounding islands where they regularly provide visitors with surreal performances. Individually, the soldier crabs are timid little blue crustaceans that won’t even go into the water, but when they form into swarms, which can number in the tens of thousands, it’s a different matter.

Once set in motion by something like a bird’s shadow passing overhead, the soldier crabs tear off like an army of demented robots. They rush about in a strange, boiling mass that seem like exercises in utter chaos, yet the swarm itself moves in a remarkably consistent straight line. This determined, predictable manner of movement is the key to the crab computer.

When two swarms of soldier crabs collide something remarkable happens. Instead of collapsing into a riotous battle, the two swarms meet in a manner that’s as predictable as a pair of billiard balls hitting each other. When two identical billiard balls collide head on they, ideally and all things being equal, rebound off one another in the opposite direction. If they strike at an angle, they fly away from each other at the opposite angle. It’s all very predictable Newtonian mechanics. In the case of soldier crabs it’s like two balls of soft modelling clay hitting each other. They squash together at the new, larger swarm and head off at the combined angle of the original swarms with a remarkable degree of predictability.

Exploiting this behavior, the Kobe team figured out how to use the crabs to make logic gates. They did this by placing two swarms of crabs in a simple maze. In one configuration, the swarms were set off in two legs of the maze. When they collide, they head off down a third leg. Since the swarms always go in the same direction, if only one swarm is placed in the maze, it will always go down the same output leg as if it had collided with the other swarm and not double back up the other leg. In this way, the maze becomes an OR gate. If one or two swarms enter the maze, the output is always positive. One swarm OR another swarm in the maze equals a positive, otherwise negative.

The researchers also used another maze was in the shape of an X with a fifth vertical leg stuck running up from the center. In this maze, letting loose one swarm resulted in the swarm passing straight through the center and into the opposite leg of the X. If two two swarms are loosed, they collide in the center, sending them up through the center leg. This is the crab equivalent of an AND gate. One swarm going in provides a negative. Two provides a positive. One swarm AND another swarm equals positive, otherwise negative.

With these two gates, it would be theoretically possible to build more complicated logic gates and from there, full-fledged computers.

Currently, there are no plans to build a full-blown crab computer, but if seafood cybernetics ever does take off, this, they will say, it where it all began.

The research was recently outlined in a paper entitled

Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate [PDF] in the journal Complex Systems

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Children in the developed world have a lot of choice when it comes to scientific toys. In fact, there are whole stores devoted to selling things like robotics kits, ant farms, and simple microscopes. In the developing world, however, such fancy toys are relatively scarce. So, what’s an adult to do if they want to get the local children interested in the sciences? Well, in the case of Arvind Gupta, he show the kids how to make scientific toys from throwaways.

Gupta’s story began in the 70s, when he was an engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology. While he was there, he took it upon himself to teach the children of the mess staff, who couldn’t afford a formal education.

Upon graduation, he went on to work at Tata Motors, where he helped to build trucks. After five years of doing so, however, it was clear that it wasn’t the career for him. In 1978, he took a one-year leave from his job, and took part in the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program. “The objective was to make science fun and exciting for village children using simple, low-cost materials available in their environment,” he told us. “This experience had a profound impact on me. I found it was much more satisfying than making trucks.”

Gupta proceeded to dedicatee his life to designing toys that demonstrate scientific principles, that children can build for themselves out of cheap or free parts. He’s written numerous instructional books on the subject, starting with 1986′s Matchstick Models and other Science Experiments, which has been reprinted in 12 languages.

Today, he is part of the four-person team that runs the Children’s Science Centre, at India’s Pune University. Together, they have designed approximately 800 trash-based educational toys … so far. Instructions and explanations for all of the toys are available copyright-free through their Toys-from-Trash website, as are all of their books, and over 250 linked YouTube videos.

“Every day over 50,000 children and teachers across the world watch these videos,” said Gupta. “Thousands of books are downloaded every day and this fills our hearts with hope and joy. We feel privileged to be able to share our work with at least some children across the entire world.”

Out of all of the toys, there are a few that have proven particularly popular. One of those is Matchstick Mecanno, in which little bits of rubber bicycle valve tube and matchsticks are used to make 2D and 3D shapes. Other favorites include the Simple Electric Motor and the Levitating Pencil, in which ring magnets are used to keep a spinning pencil floating in the air.

One of his young students, a girl named Hamsa Padmanabhan, found the pencil toy particularly fascinating. “She wrote a 12-page scientific paper on it, which won the second Intel International Award of US$2,500. Today a minor planet is named after Hamsa,” he told us. “Another girl, Durga Jetty, made the Bottle Turbine which won her 0.6 million Indian Rupees! This is indeed quite a feat.”

Needless to say, however, Arvind isn’t in it for the money, nor for the chance to become famous. Instead, he simply wishes to nurture a quality that he believes all children possess.

“Every child is born a scientist,” he said. “We kill this innate curiosity by rote learning and boring state texts. If we just remove some of the authoritarian structures in schools, children will naturally gravitate to science – simply because science is fun and exciting.”

An example of one of the instructional videos can be seen below.

Source: Toys-from-Trash

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What  you do when you’re the world’s largest museum but can display only two percent of the 137 million items in your collection (a mere 2.75 million) at any given time? In an effort to get more of their treasures into the public eye, specialists at the Smithsonian Institution’s 19 collective museums and galleries hit upon the solution of digitizing their collection and 3D printing key models and displays suitable for traveling exhibitions. It’s a tall order, but one that’s sure to give the rapidly blooming business of additive manufacturing a huge boost.

In the past, whenever curators wanted to duplicate an object, they turned to traditional rubber molds and plaster casts. Now, with the Smithsonian’s budding digitization initiative coming up to speed, teams can deploy expensive minimally-invasive laser scanners to generate virtual models of items in the collection with micron-level accuracy. Large additive manufacturing companies, such as RedEye on Demand, can then take those files and generate actual physical replicas suitable for display or loan to other museums, or even schools. The savings on insurance premiums alone could go a long way toward defraying the cost of the massive scanning project.

The program’s two co-coordinators, Adam Metallo and Vincent Rossi, both with fine art backgrounds, began at the museum as model makers. Eventually they managed to secure a grant for a 3D scanner which they knew could generate far better models when teamed with a quality 3D printer. A recent effort resulted in what the Smithsonian calls the “largest 3D printed museum quality historical replica” in the world – a statue of Thomas Jefferson identical to the one on display at Jefferson’s home, Monticello.

“Our mission,” Rossi told SPAR, “is to digitize these huge collections in 3D – everything from insects to aircraft. Our day-to-day job is essentially trying to figure out how to actually accomplish that.” They’ll certainly have their hands full – the museums’ collections literally fill acres of storage space in several facilities scattered around the region.

Unfortunately, funding for the project is still scarce, so Metallo and Rossi split their time between digitizing artifacts with laser or CT scanners (or open-source cloud-based digitization software and standard digital cameras) and touting their services to the museum’s many researchers, curators and conservators, as well as potential corporate sponsors, hoping to drum up support.

“The one resource we have plenty of is amazing content,” Rossi mused, “and along with that comes frustrating problems for us, but they’re potentially interesting problems for the industry. How do we take 3D digitization and take it to the Smithsonian scale? We’re at the ground floor of trying to understand that.”

Indeed, one major issue with archival scans is how to store the digital files so that they’ll be accessible decades into the future, when formats will surely have changed. With millions upon millions of items yet to be scanned, it appears we’ll just have to wait to see how things shape up on that front.

Rossi and Metallo will report on their Smithsonian work at SPAR International 2012, April 15-18, in Houston.

Source: SPAR Point Group via CNET

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IMAGINE A COMPUTER ONE BILLION TIMES FASTER THAN ANYTHING NOW

Quantum super computer one step closer

UNSW physicists create a working transistor, consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal. (Vision courtesy UNSW)

SYDNEY scientists have built the world’s tiniest transistor by precisely positioning a single phosphorus atom in a silicon crystal.

The nano device is an important step in the development of quantum computers – super-powerful devices that will use the weird quantum properties of atoms to perform calculations billions of times faster than today’s computers.

Michelle Simmons, of the University of NSW, said single atom devices had only been made before by chance and their margin of error for placement of the atom was about 10 nanometres, which affected performance.

Her team was the first to be able to manipulate individual atoms with “exquisite precision”.

Using a technique involving a scanning tunnelling microscope, they were able to replace one silicon atom from a group of six with one phosphorus atom, achieving a placement accuracy of better than half a nanometre. “This device is perfect,” Professor Simmons, director of the Australian Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, said.

The single atom sits between two pairs of electrodes, one about 20 nanometres apart, the other about 100 nanometres apart.

When voltages were applied across the electrodes, the nano device worked like a transistor, a device that can amplify and switch electronic signals.

The research is published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

First developed in the 1950s, transistors revolutionised the electronics industry.

Since then, miniaturisation has seen the number of transistors squeezed onto a circuit double about every two years – a trend known as Moore’s law.

Professor Simmons said this led to the prediction that transistors would need to reach the single atom level by 2020.

“So we decided 10 years ago to start this program to try and make single atom devices as fast as we could, and try and beat that law.”

This had now been achieved eight to ten years ahead of the industry’s schedule, she said.

Last year, Professor Simmons was named NSW Scientist of the Year for her team’s research.

About 15 to 20 years of research is needed before quantum computers become widely available.

Researchers at Purdue University in the US, the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information in Daejeon were also involved in the research.

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Online shopping and advertising already do it, take information based on the pages or products that a person had looked at and provide advertisements, or links to other products that may also interest that person.

In just a few years shops could use facial recognition technology to do the same.

A Perth professor is working on research that he hopes could play a role in creating this technology.

Associate Professor Ajmal Mian from the University of Western Australia first became interested in facial recognition technology when doing his PHD which he completed in 2006.

Since then he has continued to research how to use satellite technology to identify facial features that lie under the skin.

It is believed that a dot-sized part of a face may soon be all that is needed to identify a person.

Professor Mian said by incorporating numerous images of a person from different angles into a system, these could possibly be used to later identify that person by just a small section of their face.

He said while facial recognition technology was not new, being able to identify someone from just a small part of their face meant recognition could be done faster and easier.

“To be more useful it has to not be intrusive, so you don’t need to come in contact with it like fingerprinting and the ultimate is to do it without people noticing it’s happening, without them having to stop and look at a camera,” Professor Mian said.

“I am trying to dig out more accurate techniques and find different algorithms to be able to identify people more easily.”

He said a shop may use the technology to maintain a customer database.

“We know security cameras are there but if shops say you need to get fingerprinted, people are not going to want to do that,” Professor Mian said.

He said the technology may not necessarily associate people by their names.

“They may group you by different charts, they don’t necessarily have to attach a name to it, each time you come in they see what you buy, if customer A buys item such-and-such they are most likely to buy item such-and-such, like on Amazon,” he said.

Mr Mian said it was up to marketing staff as to how the information was used.

He said multi-spectral imaging can be used to measure light reflected off a face at hundreds of discrete wavelengths in the visible spectrum and beyond.

This meant that the technology being worked on would be able to recognise a person despite their different facial expressions.

Professor Mian said his research may also be able to detect people who have used cosmetic surgery to alter their looks.

He said he did not expect the technology to be expensive once created.

“Once the algorithm is developed it won’t be expensive, it is the research which is the expensive part, all you will need is a few cameras.”

“It’ll start up in shops that spend a lot of money on customer care and marketing and others will follow.”

He admitted that there would be some concerns about privacy.

“There’s always a concern about security and privacy and there’s always a trade off, it will be a discussion of topic forever,” Professor Mian said.

He said the kind of facial recognition technology he envisioned could be used in security and if used at airports could greatly improve the identification process at the immigration sections of airports.

Professor Mian was also looking into the possibility of applying it to psychology and also identifying whether people had certain syndromes.

Associate Professor Mian is the only West Australian to have won the Australasian Distinguished Dissertation Award from The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia.

He has also won two prestigious national fellowships: the Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Australian Research Fellowship.

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Ever since University of Manchester scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov first isolated flakes of graphene in 2004 using that most high-tech pieces of equipment – adhesive tape – the one-atom sheet of carbon has continued to astound researchers with its remarkable properties. Now Professor Sir Andre Geim, (he’s now not only a Nobel Prize winner but also a Knight Bachelor), has led a team that has added superpermeability with respect to water to graphene’s ever lengthening list of extraordinary characteristics.

Graphene has already proven to be the thinnest known material in the universe, strongest material ever measured, the best-known conductor of heat and electricity, and the stiffest known material, while also the most ductile. But it seems the two-dimensional lattice of carbon atoms just can’t stop showing off.

Stacking membranes of a chemical derivative of graphene called graphene oxide, which is a graphene sheet randomly covered with other molecules such as hydroxyl groups OH-, scientists at the University of Manchester created laminates that were hundreds of times thinner than a human hair but remained strong, flexible and were easy to handle.

When the team sealed a metal container using this film, they say that even the most sensitive equipment was unable to detect air or any other gas, including helium, leaking through. The team then tried the same thing with water and, to their surprise, found that it evaporated and diffused through the graphene-oxide membranes as if they weren’t even there. The evaporation rate was the same whether the container was sealed or completely open.

“Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one molecule thick sheets of ice which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction, explains Dr Rahul Nair, who was leading the experimental work. “If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules.”

Professor Geim added, “Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimetre -thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger. You cannot help wondering what else graphene has in store for us.”

Although graphene’s superpermeability to water makes it suitable for situations where water needs to be removed from a mixture without removing the other ingredients, the researchers don’t offer ideas for any immediate applications that could take advantage of this property. However, they did seal a bottle of vodka with the membranes and found that the distilled solution did indeed become stronger over time. But they don’t foresee graphene being used in distilleries.

However, Professor Geim adds, “the properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water.”

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