skinning

Robotic prostheses may have a way to go before they work exactly like human limbs, but researchers are making great strides. A team out of Georgia Tech is working on new technology that could give these robotic limbs something akin to a sense of touch.

Thanks to tactile-sensing material that covers the entire prosthesis and software that integrates the gathered data, this robotic arm can maneuver through clutter and distinguish between hard and soft objects as it grips, pushes, and pulls more intuitively.

"Up until now, the dominant strategies for robot manipulation have discouraged contact between the robot's … Read more

Using what they are calling "mechanical agitation," researchers out of the Georgia Institute of Technology say they've developed arrays that can sense touch with the same level of sensitivity as the human fingertip, which could result in better bots and prosthetics.

The transparent and flexible arrays use about 8,000 taxels, which are touch-sensitive transistors that can generate piezoelectric signals independently -- meaning they emit electricity when mechanically agitated. As the researchers report this week in the journal Science, each of those thousands of transistors comprises a bundle of some 1,500 zinc oxide nanowires, which connect … Read more

Anti-aging! Space diamonds! Groundbreaking medical research! Wow, Celestial Black Diamond Night Cream sure sounds like a miracle. Let's take a closer look.

The product description says the cream includes black diamond particles "believed to have formed in space." Huh? Either they came from space, or they didn't. Manufacturer 111 Skin doesn't divulge the sourcing method for the particles, but it does describe them as "microspheres that penetrate the deeper dermal layer of the skin in order to transport three essential youth restoring ingredients: patent-pending NAC Y2 formula, Collagen type I and III and Hyaluronic acid."… Read more

When the Country Fire Authority in Victoria, Australia, noticed that its firefighters were showing signs of heat stress even when their ear thermometer probes were reading normal temperatures, they decided it was time to find a better gauge in the hopes of preventing heat-related illnesses.

So they tested a smart pill on 50 firefighters evacuating 20 people from a burning medical center, and have already used the readings to change firefighter work patterns, including how long they're exposed to blazes, according to the Australian Associated Press.… Read more

When a patient asked Laura Ferris, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, her opinion on smartphone apps that purport to distinguish between benign and malignant skin lesions, Ferris realized she'd never used one and decided to run images of melanomas through a few of the apps herself.

"When I saw the first few results come back of them being missed, I really started to get concerned," Ferris says in a school video. So she decided to investigate further, and reports this week in JAMA Dermatology that three out of four … Read more

While many of us plug away on monotone-colored keyboards, creative folks at Sony continue to push the bar away from the anemic designs that plague our store shelves.

If you regularly observe fashionable computer accessories, you might recall that Sony's U.S. arm sells a wide array of colorful rubber keyboard skins for Vaio computers -- however, in Japan, the company sells something much more stylish. … Read more

The human skin, with all its frailties, turns out to be difficult to recreate, let alone improve on. The main challenge: It manages to be both self-healing and sensitive to the touch, enabling it to send vital information to the brain about temperature and pressure.

But chemists and engineers at Stanford say they are one step closer to developing an electronic skin that has both these properties, and they report this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology that it could help lead to smarter prosthetics and more resilient, self-repairing electronics.

Their central task was to find a self-healing material (a … Read more

Apps that make Android phones look like iPhones aren't new by any means, but they remain an interesting novelty that seems to appeal to a lot of Android users. If you've been curious about how iOS 6 would look on your Android phone, a new app called Fake iPhone 5 has just been uploaded to Google Play.

Created by a user at XDA Developers, Fake iPhone 5 is a replacement launcher that makes your Android phone's screen look almost exactly like an iPhone 5's. The main home screen's icons look like duplicates of iOS 6'… Read more

Skins let you totally change the look of apps like media players and image editors, but you can do the same and much more to Windows with Stardock's WindowBlinds. This program makes it easy to change the look of Windows without having to change everything manually in Appearance and Personalization. With preconfigured skins you can customize, WindowBlinds lets you create and customize Windows in ways the built-in tool could never match. WindowBlinds is free to try for 30 days, with a few options disabled.

WindowBlinds' user interface resembles a Windows feature, but with its own touches. It displays available … Read more