Army Goes Ghost

What the U.S. Army has to do with Sarah Palin, the Terminator and Men in Black.

Holograms may be the stuff of CNN laughability these days, but it turns out the U.S. Army is working hard on the real stuff. According to Dr. John Parmentola, Director of Research and Laboratory Management with the Army’s science and technology office, they are “making science fiction into reality” using quantum computing.

Here’s the gist: There’s a special kind of photons that don’t bounce off of objects but off of other photons, which have bounced off of objects themselves. This causes the object to be reflected in the second set of photons, creating a “ghost” image. Hence, the technique name: “Quantum Ghost Imaging.”

The Army hopes to use it in confusing the enemy with objects rendered through smoke and clouds. And we thought ghost soldiers were the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.

The interesting part is that the military has been dabbling in quantum mechanics, neuroscience and robotics a lot lately, making nice with scientists and major research universities so they can grab revolutionary technologies before the general public.

Remember the Boston Dynamics Big Dog that shot straight to the YouTube top a few months ago? The technology was actually developed years ago and its possible military applications were first discussed by roboticist Rodney Brooks in his TED talk back in 2003. They’ve also dabbled in stem cell research for “growing back” body parts, turned to neuroscience for memory-erasing amnesia beams, and looked into controlling robots with nothing but thought.

Creeped out yet? You should be — it’s scary, Big-Brother-meets-Terminator stuff. But it’s also exciting to observe the mind-blowing scientific and technological progress of our day. That, and we loved the amnesia beam in Men In Black.

via Fast Company

Geek Mondays: Unlimited Solar Power

Why MIT geeks are throwing the best dinner party ever.

After the extremely popular Blue Planet Run post last Friday, we’re still on a sustainable solutions high. And the good guys at MIT are right there with us. In a breakthrough discovery last week, they’ve found a new way of storing energy from sunlight that generates practically unlimited solar power.

Resembling plant photosynthesis, the process basically splits water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using sunlight. MIT chem professor Daniel Nocera explains. (Come on, stick with the man — he’s no stand-up comedian but let’s see Jerry Seinfeld save the world from the energy apocalypse.)

Why is this huge? Because, so far, the one thing keeping solar power from reaching critical mass has been the struggle to store energy efficiently when the sun doesn’t shine. This new method — both cheap and easy to implement — will eventually allow homes to harness daytime solar energy and store it for electricity at night.

So who’s coming to our first solar-powered dinner party? Say, November 14, 2010? Don’t be late.

>>> via CleanTechnica

Bell’s Underdog: Elisha Gray and the Telephone

A lesson in entrepreneurship from history’s little-known scandals.

By common knowledge, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It’s in the history books. There’s a medal in his name honoring outstanding contributions in telecommunications. The man even has a museum.

It may be, however, that Bell’s claim to the invention could come down to a great performance at a fair, a very pushy lawyer, and some good ol’ bureaucracy.

You see, another inventor, Elisha Gray, had been working on a similar device at the same time. Gray, who had partnered with Western Union and Thomas Edison, developed his own telephone and filed for patent on a very fateful day indeed: February 14, 1876. Fateful not because it was Valentine’s Day, but because it was the exact same day Bell filed his own patent for the telephone. That morning, Gray arrived at the Patent Office a few hours before Bell’s lawyer. So his application (a.k.a. “patent caveat”) was filed first. However, upon getting to the Patent Office, Bell’s lawyer — being a, well, lawyer — demanded Bell’s filing fee be entered immediately. Gray’s fee, however, was entered with the usual pace of governmental bureaucracy and was not taken to the examiner until the following morning.

So began the greatest controversy in telecommunications. (Malcolm Gladwell calls it “simultaneous invention,” but we think there’s no room for gray in the black-and-white world of history.)

The how’s and the why’s of this race are subject to a number of conspiracy theories. But what complicated things further was that Bell was first to claim the spotlight. In June of the same year, both Bell and Gray took their inventions to the World’s Fair in Philadelphia. Gray, once again, was first to present. But Bell, a true entertainer and showman, staged a presentation for some of the era’s greatest A-listers, including the emperor of Brazil.

The rest is, literally, history.

But we mostly like the story because it’s such a great allegory for today’s entrepreneurship and startup culture. Coming up with the big idea first has little to do with making it big. Everything comes down to impressing the right people, paying the right lawyers, and giving a hell of a presentation.

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LED The Way

How to stop global warming and hackers with the flip of a light switch.

THE REAL IDEA LIGHT BULB

LED lights have spent some time in the spotlight lately — be it as eco alternatives to Christmas lights or as cool little sidekicks in wow-projects like the Chronophage Clock. Turns out, however, that they could be the springboard for the next big leap in wireless technology.

Engineers at Boston University have just launched Smart Lighting, a program using low-power LED’s to develop the next generation of data communications and network technology — basically, making LED light the equivalent of a WiFi hot spot. And it would all be done over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability and no electromagnetic interference.

This technology would enable you to come home, flip a light switch, and have your iPod, thermostat, TiVo, Sirius and Wii instantly start communicating with you. No wires, no plugs, no routers.

The project is taking advantage of our inevitable switch from incandescent to CFL to LED light bulbs over the next few years as we try to, you know, not drown in the melting ice caps. Once enough LED’s are in place, they’d provide the infrastructure for this next-generation communication infrastructure.

Plus, since white light can’t penetrate opaque surfaces like walls, the technology would be much more secure than today’s radio-frequency-based WiFi — this means no “eavesdroppers,” no hackers, no pesky neighbors leeching onto your already feeble open wireless.

The technology relies on LED’s ability to be rapidly switched on and off with no detection by the human eye. Because data transmission comes down to patterns of 1’s and 0’s, flickering an LED light in such patterns won’t cause any noticeable change in room lighting.

We’re anxious to see where all this goes — with today’s increasing fragmentation of technology, it seems like more is invested in developing things to mediate the effects of other things (like your $300 noise-cancellation earphones to silence your roommate’s $1,000 Bose, which he uses to unwind after 15 hours in front of his $2,500 MacBook Pro), so we’re glad to see technology that focuses on cross-functionality and efficiency, utilizing what’s already there to minimize peripherals and maximize data communication.

You go, geeks.

(Thanks, @jowyang.)