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Science

Advances in Artificial Muscles Using Plastic 100

Posted by Hemos from the super-man-dom dept.
pinglej writes "According to this story on MSNBC, Scientists at SRI have made some advances in muscles made using strained plastic that are more responsive than natural muscles. Has lots of neat applications from speakers to artificial limbs. " I think the best idea is to make me the strongest man alive - it'll be better than cybernetic body armor!
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Advances in Artificial Muscles Using Plastic More

Advances in Artificial Muscles Using Plastic

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  • Plastic Muscles? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone remember the cartoon Plastic Man? That was some funny stuff. (if you don't, just think "Reed Richards with a funny suit")

    Don't pull a muscle, guys! No, not that one!
  • I can't see how this could be used for any kind of /quality/ speakers - they're completely non-magnetic.. what's worse, a plastic that vibrates over 30,000 times per second - is that /honestly/ realistic? It would have to be wonder plastic.. the likes of which the world has never seen.

  • I'd pass on the strongest man alive thing (Score:3)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @11:25AM (#1304525) Homepage Journal
    " I think the best idea is to make me the strongest man alive - it'll be better than cybernetic body armor!

    Except that you'll snap your bones like dry twigs or pull of bone chips at the attachment points.
  • Think about it, hyper-strong special forces teams. No limits on the amount of wieght a GI can cary. (within reason of course) There's got to be some type of weapons they could use. (ultra battle axe anyone) We better make sure this doesn't get out, like the nuclear stuff did.

    China has more people in its army than the US does in the whole country. Imagine what a billion super-soldiers could do.

  • We all know he wants HUGE PECTORAL MUSCLES!
    --
    Donald Roeber

  • Let me see.... (Score:4)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak&yahoo,com> on Friday February 04, 2000 @11:30AM (#1304529) Homepage Journal
    • Plastic melts. That means no more hot showers.
    • Plastic does nasty things in UV light. That means no more going down to the beach, or anywhere near an Ozone Hole.
    • Plastic doesn't restore perfectly, it stresses. Too much arm-waving, and your arms'll fall off.
    • Plastic is a non-conductor. Non-conductors, seperating conductors, have some interesting properties. How many farads is your armpit?
    • More responsiveness must mean less of something else. Probably less precision. Good for Quake 3, but painful for bitmap editing.
  • Another step has been made toward assimilating Sector 001 into the collective. Now we just need to perfect those subdermal chips ;)

  • And in other news (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For immediate release

    EroticToys, Inc. reports record profits due to demand for its new RealThruster family of adult toys.

    "We're thrilled", said CEO Byron Schlick, "the electrically actuated plastic materials really enhance the... user experience."

  • Applications (Score:5)

    by Captn Pepe ( 139650 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @11:35AM (#1304533)

    Materials like this exert force because they try to maintain an approximately uniform density, so an electric potential squeezes it into a different shape. The trouble with using this to do mechanical work -- like the "artificial muscle" this is being hyped as -- is that you can't exert very much force before the material starts to compress, or else you overwhelm the electrostatic forces. This is sort of the converse of the problem that piezo-based transducers have always had: the electrostatic potentials cause the crystalline lattice of a piezo to expand with considerable force ... but only for a few hundreds of microns, at best. Which makes them good for speakers, or ultra-fine positioning, but not so good for doing work.

    As far as I can tell, the most promising avenue for these materials would be to use them rather like small, agile hydrolic pumps that have large dynamic range but little pushing power and even less pull. The comment in the article about an artificial butterfly could be insightful with respect to what you could do with these. As far as artificial limbs go, unless they can dramatically increase the force they can put out, they might be a major breakthrough for actuating the fingers of a prosthetic hand, but they'll be no good at all for replacing the wrist flexors, never mind a bicep.

    I would suggest that researchers look for a way to turn this effect around, allowing the material to pull rather than push. Such plastics almost invariably have greater tensile strength than resistance to compression, and it's much easier to engineer around, too.

  • ...not to mention the fact that these work the OPPOSITE from the way muscles work -- they EXPAND with electricity rather than contract.

    The article mentions that they would be more akin to a rubber band-style than to a real muscle - ie: lots of give, but not much pull.

    But...this does open the way for research into doing things the opposite way - or designing things to work on the expansion principle rather than the contraction one our muscles work off of.

    Neat discovery, but the really cool stuff is yet to come.
  • Except that you'll snap your bones like dry twigs or pull of bone chips at the attachment points.

    Not my titanium bone replacements! :-)
  • How hot do you like your showers? Some plastics can be made very heat tolerant.

    With artifical muscles, UV light shouldn't be a problem. That's what our skin is for.

    If you wave your arms around that much, I think that's a benifit (for other people). ;)

    Hmm, explosive armpits... (Sounds like a alternative band)

    More responsiveness doesn't necessarily mean less of something else. Even so, I'm sure a happy medium can be obtained. (Perhaps a muscle sensitivity setting hard linked to your mouse sensitivity in Quake 3 ;) )

    Also note that the artificial muscles shown here only have the strength of a rubber band, they still have a ways to go to get up to human muscles.
  • You forgot the biggest one:
    • Weaker, so you'll barely be able to lift those arms.
  • Yeah - the 'perfect' speaker cone/dome/panel is infinitly light and infinitly rigid. I have trouble picturing a flexible substance with that kind of rigidity(word?). The sound producing substance is not usally the magnetic part (paper/kevlar/aluminum), there's usually a coil of wire surrounding a magnet... the coil is attached to the non-magnetic substance, which then moves and produces the sounds...

    I agree, though... can a piece of plastic/sillicone really exhibit these characteristics (especially with flat response throughout the audible band)? It's hard to say... it just doesn't seem that the electric response would be the same over those frequencies...

  • Re:Let me see.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Plastic melts. That means no more hot showers.

    My "what is the English word for it" to scrap the result of my cooking out of the frying pan is made of plastic. It is heat resistent up to over 200C. You might like hot showers though.

    Plastic does nasty things in UV light. That means no more going down to the beach, or anywhere near an Ozone Hole.

    True, though it would for sure not be used for bags, wrapping up chocolate and so on. No, here even I do not see a big problem.

    Plastic doesn't restore perfectly, it stresses. Too much arm-waving, and your arms'll fall off.

    Avoid to work for the traffic police.

    Plastic is a non-conductor. Non-conductors, seperating conductors, have some interesting properties. How many farads is your armpit?

    True but not quite, as conductive plastic became reality some time ago already. Sort of alloy but I am sure someone knows an URL to some article.

    More responsiveness must mean less of something else. Probably less precision. Good for Quake 3, but painful for bitmap editing.

    Less painful than a wheel-chair or crutches perhaps and for people whose muscles are going down the gutter due to some illness, there is one, it could be the only chance. Or assume someone who lost all facial expression due to a paralysis.

  • Or any other material to enhance strength. It's all a matter of reattaching the major muscles to enhance the power of the fulcrum (even moving the muscle a millimeter will greatly improve performance.) However, the current trend is to reduce the number of soldiers needed, and to increase their effectiveness. I fail to see how a large increase in human performance would better enable them to blow stuff up.
  • So we must be about two years away from implanting a weapon directly into people.

    We are getting too close to BORG time in my opinion.
  • This is one of the best uses. It's the first thing that came in my mind. Since most of the machinery is so cumbersome (hydraulic pumps, motors and belts and gears, etc.) the best thing would be to use some kind of material that would contract or push when applied with electricity.

    Granted, artificial limbs would be a great application for this, but even better would be to enhance our own abilities, like the japanese mechs. We can either be encased within a sheath of the stuff, complete with high strength artificial exoskeleton, actuating the robot with our own movements, or we could (gasp!) actuate remotely.

    We would create strands of this stuff, bundle them together into an artifical muscle which can then be wrapped with a material live Kevlar, which will protect it, and has some flexibility. We could then add tough armor outside of it to protect it from direct damage.

    if we were not the peace-loving people that we are, we could create an army of these, send them over to any hostile area, and destroy the crap out of people, and never risk the life of a single American soldier (which the American public always gets all worked about).

    Or, we could use it to build prostheses for veterans who may have lost their limbs in battles because they had to be there in person.

  • Recently I've been wondering about the possiblilty of using a chained array of solenoids as an artificial muscle. The shaft of the solenid could pull on the chassis of the one infront of it, providing muscular pull. The ones I've spected on some of the web sites have a pull of about 5 lbs. A quad can push 350+ Lbs.. so to make a leg strength musclce would require 60-70. Expensive but do-able. The best parts is the solenoids are responsive to varying amounts of currents.
    Anyone with more electronics knowledge care to comment
  • Sounds like the body shops in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Just watch, next week they'll announce head-implantable machine guns.
  • >I would suggest that researchers look for a way >to turn this effect around, allowing the material >to pull rather than push.
    Wouldn't it be possible to just apply the same charge to both electrodes, causing them to move apart and the plastic to contract horizontally?
  • That shouldn't be a problem for creating artificial limbs. (I.e., the research suggested has already been done.) Animal musculature is usually paired; one muscle moves the limb one way, the other muscle moves it the other way. With this pairing it is possible to constuct the artifical limb so that there is always tension and the signal relaxes one 'muscle' to allow the other to move the limb. I think I've even heard that natural musculature actually works this way to some extent. IIRC, it's a trinary system with continuities in 2 states: off, contract to some degree, relax to some degree.
    Ever notice . . .
    Microsoft and its allies assume everyone is stupid.
  • Combine this with that guy who made the supersuits that basically protect you from everything (you can jump off cliffs in it, get shot with a machine gun, get attacked by wild animals, pretty much anything) and it'd kick ass... people will say there are potentials for abuse. What abuse? That someone might hold up a store knowing that if they got shot it wouldn't hurt them? And you think the guy behind the counter wouldn't have the same stuff? What would he old the store up WITH? ;)

    Esperandi
    Looking forward to bullet-proof muscles.

  • I wonder what the biggest application will be; Artificial limbs or augmentation (aesthetics)?

    We would definately have some changes in culture:

    Augmented Olympics

    Record body counts on the Jerry Springer show.

    Augmentation as a job requirement

    Augmentation as a hinderance to employment

    br mcleodnineathomedotcom
  • Is it cheaper than pork?
    Less cholesterol than beef?
    What is the best way to prepare it? What does a polymer steak taste like? Will it constipate me? What is the nutritional value? Imagine the shelf life! No more ecoli or sam&ella! Wow, I'm gonna get rich selling polymer bergers!

  • Genom said: "...not to mention the fact that these work the OPPOSITE from the way muscles work -- they EXPAND with electricity rather than contract. "

    No problem. Put a bunch of round ones inside a muscle-shaped plastic bag, perpendicular to the line of the muscle and attached to the bag itself (i.e. each is a cross-section of the muscle bag). Pack the bag with non-reactive gel. When charge is applied, the disks expand, the bag increases in diameter and decreases in length.

    Assumes the disks are relatively rigid and have good resistance to compression.

  • Well this a nice abstract idea. The problem you have, is that with these motors in a chain, the tension in the entire chain is equal to the tension in each individual solenoid. ie, if your goal is to be able to lift 375 pounds, requiring lets say 75 soleniods, the tension in each solenoid is still 375 lbs. The tension isn't distrubted evenly among the chain like you think, so though multiple solenoids can handle a larger load then a single one, they aren't rated to be "chained". Most likely you will not gain much benefit from adding more then a few solenoids in a chain. In order to lift that much you have to redesign the motor to handle a larger tension.

    Spyky

  • Nitinol muscle wire & Stiquito (Score:4)

    by c.jaeger ( 30528 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @12:45PM (#1304555) Homepage

    My first contact with the concept of an artificial muscle started when Prof. Jonathan W. Mills from Indiana Univ. gave an IEEE talk at my college around 1992. When he demonstrated the foreshortening of a small nickle-titanium (nitinol) heat actuated leg all the geeks in the auditorium were impressed. (College profs included)

    We had a small lab session where we made the legs from materials he brought and did a Q&A session. I still have that device around played w/ it 2 nights ago. Didn't have a battery around to run current through the nitinol wire to actuate it (the electrical resistance generates enough heat to contract it), so I held a lighter about 6" underneath to test it out. Still worked like a charm.

    If you are interested in looking into this thing, I'd suggest hitting

  • The reason that speakers nowadays use magnets is because its the easiest way to convert electrical energy into mechanical (vibrational, ie. sound) energy. The electrical signal passes through a coil that is in a magnetic field... this causes the coil to become magnetically charged and get attracted or repelled by the magnet, moving the cone (this happens at high frequency, causing a back and forward movement of the coil (which is attatched to the cone... which moves the air at that frequency ... which makes you hear the sound))!

    Now... back to the plastics. If we could us a plastic to move a cone (or just itself) in response to an electrical current, then we eliminate the costly, heavy and bulky parts of a speaker (the coil and magnet). SO... yes this can be used to make potentially high quality speakers!

    i wont even bother to comment on your "30Khz point" because it is completely illogical.. you would want it to vibrate at different rates, ranging from a few times a second to nearly 20000 times a second in order to cover all sounds that the human ear can hear.
  • HAHA, anyone else remember how Jimmy Olsen drank the little vial of chemicals and got super-stretchy powers? Then he went around calling himself Elastic Lad? Sweet Jesus in a birtchbark canoe, that was great. Elongated Man on the other hand, was not so great. I think the entire comics industry was on crack back then. Only way to explain these things.Sharkey
    http://www.badassmofo.com [badassmofo.com]
  • An additional benefit of it not being magnetic is that it wont cause (or be affected by) interference from monitors and cellphones!
  • 1) I read some guy saying "Plastics melt" (among other "weaknesses")- ok, we're not talking saran wrap or the stuff they make pens out of here... the word of the day was "Acrylic"... some polymers can be made to withstand tremendous heat/strain/environments...
    2) When they say "muscle"... it doesn't necessarily mean they've got to put it in a human body. They could mean for use in a machine - and muscle is the best word to describe how it works... (Robots, exoskeletons, automatic door closers...)
    3) If they were developing it for the human body, it would have to be developed in a tested and controlled fashion. Allowances for added stress would have to be made (re-enforcements to skeletal structure) as part of the design/engineering of the product. Otherwise, the muscle would need be developed to not exceed the strength of the skeletal structure. (beyond the fact that I seem to remember that when bones are stressed they emit a small electrical signal - which would cause these "muscles" to stretch and relieve the tension...)

    Don't just look for nay saying ways to FUD the product... any idiot can point out problems... if you were really smart, when you found the problem, you would make a suggestion on how to fix it.
  • ..would've seemed a bit strange if he'd had plastic bionics, with 'Made In Taiwan' stamped on them somewhere! :-)
  • english word for scraping thing is spatula methinks
  • Nitinol is very interesting stuff, but it needs too much current for some types of "Tilden" type robots. "Things that walk".

    I wonder what the current requirements are for the plastic?

    Here are some links for Nitinol wire and its application on the Mars Pathfinder Mission: http://www.robotstore.com

  • Well, there is a difference between serial and parallel linking. If you have ten of these motors linked like a chain (serial), then the scenario you described would hold true. If you had ten of these hooked up in parallel, then each motor would have 1/10th of the tension of the load...kinda like when we were kids and we learned how to distribute the load of lifting a person by everyone gathering around and putting two fingers under the person laying down. Remember how amazingly easy it was to lift them?

  • Wow. My first +5. Yay for me.

    To the fellow who suggested placing the same charge in each electrode and hoping they repel, this in general doesn't work. The expansion you see is caused by a potential difference across the substance, which changes the geometry of the material's molecues relationships to each other, not by electrostatic attraction/repulsion as per se. Especially when you consider that the breakdown voltage for this material is probably a few 100V/mm at most, you'll never get a large enough charge to collect on the material's boundaries to exert a useful force. You don't see capacitors getting crushed by the electrostatic attraction of their plates -- you see dielectric breakdown.

    So when I suggested looking for a way to reverse the process, they actually need to find a different, but probably related, substance, that undergoes an expansion, rather than a contraction, along the direction of the potential gradient.

  • Next thing you know we'll be plugging ourselves in at the movie theaters and those subwoofer hits will get our whole body jolting. Ever wanted to _feel_ the dino's toss you around in Jurassic Park? ;)

  • The major problem I see with this is the amount of current needed to drive that many solenoids. Lets say you want to move said 350 pounds though a range of motion of, say, 20 cm in a second. Okay, you just drew 300 W of power, assuming perfect efficiency. Throw in the heat loss most solenoids incur, and you're up to a 500 W muscle. Your body can do this, easy, because it has the equivalent of a massively parallel power plant (sugar metabolism in each of the 1E7 to 1E9 muscle cells in a muscle). You want to carry around a power supply that feeds 300 W to each of about 10 muscles in a leg. Probably not.

  • Plastic does nasty things in UV light. That means no more going down to the beach, or anywhere near an Ozone Hole
    A slow pitch right down the middle. ugh, I just can't swing, you made it too easy.

    Anyway, here in the states, we wear clothes, they really seem to help with the whole going outside problem.

    Too much arm-waving, and your arms'll fall off.
    Honestly I really don't wave all that much. To hit this stress level you'd almost have to be a beauty pagent contestant or something like that, if your male, use your arm repeatedly in such a way. . .. umm, err, nevermind.

    Never knock on Death's door:

  • Now, having said that... it could also pose competetion in the viagra dept...
  • i wont even bother to comment on your "30Khz point" because it is completely illogical.. you would want it to vibrate at different rates, ranging from a few times a second to nearly 20000 times a second in order to cover all sounds that the human ear can hear.

    Brain was fried. Yes, that is about the range of human hearing.. although it's usually alittle higher than 20k...

  • And we all know how many millionaires rob 7-11s.

    Esperandi

  • Not to mention that you'll still look like a geek.

    Except for those rippling muscles of plastic! Yeah, the babes will swoon over those.


    --

  • You wouldn't have to attach to the bone the same way muscles attach... you could use a screw and drill it all the way in.

    As for snapping them, I think bones are built to take a lot more stress than muscles can create. You could probably be significantly stronger before fractures became a serious risk.

    After all, how often do body builders break bones? I mean, it happens, but it's pretty darn rare. In fact, muscle tears are far more common than broken bones, and that risk would go away.

    A world-class power lifter can probably lift 4-5 times what the average man can lift. That would still be pretty cool, particularly if you could have the strength without all the extra mass.


    --

  • Honestly, when I read his blurb, I thought it said "strangest man," which was something I took offense to, because I want to be the strangest, well, sentient being around...

    Oh well, Rob doesn't have a color fetish like I do (look it up on everything2 [everything2.net]... seems to be down right now so I can't make a link right to the node), so I think I'd still win the contest. :)
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine [nmsu.edu].

  • I'm suprised no one has mentioned the application of this technology for use in space.

    Think about it, if these plastics can expand and conract on such a small scale, then they'd obviously be able to expand on a much larger scale. Realistic inflatable heat sheilds were just mentioned [slashdot.org] on /. a little while ago. Why not go the next step and make the whole damn ship expandable. Make it nice and small for exits and re-entrys (less drag, surface area, etc..), and once you're out in space you can expand out to be twice, or however much larger you can stretch these plastics. Plus, from the discriptions of these technologies, the synthetics these are being made from will soon be strong enough to withstand multiple re-entries. They'll be no space shuttle, sure, but it's better than the inflatable sheild which probably can only be used once.

    Also, then we can start building cool organic looking ships. (See the Mon Cal crusiers of Star Wars for examples.)

  • more responsive than natural muscles

    I'd imagine they lack one critical feature of real muscles, the ability to repair themselves.

    It's neat and all, but life really is the ultimate engineering feat. Being adaptive, with the ability to modify our own behavioural routines, in a self contained, self sustaining unit, that's amazing.

    And I thought writing self modifying code in my AI class was hard!

    Some guy named Chris

  • I'd like to see someone do a homebrew version of this. How to build a biomorphic exoskeleton in my own back yard.

    Heck, how-to instructions for an individual twitch-fiber would be enough to start some interesting projects. Sure would beat Lego Mindstorms.

  • "Do you use a magnet to talk?"

    Gee, I'd like to hear speakers that really sing.

  • Sorry, McDonalds beat you to it. :)
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine [nmsu.edu].
  • I just want a tail, and maybe prosthetic quills. (I know I'm not alone on this one. :)
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine [nmsu.edu].
  • Actually if you electrically stimulate a muscle to its maximum possible contraction, the bone it is attached to *will* snap like twig. It's been done. I'm not sure if muscle tears happen because of extreme contraction. The reason is probably overuse. Also, muscles are extremely strongly attached to the bones, judging from the fact that they can brak a bone and still stay attached to the bone. For example your biceps is like a lever, in which one lever arm is more than 5 times shorter than the other. Thus if you are holding 10 pounds forward (using biceps muscle), the force on the bone-muscle connection is about 50 pounds. So they are even stronger than you would imagine.
  • Man, all this country needs is one more way to distance our conscience from our military actions. Having anything inhuman doing our killing would probably be one of the worst episodes in History.
    I'm not picking on America - that would happen to any nation with that kind of power, but we would be among the first to develop this new technology...
  • After all, how often do body builders break bones? I mean, it happens, but it's pretty darn rare. In fact, muscle tears are far more common than broken bones, and that risk would go away.

    Body builders build bone as well as muscle. The skeleton is an amazing adaptive system -- heals in bone such as at an old fracture point are stronger than virgin bone. When you engage in weight bearing excercise and you create microfractures in your bones that heal into a network of stronger bone. This way, the skeleton adapts to actual patterns of use, becoming strong as needed while remaining light as possible.

    Stress fractures happen when you don't give bone time to heal or when there are hormonal problems. Thus, somebody who is taking steroids to reduce his recovery time for muscle building may risk getting stress fractures, as well as women who exercise to the point where they stop menstruating.

    In any case, since you won't be perceiving any muscle strain or pain from exercise, there's an excellent chance that even if the bone can bear the force initially, that you'll be getting some stress fractures pretty soon. The secret of exercise is that the benefits come from the rest that follows.

    ... you could use a screw and drill it all the way in

    The stresses around the screw would be terrific; perhaps if you slowly ramped up the force the bone could adapt, but it is unlikely to be as strong as something which left the bone intact, like some kind of artificial tendon.

  • Why making the stuff contract by gluing the stuff together in a fanfold shape? Again, that's like stacking discs of the stuff, but it's one piece so wiring it together is easier (especially if you do an even number of folds, you'll have different electrodes on either end).

    For more force, just use a wider sheet. Or just bundle them up cut in square bunches and run more in parallel if you needed more force- that way if it did short out one bundle, you'd still have some muscle action, albeit a bit weaker. You might need to wrap an insulator around each of the individual bunches so they don't short together.
  • To a certain extent, you could do it by "reversing the plugs" -- for example, have the bicep-replacement recieve the signals intended for the tricep, and vice-versa. Of course, relaxing both muscles would cause a double pull instead of a double relax, so it'll be a lot more sensible (at least during early stages) to use it in artificial limb replacements instead of for augementation of existing limbs.

    As a heart replacement, logically one would also embed a pacemaker-like device either to control or convert singnals so it would pump correctly...
    (just don't let Microsoft install Universal Plug & Play on the thing...)

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • like the "artificial muscle" this is being hyped as -- is that you can't exert very much force before the material starts to compress, or else you overwhelm the electrostatic forces

    What I wondered when I read about it using electric forces, da dee da, is that, if you're going to try to make a muscle out of these things, and you stick a bunch of them together (and they're going to have to be close together to work properly, even though I know they're small) isn't there going to be a lot of electro-static accumulation? Wouldn't somebody outfitted with muscles made of these little things shock everyone they touched? Plus, what kind of battery life is to be considered here? I realize the muscle bit is a while away (or, I think it is), but I still think these are somewhat valid questions.. unless I'm just looking at it all wrong.

  • Yeah, I'd wondered about the power consumption. I still think magnetism is the way to go, though.
    I mean, it is the direct conversion of electricity to kinectic energy required and in controllable amounts.

  • The stresses around the screw would be terrific; perhaps if you slowly ramped up the force the bone could adapt, but it is unlikely to be as strong as something which left the bone intact, like some kind of artificial tendon.

    True; it might be better to wrap a strip of metal all the way around the bone and attach to that. It would probably be stronger and less invasive to boot.


    --

  • damn! I wish he'd mentioned it sometime during fall semester when I was in his C335 class at IU!

    nuts :)

    -evilwurst
  • Get away. They're in it together. In fact it's probably the same guy arguing with himself, I've seen it before on Slashdot only recently. In fact, it's probably YOU!

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction

  • FINALLY! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    People with certain strains of MS, MA, etc. (Like me with SMA [See http://www.fsma.org/]) are waiting for this to have a much better life.
  • This is true, the way I read the previous authors comments, calling it a "chain" I considered it to be a serial linking. However, either combination causes certain problems with size if you are trying to do anything useful, so perhaps a combination of both is the best approach. At any rate, we are way off topic here ;-)

    Spyky
  • I think before that happens, we would develop nanomites that can selectively target the enemy, burrow into their body, and paralyze them or self-destruct. But the public outcry would probably be very loud, and there would probably be international treaties against it, but it will be developed.
  • there's an interesting novel dealing with such issues. It's called Metal Fatigue by Sean Williams.

    the issues presented in the book raise the question of the impacts to society that such modification have.

    for exaple, I can use this technology to repair damage to ones arm so that they can regain the use of that arm. on the other hand, I can use this technology to create your supersoldier.

    what you then have to ask yourself is: what kind of impact is this going to have on the individual? For the arm dude, he regains agility. for the supersoldier, does he get a sense of superiority? of somehow being "Better" than everyone else?

    what about his commanders? they have access to a better killing machine now. how are the general populacy going to react? how are the modified people going to react?

    you haven't created a dude that's just stronger than everyone else, you have created a person that thinks he's stronger/better than everyone else. a deadly concoction if you ask me


    we can rebuild him! we have the technology!
  • A physics teacher once told us, many people break bones when they fall to the ground from heights, because their muscles contract and break the bones. He told us, if we were to fall from an upper-story window or something, to relax your muscles, lie on your side, and put your arm between your skull and the ground.

    He was a great story-teller and a less great teacher (didn't bother me, though), so I'd like to know what you think of this advice.
  • So how do you picture it being used for your benefit? Would you go for (potentially more risky) surgical augmentation, or for an exoskeleton-type device? Would you want it designed so you were "average" in strength etc. or would you go straight for "superhuman"?
  • but, ha ha ha ha, your reply *did* make me laugh out loud.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • I could give you all of the info you wanted on anything about Robotech if only you didnt post anonymously, oh well... All three seasons had mecha, the second actually had the least, but it's ok to be confused. For a good robotech webpage try http://robotech.simplenet.com. If by any chance anyone needs info from one of the worlds largest Robotech fans (large in fandom, not body mass) feel free to write me at Robotech@cookiemonster5.8m.com.

    "Apparently, Dana finds the 15th boring and dull, dull, dull! Maybe they all should get poofy afros like hers?!" -Nova Centauri, about Dana Sterling (Robotech (second season))

  • The reason a speaker is stiff is because it is transmitting vibration from a coil around a magnet to the air. If it is not stiff, it will simply flex and the vibration energy will be lost in the speaker cone. One of the problems with a speaker is that the mass of the stiff cone keeps the speaker from responding to high frequencies. Thus the need for smaller tweeters with less massive cones.

    A vibrating lump of plastic will be transmitting the vibration directly to the air so it's stiffness is not an issue. The flexing of the plastic is what is puting the energy into the air.

    One of the best sounding speakers I ever heard was even less stiff than a glob of plastic. It was a flame speaker. It consisted of a critical flame with ionized material in the flame. Two wires were put in the flame and a high voltage audio signal was put across the wires. The flame vibrated and produced sound. Several construction articles existed, the technology just wasn't feasable for any long term use (there was enough heat from the tubes). This was in the mid '60s.

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