The Perseverance rover is headed for Mars. Safe journey, Percy!
Somewhat lost in all the pandemic and political news is NASA’s launch of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover (nickname: Percy), which on July 30th headed off on its seven-month trip to the Red Planet, where it will join Curiosity, which touched down in August 2012 and is still active. (The earlier rovers – Sojourner (1997) […]
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Keeping Hackers Out of Industrial Control Systems
It seems that there’s always a hacking story in the news, the most recent being a hack of Twitter accounts which you’ve likely read about. Hackers had managed to con a couple of Twitter employees into giving them access to their credentials. They used these credentials to make their way past security and sending out […]
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Keep your distance! Technology for maintaining social distancing.
If you’ve been in a grocery, pharmacy, or big box store recently – or lined up outside a Starbucks – you’ve seen the duct-taped X’s telling you where to stand to keep your social distance from the person in front of you. And if you’ve been taking walks – or just walking down the aisle […]
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Oura rings enlisted in the fight against COVID
Remember mood rings? They were a 70’s fad that recycles every once in a while. The rings contained liquid crystal, which changes colors when the temperature of your finger changed. Red means you’re excited. Gray, nervous. Blue, calm. The science was a bit sketchy, but there was something to it. Anxiety sends blood towards your […]
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Underwater energy harvesting
I’m always bookmarking articles of interest, and in going through my backlog, I just came across one on underwater energy harvesting that appeared in EETimes this past February. (And speaking of February, doesn’t that seem a million years ago?) In the article, Bill Schweber describes a new approach that some MIT researchers are using. The […]
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Your smartphone’s getting even smarter
When the pandemic hit, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in making sure I knew where the thermometer was, replacing the battery on the pulse oximeter, and checking the expiration dates on the cold medicine in the cabinet. Your home “doctor’s bag” may well have a blood pressure monitor in it: a device with an inflatable […]
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Send in the drones!
Like those belonging to pretty much everyone else, the electronics devices and gadgets I rely on occasionally run out of juice. I forget to charge my phone. Or my smart watch. I misjudge how long my laptop has been running untethered, and now I’m finding that I’m running on empty. Sure, it’s not as terrible […]
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Mind over matter. In this case, a prosthetic hand.
Mind-controlled prosthetics for amputees have been around for years. And they’re amazing. But the functionality they provide is limited. They can be awkward to use and don’t provide fine motor control. And their use was generally confined to those who hadn’t just lost a limb, but who were also paralyzed. That’s because it required a […]
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Running on Technology
This past Monday should have seen the running of the Boston Marathon. I’m not a marathoner, but it’s hard not to pay just a bit of attention to Boston, the longest running (since 1897) marathon in the world. The event, like so many others, has been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and will be […]
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From the MIT Technology Review: 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2020 (Part Two)
In my last post, I described the first five breakthrough technologies listed in the March/April edition of The MIT Technology Review. In this post, I’m doing the remainder of the Top Ten. (In parentheses, after each section, I’ve noted the writer for that article.) Satellite Mega-Constellations: This article starts with a fairly startling statement: “More […]
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