Conductive Blanket Makes 3-D Images

For those who never jumped on the Snuggie bandwagon, you were wise to wait. There's a smarter, more advanced, self-aware blanket from the University of Toronto that will put all other wraps to shame.
The prototype, dubbed the “IM Blanky,” is made of a conductive fabric and contains tilt sensors. Clusters of sensor-embedded petals gather information about their respective angles and send the position information to an Arduino computer, which calculates the slopes between the flowers. This results in a 3-D picture of the blanket’s state no matter how crumpled or folded it may be.

Paraplegic Remotely Controls Robot with Thoughts

A professor at a Swiss university on Tuesday unveiled a robot that can be controlled by the brainwaves of a paraplegic person wearing an electrode-fitted cap, news agency ATS reported.
A paralyzed man at a hospital in the town of Sion demonstrated the device, sending a mental command to a computer in his room, which transmitted it to another computer that moved a small robot 60 kilometers (37 miles) away in Lausanne.

The system was developed by Jose Millan, a professor at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne who specializes in non-invasive interfaces between machines and the brain.
The same technology can be used to drive a wheelchair, Millan said.
"Once the movement has begun, the brain can relax, otherwise the person would soon be exhausted," he said.

But the technology has its limits, he added. The brain signals can be scrambled if too many people are gathered around a wheelchair, for example.
Besides making paraplegics mobile, neuroprosthetics could be used to help patients recover lost senses, researchers said.
Professor Stephanie Lacour and her team are working on an "electric skin" for amputees, a glove fitted with tiny sensors that would send information directly to the user's nervous system.
Eventually, researchers say they hope to create mechanized prosthetics that are as mobile and sensitive as a natural hand, Lacour said.

Ah yes, the grocery store dilemma: How does this food item stack up against the rest? When the options are squinting at labels or using a special phone app on each package, sometimes good intentions get left behind. Maybe your grocery cart will have the answer.