At South by Southwest on Sunday, MIT professor and double amputee Hugh Herr shared his vision of a future without disability. In the field of bionics, Herr and his team have made incredible strides, such as building powered ankle-foot prosthetics that provide tactile feedback like their biological counterparts, or regenerating neurons in rats and humans. But beyond the possibilities of now or even the near future, Herr gives us a glimpse into a world where, eventually, those with healthy or even mildly suboptimal limbs may prefer bionic limbs, or where having bionic legs wouldn't be an impediment but rather an advantage. We caught up with Herr after his IEEE presentation to learn a little more about the world of extreme bionics.
In 2009, a Maryland county court convicted Glenn Raynor of rape, the verdict hinging on a key piece of evidence: Raynor's DNA samples. However, Raynor didn't give his DNA willingly. After he consistently refused to provide any samples to the police, officers snagged a few samples of Raynor's sweat from a chair he had been sitting in during an interrogation session. The DNA matched DNA found at the crime scene, and the prosecution built their case around that fact, leading to a 100-year prison sentence.
In 2014, a biotechnology company began offering a whole new service to police departments. Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs' Snapshot service allows police to send Parabon NanoLabs DNA samples taken from crime scenes. From that DNA, the company reconstructs a guess of what the person's face looks like.
In the transitory space between Mexico's Tijuana and America's San Ysidro, the drone flew. Six rotors carried it forward, and strapped to its body were six packets of methamphetamine, weighing more than six pounds. Discovered by Tijuana police crashed in a parking lot just shy of the San Ysidro border crossing, the drone never completed its illicit mission.
Though it's becoming fairly common for forensic scientists to create 3D maps of a crime scene, all that information gets flattened out onto paper when it gets to the courtroom. Seeing the crime since in just two-dimensions can make it difficult for jurors to understand how people and objects (like bullets, for instance) moved through space at the scene of the crime.
Lunar Mission One, the team of U.K.-based scientists and engineers hoping to send a robotic probe to drill into the moon, just reached a major milestone in funding. Today, the project's Kickstarter campaign reached its target goal of £600,000 (close to $1 million USD), with more than 30 hours to spare.
With all the symbolism of man's hubris turned to dust, in 1986, the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl melted down. The scale of the devastation was vast. A whole town, abandoned, was left to the elements. And in the decades since, the Ukrainian city of Pripyat has become a strange, modern ghost town.
