José Gómez-Márquez builds strange-looking medical equipment: pregnancy tests that look like Lego kits, inhalers inspired by plastic toy helicopters, and centrifuges made from toilet plungers. His inventions aren’t destined for high-tech hospitals——they’re headed to poor countries where electricity, high-tech medical materials, and health personnel are often scarce.

Gómez-Márquez’s innovative work earned him a spot in Technology Review’s TR35, the magazine’s annual list of innovators under 35: He’s their 2009 humanitarian of the year.

His designs are practical, functional, and innovative, and one of his new projects aims to spread that spirit around. “He is now creating development kits for medical technolog­y—sort of like Erector sets for medical professionals—which will initially be used in Nicaragua,” writes Technology Review. “The kits will enable doctors and medical students to devise diagnostics, drug delivery devices, microfluidic chips, and more.”

Read more about Gómez-Márquez’s incredible story, which involves lots of childhood visits to doctors’ offices in his home country of Honduras, and watch him demonstrate some of his inventions in this short video.

Source: Technology Review

It’s time to limit the love and attention lavished on iPhones, Lisa Katayama argues on Boing Boing Gadgets. At first, “I pretended not to care while [my boyfriend] lay in bed smoothing his finger across the unlock bar, and sat stoically at the other end of the dinner table as he and the iPhone whispered sweet nothings to each other,” Katayama writes. “I get it. It’s exciting to be in love with something new.”

“But after several months of this, I started to question whether something was being lost because of my boyfriend’s intense iPhone infatuation. Did we still have stuff to talk about other than new apps and ATT’s shitty cell phone signal in our neighborhood? Was I just hating because I subconsciously want an iPhone, too?”

Their solution: ground rules. No iPhones in bed. No iPhones at the dinner table. On that second count, though—because a little understanding never hurt anyone—“I usually let a short half-minute peek slide every now and then, so he can scratch what itches,” Katayama admits.

(Thanks, @chuckumentary.)

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets

Thirteen-year-old Scott Campbell recently gave up his iPod for a week, opting instead to use his dad’s clunky old Sony Walkman. He writes about his week with the Walkman for the BBC News Magazine, offering quite a few spot-on (and often very funny) observations from the perspective of a digital-music native.

On the plus side, he notes, the Walkman’s enormous play button "engages with a satisfying clunk, unlike the finger tip tap for the iPod." For the most part, however, he finds the Walkman inconvenient (who wouldn’t?), though he is surprisingly gentle, and generally very technical, in his discussions of its shortcomings.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle," where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly—effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, “Walkmans eat tapes.” So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day. 

Source: BBC News Magazine 

Image by nextartist, licensed under Creative Commons.

DAPRA-funded Berkeley researchers have tricked out a beetle with tiny electrodes that allow them to control its flight, reports California. Next step: Outfitting the insect with onboard sensors that relay information back to mission control. Hello, coleopteran espionage!

This certainly isn’t the first time animals have been “pressed into military service,” the University of Berkeley alumni magazine reports. The cyborg beetle is merely the latest in a line of distinguished (also often disastrous and no doubt PETA-enraging) military critters. California did us the courtesy of a recap. Here are a couple of my tragicomic favorites:

The common gerbil. “With their unique ability to smell increased adrenaline in sweat, gerbils had been slated to detect spies and terrorists since WWII. The Israeli internal security force put gerbils to work at the Tel Aviv airport, but cancelled the project when the furry creatures implicated innocent passengers who were just anxious about flying.”

The domestic cat. “The CIA inserted a transmitter and battery pack in a cat and put a microphone in its ear and an antenna on its tail, to eavesdrop on the Soviets during the Cold War. On its first test run, the cat was run over by a taxi before reaching the intended target.”

Source: California

Image by wildxplorer, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s been 25 years since Apple introduced its first Macintosh computer, and even with an economy resembling a swirling vortex of failure, the company and its products are still going strong, according to the Wall Street Journal. To celebrate the Mac's silver anniversary, CNET put together a series of articles exploring the computer’s history and future potential, interviewing some of the project’s early team members, and asking readers to share their favorite memories of the landmark invention.

Image courtesy of Creek Hopper, licensed under Creative Commons.

Video games are evolving into more and more elaborate forms, but they're still dominated by white or Asian protagonists. Writing for The Escapist, Chris LaVigne asks, why aren’t other races and cultures being represented in video games?

The argument for more minorities in video games has been made before, notably in a 2003 article by Ernest Adams, but discourse usually concerns the portrayals of black and Hispanic people in games like Grant Theft Auto. What LaVigne advocates is a way for games to reflect today’s high level of globalization.

As an example of what not to do, LaVigne cites the popular game Tomb Raider, which takes place in Peru, yet the native Peruvians are relegated almost entirely to the background and never speak. And with the glut of World War II games like the Call of Duty series, LaVigne wonders why gamers can’t play as “the Filipino soldiers who fought alongside American forces at the Battle of Luzon to free their capitol city, Manila? Why can't we play as the Rhodesians (now Zimbabweans) who fought with the British military against Axis forces? It was a world war, after all. Why don't developers see the value of telling these unique stories instead of giving us the same 'good ol' boy' Yankees and ‘stiff upper lip’ Britons that were already clichés when they were first introduced?”

Games like Resident Evil 5 (with African characters and setting) and Prince of Persia are headed in the right direction, according to LaVigne. Hopefully, he writes, developers will stop “babying their audience” and open them up to a genuine representation of the world, digital or otherwise.

Image courtesy of RebeccaPollard, licensed under Creative Commons.

Adding to the trend of green and alternative burials, one British woman is developing a new, elegantly morbid way to honor the dead: by pressing loved ones’ cremains into fully functional pencils. 

The project “Carbon Copies” is the brainchild of Nadine Jarvis, a product designer who is currently exploring ways “to challenge our archaic post mortem traditions and to offer proposals for alternate treatment for our deceased.”

Image courtesy of Srthnow, licensed under Creative Commons.

Every new communication method is marked by the technology's first message sent. Colin Barras at the New Scientist rounded up the first messages broadcast with various devices, including the 8,500-year-old Chinese tortoise shells (“woman … eye … window”), Samuel Morse’s “a patient waiter is no loser” telegram in 1838, and “Merry Christmas,” the first text message in 1992.

New Scientist invites readers to submit their predictions for the next communications revolution: “What will be the next communication medium to change the world? And what would your first, historic message be?” One submission will be chosen to win a six-month subscription to the magazine.

I’ll get the ball rolling with my submissions:

1) A banner towed by an airplane bearing a message in LOL speak: “Oh hai! Im up in ur airspace, decorating ur sky!”
2) Subliminal messages embedded in presidential debates: “Attention Joe the Plumber: You are being exploited as a talking point.”
3) Hundred-mile-high lettering etched into the moon’s surface with dynamite: “I Am Writing On the Moon with Dynamite.”

Image by Bill Bradford, licensed by Creative Commons.

Just when you thought Google couldn’t get any more useful (or pervasive), engineers at Google Labs have launched Mail Goggles, a Gmail feature designed to prevent you from sending drunken emails you may regret in the morning. Here’s how it works: When the feature is enabled, Mail Goggles will ask you a series of basic timed math problems to see if you’re functional enough to know what you’re typing. If you pass, your message will be sent. If you fail, it’s probably best to wait until morning to write to your ex (or mother or boss).

To activate Mail Goggles in Gmail, go to the settings, click on "labs" on the right-hand side, and scroll down to find it. The default active time frame for the feature is late at night on weekends, but you can tailor it to your specific needs; say, if you tend to go overboard on the Bloody Marys during brunch, or if you plan on playing one of several drinking games designed for the presidential debates.

(Thanks CNet.com)

Image courtesy of  SuperFantastic , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

A newly developed piece of clothing called the Speed Vest is giving bicycle safety some much-needed visibility.

The reflective vest displays its wearer’s speed in bright neon numbers on the back, increasing the rider’s visibility while addressing the common complaint that bikes slow car traffic. Automobile drivers’ impatience might be mitigated if the Speed Vest confirms that the bike in front of them is traveling at or near the car’s speed.

The Speed Vest is still in the prototype stage, but its designers—Brady Clark, of Minneapolis, and Mykle Hansen, of Portland, Oregon—have already won the Bike Gadget Contest held by the Hub Bike Co-Op in Minneapolis and showcased their invention at the Minnesota State Fair this summer. The bike blog Urban Velo has some playful suggestions for alternative messages bicyclists could convey via the Speed Vest.

Image by Nathaniel Freeman, courtesy of Speed Vest.

Visual learners can thank Wordle, a site that creates word clouds from text or RSS inputs, for making the printed word a little more palatable. The images made by Wordle are part mutated magnetic poetry, part narcissistic blogger temptation (see Utne Reader Wordles below!).

Here's a Wordle image made from the article "It's Not a Gay Thing..." from the July-August issue of Utne Reader.

And here's Albert Einstein's book, Relativity: The Special and General Theory:

More practical Wordle users could get news updates, suggests Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com, with word clouds created from an entire edition of a newspaper to show readers the day's top stories. The website Capitol Words provides a similar word watch for the U.S. government, highlighting the top term discussed in Congress each day. According to the site, Congressional conversations this month focused on “energy” (July 8), “Bosnian” (July 11), and “intelligence” (July 16).

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily.)