Mechanical characters mass-produced by Disney, cyborgs at Harvard

Apologies to TRF readers – I was too busy these days: traveling, swimming, walking, and more. Here's a recreational blog entry. In the following video, you may see some cute mechanical puppets displaying some highly realistic motion:



In fact, Disney Research has a whole infrastructure to mass-produce toys of various kinds.




If that's too mundane and old-fashioned a piece of technology for you, let's try something else.




Nature Materials just published a paper

Macroporous nanowire nanoelectronic scaffolds for synthetic tissues

by a Harvard-HMS-MIT collaboration. They develop a method to fabricate "scaffolds" that may be later filled with cells and become a tissue. You may ask where the biological activity ends and where the electronic activity begins and the very purpose of this engineering is to make the boundary fuzzy and hard to localize.

The photograph of Cyborg Witten, one of the most famous cyborgs who also wrote the paper discussed in the previous blog entry, was taken by Warren Siegel.

See reviews of this ethically provoking if not controversial advance at 33rd Square and a press release at EurekAlert.

Hat tip for both developments: Viktor Kožený, an enthusiastic follower of all these and related technologies, thanks