Want to know what it's like to shuffle around the grocery store like achy old folks do? Just in case that sounds like fun, researchers at MIT's Agelab have created a jumpsuit that brings the experience to life for the young, able-bodied masses.

The Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES, get it?) was created to provide insight into the physical effects of aging. 

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That's important because all those baby boomers who've dictated politics and the economy for what seems like forever are now getting old. To continue making money by selling them stuff, products need to be designed that make life groovy for people with poor eyesight, stiff joints and a hunched back.

AGNES consists of arm, leg and neck braces as well as a web of stretchy cords that make moving around cumbersome and uncomfortable. Yellow goggles mimic reduced vision. A safety helmet strapped to the body gives the feeling of a compressed spine. Custom shoes make you feel off balance.

What's more, fashion-conscious researchers who get to wear the suit around will feel the bliss of what it's like to not give a hoot about how they look in the public. 

More importantly, though, the suit really could help make life more comfortable and enjoyable for our aging population. In turn, maybe these happy old folks will be inclined to share their wisdom with those of us who wise up to their plight.

[Via: Discovery News and PopSci]

More on old age:

• Telemedicine rings off the hook
• 10 gadgets that make you look old
• As boomers age, 1 in 5 drivers will be oldsters
• 90 year old marathoner races to old age
• Your odds of reaching 90 keep getting better

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Even if everything about different groups of animals is identical down to the level of their genes and physical surroundings, they can develop unique ways to communicate, according to an experiment done with robots that use flashing lights to "talk."

The Swiss researchers used the robots to get handle on why there is such diversity in communication systems within and between species, something that is difficult to do in living animals. 

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The answer, they found, "is contingencies in evolutionary history, i.e. stochasticity (randomness) in the occurrence order of new ... traits," Steffen Wischmann, a researcher in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Lausanne, told me in an email.

He and his colleagues started with 20 populations of identical two-wheeled robots each equipped with a camera, a food detection sensor, a simple information processing program, and a ring that could emit a blue or green light.

These robots, grouped in populations of 20 individuals, were placed in an arena containing a food source. The team ranked each robot according to how long they spent at the food source. 

They then used a "standard roulette-wheel selection algorithm" to select 100 robots' programs, or genes, for reproduction, according the paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Because the 'genes' — which encoded specifications of the robots neural controllers, responsible for processing sensory information and producing motor actions — were initially set to random values, the robots behaved unpredictably at first," the journal explains in a news advisory.

"But after 1,000 generations, all 20 populations emitted light to indicate food location. In approximately half the populations, the robots emitted a signal only in the presence of food, while the other populations also emitted a different color light in areas without food."

It turned out that the one-signal robots were the most efficient communicators — they found the food faster — but they were also the weakest competitors when pitted against other groups of robots who communicated with two flashing lights.

In other words, there's a tradeoff between communication efficiency and competitive robustness, the researchers note. And, randomness in evolutionary history can affect the outcome of competition between populations.

"Since the two-signal populations use both signals they can also utilize the signals of other populations independent of which signal this other population uses to signal the presence of food," Wischmann explained to me.

Further analysis of the data gleaned from the robots shows that the signaling differences occurred early in the robots' evolution. 

This randomness in the occurrence of mutations can drive the evolution of language and "might also be involved in speciation processes," the team concludes.

More on language evolution:

• Robots invent their own spoken language
• Grow a new language in your head
• A baby's babble leads to language
• Mice given 'human' version of speech gene

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

A new generation of workout machines that generate electricity as you work up a sweat are poised to invade fitness centers and help you keep your New Year's resolution to trim down your waistline.

The electricity generated by the machines is fed back into the grid, helping the gym save on its utility bills.

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The so-called Green System from Woodinville, Wash.,-based SportsArt Fitness, represents a novel way to harness "human power," Ken Carpenter, director of sales for the company, told me.

It joins a growing list of similar concepts, including PaveGen's pavers that generate electricity as people walk (and boogie) on them and devices such as shoes and a backpack that charge batteries as you go for a jog or hike in the woods.

Sweaty watts
The Green System consists of recumbent and upright bikes as well as elliptical trainers, each with a box that captures 75 percent of the watts you generate during a workout. 

Boxes in several machines are hooked together and routed through an inverter that can handle up to 2,000 watts. Assuming an average of 133 watts per person, a pod might have 15 machines on it, Carpenter said.

"Most facilities are going to be drawing so many watts and amperage, you'd have to have a lot of inverters to really reverse that meter, because of light bulbs, air conditioning, and all the other things being powered," he said.

Nevertheless, 2,000 watt hours are enough to power a clothes washer for 6 hours, a microwave oven for 2.5 hours, or a 27-inch flat screen TV for 17 hours, according to SportsArt Fitness.

This is enough electricity that the system will pay for itself in about three years, according to Carpenter. The company has an online calculator where you can figure out your potential savings.

The system includes an inverter and the exercise machines. The inverter runs about $3,000, while the the machines could cost about $3,500 to $7,000.

Generating award points
The system is also hooked up with Victoria, Canada,-based EcoFit, which produces digital technology to calculate the number of watts an individual generates during a workout, put it on a graphical display and keep track of watts over time on a card.

In the future, the companies hope to turn these "eco-points" generated at the gym into currency accepted at coffee shops and other retail outlets. 

Back at the gym, the display technology also allows individuals to compete. For example, if you see your buddy is generating 115 watts, you might ramp it up so you can generate 130 watts.

Right now, most people measure their performance at the gym in terms of workout time, or distance biked, or calories burned, but Carpenter said he thinks this paradigm will shift to watts "the more eco-conscious people get."

So, eat, drink, and be merry this weekend. But come the New Year, hit the gym and generate some watts.

More on harnessing human power:

• Shoes redefine 'power walking'
• Backpack generates its own electricity
• Pavers generate electricity from steps
• Device produces electricity from a swinging knee

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Gadgets are great. We're enticed to buy new ones every few years. Sometimes that's because the new features are too awesome to resist, but other times we're simply buying replacements. As cool as gadgets are, they are prone to break and hard, if not impossible, to repair.

That frustration of throwing away perfectly good technology just because it doesn't work may be history, thanks to a "self-healing" electronics developed by engineers at the University of Illinois.

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This system restores electrical conductivity to a cracked circuit in less time than it takes to blink, the university reports. It does this with tiny microcapsules on top of a gold line functioning as a circuit in a chip.

"As a crack propagates, the microcapsules break open and release the liquid metal contained inside. The liquid metal fills the gap in the circuit, restoring electrical flow," reads a new release on the technology.

While this technology could find a home in gadgets, the reality is you'll still want to replace them every few years to take advantage of technological leaps. But for other uses, such a ship en route to Mars, self-healing electronics could be a life saver.

For more information, check out the news release on the study reported in the journal Advanced Materials as well as the video above with lead author Scott White, a professor of aerospace engineering.

More on self-healing tech:

• Fix scratches in a flash, literally
• Metals with memory could fix dents
• Self-healing car coating repairs scratches
• Bendy antennas could reshape electronics

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Robotic helicopters capable of ferrying 3.5 tons of cargo in a single load are at work supplying NATO troops in Afghanistan, according to a defense technology blog.

The helicopter is a Lockheed Martin / Kaman Aerospace K-Max designed for battlefield cargo resupply. Confirmation of its use in Afghanistan means "we're now in the age of unmanned logistics," Paul Mcleary writes for Aviation Week's Ares blog. 

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The technology will put fewer soldiers at risk flying over enemy lines on re-supply missions. That doesn't mean, however, that the military will put the helicopters directly in harm's way. 

"Most of the missions will be conducted at night and at higher altitudes," Marine Capt. Caleb Joiner, mission commander, said in a news release. "This will allow us to keep out of small arms range."

While the helicopter should save lives on the battlefield, how might robotic choppers and other supply vehicles translate to civilian life? Feel free to share your wishes in the comments section below.

More on military robots:

• Military faces overload from robot swarms
• Dog vs. robot: Which is the better soldier?
• Military developing robot-insect cyborg
• Scientists debate a robot war
• Future of war: Private robot armies fight it out

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Developers of the next-big social networking application stand a greater chance at skyrocketing success if Hollywood stars and big media go gaga over it, according to an analysis of Twitter's meteoric rise in popularity.

Data collected on the number of users adopting the microblogging service in its early years (between 2006 and 2009) show that it first spread gradually via traditional social networks — real-world friends, work colleagues, neighbors — then took off when media stars started to gather their flocks.

 

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"The first big run up in the number of Twitter users corresponded to the months that Ashton Kutcher was trying to be the first one to a million followers," Jameson Lawrence Toole, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-author of the study, told me today.

 

 

The Hollywood actor, who is most recently in the news for his recent divorce with actress Demi Moore and starring role in the hit TV series Two and a Half Men, touted his Twitter flock on Oprah Winfrey's daytime talk show. And that's also when Oprah herself sent her first tweet.

"The most number of people ever signed up for Twitter during that week," Toole said.

From there, Twitter's rise was unstoppable. News reporters wrote about Kutcher and Oprah and more people signed up for Twitter. More media personalities wrote their own stories about sending 140-character tweets. More people signed up. More stories, more users.

While the data isn't all that surprising, it suggests a new way for researchers to model the power of media influence in their analyses of what drives a company to success, according to Toole.

In traditional models, he said, the role of media is considered a constant across time. What the Twitter analysis illustrates is the existence of a feedback loop present in today's media. "The more people sign up, the more news articles are written, and then more people sign up," he said.

The effect has been named elsewhere as the Oprah Effect, which is particularly prevalent in book sales. Aspiring authors know that if the talk show host picks their book for her monthly book club, for example, a spot on the best seller list is almost certainly in their future.

The comedian Stephan Colbert has a similar effect, known as the Colbert Bump, which is particularly effective for politicians, according to Toole.

Given the analysis of Twitter data from its early years, the power of big media stars seems to apply to Internet-based applications as well. So, if you want millions of users to use your app, make sure a big name pitches it, preferably in a quasi-viral way. That should mean success, according to the new model.

"What we can't model is if Oprah is going to pick up your Web service," Toole noted. 

More stories on Twitter and the power of media:

• Turns out Twitter is more than Ashton Kutcher
• Oprah's magic helps small businesses, ready or not
• Science confirms the 'Colbert Bump'
• Human brain limits Twitter friends

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The study is scheduled to appear this month in the journal PLoS One.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Lab scientists are getting a $50,000 assist from the U.S. government to go to school and learn the entrepreneurial skills required to take their innovations into the marketplace and, perhaps, become millionaires.

"I am basically teaching them how to do eye contact and test their hypotheses outside of the lab," Steve Blank, a startup guru at Stanford University who designed and teaches the course, told me Tuesday.

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The course is part of the National Science Foundation's recently launched Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, which aims to help researchers make the leap to entrepreneurship. The first 21 teams wrapped up the two-month-long course earlier this month.

It is modeled after Blank's Lean LaunchPad class, which replaces the traditional masters in business administration curriculum — balance sheets, business plans, etc. — with what Blank calls "the scientific method for entrepreneurship."

Entrepreneur training
The course forces teams of researchers — an entrepreneur, principal investigator, and mentor — to network with colleagues and potential clients to test hypotheses about the market for their lab innovation.

As hypotheses fail, the teams adapt with what Blank calls a pivot, or change in the business plan. It acknowledges that startups usually go through multiple failures en route to success.

That's different than how a traditionally-trained MBA would operate in an established corporation, notes Blank, where failure would almost certainly result in the firing of an executive.

"This word pivot not only encapsulates the fact that you are going to be changing rapidly, it embraces the fact that we are going to do it without crisis. We are going to do it without firing executives," he said.

For example, a company called Arka Solutions, led by Satish Kandlikar, a mechanical engineer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, pivoted twice throughout the process. 

They started with an idea they would manufacture highly efficient LED lamps, but ended up with a company that uses their technology to make heat-pipe cooling systems for LED lights as well as electronics cooling and HVAC applications.

The next Google?
Before the course started, Blank thought maybe three or four of the teams would end up going forward as companies. After 8 weeks and 1,947 calls, 19 of 21 teams said they are now entrepreneurs.

None of these companies are going to be the next Google or Facebook, well-known Internet companies with eye-popping billion-dollar market valuations, Blank noted. But successful $100 million companies? 

"Absolutely," he said, adding that these teams of scientists and engineers echo the original roots of Silicon Valley, which was founded by a bunch of PhDs, not MBAs.

"The National Science Foundation has started the first incubator for science and engineering from the government," he said.

Armed with his hypothesis-testing methodology to successful entrepreneurship, Blank says the teams involved in I-Corps could attract venture capital away from overly valued Internet companies.

That should come as good news to students who stuck with chemistry, biology and physics as their counterparts chased riches promised by degrees in law or business.

More on I-Corps, innovation and science:

• Corps will turn science into startups
• Gov't picks tech to incubate
• Eight great American discoveries in science
• White House issues scientific integrity memo

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The National Science Foundation will be offering the I-Corps at least twice in 2012 and expanding the course to universities around the country. For more information, visit the I-Corps website.  

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

The bar of the future may have all-organic brews on tap and blinking neon signs in the window made with millions of bacterial cells that periodically glow in unison.

The same "living neon sign" technology could also be used to help brewers and other folks monitor environmental pollutants in water such as arsenic, according to research published online Sunday in the journal Nature.

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The breakthrough involved attaching a fluorescent protein to bacteria engineered with biological clocks, and then synchronizing the clocks of thousands of bacteria within a colony to create a so-called biopixel.

Thousands of these biopixels, each an individual point of light like a pixel on a computer screen, are then synchronized so they all glow in unison to create a sign.

The largest signs made so far are about the size of a paperclip, according to the researchers working on the technology at the University of California at San Diego. 

Path to success
The work started with engineering a biological clock into a single bacterium, explained Jeff Hasty, a professor of biology and bioengineering at the university.

These engineered clocks are attached to a fluorescent protein that flashes on and off. 

Next, Hasty's team synchronized all the clocks in a bacterial colony via what's called quorum sensing, which is a way bacteria communicate with each other using molecular signals.

This made it so that "an entire colony would flash in synchrony," Hasty explained to me Monday.

A single bacterial colony is 10s of microns in diameter — about the size of a pixel, hence biopixel.

"If you want to get out to the centimeter-length scale, this quorum sensing won't work because it is too slow; you would get something that looks like waves," he said.

To get over that hurdle, the team connected a gene that codes for hydrogen peroxide gas vapor to the biological clock. The gas vapor is used to communicate and synchronize the colonies.

"When the clock goes on, you get a pulse of vapor and that pulse of vapor then goes to a neighboring colony and that's what communicates the signal. And when the clock goes off, the vapor goes off," Hasty said.

In the final system, quorum sensing is used for signaling at the colony level, the gas vapor signal is used to synchronize across colonies.

Environmental sensors
The researchers have turned the blinking bacteria into a sign that spells out UCSD and could, for example, get to the scale where it could spell your favorite brand of beer for display in a bar window, Hasty said.

More practical applications will come in the environmental sensor market. As a proof of concept, the team created a biosensor that detects levels of arsenic, a heavy metal, in water. The more arsenic detected, the slower the sensor blinks. 

These sensors can be built in the lab for less than $100, Hasty said, and each sensor lasts for weeks at a time.

For now, the researchers are trying to figure out the limits of scale for the technology. 

"How many cells can we get in a centimeter-length scale to increase the signal?" Hasty said. "And then, how much can we increase this length scale to get something that is even macroscopic?"

Imagine, for example, a giant flashing "living neon sign" hovering over the outfield seats advertising the marquee sponsor for the Colorado Rockies baseball team.

More on glowing life forms:

• Glowing bacteria encrypt codes
• Plants that glow on their own developed
• Bright bacteria wins synthetic biology competition
• Glow in the dark mushrooms discovered

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.  

For some of us, jetpacks represent a dreamy way to fly over traffic en route to work. For those just looking for fun, look no further than the Flyboard, a contraption that lets you zip in and out of water — and soar above it — akin to Flipper after way too much caffeine.

The device was created by French water sports racer Franky Zapata. It's essentially a board hooked up to a personal watercraft such as a Jetski via a water-sucking hose. Water shoots out through jets below the feet and hand grips to provide propulsion. 

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In the video above, Zapata shows off the Flyboard's ability to turn humans into flipping, twisting, jumping and diving dolphins. It looks like a blast, though some skill must be required not to get tangled up in the hose. 

It hooks up to any personal watercraft with more than 100 horsepower and costs about $6,400 (PWC not included). While there are certainly other jetpacks on the market, this one might fit a few more budgets and spike higher on the fun-o-meter.

[Via PopSci and The Australian]

More on jetpacks:

• Jetpack soars a mile high
• This jetpack can be yours for $100,000
• Dude, where’s my flying car and jetpack
• 7 flights of fancy that fizzled

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.