| Blog - Design And The New Industrial Revolution and Ultrasound App Lets Almost Any Phone Pay |
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Product designers have always had to choose between additive processes such as 3D printing and subtractive processes like machining. Now they can have bothIf you hadn't heard, there's a new industrial revolution sweeping the world. This revolution, say the champions of this new kind of making, is the result of three factors that together change the nature and economics of manufacturing.The first is free software for designing complex 3D objects; the best known example being Google Sketchup.The second is 3D printing in which computerised machines turn virtual designs into physical models that you can prod, fondle and squeeze.Finally, there is the precipitous drop in the cost of 3D printers and other rapid prototyping techniques. This suddenly makes it practical and profitable to make-on-demand instead of mass producing products. [Read the full article] Agent 86, eat your heart out. These smart shoes may not make phone calls, but they'll analyze your gait like none other.Perhaps you thought that the shoe, that ancient yet humble piece of technology, had reached its ultimate form long ago. Well, you thought wrong. A company called XSens has just introduced to the world sensor-packed shoes with a variety of applications. Not since Maxwell Smart's shoe phone has the world seen such high-tech innovation in footwear.XSens calls its ForceShoe "an ambulatory gait lab." Each shoe in a ForceShoe pair contains an array of sensors beneath the heel and sole to measure forces, together with proprietary inertial and magnetic trackers. A transmitter (dubbed the "XBus Master") can push data in real-time to a computer, which in turn can run XSens's own software for access to raw data on the fly. Gait analysis like this has traditionally been possible in the lab; the ForceShoe brings it into the field. [Read the full article] Researchers at MIT and University of Massachusetts-Amherst have collaborated to design a new system that would help prevent such hypothetical attacks. They envision a device that someone with a pacemaker (or drug pump, or defibrillator) could wear that would act as a jammer against unauthorized signals in the implant's operating frequency. This device—a "shield," the authors call it in a paper they plan to present at the Association for Computing Machinery's upcoming Sigcomm conference—could simultaneously send and receive signals in the same frequency band, something not possible with ordinary wireless technology. In their paper, they call their dual functioning device a "jammer-cum-receiver."Aren't there enough real cyberthreats out there for it to be silly for researchers to be worrying about imagined ones? Not at all, said Stefan Savage, a UC San Diego cryptographer. [Read the full article] 
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