Lifeboat Foundation

Remember that paralyzed guy from Southern California who managed to walk on his own accord thanks to a revolutionary technique that bridged the gap in his severed spinal column with a wireless Bluetooth link? A team of doctors at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University have reportedly accomplished the same feat with a patient’s arms.

The team described its initial findings at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago on Tuesday. The system works much like that of the earlier team at UC Irvine: a brain-control interface (BCI) reads the patient’s brain waves emanating from his motor cortex, converts them into actionable electrical signals and wirelessly transmits them to an actuator “sewn into” the patient’s arm. This actuator is comprised of 16 filament wires that generate electrical impulses, which cause various muscle groups to contract when stimulated. The patient thinks about moving his arm and it does so — well, sorta.

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Finally. A Back to the Future tribute that’s genuinely cool.

Engineers at Stanford University along with Renovo Motors built an electric, self-driving DeLorean, appropriately named MARTY. The researchers are using it as a test bed to develop autonomous cars that use racing-inspired techniques to avoid accidents.

See also: USA Today travels ‘Back to the Future’ with front page from the film.

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#5. Denmark pays students $900 a month to attend college.

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What will life be like in 30 years’ time? We asked six forecasters to do better than Back to the Future II’s predictions.

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We’re going back to the future! In Back to the Future Part 2 Doc and Marty travel to the future—October 21, 2015. Yup, we’re living their future! But while we might not have flying cars, hoverboards, or self-fitting shoes, a lot of their predictions about the future weren’t that far off. Here’s a list of 10 they got right.

But seriously, they got a lot wrong. Find out what in our other video, 10 Things Back to the Future 2 Got Wrong!

Continue reading “10 Things Back to the Future 2 Got Right” »

Just a few years ago, we were wondering where all the movies about outer space had gone. And now, we don’t have to wonder any more, because we’ve been getting a crop of fantastic new movies about astronauts, spaceships, and the joy of exploration.

There have been at least a couple of previous golden ages of space movies—the period following 2001 comes to mind, and so does the boom in space-opera adventures after Star Wars. The post-2001 boom saw a handful of idea-rich, very human-focused movies about ideas, which used space and science fiction as a way to further conversations and arguments that were rooted in the eras they were made in. Space, following Star Wars, became a fantastical, otherworldly setting, full of the magic and monsters of pulp serials and fantasy, dressed in other-worldly garb.

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A HUGE asteroid with a highly unpredictable orbit that has more chance of HITTING the Moon than Earth when it passes on HALLOWEEN is being closely monitored after being discovered just DAYS ago.

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This video shows key elements of the optical mining technology that TransAstra has developed.

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Marty McFly’s self-lacing Nikes from Back to the Future are finally real.

Nike has confirmed to Mashable the “first pair of self-lacing Nike Mag shoes is in New York City.” The company didn’t provide further details as to the sneakers’ precise whereabouts in the city, but they’re sure to turn up soon enough.

See also: USA Today travels ‘Back to the Future’ with front page from the film.

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