To the naked eye or even to powerful telescopes, it may well look like a flying insect or bug. But it is much more than that: it is a tiny unmanned microvehicle. PhD candidates are working on different prototype designs for artificial flying creatures which will blend innocuously into the atmosphere.

The Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio is the scene of this activity. There are many people working on such micro machines which have been inspired by nature. Major Ryan O’Hara created a carbon filter tobacco moth wing which can flap 30 times a second. O’Hara is basing his bugs on bioengineering, by using very thin carbon fibers, much thinner than the human hair, putting them in epoxy resin, and laying them in different orientations so that they look and act as wings. (more…)

The parallels between fiction and real life have always been amazing. Science fiction and futuristic fiction gadgets have often predicted gadgets which have actually found expression in real life years later. So now Brazilian police are getting sunglasses inspired from the movie, RoboCop. These sunglasses use face recognition technology to scan faces and pick out criminals.

The sunglasses actually have a high speed camera which can scan as many 400 people in a second and compare the biometric features wirelessly with a data base of known criminals. If there is a positive match, a red light will come on, telling the officer of the fact and he will also receive instructions as to what to do next. (more…)