Ant-man’s Camera December 1, 2021
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Oh sure, it needs a nice camera bag. But at least it works well enough for Science.
Chip fabrication in the garage August 24, 2021
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This fellow has succeeded in making a chip prototype in a home setup…not your ordinary garage, it’s true; he’s got equipment I bet you haven’t got. Still, none of it is truly impossible to get if you want to spend a little money.
No title, just watch and see August 20, 2021
Posted by stuffilikenet in 3D Printing, Applications, Awesome, Geek Stuff, Toys, Uncategorizable, Video.add a comment
I really enjoy deadpan delivery and self-deprecating humor and therefore watch Integza on Youtube…but this guy has help with deadpan from his hilariously barely-patient pregnant wife, whose archery skills are really, really good…compared to his especially. Naturally, his competitive nature will not tolerate that…
Human Biology and the Iron Man Suit April 16, 2021
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Robert Sapolsky is a genius lecturer and neuroendocrinolgist at Stanford whose lectures are part of Stanford’s video lessons. Check him out here (maybe start with Lecture 24, like I did, and then start again from Lecture 1. Trust me).
Alex Burkan is “some mad Russian guy” who is building an Iron Man suit in in a cave from a box of scraps his machine shop with oddly compelling first choices for prototyping muscles (from electrolyzed water for high-pressure hydrogen) for the exoskeleton, using high-pressure hydrogen for a repulser (nearly blowing off his arm) and launching missiles…also, he’s hilarious.
Finally, my handwriting sucks so I thought I would practice journalling to work on it. Then I thought about stuffilike.net and how I never post anymore (see “Bad Things” earlier in time) and it occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one virus, er, stone. So, here’s a first go at making my journalling/handwriting practice relevant to stuffilike.net.
OCR results will vary. All the free ones (not counting Evernote, because I haven’t tried it yet) yield crap:
Onlineocr.com version:
“,04’r it:V= :1
Inq
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e-77’1111W4.1′
in-F. , }-fr
-PXV 7(4 )
27,777, ), , 7M• .-“y -a -.1P7-
–(—–15-977 , _ r , -0 -1–. –) 7, K7,- 11:?)/’ ,)91 7 ,) +7′ r 1 ) .6,77 – d ,4) jp, :}0 / .4-,,,,,77hr- -,n211 1 i .. 7 ), p_,,ii-rip oto rw:- -1/1,–rY ) 7Y) 1 j / 6 / – v4- ,,,, 1 ,,,..)–r ( ;1.71…/i7 ?1,
r”
This does not surprise me.
Google Docs version:
“& watched both Robert Aapolsky and a hilarious Russian fellow named Alex who is beilding an
Dron Man suit in lix machine shop using eldrolysed water to generate high prescere bydrogen for cutificial muscles and to
pouse “repulsors (besically, expelling a budioflydogenlonger mettere al igniting it dont try this at home] He’s nuts and very entertaining in a manic Russian sout of ruaz Also, this gadgets seem to mork, Oddly enough, I can see his stastegy morking hartwith lots and lots of the ratione for the mechanicals, and beige benouits of had baile for stie contrals (can you francese the store Hedding valued)”
It is possible I could use this method (take picture or scan to .pdf, then “open in Google Docs”) if my handwriting improves. We shall see.
Google Lens version:
“an I wat led both Robert Aapolsky and a hilarious Russian fellow Maned Alok whle is building. Is a Man suit is his machine stop using al dialyd water to generate high-prosesse hyclroger for autficial muscles and the “mepulests” (levicallys expuelling a level of and iquiting it don’t by this at home ), He’s nuts, as I very entertaining in a mavic Pussian sout of way. Also, this gadgets seem to work. Oedly enough, I can see his strategy working, just with lots and lots of the ration the nechcemicals, and burge of feedback for the contrale tear you imagine the software beting in valued i”
Well, I did say my handwriting was pretty poor. And it was attempting to read cursive, a style which I understand is no longer taught in USA schools (you poor kids. Are you going to be able to neatly print in time to write enough to pass essay exams?).
COVID Vaccine Info Dump December 30, 2020
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Berthub.eu has an excellent deconstruction of the Pfizer vaccine (“a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine”).
You won’t be sorry.
Free Time November 22, 2020
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I used to write these posts here about Stuff I Like during my lunchtime before a number of Bad Things happened to me. The Bad Things got steadily worse for awhile, and I got out of the habit of writing frequently. I haven’t posted much in the last few years because of timing issues, moving twice, taking eighteen months off work (partly related to the aforementioned Bad Things) to travel and generally letting writing fall onto a back burner. Don’t forget, this blog started out as just an example for my sister to follow to monetize her medical experience without having to have an actual job; I just got a little carried away.
Well, every once in a while I get enthusiastic enough to rise from my pit of despair to write up more Stuff I Like…like this little gem:
This gent has taken the longest possible route to boot his PC. The writeup is fairly detailed, with GitHub sources and self-mocking humor. I would say more, but I’m only just a little bit out of my pit of despair and I’m not charming nor am I witty lately.
3D Printed Layer Strength Fixed! May 14, 2020
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One of the many problems with the gee-whiz near-Star Trek technology of 3D printing is the sometimes poor adhesion between layers of deposited plastic; sometimes they just don’t bond as strongly as desired, resulting in a weaker part than an equivalent injection-molded part. In a paper dropped in Nano Letters, scientists at Texas A & M have found that carbon nanotubes in the mix under a plasma stream heat just the surface layers of the plastic and insure a good weld, as it were, between them. Naturally, they said it in a much more flowery way: “a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma electrode mounted concentrically around the nozzle of an ME 3D printer for in situ welding of thermoplastic parts.” That’s just the abstract; I’m sure they managed to make it sound like they earned their pay in the full document.
Homework: C. B. Sweeney et al, Dielectric Barrier Discharge Applicator for Heating Carbon Nanotube-Loaded Interfaces and Enhancing 3D-Printed Bond Strength, Nano Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b04718
H@ck Skool Security Training
April 21, 2020
Posted by stuffilikenet in Applications, Geek Stuff, Toys.
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For all aspiring script kiddies security researchers: the demo site for web vulnerabilities from OWASP, OWASP_Broken_Web_Apps_VM_1.2, is available on SourceForge. Set it up as a virtual machine using VMWare or VirtualBox (if your mom’s purse doesn’t have a few hundred bucks in it company doesn’t have a budget for VMWare), run it as a website inside your box, then set up Kali Linux as another virtual machine and attack it.
Fun for all.
Game-changing engineered PET enzyme to break down and recycle plastic bottles April 13, 2020
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Nature published a paper by researchers at Carbios and Université de Toulouse that describes an enzyme that breaks down PET plastics (the kind in those clear water bottles that everyone uses…and throws away–like 800 billion tons, which is only an estimate) really, really fast and efficiently. They made the protein which “achieves, over 10 hours, a minimum of 90 per cent PET depolymerization into monomers, with a productivity of 16.7 grams of terephthalate per liter per hour (200 grams per kilogram of PET suspension, with an enzyme concentration of 3 milligrams per gram of PET)” with good, old-fashioned genetic engineering to solve a recycling problem two generations in the making.
Carbios plans to begin testing its enzyme in 2021 in a demonstration plant near Lyon, France.
The paper is available at Nature (not just the abstract, if using the link below), and is fairly readable by a layman.
Homework: An engineered PET depolymerase to break down and recycle plastic bottles: V. Tournier, C. M. Topham, A. Gilles, B. David, C. Folgoas, E. Moya-Leclair, E. Kamionka, M.-L. Desrousseaux, H. Texier, S. Gavalda, M. Cot2, E. Guémard, M. Dalibey J. Nomme, G. Cioci, S. Barbe, M. Chateau, I. André , S. Duquesne & A. Marty
Electric, Adjustable Waterproof Glue March 6, 2020
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The title is quite a promise, isn’t it? Bruce Lee, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan Tech, is a part of the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) and showed how to use pH to make smart underwater adhesives (similar to mussels’ adhesives). He and Saleh Akram Bhuiyan developed a new method using an electrical current to turn off the adhesion of a catechol-containing material.
For extra coolness the adhesive turns red when it’s shut off. For ultimate coolness, they can turn it back on.
Homework: Md. Saleh Akram Bhuiyan et al, In Situ Deactivation of Catechol-Containing Adhesive Using Electrochemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society (2020). DOI: 10.1021/jacs.9b11266
3D Printed Topological Map February 27, 2020
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One of the more retentive members of Silicon Valley 3D Printing Meetup has printed a very complex and beautiful rendering of (some of) the Earth’s topological features in glorious PLA. Thirty-two tiles, ranging in print time for four hours to twenty-two(!) hours for the taller elevations, each “pixel” is 10 KM on a side.
New Aussie Fusion Technology February 25, 2020
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The lateral-thinking Australian fusion start-up HB11 (from the University of New South Wales) patented a unique new fusion technology. Interestingly, this laser-driven technique uses no radioactive fuel(!), and much lower temperatures than “traditional” approaches employed by most fusion researchers involving heating deuterium and tritium fuel up to 15 million C.
I don’t need to tell you that method hasn’t worked yet, do I? Fifty-something years and no joy yet. I wonder why in an industry arguably filled with geniuses or at least Really Smart People that someone hasn’t said, “Hmmm…maybe we should try something new.”
UNSW Emeritus Professor of theoretical physics Heinrich Hora did. His research is being commercialized by HB11, which uses hydrogen-boron fusion wherein two lasers to push atoms of hydrogen into boron. The lasers use “Chirped Pulse Amplification” technology, which won Gérard Mourou, Arthur Ashkin and Donna Strickland the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics(!).
One laser creates the magnetic containment field for the plasma and the second laser triggers the ‘avalanche’ fusion chain reaction. The alpha particles produced by the reaction would create a positive electrical flow that can be channelled almost directly into the existing power grid with no need for a heat exchanger or steam turbine generator, and no chance of blowing the whole thing to atoms leaving a smoking crater.
The simplicity is pretty compelling…if it works. Time will tell.
Artificial Intelligence Finds an Antibiotic February 20, 2020
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In a news flash from M.I.T. scientists announce the discover of a (potentially) low-toxicity molecule which interferes with bacteriological cell walls’ ability to maintain electrochemical gradients, which are essential to creating ATP, the main energy molecule in, well, everything: the cells would starve. An A.I. was trained on 2,500 molecules and then scanned the Broad Institute’s Drug Repurposing Hub, a library of about 6,000 compounds. The model picked out one molecule that was predicted to have strong antibacterial activity and had a chemical structure different from any existing antibiotics. Using a different machine-learning model, the researchers also showed that this molecule would likely have low toxicity to human cells.
It worked very well in vitro and in mouse models on a bunch of stubborn microbes that are getting to be pretty resistant to everything we have: Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The drug apparently worked on EVERYTHING they tested, except Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
A.I. and Gene Regulation December 27, 2019
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Understanding gene regulation is a bitch. Seriously, this is one of the thornier problems of science today and it is because the complexities of living cells, with the thousands of proteins in each cell, make tracing a single protein’s regulation just as complex as hell. Smart guys Tareen and Kinney have figured out a way for AI to interpret (some) interactions using massively-parallel reporter assays to figure out the biophysical basis for (some) gene regulation…which is more than we have had heretofore. They did this by assigning nodes and weights with explicit physiochemical interpretations. This last is the important bit; many AI algorithms are very difficult to interpret, so the underlying “logic” is impenetrable to humans. The smart guys made many of the decisions explicit, so they would be better able to understand the “logic” by which the characterizations were derived.
Homework: Biophysical models of cis-regulation as interpretable neural networks,
Multi-dimensional Blood Testing and A.I. December 23, 2019
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I suggested long ago that sufficiently-comprehensive blood tests could effectively predict a person’s risk of developing a broad array of different diseases. We would use artificial intelligence to find patterns of varying concentrations of blood proteins to predict and/or diagnose disease. Someone much better funded than me has a newly developed platform called SomaScan which can scan five thousand individual proteins from a single blood sample.
In a new study testing the efficacy of predicting 11 different health indicators using these protein expression patterns some models were much more effective than others, such as the protein expression model predicting percentage body fat. The cardiovascular risk model was cited as only modestly predictive, however, the researchers do suggest the protein-pattern-based system is generally more convenient, and cheaper, than many traditional tests currently available for evaluating health conditions.
The study in Nature Medicine was funded by SomaLogic which owns SomaScan, so grain of salt, people. But it’s exciting to see that someone is actually looking into what I feel will be the method of the future for maximizing health…also, the study used ~85 million protein measurements in 16,894 participants, which is a pretty damn good sample size. Plenty of data there for an A.I. to examine for hidden relationships.
Homework:
Plasma protein patterns as comprehensive indicators of health, Nature Medicine, Stephen A. Williams, Mika Kivimaki, Claudia Langenberg, Aroon D. Hingorani, J. P. Casas, Claude Bouchard, Christian Jonasson, Mark A. Sarzynski, Martin J. Shipley, Leigh Alexander, Jessica Ash, Tim Bauer, Jessica Chadwick, Gargi Datta, Robert Kirk DeLisle, Yolanda Hagar, Michael Hinterberg, Rachel Ostroff, Sophie Weiss, Peter Ganz & Nicholas J. Wareham
Enchanting Furby Toy Hack December 20, 2019
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I do wish I had thought of this.
Capable Modular Robots November 9, 2019
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MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory’s M-Block robots can self-assemble into different structures. The little cubes (in development over the last six years) have gained the ability to jump, flip, spin, and recognize each other. A barcode-like system on each face of each cube, allowing them to identify the other cubes around them.
The engineers wanted to see if the M-Blocks could (for example) form a straight line or form a random structure using the new communication algorithms. They waited to see if the blocks could determine how they were connected, and then what direction they would need to move to create that line. They found that 90% of the block swarm knew which motion and guidance to move to accomplish the task. I’m curious to know what the other 10% did…
Engineers hope to create a more substantial swarm of blocks (>16) that can assemble to form more complex structures with new capabilities.
3D Scanning to Print (Photogrammetry) October 8, 2019
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Due to an unfortunate incident while moving from the very parted lips of Hell (Greenville, CA) I have had to replace a few parts on my Casio CDP-120 piano keyboard. Basically, the highest key (C, for those who need to know) was/is smashed and needs a replacement. Aha! I have this iPrusa printer and can whip up a new key post-haste using Fusion360 to measure and design a new key. Right?
No. It’s a part with surprisingly complex geometry, so I thought I would try photogrammetry to create a model and see how that works. I never tried this before, so what could it hurt? Can’t be any harder than Fusion360 to master. Right?
No. There seems to be no (free as in beer) software which can do this which is simple enough for me to install (grumble, grumble) on this company Mac, and I’m not sure company policies built into the security suite on this company Mac would permit it (grumble, grumble) anyway. Since my replacement Windows box isn’t here yet (grumble, grumble) I have to pay for a cloud-based solution…Altizure.com. So I took 56 pictures of the C key an octave down with my cellphone camera, submitted them to Altizure.com‘s loving embrace and was rewarded with a fairly competent render of my key:
I say “fairly competent” because it has lots of hole in the sides. No matter; I can probably fix it in software modify it in Fusion360 to fill in the holes. I will likely need to use Fusion360 to get the dimensions useably correct in any case.
Now I have to steel myself to pay the subscription rate of something like $70 per project. It would be worth it if I was a company making a prototype with great prospects for the future…but I’m not (grumble, grumble).
The key costs about five bucks from Casio’s parts subcontractor, plus six or so to ship it. I know which I am going to choose.
It’s a shame, really; I was looking forward to monkeying around with it. Maybe next time.
However, I don’t give up easily; I got 3DF Zephyr and used the (limited to) 50 pictures in it at the highest defaults in the wizard to create this render:
My army of loyal and discerning readers may notice a bit of degradation here and there…yeah. I will try again, but this took an hour or so and was NOT automatically rendered, but went through stages. In all fairness it would have been shorter if my graphics card had CUDA…but I don’t have a graphics card, just whatever Lenovo thought was cheap but still enough to get by on. Still, it needs work, and it’s midnight. Possibly updates to follow, if I get any sleep.
EXCITING UPDATE:
I got a better render with 50 pictures and the most extreme settings I could figure out:
It’s got the holes that Altizure’s render had, but 3DF Zephyr is free to use. Now I have to figure out how to make the save-able form of this (an .obj file) into an .slt and thence to gcode. With luck, I will have a hideous key to use before my real one arrives.
3D Printing Progress May 10, 2019
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There’s going to be a lot of that, now that critical mass of commercial systems are available. new materials are being used in additive manufacturing and new devices have considerably expanded the capabilities of systems in terms of speed, build volume and finish. It’s an interesting moment in engineering history, and nobody knows where it will lead.
Printing with [anything besides plastics] is fraught with difficulty, so interesting methods have been tried for substances like metals, clay, frosting(!) with varying success. Two methods have lately shown promise in metal and glass(amazingly enough).
First, metals. The most common method of depositing metals has been to embed the metal in something a bit more fluid, like in an ink suspension. This has the usual effect of having poor mechanical adhesion, because after the fluid dries the metal may adhere to itself poorly (likely) and there may be fluid contamination trapped in the metal layers (very likely). Researchers got around this with an entirely new method, using a sacrificial electrode to generate ions of the metal and spraying those ions electrostatically. You can get insanely small resolution using this technique:
…and you can print with more than one metal by building both into the tip and just switching voltage from one electrode to the other:
Elegant as hell, isn’t it?
Then, glass: a team in France using chalcogenide glass (which softens at a relatively low temperature compared to other glass) produced chalcogenide glass filaments with dimensions similar to the commercial plastic filaments normally used with the 3-D printer. The research team then increased the maximum extruding temperature of a commercial 3-D printer from around 260 °C to 330 °C. The result is pretty interesting:
An interesting proof-of-concept piece, this points to novel uses for chalcogenide glass commonly used to make optical components that operate at mid-infrared wavelengths. It’s not likely to be used elsewhere, as it’s a “soft” glass, but the feat is going to be useful in optics fabrication. Also, there are some low-temperature metal alloys that could probably benefit from this technique.
Homework: Alain Reiser et al. Multi-metal electrohydrodynamic redox 3D printing at the submicron scale, Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09827-1
E. Baudet et al, 3D-printing of arsenic sulfide chalcogenide glasses, Optical Materials Express (2019). DOI: 10.1364/OME.9.002307
AI Detects Rare Syndromes From Images January 9, 2019
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Rare disorders often present with patterned discoloration of the epidermis, distortion of features and other visibly-detectable aberrations in appearance. Marfan’s syndrome presents with long, flexible body type. Noonan syndrome may present wide-set eyes, and Down’s syndrome is well-known to nearly everyone. Now, researchers have developed a facial analysis framework, DeepGestalt, using computer vision and deep learning algorithms, that quantifies similarities to hundreds of genetic syndromes based on unconstrained 2D images. DeepGestalt is currently trained with over 26,000 patient cases from a rapidly growing phenotype-genotype database, consisting of tens of thousands of validated clinical cases, curated through a community-driven platform. DeepGestalt currently achieves 91% top-10-accuracy in identifying over 215 different genetic syndromes and has outperformed clinical experts in three separate experiments.
In results published in Nature Medicine, DeepGestalt outperformed doctors in diagnosing patients with Angelman syndrome and Cornelia de Lange syndrome versus other disorders, and in separating patients with different genetic subtypes of Noonan syndrome.
It’s a neat study in that it controls for a bunch of conditions including ethnicity and gender, so it’s a bit more robust than previous studies.
Homework: [PDF] https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.07637
Stuffilike.net 