GigaOM » University of Illinois

Make your own rat-cell robot with a 3D printer!

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:48:12 +0000

The uses for a 3D printer are truly astounding. Take for example researchers at the University of Illinois, who have made a “walking” robot comprised of a smattering of hydrogel and a few cardiac rat cells. Researchers built the robot using a 3D printer, creating a cyborg inchworm whose forward motion occurs with every beat of the rat’s heart cells.

The goal here was to create bio-compatible designs that mimic and take advantage of nature to build machines and solve problems. While the bio-bot is only 7 mm long — about a quarter-inch — it could be used in drug testing or other chemical detection jobs. Integrated sensors that react to certain chemicals could be installed on the bio-bot and cause it to veer away from specific chemical compounds, indicating their presence. It could be a 7mm-self-propelled canary in the coal mine.

From a release on the topic:

“The idea is that, by being able to design with biological structures, we can harness the power of cells and nature to address challenges facing society,” said Bashir, an Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering. “As engineers, we’ve always built things with hard materials, materials that are very predictable. Yet there are a lot of applications where nature solves a problem in such an elegant way. Can we replicate some of that if we can understand how to put things together with cells?”

The bio-bot moves because it’s asymmetrical, with one long, thin leg resting on a shorter, wider support leg. The thin leg is covered in the rat heart cells and when those heart cells beat, the long, thin leg pulses and moves the bio-bot forward. Yes, this sounds utterly creepy, but it’s undeniably cool to watch this thing spasm its way across the surface in the video:

As an aside, this is the second awesome research project I’ve read about being built by academics using a 3D printer. On Wednesday MIT detailed how students used a 3D printer to make a new type of radio antenna out of new meta-materials, which it compared to the planet-destroying Death Star from the Star Wars movie. The new antenna might be useful for deep-space imaging or perhaps microscopy at the nano level, but all I could think of was MIT students are using their 3D printers to recreate stuff from Star Wars movies.

Now I can add the folks at the University of Illinois to the list of institutions where researchers are taking 3D printers and building stuff out of science fiction novels.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Bitgravity Co-Founder Gets Funding for New Crowdsourcing Venture

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:30:00 +0000

Bitgravity co-founder and former CTO Barrett Lyon has a new venture, which he recently introduced by announcing a round of funding from Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates. Lyon wouldn’t give much in the way of detail on the new company, called 3Crowd, except to say that it would be focused on crowdsourcing information on the Internet.

“When you look at the crowdsourcing stuff that’s been going on, there’s quite a bit of power within massive groups of people,” Lyon said in an interview with NewTeeVee. However, he says that with currently available crowdsourcing ventures, there’s “no middle ground between crowdsourcing applications and full-on cloud services” that gather data.

3Crowd is based in San Mateo, Calif., and currently has about 10 employees, most of whom are engineers and some of which came from Wikia and Socialmedia.com. According to Lyon, the company has a number of customers in beta tests already, even if the stealth startup isn’t ready to talk about its technology and won’t be announcing products until the first quarter of 2010.

Lyon has historically been focused on massive infrastructure-type projects, so expect more of the same. In addition to helping to build out the architecture of the Bitgravity CDN as its CTO, Lyon was behind the Opte Project, one of the earliest initiatives designed to map the global Internet.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

PHOTOS: EBI Shows Off Biofuel Crop Farm, 100 Species, 340 Acres

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:30:43 +0000

The Energy Biosciences Institute — the $500 million research collaboration between BP, the University of California, Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois — has been quietly developing the EBI Energy Farm, a swath of agricultural land in Urbana, Illinois, which will act as a lab for potential biofuel feedstocks. Across 340 acres of the farm researchers will be able to study ways to manage, store, and harvest crops for biofuels. They plan to grow at least 100 different crop species, including miscanthus, switchgrass,
and maize. EBI says the area will be “one of the world’s leading outdoor test sites for such research. If you can’t make it out to the farm’s first public open house next Thursday, check out these photos, which were snapped by photographer Susan Jenkins for EBI:

Microplots that will study the effect of insects on crops for biofuels.

The miscanthus crop, after the harvest and before the harvest.

An unmanned aerial vehicle that monitors crops on the farm.

Energy Biosciences Institute Deputy Director Steve Long, who is also Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, checks out the crops. (Long is actually leaving in the Fall for a position as the Associate Director at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Microsoft and Intel Give $20M for Multicore Software

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:00:47 +0000

The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be the recipients of $20 million in research grants from Microsoft and Intel over the next five years to further the use of multicore chips, the four said today. On the conference call detailing the funds and unveiling computing research centers on each school’s campus, we got to hear about all the whiz-bang consumer applications that parallel computing will enable such as personal health monitors and the ability to create a digital personal assistant that resides on a cell phone.

Multicore chips are comprised of two or more CPUs on a single chip. To take advantage of multiple cores, software must be written in such a way that instructions can be split up and delivered to each core at the same time. On the call, researchers from Intel and Microsoft asked researchers to develop software that will be able to better take advantage of the multicore chips that currently reside in servers and in gaming consoles, and are destined for even more devices.

The push to take multicore architecture into a myriad of consumer devices, from laptops to cell phones, also signals a shift in the chip industry’s focus on Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months, to the idea of putting more chips to work as a way to increase speed. The researchers on the conference call proposed that Moore’s Law could accelerate as a result of parallel computing, which is true as long as we tweak the law to allow for more transistors on more chips. Maybe we should call it the More Law.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Blizzard Sells 2.4 Million Copies of WoW Expansion… But Does It Expand the Audience?

Jason McMaster — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:10:32 +0000

What a great day for Blizzard, selling 2.4 million copies of the WoW Expansion upon opening – but I can’t help but wonder if we’re nearing the beginning of the end. Blizzard broke North American sales records and released the highest selling PC game in history. Good news for Blizzard, but can they maintain players on such a leisurely update schedule, let alone grow their expanding audience?

World of Warcraft, the best-selling MMOG ever, released its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, on January 16th to crowds of gamers around the world. Currently, the game has over 8 million active subscribers worldwide. In North America, 1.2 million copies were sold in the first day and Europe accounted for another 1.1 million. Blizzard is fairly pleased with these numbers.

But the biggest question now is, “How long will this last?” A French player hit the new level cap of 70 (the highest you can reach) within hours last week. Several people that I know personally have already reached the level cap as well. Now, of course, there are new dungeons and places to explore, but this expansion was a long time in the making.

World of Warcraft launched in November of 2004 and has just released its first expansion pack, which is crazy in terms of other game’s progression. In the months leading up to the release of The Burning Crusade, many of the hardcore players took extended breaks or just quit altogether. The real test of a game like WoW, which has set records left and right, is if it can keep going at this pace.

The only real additions to the game, other than the new areas and two new races (not classes) is jewelcrafting. After two years, two new races and jewelcrafting. Will the couple hundred hours it takes to master the dungeons keep hardcore players, who have hung in there for over two years, playing? Will this expansion manage to grow the audience? As a WoW player who waited through the dry times, I’m sketpical – but only time and hard numbers can really tell.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.