Secrets of Future Technologies That Will Blow Your Mind

Image by © European Southern Observatory - Creative Commons Attribution - via flickr

Civilization is built on the human drive to invent, we take the tools from our planet, the materials that give names to the Egypt. Stone, bronze, iron and more, crafting into new forms, expanding our horizons, exploring hidden worlds, and engineering life changing technologies, always pushing the limit to be colder, faster, safer, wilder and now a new era is upon us.

As scientists turn for inspiration to the ultimate inventor and engineer, nature what can we learn from living things. To make our own technology even better how long before they become self-aware and turn on our Lords.

We humans love to invent, we've been doing it for thousand of years, but how many of our inventions really stand the test of time.
Imagine a world filled with only the very best stuff, amazing ideas and astonishing designs each one the result not just in years not a decade but millions of years have researched and tested, in an environment where the competition can be ruthless.
Since life began on Earth, it has been invaded making discoveries in materials and engineering, we have only recently began to appreciate the hard won lessons of life on Earth gained over eons may help solve our very human problems can forms found in nature reshape our machines making them more useful, can we build the agile movements of animals into our robots, have some of the best ideas for new materials already been discovered by nature? What if we could make things like nature does, can we grow the electronics and fuels of tomorrow using the food of life itself DNA, the search for answers to these questions has taken some strange terms.

Walking is easy for animals, even a toddler can do it and thanks to movies creating walking machines seems easy too, just look at c3 PO from Star Wars or its walkers, you think the problem has been solved but in real life it's hard. One of the best known early attempts at a walking machine is general electrics walking truck from the sixties, even tackled uneven terrain, but it took a human operator to decide where to place each foot one at a time an exhausting task.
By the Seventies computer control automated the walking motion in a series of crawlers built around the world, those still driven by human operators, he kept a tripod legs on the ground maintaining stability at all times a system called static balance, they move slowly like a walking table but in the nineteen eighties a very different approach gained ground.

I've traveled to the Massachusetts to visit a company that builds robots based on that work, the company's founder Mark Rebirth has been building walking robots for over 30 years, early on he steered away from the static balance of walking tables, to help me understand how he views animal locomotion he invites me to take a ride on a pogo stick, it's tricky because like all standing humans i am top heavy, in technical terms an inverted pendulum, he said here's a normal pendulum right, if you swing it we just passed out but if you put the way to the top what happens, if you don't do anything it taps over but if you move it some more you can keep it down, if you are top heavy staying balanced requires keeping your base of support under your center of gravity, that's what Mark is doing by shifting the bottom of the room as it taps, that's what i am doing by moving around the polo stick and that's what all of us do all the time when we are right.