Robot opinions, robotic telesurgery, and other good ideas

Dean Kamen is an interesting guy. I saw him the other day on the Colbert Report talking about his new filterless water purification system. I have some unanswered questions about that, but...
Here is some video of Kamen discussing his vision for robotics and some other things.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=281

Speaking of robotics, how about robotic telesurgery? Cool stuff. Did you know that you can watch telesurgeries live? I just found this out.
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/2008/03/25/robot_surgery_reassuring_or_scary.html

And in only marginally related news, the guy who invented the Supersoaker has come up with another good idea. This one is getting funded by NSF because it has the potential to basically double the efficiency of passive heat energy harvesting. It's kind of like a closed-system fuel cell with some engineering enhancements thrown in.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar08/6079

From the world's first computer to high-rate haptics

Here are a couple of neat articles highlighting how far technology has come in the past 6-7 decades.
Incidentally, Dr. Okamura, mentioned in the first article, visited our lab at UNMC briefly several months ago and gave a very interesting talk at the HPER lab at UNO.
http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org/portal/site/tionline/menuitem.130a3558587d56e8fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=institute_level1_article&TheCat=2201&article=tionline/legacy/inst2008/mar08/featuretechnology.xml&
http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org/portal/site/tionline/menuitem.130a3558587d56e8fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=institute_level1_article&TheCat=1008&article=tionline/legacy/inst2008/mar08/history.xml&

Cool bionics/robotics stuff from IEEE

Here's an article on new nerve interfaces for prosthetic arms...
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar08/6069
...and a short video on topics including flying microrobots...
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/video?id=260
...and video of DARPA's Big Dog robot (you may have seen earlier video spoofed by Colbert).
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/2008/03/17/scoop_new_video_of_bdis_big_do.html
Enjoy!