Wound and Gadget Coating from Covalon

New skin

Just a few days ago I was in the food store (it’s called something else but I forget what) and I saw boxes of bandaids that have silver in them. At first I thought it was some weird fad, you know like Chia-Pets, but it turns out that silver is a natural antimicrobial. I did a little searching around and discovered that you can get all sorts of things with silver in them, shits, socks being the most common. The ‘wound dressings’ (Band-Aid is a trademark after all and this stuff can be used to cover tools as well) were the coolest by far.

The Silver Collagen Antimicrobial Gel Sheet is a hydrated denatured porcine collagen produced by polymerization. It maintains a moist environment at the wound surface that aids in granulation tissue formation, epithelialization, and enables healing to occur at a rapid rate. The sustained release of ionic silver into the wound creates an effective barrier to fungal penetration and is effective as a method to reduce infection of partial and full thickness wounds.

Wound and Gadget Coating from Covalon

antimicrobial, silver, wound, medical

KR 40 Robot Arm

Arm

I want one to load the dishwasher and to fold my clothes. It needs wheels do it can move around the house… It should also be intergrated into a household computer network and be called ‘Proteus’… Hold on, I’m getting Demon Seed flashbacks.. Scratch that. Don’t need the arm.

The Kuka KR 40 is a four axis robot that integrates carbon fiber into the design. Three out of the four motors on the robot are built into the base thus reducing weight and allowing for more speed and acceleration.

It really stacks up: the new KUKA palletizing robot is capable of stacking europallets up to 1,6 m net height. State-of-the-art materials (carbon fiber composite CRP) make the robot extremely light, without sacrificing high stiffness.
Loads

Payload 40 kg
Supplementary load 20 kg

KR 40 Robot

industrial, arm, robots, robotics

More News From The Workers Paradise

Homebrew boat

I know, I know, this is old news but I think people should be reminded just what a great place Cuba is. Oh wait, if it was such a great place people wouldn’t be building boats out of cars and trying to sail them to the United States.

A vintage blue taxicab converted into a seagoing vessel and carrying several Cuban immigrants was intercepted Tuesday off Key West by the Coast Guard, a television station reported.

Let’s grab a cab to the United States

Florida, boat, communisim, Cuba

Flocking Bots

Flock

I love it. Off the shelf parts and clever software builds a swarm of flying robots.

For their proof of concept, the researchers are using lightweight $69 Proxflyer Bladerunner toy helicopters equipped with gumstix processors — tiny self-contained computers weighing 8 grams (0.28 ounces), but packing enough power to run the Linux 2.6 kernel and communicate over a built-in Bluetooth module.
The coaxial Bladerunner weighs only 50 grams (1.8 ounces) and is held aloft by two rotors, one atop the other, spinning in opposite directions to achieve a stable, insect-like flight. It’s sold as a remote-control toy, but after adding the gumstix and a downward-facing video camera, the Essex University researchers have already turned one of the choppers into what they describe as the world’s smallest flying web server.

Linux Powers Airborne Bots

swarm, linux, air, computer,