A couple weeks ago George Lucas re-released Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace in 3D, earning enough extra cash (over $30 million) for the film to surpass Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the #11 spot in the list of the highest grossing films of all time. We weren’t among that $30+ million in new ticket sales (fool me, you can’t get fooled again). We’ve already discussed today how sucktastic that movie was, so let’s move on to a related Star Wars topic: are gold bikinis appropriate to wear to the DMV? what would it take to build your own Death Star?

Economics students at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania have made some calculations to help answer that question. The first Death Star was said to be 140 km in diameter (almost moon-like you could say). The students assumed it was made of steel (a bit presumptuous, what with all the lightweight, sturdy alloys it could be) and had a similar density to a modern warship.

A 140 km steel ship with a density similar to a modern warship would require 1.08 x 10¹⁵ tonnes of steel. There is plenty of iron ore on Earth to handle such a large amount of steel. In fact, we have enough iron to make about two billion Death Stars, although most of the iron is near the core of the planet, and it isn’t as easy to get to the core as Hilary Swank would have you believe.

The amount of steel needed for one Death Star would cost $852 quadrillion dollars, which is about 13,000 times the entire world’s yearly GDP. In addition, extracting enough steel for one Death Star at Earth’s current extraction rate of 1.3 billion tonnes annually would take 833,315 years. And you just know the design would become obsolete in the 833,314th year or some young upstart would find the small thermal exhaust port right below the main port.

None of this is going to stop us from fundraising, however:

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Okay guys, we may not have our jetpacks yet and poverty and war are still serious worldwide issues, but I’m calling it — the future is here! Why? Because the greatest piece of sci-fi technology every conceived has been made a reality. I’m talking of course about Geordi La Forge’s VISOR.

I always eat my dinner too fast because I want to bask in the majesty of the plate underneath.

Israeli scientists have created a new device that essentially hacks into the visual cortex of a patient with congenital blindness, allowing them to “see” again. Put simply, the VISOR-like device gathers visual data through built-in cameras, and then converts it into sound which patients can, with practice, use to create detailed “soundscapes”. Blind patients have shown the ability to identify complex objects and even read using this system. Next step — see if they can successfully vent a breached warp core while wearing the device.

You can check out a picture of this real-life VISOR after the jump…

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So yeah, 3D printers — maybe this will shatter my science-nerd cred, but I didn’t even know these things existed until fairly recently. What can I say? Printers are a weird mental blind spot for me — I can still barely figure out how to get my inkjet to work.

Anyways, we reported a couple months back that scientists at Washington State University were looking into the possibility of creating replacement bones using 3D printers. Well, turns out some guys in the Netherlands beat them to the punch. The news has only become public recently, but back in June 2011, Dutch doctors performed the first transplant using a bone created with a 3D printer.

The Dutch doctors created a new jawbone for a lady who had to have hers removed due to a bone infection. The operation was a rousing success, with the patient being able to talk only hours after the operation, and swallow and eat by the next day.

Apparently bones are just the beginning too. The next big step will be finding a way to 3D print our organs and other squishier parts, so start designing your custom printed dream wiener now guys.

via BBC News

So, guess what? Turns out in the future you may be filling your pockets and computer with salmon sperm. Yup. Allow me to elaborate…

Taiwanese scientists have come up with a new data storage device by combining salmon sperm DNA, silver and lasers. Put very basically, they added some silver to a thin film of salmon sperm, then shone a UV light on it. The UV light caused the silver molecules to bunch into nanoparticles. Zap some of these nanoparticles with a laser and they’ll become electrically charged. You can then go back and read the data with charged particles equalling a “1″ in binary computer speak, and non-charged particles equalling a “0″.

Get all that? Yeah, neither did I entirely, but that’s okay — the real point here is that this salmon sperm-based memory would be a lot cheaper to produce than the high-quality silicon based memory we use now.

I dunno, I like a bargain and all, but SD cards are already pretty ridiculously cheap — I think maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to resist buying the ones made out of fish jizz.

via Gizmondo

The Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE (previously discussed here) has officially launched at CES in Las Vegas with financial backing from the X PRIZE Foundation and Qualcomm. The $10 million prize will go to whoever can build a portable, non-invasive device which is “capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases”.

In order to win the prize, the device also has to weigh 5lb (2.2kg) or less, and the competition will only be open for the next three and a half years. In other words, you have till the summer of 2015 to invent the tricorder used in the 23rd century on Star Trek. X Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis did specify that the tricorder wouldn’t need to make the same sound effects to win the prize, although we think it totally should.

[Sources: BBC, Medgadget, and DigitalWorldTokyo]

Hey guys, say hello to Razer’s Project Fiona — it’s a tablet that can play hi-def PC games and comes outfitted with motion, touchscreen and traditional button controls. In other words, it looks like Razer decided not to dillydally and ripped-off the WiiU months before Nintendo’s new machine is even set to come out.

Of course it’s not exactly like the WiiU. WiiU games run on a traditional, box-under-your-TV console and are merely streamed to the tablet controller, while Project Fiona runs the games on the controller itself. Another difference, Project Fiona will sell 100 units, while WiiU will probably sell 100 million. Or maybe I’m wrong — check out a video of this possible (anything’s possible, right?) new gaming sensation after the jump…

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