Free Republic

The touch device has been created by researchers in America who used nanoparticles to sense the contours of a coin. It is accurate enough to detect the outline of Abraham Lincoln's face on a 1c coin and the letters TY in the word Liberty. To make the sensor, the researchers built up a film consisting of alternate layers of gold and cadmium sulfide nanoparticles with a thin plastic sheet on top and glass below. An object is placed on the plastic and an image sensor beneath the glass reads the changes in electrical current and electroluminescence caused within the nanoparticle...

Back in the 1980s, the rationale for building a surgical robot was the stuff of science fiction. Intent on providing "a doctor in every foxhole," military strategists envisioned a severely wounded soldier being loaded into a battlefield ambulance equipped with a robot so that a surgeon at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH unit, miles away could perform life-saving telesurgery to prevent exsanguination or some other physiological catastrophe. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had a similar vision. A terrestrial physician would be able to remove an acutely inflamed appendix from a patient aboard a robot-equipped space station. In...