machines

Pictured here is a machine with which I've had a strange obsession ever since it randomly happened into my life several years ago for $25; one of the last holdouts in a liquidation sale of a former mass mailing business, and the very machine with which that business had been started one generation prior. It is known as a Graphotype.

I needed a forklift when I moved my shop last month.(Of course, everyone just needs a forklift, period.) Besides the stock of steel, the heavy machines and tables, and all of the normal stuff, there's just a lot of, well, Other Stuff, and a lot of it is really heavy. Much of it I keep because I'm planning to use it in some future project. Some of it is here because I just haven't gotten around to getting rid of it yet. And some of it is even photogenic. Here's a collection of my once and future useful stuff.

ChefStack Automatic Pancake Machine:  courtesy ChefStack

At $3,500, this little beauty may not find its way onto my kitchen counter any time soon, but I have to admit it's tempting. Fill it with batter, close the lid, and the ChefStack shoots out perfectly formed pancakes at a rate of 200 per hour.

The pattern is familiar: Researchers develop a technology or drug to aid the ailing. Soon thereafter, healthy people co-opt it to make themselves stronger, faster or smarter. Follow this trend far enough, and we reach the augmented human. Popular Science has scoured the most promising research under way in bioengineering laboratories worldwide to take an informed look at how technology will enter and alter our bodies over the coming decades.

The power of thought just got a lot more powerful. Scientists have created a cranial implant that allows monkeys to control a robotic arm just by thinking about it. Using brain signals, the monkeys persuaded the arm to pick up and feed them chunks of zucchini, cucumbers and apples.

Last winter, neuroscientist Andrew Schwartz and his team at the University of Pittsburgh trained monkeys to think about reaching for food (the animals' arms had been temporarily restrained). Using almost 200 electrodes