Hans Rudolf Giger father designer of "Alien" left a "biomechanical" designs legacy.

Francisco De Jesùs.

CHUR -. Switzerland. - June 26, 2007, the Swiss artist HR Giger posed with two of his works. Giger died on May 12, 2014, at 74 years of age. EFE

Giger, who designed the monster and revolutionary sets of  science - fiction film "Alien ," has died at age 74 , reported Monday the Swiss television .

Giger , the son of a chemist named Hans Rudolf was born in the Swiss town of Chur in 1940 . He died Monday from injuries he suffered during a fall, said the television SRF .

Famous for creating the Alien creature from the horror film "Alien" ( 1979) by Ridley Scott, Giger received an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1980.

Giger's work , who studied architecture and industrial design at Zurich, explores the relationship between the human body and machines, and created dreamscapes in a style described as " biomechanical " .

In 1998 , he opened his own museum in Gruyeres , in central Switzerland, where much of his paintings , sculptures and film designs are shown, as well as his private art collection , which contains some works of Spanish painter Salvador Dalí.

Giger working on Alien

More pictures of his designs you can find on: Google and almost all of his work on: Wikipedia

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From Fiction to Fact: Revolutionary experiment adds sense touch to artificial hand. Robocop can count with it. Video.

Most of the discoveries sometimes were fiction and we see them on the sci-fi movies first, well the artificial hand of Robocop is truly sensitive to touch as a fact now.

The first prosthetic limb to give wearers sensory feedback has been described as ''amazing'' by an amputee who has just tested the device for the first time. The prototype hand is being developed by researchers in Switzerland and Italy, to replicate the sensation of touch for amputees with mechanical limbs.

To feel what you touch ― that’s the holy grail for artificial limbs. In a step toward that goal, European researchers created a robotic hand that let an amputee feel differences between a bottle, a baseball and a mandarin orange.

The patient only got to experiment with the bulky prototype for a week, and it’s far from the bionics of science fiction movies. But the research released Wednesday is part of a major effort to create more lifelike, and usable, prosthetics.

“It was just amazing,” said Dennis Aabo Sorensen of Aalborg, Denmark, who lost his left hand in a fireworks accident a decade ago and volunteered to pilot-test the new prosthetic. “It was the closest I have had to feeling like a normal hand.”

This isn’t the first time scientists have tried to give some sense of touch to artificial hands; a few other pilot projects have been reported in the U.S. and Europe. But this newest experiment, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, shows Sorensen not only could tell differences in the shape and hardness of objects, he also could quickly react and adjust his grasp.

“It was interesting to see how fast he was able to master this,” said neuroengineer Silvestro Micera of Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, who led the Swiss and Italian research team. “He was able to use this information immediately in a quite sophisticated way.”

Scientists have made great strides in recent years in improving the dexterity of prosthetics. But the sense of touch has been a much more difficult challenge, and is one reason that many patients don’t use their prosthetic hands as much as they’d like.

Consider: Grab something and your own hand naturally grasps with just enough force to hang on. Users of prosthetic hands have to carefully watch every motion, judging by eye instead of touch how tightly to squeeze. The results can be clumsy, with dropped dishes or crushed objects.

“You always have to look and see what’s going on, so that’s what is so much different from this new hand that I tried,” Sorensen, 36, said in a telephone interview.

First, doctors at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital implanted tiny electrodes inside two nerves ― the ulnar and median nerves ― in the stump of Sorensen’s arm.

Those nerves normally would allow for certain sensations in a hand. When researchers zapped them with a weak electrical signal, Sorensen said it felt like his missing fingers were moving, showing the nerves still could relay information.

Meanwhile, Micera’s team put sensors on two fingers of a robotic hand, to detect information about what the artificial fingers touched.

For one week, cords snaked from a bandage on Sorensen’s arm to the artificial hand, and the electrodes zapped the nerves in proportion to what the sensors detected.

They essentially created a loop that let the robotic hand rapidly communicate with Sorensen’s brain.

“It is really putting the brain back in control of the system,” said biomedical engineer Dustin Tyler of Case Western Reserve University, who wasn’t involved with the European work but leads a team in Ohio that recently created and tested a similar touch-enabled hand. “That’s an important step.”

Added neurobiologist Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh: “It shows with a few sensors and some pretty elementary technology, that they can recover a fair amount of functionality.”

AP

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Robots: Tiny robot operates inside your eye.Video

WorldWideTech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.


Researchers in Switzerland are perfecting a robot small enough to be injected into your eye without anesthetic.


 The team says their device could carry drugs to the exact position they are needed or even carry out minor operations.

Switzerland: Orange launches CineHome digital TV service

WorldWideTech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

Orange Switzerland has announced the launch of the new Orange CineHome service on 17 January to bring cinema films direct into the homes of customers.

It will offer a wide range of top films and TV series, with customers signing up by 12 June getting the first month free. Orange Mobile subscription customers (not Prima, Comfort and PrePay) will pay a reduced price of CHF 14 per month.

Non-Orange Mobile customers will pay CHF 19 per month, with customers signing a minimum 12-month contract. Film rental prices will be CHF 4.90-CHF 6.90 for the latest releases and CHF 3.50-CHF 3.90 for catalogue tittles. HD film rentals will cost CHF 5-CHF 8.50 per film, with TV series rentals costing CHF 1.50-CHF 1.90 per episode.

Film rentals by post will cost CHF 6 per film (DVD/Blu-ray), with a minimum rental of two films. Orange CineHome is available at all Orange Centers as well as online at orange.ch/cinehome.

 The set-top box rental is included in the subscription service. The box works with any broadband internet connection of 2 Mbps or more, although subscribers looking to watch HD content should have a minimum 5 Mbps connection.

Orange has selected Hergiswil as its leading location for the launch of Orange Cine-Home.

Swisscom testing LTE in Switzerland

Switzerland's telecom service provider Swisscom is currently testing the LTE in Grenchen.  According to the company statement, LTE is to be added to the Swisscom mobile network at the earliest in 2011.

Between now and the end of 2010, Swisscom also plans to increase transmission speeds throughout its HSPA network to 7.2 Mbps. At around 500 mobile sites equipped with HSPA+, transmission speeds as high as 21 Mbps are supported.

To gain more practical experience with LTE, Swisscom launched a series of laboratory tests in April of this year, and since September has been running a pilot test in Grenchen in the canton of Solothurn. Swisscom will decide on its next course of action concerning network expansion once the pilot test is completed at the end of 2010.