Midway through a west coast red eye last week, I was sleepily browsing through an airport bookstore when I saw something flashing up at me from the stacks.  Was that my imagination or was that magazine blinking?  Indeed it was.

The October edition of Esquire looked like a miniature Times Square billboard, its sleek black cover eclipsed by a flashing message (and a cheeky one at that): “The 21^st Century Begins Now.”  In celebration of its 75^th anniversary, Esquire claims to be the first magazine cover to be printed with electronic ink (also known as “e ink”).

Even if you missed this edition of Esquire, you’ve likely seen eink in action before. It’s used in electronic displays, including in the top ebooks on the market, Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony’s Reader. However, this is reportedly the first time the digital technology has been incorporated into a print page.  Esquire explains the arduous, innovative (and somewhat chilly) path its creation: first, EInk Corporation (creator of the technology) had to design circuitry thin and flexible enough to bend with the cover, as well as small enough to draw a level of energy that would allow the battery to last at least 90 days. The display, electronics and batteries were assembled in Shanghai, then shipped to Mexico (via refrigerated trucks) where each unit was embedded by hand.

How does it work? Our friends at Wikipedia say: the principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair…each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader.

This makes the surface appear white at that spot.

At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot. 

The long road to the future

So, what’s the future of eink?  While it’s been heralded as a “game changing” technology for nearly a decade, it’s just now coming into its own - a tad longer lead time than its inventors (and its investors) anticipated. But like most game changers, the road between getting in the game and actually changing it is often paved with hype.

E Ink cofounder Joseph Jacobson, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, was working on the discovery which led to the development of eink technology in 1997.  The company launched that year with $100 million in funding and predictions of an $80 billion market opportunity. Three years later the first working prototype of electronic paper was unveiled. While it got rave reviews, what it didn’t get were a lot of customers. According to this Forbes article, by 2003 E Ink was out of money, having run through its initial funding without delivering a product to market. But the company was resurrected the following year when the CEO was replaced and it nailed a contract to provide the displays for Sony’s ebook Reader. In 2007 it landed the Amazon Kindle contract. Last year reportedly more than half of the company’s $15 million in revenue came from companies that sell ebook gadgets.

The vision of E Ink isthe next-gen RadioPaper, a lightweight, flexible display similar to organic paper that could be used to create an electronic book or newspaper “with real pages that can be leafed through, thumbed over and read on the beach.” Ultimately electronic ink could transform almost any surface to into a dynamic display: clothing, buildings, everyday objects, turning the whole world into an information (or perhaps advertising?) mecca.

Note: this is cross-posted on the Pop!Tech blog. If you don’t read Pop!Tech, stop by and have a look around. It features a cadre of stellar bloggers and is chock-full of interesting ideas.

(Photo credit: Chosun Ilbo) 

I have a new addition to my ever-growing list of favorite robots (including those that play the violin, teach science and comfort the elderly): a robotic plant. Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper is reporting that the robot research laboratory at Chonnam National University has developed a robotic plant that has humidifying, oxygen-producing, aroma-emitting, and kinetic functions. As someone who has been directly responsible for the slow (albeit involuntary) death of scores of houseplants over the years, this is - literally - music to my ears.

In fact, that’s part of the point. In addition to several real-plant characteristics (such as emitting oxygen, moisture and aroma), the four-foot-tall robotic plant also responds to external stimuli including people, music and light. According to the article “when a person comes within a 40 cm radius of the flower, its supersonic sensor perceives the approach, the stem bends towards the person, and the buds come into full bloom. When the person leaves, the plant returns to its original state. If a person’s voice becomes louder than a certain level, the flower buds will come into bloom, and the stem shakes slightly to suggest a greeting. When the room lights up, the buds open and close, and when music is played, the plant dances.” Users could build a “robot garden” of several robots embedded with a ubiquitous networking system or use them for indoor interior decoration.

Finally, plants with a purpose! No more composting, weeding or watering. Come springtime, stop by my robot garden and smell the circuitry.

We like to think of the FringeHog Friday Five as a weekly starter-kit to the future: each week we feature five perspectives on “the future of” a particular theme from food to design to yes, boxes.  The science behind choosing the topics is simple: satisfy our insatiable curiosity about how to world is changing in both profound and minute ways. This week is a brief look back at some of our favorites.

Have an idea for a future Friday Five?  Drop us an email.

Five Things to do with your Genome

Genes are becoming the Legos of life, a super-size carton of biological toys that can be endlessly combined, cut, spliced and reengineered.   The average human has about 25,000 genes - that’s a lot of A, C,T & P’s floating around. Scientists are still clueless about what to do with most of them, so here’s a few ideas for putting your spare genome to good use (including hang it on a wall and use it as musical inspiration).

Future Cities

Does the world seem a little more crowded these days? If so, it might be because on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 a subtle but significant tipping point occurred: for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural.  On that day say researchers, the global urban population exceeded that of the global rural population by 125,849 people. The after-shocks of this seismic shift are just starting to reverberate in cities throughout the world. This Friday Five features cities of the future, including megacities, “smart” cities and the increasingly popular carbon-neutral city.

The Future of Water

While more than 1 billion people on Earth - about one sixth of the global population - lack access to dependable, safe drinking water, yet industrialized countries readily pay a small fortune to drink tap water out of a bottle. Here at five views about the future of water, one of the most critical - and contentious - issues facing the humankind in the coming decade. 

Super Size Innovation

What will inspire the next world-changing innovation?  It just might be money.  The X-Prize Foundation calls it “revolution through competition”; I call it Super-Size Innovation. What it is: cash prizes to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. A new crop of public “innovation challenges” have emerged, all offering large cash prizes for armchair innovators who are able to solve some of our most pressing problems: global warming, space travel, clean water, to name just a few.

The Future of Robots

For nearly fifty years, robots have captured our collective imagination.  From Rosie, the arthritic robo-housekeeper in the Jetson’s to Robin William’s emotionally available Bicennential Man to every guy’s favorite cyborg assassin, the media has played to our fascination with all things humanoid. Here we look at the increasingly social role robots will play in the future, from violin-playing androids who care for our elderly to, um, sexbots.  

As I scroll through the 700 emails in my inbox, I mumble the prayer to St. Anthony, patron saint of missing things.

I’m giving a speech next month and the organizers need my picture to include in the conference program. I’m positive that the photo, a mid-life version of my high school yearbook picture - is in here, buried under an avalanche of emails. I’ve realized that Gmail has become my personal bunker - the endless vault where I greedily stockpile thousands of emails and files, rationalizing my electronic hoarding with the Just In Case theory. That is, “just in case I spill diet coke on my laptop again”… or “just in case my dog chews up my memory key”… or “just in case planetary sunspots cause freak electrical storms and my hard drive is fried like an egg”. Given any of these scenarios, thanks to Gmail’s unlimited storage space, I’ll be able to recover all of the emails, files and digital photos which make up the electronic anthology of my life. Such as picture I’m looking for.

Which I still can’t find. I’ve searched dozens of keywords - “picture” “michele” “speeches”. Nothing. Thirty-two agonizing minutes later I find it. Of course, it’s not labeled something simple, something obvious - Michele’s Picture, for example. Instead, in a fit of fuzzy logic, I apparently chose to name this particular file “MB Headshot.”

So goes the paradox of the ?information’ age. To effectively navigate the web, I have to name what I’m looking for, which is a little like saying “I could find the sweater I lost if I just remembered where I put it.” Despite Google’s ability to searchthree gazillion websites before I can finish typing the query; in spite of the plethora of social media tagging sites such as digg.comand del.icio.us, search is still somewhat of a crap shoot. This is because the underlying search function works on the assumption that my mental filing system makes sense, which often it does not.

When it comes to searching effectively, we’re still stuck in the Middle Ages, that is, the purgatory between Web 1.0 and 2.0. Search today is conceptual and one-dimensional, it relies on abstract concepts and clumsy language constructs; do a search for “toast” and you’ll likely get as many hits for clever wedding speeches as you do for breakfast food.

And the problem will only get worse. The most prominent language in the world today isn’t English or Spanish or even Mandarin - it’s binary code. The language of 1s and 0s is dematerializing our world. Physical objects are increasingly transmogrified from atoms to bits. Who needs Blockbuster when you can get the streaming bits - minus the plastic packaging, the late fees and the obsolete DVD player - from YouTube??

As we overpopulate the planet with bits and bytes, the ability to understand and explore our world will depend on new approaches to search and rescue (or search and destroy, as the case may be). Current strategies to improving search have centered on inventing increasingly complex algorithms, but a simpler answer might (literally) be right under our nose.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow have created a computer program which allows users to attach distinctive smells to digital photos. Called Olfoto, the program uses an array of cube-shaped capsules, similar to an ink jet printer cartridge, each of which contain a unique smell - the scent of an open wood fire, for example, or the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. The capsules release a different fragrance when activated electronically so that when a particular image appears on-screen a user can “tag” it with a scent. They can then sort through their image collections simply by sniffing.

The idea - pardon the pun - a potent one. Humans can smell approximately 10,000 odors. Scents are powerful memory tags. While I remember next to nothing from 3 years of Japanese classes, one whiff of Jagermeister triggers a gag reflex that instantly reminds me of the most important lesson I learned in college (which is of course, that one should never, ever drink Jagermeister).

In the future, we’ll need a multi-sensory approach to navigate the dematerialized world. In this way, Olfoto may ultimately become an important social and business tool, adding another dimension to our ability to communicate. Emails from your ex may smell like skunk. The quarterly finance reports might exude the aroma of champagne or sour milk, depending on the market results. And just so you know, if you want me to read your email, make it smell like freshly baked cookies.

Homaro Cantu has been called many things over the years: “techno-chef”, “mad scientist”, “a modern-day Willy Wonka” - to name just a few. But now he can add another epithet to his resume: Champion.

Last night in the culinary equivalent of the gridiron known as the “Kitchen Stadium”, Cantu narrowly edged out famed Japanese Iron Chef Masuharu Morimoto to capture a 52- 51 point victory on the Iron Chef America. (If you’ve never seen the Iron Chef before, it’s a “cooking battle” show in which two chefs - an incumbent Iron Chef and a Challenger - must each cook a meal in less than an hour including in each course a specific ingredient.)

To secure a win against veteran Iron Chef Morimoto, Cantu and his team (including sous chef Ben Roche) pulled out the big guns: liquid nitrogen, an ink jet printer, and of course, a class IV laser. After filling several balloons with beet juice (the “ingredient of the day” for the competition) he rolled them in a bath of liquid nitrogen to create beautiful frozen orbs. Next he fired up the laser to a scorching 2800 degrees to caramelize some cellulose-based packing peanuts (yes, the kind that are used in shipping boxes). And while Iron Chef Morimoto delicately sliced beets to make sushi rolls, Cantu simply printed out pictures of maki onto edible paper using an HP printer and soy-based ink.

Cantu, owner of the Chicago-based Moto restaurant, has been hailed as an innovator in the emerging field of “molecular gastronomy“. I’ve been salivating over his work from afar for the last few years, but in October I had the chance to catch up with him at PopTech!. The following is an edited excerpt from our chat (the full version will be featured in the Big Idea Interview on the next episode of FringeHog).

MB: Tell me how Moto is different than other restaurants.

HC: Moto is the tool by which my design company, Cantu Designs, test markets all of its ideas and innovations. Cantu Designs is an idea factory revolving around what I call food delivery systems or consumable products. These can be the inventions that deliver the food to you or the actual food product itself.

MB: Give me a couple of examples…

HC: For instance, if you’re not able to digest a steak we can print one up for you that will dissolve on your tongue. MB: How do you ?print up a steak’?HC: Well, it’s patent pending… but in short, you press a button [on a desktop printer] and out comes your edible substrate [aka, edible paper] and you can eat it. We can alter the texture, the flavor, we can print text on it to communicate with you. We’re also working on a 3D food printer with the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC)…We’re dissecting, for example, the ingredients in an apple -pectin, water, chlorophyll, sugars, acids, etc. and after we dissect those, we place them into say, ink-jet cartridges, and we can reformulate it with a 3-dimensional printer. [The result is] a direct replication of the original product that looks and tastes just like it, but has an indefinite shelf life.

MB: Reformulating apples aside, what are some other applications of this technology?

HC: I think this could be used for famine relief. We want to take it a step further so we print up edible substrates that can be shipped over to developing nations and can be sort of patch for something that is far too costly for us to deal with right now. People need food to exist. If we don’t eat food, we die. If we have nations that have this crisis of starvation - of energy - we’re never going to evolve as a human society. This is the first step toward answering it from a technological point of view.

MB: In 25 years, what do you think the future of food will look like?

HC: I think we’re going see a lot of things grown in a lab. I use the word “lab” but I call it a food replication factory. We’re tired of watching cows get slaughtered… so we’re growing to grow meat in a Petri dish. When beef is grown in a Petri dish we can alter the caloric value, the good cholesterol that you ingest and maybe make super foods. So we become more healthy, physically which then directly affects our mental health, which directly affects us as a society.

If you missed last night’s competition, you can catch the recap of the sushi smackdown when the show re-airs on the Food Network at the following times.

January 25, 2007 9:00 PM ET/PT
January 26, 2007 12:00 AM ET/PT
January 27, 2007 7:00 PM ET/PT
January 27, 2007 11:00 PM ET/PT
January 28, 2007 2:00 AM ET/PT