Southwest Harbor, Maine’s Peter Homer won $450,000 in NASA’s Astronaut Glove Challenge yesterday.

This is Homer’s second time winning the contest. Homer’s first win in 2007 launched his startup, Flagsuit. Flagsuit is developing pressure suits using the same technology as Homer’s prizewinning gloves — for use as a wearable substitute for hyperbaric chambers used to treat conditions such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, stroke and autism. Down the line, Homer plans to target the the space tourism industry, which Homer sees growing in the next two years.

Last summer, Flagsuit also won the Heinlein Business Plan Competition.

The MIT Media Lab’s Pranav Mistry recounted the history of his SixthSense project at TED India this week. SixthSense started when Mistry took the rollers out of two computer mice (mouses?), attached some pulleys, and made a glove-like hand-gesture interface. Moving through SixthSense’s evolution, Mistry talks about some Internet-synced sticky notes, pens that draw in three dimensions, Google maps that interact with physical objects, and other things that, if said by anyone else, would just be crazy talk.

From there, he explains how he inverted the process, in an effort to “paint the physical world with that digital information.” He started with a projector mounted on his bike helmet that would project pixels onto the physical world. He added a camera and the system eventually shrank down to the pendant we recognize as the current incarnation of SixthSense.

In the video, Mistry demonstrates the system by casually doing things that shouldn’t make any sense: Digitally painting on a physical wall, taking a photo of the Boston skyline by framing it with his index fingers and thumbs, dialing a phone number on numbers projected on his palm, watching video of President Obama’s MIT speech on a print newspaper; reading a tag cloud — “comedian,” “geek,” etc. — that appears on comedian/blogger Baratunde Thurston’s shirt when Mistry meets him; playing a video game on a piece of paper; and copying text and charts from the regular kind of paper and pasting them to his crazy, digital paper, just by picking it up and moving it.

One of the companies the times talks to is Needham-based Sky Vegetables. Sky Vegetables sells systems for growing vegetables on urban rooftops. The full system includes wind turbines, solar panels, rainwater harvesters, greenhouses and composting bins. The Times story says the company wants to build rooftop farms on hospitals, schools and food banks.

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Closer to home, Sky Vegetables is working on what it calls the state’s first commercial rooftop hydroponics farm in Brockton. The company won zoning approval last week to build the farm on the roof of an abandoned shoe factory in Brockton (above).

Sky Vegetables was founded by Keith Agoada, a University of Wisconsin Madison alum and a former marketing intern for the Patriots.

Now, a report in MIT Tech Review points to the possibility of treatment on the horizon. A drug made by French biotech Trophos aims to keep neurons in survival mode and away from degeneration mode.

Currently in clinical trials, the drug compound focuses specifically on nerve cell mitochondria and preventing any unhealthiness, dying off, or degeneration associated with it.

Read more…

There are those people who walk into a room and enter into a discussion and you know right away, there’s something special about them. They are bright, well-informed, focused and energetic. They’re leaders. Put 10 of them in the room, and you have something dynamic.

That’s the way it was with the 2009 MHT Women to Watch event last spring.

You had a room full of people like Cambridge Nanocomp’s Jill Becker who has been building and then selling “atomic layer deposition” systems, sort of like an oven used to develop nanoscale thin films, such as coatings for drillbits. But she often did it one-handed, with a baby in the other arm.

Intel’s Mondira Pant has a batch of microprocessor-related patent applications in the pipeline and has authored some 30 technical papers. She also has focused on developing her skills as a public speaker, being honored as the best speaker at an Intel technical conference, while reaching out to the community to teach dance.

Then, there was Anna Mracek Dietrich, one of the MIT rocket team alums that are building a roadable aircraft, what the rest of us might call a flying car. But Dietrich isn’t just a techie, she’s the business person behind the business at Terafugia. In addition, to show the wisdom of youth, as one of the youngest Women to Watch, she observed that she awaits the day when there will be no need for an event that focuses just on the achievements of women.

For now, though, it’s important to continue to recognize the accomplishments of the women who are driving forward the New England technology sector. So, for the seventh year, Mass High Tech will recognize the women who have contributed to the tech community, but also are poised to be industry leaders of the future.

Time is running out. We need you and your peers to nominate great candidates for the 2010 Women to Watch awards. As members of the tech community you know best who they are.

Nominations close on December 4, with honorees being celebrated on March 18. Please submit your nominations here.

Now that Dodge has landed on his feet at Google, there’s some backlash against the initial You-can’t-do-that-to-Don-Dodge gasps. Dan Lyons, AKA Fake Steve Jobs, plays Tim Russert and parses a Google Dodge blog post, in which Dodge’s opinons about Google have been magically adjusted.

Valleywag pulls it all together, with side-by-side, before-and-after opinions:

Before:

“Even Microsoft’s online version of Outlook called Outlook Web Access is far better than Gmail… Gmail… doesn’t compare to Microsoft Outlook.”

Now:

“Outlook… was getting kind of tired. Gmail is new, fast, web based, and has all the features I need. I especially like the way it threads conversations making it easy to keep everything in context… One other subtle thing: no spam. I never realized how much corporate spam invaded my Microsoft inbox.”

Using the state Department of Transportation’s open developer information, Todd Vanderlin, Ryan Habbyshaw and Brad Simpson made a series of images (above) for the DOT’s vizualization challenge.

The trio took the T’s data from August 12, ran it through openFrameworks and Matlab statistical software, and made the images with Adobe Illustrator.

So next time you hear an announcement about a disabled train or signal problems or an unruly passenger, just think about how pretty the delay will look on a poster.

Via Universal Hub.

Taking that down a few pay grades, blogger Steve Garfield is conducting an experiment, posing a question to the four candidates for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. He asked Martha Coakley, Mike Capuano, Steve Pagliuca and Alan Khazei, “How do you handle disagreement on a work team?” So far, he’s heard back from Capuano, or whoever is ghost writing Capuano’s Twitter stream.

Via Universal Hub.

Time listed its 50 Greatest inventions of 2009 last week. No. 33 was the No-Punt Offense, the brainchild of a Little Rock, Ark. high school coach named Kevin Kelley.

According to a recent Sports Illustrated story, Kelley doesn’t believe in punting — he doesn’t think it makes sense statistically. His team, Pulaski Academy, doesn’t have a punter or a kicker. The team hasn’t punted since 2007. Pulaski won the state championship last year, and is currently tied for first place.

You can nitpick whether or not the strategy is an invention, but Kelley is doing something right. Last night, obviously, things didn’t work out quite as well for the Pats against the Colts.

Above, watch Pulaski in action — fourth-and-long situations, onside kicks, and other things that are not punts. After the jump, watch Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s less scientific explanation for the controversial decision: “I thought we could get a yard.”

The bumpy economy continued to take a toll on U.S. console gaming market in October, the last full month before the peak holiday sales season. Overall sales of video games hardware, software and accessories fell 19 percent compared with the same month last year, according to the NPD Group research firm.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 continued to improve its position, with 320,600 units sold in the country for the month, up considerably from its October 2008 result of 190,000 units. Nintendo’s Wii reclaimed the top spot for the month, with 506,900 units sold, but that was down from more 800,000 units sold a year ago.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 sold 249,700 units, in third place based purely on hardware unit sales. However, in an interesting twist, the Xbox 360 platform still led the industry in total revenue from hardware, software and accessories for the month, claiming 27 percent of U.S. industry sales, according to NPD data. That was just ahead of the PlayStation 3, which came in at 26 percent, up 8 percentage points year-over-year.

“Year-to-date, the hardware category has experienced the sharpest decline in the industry, with unit sales down 10% compared to the same time period last year,” said Anita Frazier, an NPD analyst, in a summary of the results. “Recent price cuts helped spur a one to two-month increase in unit sales, and this month’s Wii sales reflect that boost, but the other platforms have not sustained the sales momentum post price reduction.”