Metal 'muscles'Autonomous robots, micro-scale air vehicles, and prosthetic limbs are all supposed to operate for long periods without recharging or refuelling, making efficient energy supply crucial.
Nature's choice is to provide chemical power for natural actuators like muscles. Human engineers have typically taken another route, relying on converting electrical energy into mechanical energy using motors, hydraulic systems, or piezoelectric actuators.
This is much less efficient, meaning even the most athletically capable robot must be wired to a stationary power source for much of the time.
The ideal solution is an artificial muscle that can convert chemical energy directly and efficiently into mechanical energy, says Ray Baughman a physicist at the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas in Dallas, US.
Baughman says he has built such a device made of a "shape memory" alloy of nickel and titanium. The metal is coated with a platinum catalyst and placed in a device that allows methanol to be drawn along the surface.
Exposing the surface to air causes the methanol to be oxidised, which heats the alloy and makes it bend in a pre-determined way. Cutting off the methanol supply lets the alloy cool and causes the alloy to its original shape.
Baughman says the device can generate stresses 500 times greater than human muscle and believes further significant improvements should be possible.
Read the full metal muscle patent application
'Circuit-board' clothing"The integration of electronic components into clothing is becoming an increasingly important area in the field known as wearable computing," says the electronics giant Philips in one of its latest patent filings.
The textile industry can today produce threads that are highly conductive and as flexible as regular fabric so that sensors in garments can measure biometric characteristics, like the wearer's temperature or heart rate. Such garments could have important applications in medicine and sports.
The trouble is that weaving sensors into these textiles is tricky. Threads not only need to be highly durable to survive the weaving process but, because fabrics are woven on a large scale and then cut to size, it is hard to ensure they will end up where they are needed in the garment. This fabrication method also limits the choice of sensors that can be used.
So Philips is pioneering another approach. This involves making a fabric that acts like a flexible circuit board to which any variety of sensors can then be attached. The company suggests weaving a fabric out of both conducting and non-conducting fibres, and then cutting the garment to size.
Sensors can be pinned to the garment where they are needed, with the conducting wire providing power but also communications between different sensors. The resulting fabric can easily be tailored to any size and can carry a variety of sensors for monitoring the wearer's body.
Read the full sensor fabric patent application.
Laser near-vision restorationThe long sightedness that afflicts people in their 40s and 50s is known as presbyopia, and is caused by a gradual stiffening of the lens in the eye. This is the result of the continual generation of new cells on top of older ones on the lens, a process that makes it stiffer and thicker.
In practice, this inflexibility prevents people focusing on near objects and means they must rely on reading glasses instead.
Now Szymon Suckewer, a mechanical engineer and laser specialist at Princeton University, New Jersey, US, says it may be possible to remove excess cells in the lens by using short laser pulses to vapourise them.
The process is entirely different from current laser treatments for vision, which change the shape of the cornea. Instead, it should make the lens fully flexible again, giving sufferers back their near vision.
However, Suckewer makes no mention in his a patent application of any tests involving animal or human subjects. So best wait and see how well the idea works before throwing those reading glasses away.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Invention : Metal 'muscles' Autonomous robots,
Invention : Metal 'muscles' Autonomous robots,
Metal 'muscles'Autonomous robots, micro-scale air vehicles, and prosthetic limbs are all supposed to operate for long periods without recharging or refuelling, making efficient energy supply crucial.
Nature's choice is to provide chemical power for natural actuators like muscles. Human engineers have typically taken another route, relying on converting electrical energy into mechanical energy using motors, hydraulic systems, or piezoelectric actuators.
This is much less efficient, meaning even the most athletically capable robot must be wired to a stationary power source for much of the time.
The ideal solution is an artificial muscle that can convert chemical energy directly and efficiently into mechanical energy, says Ray Baughman a physicist at the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas in Dallas, US.
Baughman says he has built such a device made of a "shape memory" alloy of nickel and titanium. The metal is coated with a platinum catalyst and placed in a device that allows methanol to be drawn along the surface.
Exposing the surface to air causes the methanol to be oxidised, which heats the alloy and makes it bend in a pre-determined way. Cutting off the methanol supply lets the alloy cool and causes the alloy to its original shape.
Baughman says the device can generate stresses 500 times greater than human muscle and believes further significant improvements should be possible.
Read the full metal muscle patent application
'Circuit-board' clothing"The integration of electronic components into clothing is becoming an increasingly important area in the field known as wearable computing," says the electronics giant Philips in one of its latest patent filings.
The textile industry can today produce threads that are highly conductive and as flexible as regular fabric so that sensors in garments can measure biometric characteristics, like the wearer's temperature or heart rate. Such garments could have important applications in medicine and sports.
The trouble is that weaving sensors into these textiles is tricky. Threads not only need to be highly durable to survive the weaving process but, because fabrics are woven on a large scale and then cut to size, it is hard to ensure they will end up where they are needed in the garment. This fabrication method also limits the choice of sensors that can be used.
So Philips is pioneering another approach. This involves making a fabric that acts like a flexible circuit board to which any variety of sensors can then be attached. The company suggests weaving a fabric out of both conducting and non-conducting fibres, and then cutting the garment to size.
Sensors can be pinned to the garment where they are needed, with the conducting wire providing power but also communications between different sensors. The resulting fabric can easily be tailored to any size and can carry a variety of sensors for monitoring the wearer's body.
Read the full sensor fabric patent application.
Laser near-vision restorationThe long sightedness that afflicts people in their 40s and 50s is known as presbyopia, and is caused by a gradual stiffening of the lens in the eye. This is the result of the continual generation of new cells on top of older ones on the lens, a process that makes it stiffer and thicker.
In practice, this inflexibility prevents people focusing on near objects and means they must rely on reading glasses instead.
Now Szymon Suckewer, a mechanical engineer and laser specialist at Princeton University, New Jersey, US, says it may be possible to remove excess cells in the lens by using short laser pulses to vapourise them.
The process is entirely different from current laser treatments for vision, which change the shape of the cornea. Instead, it should make the lens fully flexible again, giving sufferers back their near vision.
However, Suckewer makes no mention in his a patent application of any tests involving animal or human subjects. So best wait and see how well the idea works before throwing those reading glasses away.
Invention: Metal muscles
Metal 'muscles'Autonomous robots, micro-scale air vehicles, and prosthetic limbs are all supposed to operate for long periods without recharging or refuelling, making efficient energy supply crucial.
Nature's choice is to provide chemical power for natural actuators like muscles. Human engineers have typically taken another route, relying on converting electrical energy into mechanical energy using motors, hydraulic systems, or piezoelectric actuators.
This is much less efficient, meaning even the most athletically capable robot must be wired to a stationary power source for much of the time.
The ideal solution is an artificial muscle that can convert chemical energy directly and efficiently into mechanical energy, says Ray Baughman a physicist at the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas in Dallas, US.
Baughman says he has built such a device made of a "shape memory" alloy of nickel and titanium. The metal is coated with a platinum catalyst and placed in a device that allows methanol to be drawn along the surface.
Exposing the surface to air causes the methanol to be oxidised, which heats the alloy and makes it bend in a pre-determined way. Cutting off the methanol supply lets the alloy cool and causes the alloy to its original shape.
Baughman says the device can generate stresses 500 times greater than human muscle and believes further significant improvements should be possible.
Read the full metal muscle patent application
'Circuit-board' clothing"The integration of electronic components into clothing is becoming an increasingly important area in the field known as wearable computing," says the electronics giant Philips in one of its latest patent filings.
The textile industry can today produce threads that are highly conductive and as flexible as regular fabric so that sensors in garments can measure biometric characteristics, like the wearer's temperature or heart rate. Such garments could have important applications in medicine and sports.
The trouble is that weaving sensors into these textiles is tricky. Threads not only need to be highly durable to survive the weaving process but, because fabrics are woven on a large scale and then cut to size, it is hard to ensure they will end up where they are needed in the garment. This fabrication method also limits the choice of sensors that can be used.
So Philips is pioneering another approach. This involves making a fabric that acts like a flexible circuit board to which any variety of sensors can then be attached. The company suggests weaving a fabric out of both conducting and non-conducting fibres, and then cutting the garment to size.
Sensors can be pinned to the garment where they are needed, with the conducting wire providing power but also communications between different sensors. The resulting fabric can easily be tailored to any size and can carry a variety of sensors for monitoring the wearer's body.
Read the full sensor fabric patent application.
Laser near-vision restorationThe long sightedness that afflicts people in their 40s and 50s is known as presbyopia, and is caused by a gradual stiffening of the lens in the eye. This is the result of the continual generation of new cells on top of older ones on the lens, a process that makes it stiffer and thicker.
In practice, this inflexibility prevents people focusing on near objects and means they must rely on reading glasses instead.
Now Szymon Suckewer, a mechanical engineer and laser specialist at Princeton University, New Jersey, US, says it may be possible to remove excess cells in the lens by using short laser pulses to vapourise them.
The process is entirely different from current laser treatments for vision, which change the shape of the cornea. Instead, it should make the lens fully flexible again, giving sufferers back their near vision.
However, Suckewer makes no mention in his a patent application of any tests involving animal or human subjects. So best wait and see how well the idea works before throwing those reading glasses away.
Massive Black Hole Smashes
Using two NASA satellites, astronomers have discovered the heftiest known black hole to orbit a star. The new black hole, with a mass 24 to 33 times that of our Sun, is more massive than scientists expected for a black hole that formed from a dying star.
The newly discovered object belongs to the category of "stellar-mass" black holes. Formed in the death throes of massive stars, they are smaller than the monster black holes found in galactic cores. The previous record holder for largest stellar-mass black hole is a 16-solar-mass black hole in the galaxy M33, announced on October 17.
"We weren't expecting to find a stellar-mass black hole this massive," says Andrea Prestwich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., lead author of the discovery paper in the November 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters. "It seems likely that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized."
The black hole is located in the nearby dwarf galaxy IC 10, 1.8 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. Prestwich's team could measure the black hole's mass because it has an orbiting companion: a hot, highly evolved star. The star is ejecting gas in the form of a wind. Some of this material spirals toward the black hole, heats up, and gives off powerful X-rays before crossing the point of no return.
In November 2006, Prestwich and her colleagues observed the dwarf galaxy with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The group discovered that the galaxy's brightest X-ray source, IC 10 X-1, exhibits sharp changes in X-ray brightness. Such behavior suggests a star periodically passing in front of a companion black hole and blocking the X-rays, creating an eclipse. In late November, NASA's Swift satellite confirmed the eclipses and revealed details about the star's orbit. The star in IC 10 X-1 appears to orbit in a plane that lies nearly edge-on to Earth's line of sight, The Swift observations, as well as observations from the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, told Prestwich and her group how fast the two stars go around each other. Calculations showed that the companion black hole has a mass of at least 24 Suns.
There are still some uncertainties in the black hole's mass estimate, but as Prestwich notes, "Future optical observations will provide a final check. Any refinements in the IC 10 X-1 measurement are likely to increase the black hole's mass rather than reduce it."
The black hole's large mass is surprising because massive stars generate powerful winds that blow off a large fraction of the star's mass before it explodes. Calculations suggest massive stars in our galaxy leave behind black holes no heavier than about 15 to 20 Suns.
The IC 10 X-1 black hole has gained mass since its birth by gobbling up gas from its companion star, but the rate is so slow that the black hole would have gained no more than 1 or 2 solar masses. "This black hole was born fat; it didn't grow fat," says astrophysicist Richard Mushotzky of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who is not a member of the discovery team.
The progenitor star probably started its life with 60 or more solar masses. Like its host galaxy, it was probably deficient in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In massive, luminous stars with a high fraction of heavy elements, the extra electrons of elements such as carbon and oxygen "feel" the outward pressure of light and are thus more susceptible to being swept away in stellar winds. But with its low fraction of heavy elements, the IC 10 X-1 progenitor shed comparatively little mass before it exploded, so it could leave behind a heavier black hole.
"Massive stars in our galaxy today are probably not producing very heavy stellar-mass black holes like this one," says coauthor Roy Kilgard of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "But there could be millions of heavy stellar-mass black holes lurking out there that were produced early in the Milky Way's history, before it had a chance to build up heavy elements."
A New Video Game with Expressive Characters Lead to Emotional Attachment
When one thinks of the leaders in computer animation, a few familiar film studios come to mind, namely DreamWorks and Pixar. Traditional movie companies like Fox and Warner Brothers have also made successful forays into animated fare.
Video games, however, have rarely been known for the artistry of their animation, for two reasons. First, while they almost inevitably fall short, most video games of any genre try to look realistic - realistic cars, realistic football players, even plausibly "realistic" dragons and aliens. But what defines great animated characters like Mickey Mouse and Shrek is not any notion of realism, but rather an exaggerated yet unthreatening expressiveness. That is one reason so few of the classic animated characters are human: anthropomorphized animals give the artist much more creative leeway.
Just as important, in those cases when designers have gone for an animated look, technology has simply not allowed games to come anywhere near the fluidity, detail and depth possible in a noninteractive film. Not to mention that game companies often undermine even brilliant graphics with lackluster voice acting.
All that is changing this week with the release of Insomniac Games' Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for Sony's PlayStation 3 console. The new Ratchet is a watershed for gaming because it provides the first interactive entertainment experience that truly feels like inhabiting a world-class animated film.
Ratchet is expressive and chock- full of family-friendly visual humor, delivered with a polish and sophistication that have previously been the exclusive province of movies like "Toy Story" and "Monsters, Inc." (The game is being released with a rating of E 10+, which means it has been deemed appropriate for all but the youngest children.)
In addition to its creative achievement, Ratchet may also prove important in the incessant turf battle that is the multibillion-dollar video game business. Put baldly, Ratchet is the best game yet for the PlayStation 3, which has lagged behind Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii systems in the current generation of console wars. The PlayStation 3 has more silicon horsepower under the hood than either the 360 or the Wii, but until now there has not been a game for it that seemed to put all that muscle to use.
Ratchet, however, will surely become a showcase game for Sony because, given current technology, it seems unlikely that any game for either the 360 or the Wii will be able to match Ratchet's overall visual quality.
So how did Insomniac do it, and who is this Ratchet anyway?
In the best tradition of animation, Ratchet is a mischievous yet good-hearted member of the not-quite-human, not-quite-animal Lombax species. He is covered in yellow and orange fur, and he has a tail and long, floppy ears. Clank is his sage robot sidekick, and together they traverse the galaxy defeating the forces of evil. The first Ratchet game was released in 2002; since then the series has sold more than 12 million copies. As the new game begins, the once-idyllic city of Metropolis has come under attack by the legions of the big bad guy Emperor Tachyon.
"Ratchet has always been our opportunity to push the lighter side of gaming," said Ted Price, Insomniac's chief executive and founder, in a recent interview here. "Ratchet has allowed us to make jokes on those two pop culture levels where if the kids don't get it, the parents will.
"For instance, the character Courtney Gears was a big feature in the earlier game Ratchet Up Your Arsenal. Actually, a lot of us are huge Pixar fans, and we're inspired by their work because those guys do a great job of telling stories, and we think an area where we can drive games forward is not just in the visuals but in the area of character development." (For a kick, check out clips of Courtney Gears on YouTube.)
In a conference room dominated by an immense flat-panel screen, Brian Allgeier, the creative director of the new game, explained how new technology can help create a more engaging game experience. "The Ratchet character now has 90 joints just in his face," he said, referring to the character's virtual wrinkles and bones. "On the PlayStation 2, he had 112 joints in his whole body. So now we have a lot more power to make the characters more believable and expressive."
"Ultimately we're trying to create more emotional intimacy," he said. "That's one of the things that movies do really well with the close-up, where you can really see the emotions on the character's face. But in games, so often you're just seeing the action from a wide shot behind the character you're controlling and you don't have that emotional connection. So that's what we're going for."
Like most games, the new Ratchet includes a variety of weapons, but they tend toward whimsical gear like the Groovitron. Being pursued by a pack of bloodthirsty robot pirates? Bust out the Groovitron, a floating, spinning disco ball that compels your foes to dance to its funky beats while you make a getaway.
The biggest problem with Ratchet is that at times it is so lushly compelling that you find yourself just staring at the screen, as if it were a movie, rather than actually playing the game. And that, of course, is not a bad problem at all.
Waste management :IBM to recycle silicon for solar
IBM announced today that it has created a process allowing its manufacturing facilities to repurpose otherwise scrap semiconductor wafers.
Since the silicon wafers need to be nearly flawless to be used in computers, mobile phones, video games and other consumer electronics, the imperfect ones are normally erased with acidic chemicals and discarded. IBM had been sandblasting its flawed wafers to remove proprietary material. Some of the pieces, called "monitors," are reused for test purposes.
The new process cleans the silicon pieces with water and an abrasive pad, which leaves them in better condition for reuse. The entire process to clean an 8-in. wafer is about one minute. Eric White, the inventor of the process, said IBM can now get five or six monitor wafers out of one that would have been crushed and discarded. The cleaned wafers can also be sold to the solar-cell industry, which has a high demand for the silicon material to use in solar panels. White said that shortage would need to be "extreme" to use the wafers in consumer electronics, and that IBM does not plan to do so.
The IBM site in Burlington, Vt., has been using the process and reported an annual savings in 2006 of more than $500,000. Expansion of the technique has begun at IBM's site in East Fishkill, N.Y., and the company estimates its 2007 savings are more than $1.5 million. The Vermont and New York plants are IBM's only semiconductor manufacturing sites.
Chris Voce, an analyst at Forrester Resarch Inc., said he doesn't anticipate savings for the end user, but added, "When a semiconductor company can improve its process and drive efficiency into their manufacturing process, that's always great for their margins, but it's even better when there are broader benefits for the environment." Annually, IBM estimates that the semiconductor industry discards as many as 3 million wafers worldwide.
IBM plans to patent the new process and provide details to the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
Stem cells can improve memory after brain injury
Stem cells can improve memory after brain injury
New UC Irvine research is among the first to demonstrate that neural stem cells may help to restore memory after brain damage.
In the study, mice with brain injuries experienced enhanced memory -- similar to the level found in healthy mice -- up to three months after receiving a stem cell treatment. Scientists believe the stem cells secreted proteins called neurotrophins that protected vulnerable cells from death and rescued memory. This creates hope that a drug to boost production of these proteins could be developed to restore the ability to remember in patients with neuronal loss.
"Our research provides clear evidence that stem cells can reverse memory loss," said Frank LaFerla, professor of neurobiology and behavior at UCI. "This gives us hope that stem cells someday could help restore brain function in humans suffering from a wide range of diseases and injuries that impair memory formation."
The results of the study appear Oct. 31 in the Journal of Neuroscience.
LaFerla, Mathew Blurton-Jones and Tritia Yamasaki performed their experiments using a new type of genetically engineered mouse that develops brain lesions in areas designated by the scientists. For this study, they destroyed cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain vital to memory formation and where neurons often die.
To test memory, the researchers gave place and object recognition tests to healthy mice and mice with brain injuries. Memories of place depend upon the hippocampus, and memories of objects depend more upon the cortex. In the place test, healthy mice remembered their surroundings about 70 percent of the time, but mice with brain injuries remembered it just 40 percent of the time. In the object test, healthy mice remembered objects about 80 percent of the time, while injured mice remembered as poorly as about 65 percent of the time.
The scientists then set out to learn whether neural stem cells from a mouse could improve memory in mice with brain injuries. To test this, they injected each mouse with about 200,000 neural stem cells that were engineered to appear green under ultraviolet light. The color allows the scientists to track the stem cells inside the mouse brain after transplantation.
Three months after implanting the stem cells, the mice were tested on place recognition. The researchers found that mice with brain injuries that also received stem cells remembered their surroundings about 70 percent of the time - the same level as healthy mice. In contrast, control mice that didn't receive stem cells still had memory impairments.
Next, the scientists took a closer look at how the green-colored stem cells behaved in the mouse brain. They found that only about 4 percent of them turned into neurons, indicating the stem cells were not improving memory simply by replacing the dead brain cells. In the healthy mice, the stem cells migrated throughout the brain, but in the mice with neuronal loss, the cells congregated in the hippocampus, the area of the injury. Interestingly, mice that had been treated with stem cells had more neurons four months after the transplantation than mice that had not been treated.
"We know that very few of the cells are becoming neurons, so we think that the stem cells are instead enhancing the local brain microenvironment," Blurton-Jones said. "We have evidence suggesting that the stem cells provide support to vulnerable and injured neurons, keeping them alive and functional by making beneficial proteins called neurotrophins."
If supplemental neurotrophins are in fact at the root of memory enhancement, scientists could try to create a drug that enhances the release or production of these proteins. Scientists then could spend less time coaxing stem cells to turn into other types of cells, at least as it relates to memory research.
"Much of the focus in stem cell research has been how to turn them into different types of cells such as neurons, but maybe that is not always necessary," Yamasaki said. "In this case, we did not have to make neurons to improve memory."
UCI scientists Debbi Morrissette, Masashi Kitazawa and Salvatore Oddo also worked on this study, which was funded by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institutes of Health, and a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine postdoctoral scholar award.
The Google phone is inching closer to reality
The Google phone: Has a wireless upheaval begun?Questions remain, but analysts expect a Google phone by mid-2008
The Google phone is inching closer to reality, with wireless handhelds running Google Inc. applications and operating software expected in the first half of 2008, several industry analysts said today.
Some see Google's model as revolutionary in the U.S., where nearly all customers buy their cellular phones from a wireless carrier and are locked into a contract with that carrier. But Google's entry could signal a more open system where a customer buys the Google phone and then chooses a carrier, they noted.
The Wall Street Journal today cited unnamed sources and said that Google is expected to announce software within two weeks that would run on hardware from other vendors. The Google phone is expected to be available by mid-2008. The company did not comment.
Last week at the semiannual CTIA show in San Francisco, several analysts said they had heard rumors that Google would be offering software to Taiwan-based device maker High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) for the Google phone.
Today, Gartner Inc. analysts Phillip Redman said the rumor was still that the Google phone "is coming from HTC for next year, [with] 50,000 devices initially."
HTC could not be reached for immediate comment.
Lewis Ward, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based market research company IDC, said Google is clearly working on software for a phone, but after making a presentation at CTIA on emerging markets last week, he said, "It didn't sound like it was on HTC after all."
Unlike several analysts who said that Google could face a fight from carriers opposed to open networks and open devices, Ward and Redman said some carriers will cooperate with Google. "It's possible some carriers will work with Google," Ward said. "AT&T seems to be more open already with its iPhone support and other things, while T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel may be more open than Verizon Wireless."
Redman said that Google's "brand is attractive, so I think there will be takers" for building hardware and for providing network support.
At CTIA, Ward said a Google phone would make a wireless portal out of what Google already provides on a wired network to a PC, such as maps, social networking and even video sharing.
"This is about Google as a portal," Ward said last week. "This is fundamentally about wireless and wire-line converging."
Ward said Google's plans for its phone software are still up in the air. "What's unclear also is whether it will be a Linux free and open [operating system] running on top of the hardware, with applets and widgets and search and all the advanced stuff that Google has done in the past."
Jeffrey Kagan, an independent wireless analyst based in Atlanta, said many questions are raised by Google's proposition, including what the phone could be named. "Will it be a regular phone, or will it be more like the Apple iPhone? How will customers pay for it? Will it be different from the traditional way we use and pay for wireless phones? There are so many questions," Kagan said.
Like Apple Inc. with the iPhone, "Google could be very successful if they crack the code." Kagan added. "The cell phone industry ... is going through enormous change and expansion. Many ideas will be tried. Some will work, and some will fail."