June 27th, 2009
Robo-furniture eats household pests
Robotic furniture that eat vermin, like mice and flies, are a part of a design project at the Royal College of Art, London.
Designer James Auger is exploring a new breed of domestic robots that he says can sit comfortably at an intersection of products and pets. While some may balk at the morbid aspect of his creations, his aim is to “define various robot ‘raison d’etre’; the roles, behaviours, interactions and forms that might enhance their chances of securing a place in the human home.”
New Scientist reports that Auger built five domestic robots with the help of long time collaborator and fellow designer Jimmy Loizeau. “Each can sense its environment, has mechanical moving parts, and can perform basic services for its human hosts, such as telling the time or lighting a room.” You can see all the carniverous robots in a photo gallery.
Robotic Lampshade from Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robot Series (Credit: James Auger)
The robots gain energy by luring in pests that are digested by an internal microbial fuel cell. According to New Scientist this exploits the way microbes generate free electrons and hydrogen ions when oxidizing chemicals for energy. Electronics can be powered by directing the electrons around an external circuit before reuniting them with the ions. Read the rest of this entry »
June 24th, 2009
Students create portable device to detect suicide bombers
According to latest reports, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the weapons of suicide bombers, are responsible for about half of soldier casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To help contain this urgent threat, specialized contractors are being called in to provide services like counter IED training and technologies like counter-IED jammers. But a group of undergraduate engineering students at the University of Michigan has developed a new way to detect IEDs that appears to be magnitudes cheaper than comparable approaches.
The students invented a wireless network of portable hand-held metal detectors that could be hidden in trash cans, under tables, in flower pots, and, ideally, in inconspicuous roadside objects, for example. The network of palm-sized detectors conveys to a base station where suspicious objects are located and who might be carrying them. Compared with existing technology, the sensors are cheaper, lower-power and longer-range. Each of the sensors weighs only about 2 pounds.
June 21st, 2009
Futurist pinpoints world's top ten long-term challenges
With the growth of unpredictability comes forecasts that are harder to believe. But good leaders plan for a wide range of scenarios that are based on trends we see today.
In his recent commencement address to the 2009 graduating class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Tory, NY, Peter Schwartz outlined ten top world challenges that the graduates should consider to make an impact. Schwartz is a business strategist, futurist, and author of The Art of the Long View.
Peter Schwartz is an internationally renowned futurist, business strategist, author, and co-founder and chairman of Global Business Network
He said that today’s number-one challenge—and opportunity—is to develop a long-term solution for our energy needs.
“That means it must be nonpolluting and inexhaustible,” he said. He believes the world of 2050 will be one of clean and sustainable energy production, transportation, and manufacturing. But to achieve a peaceful and prosperous world will require “monumental innovation, collaboration, and leadership.”
June 17th, 2009
Scientists envision inflatable alternative to tethered space elevator
An inflatable free standing tower could one day carry equipment and tourists 20 kilometers above Earth, and it could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator, say researchers at York University in Toronto, Canada.
They envision a giant tower assembled with a series of modules made up of Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes that would be made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as hydrogen or helium. This would actively stabilize the giant tower and allow for flexibility. The elevator would support a series of platforms or pods that would launch payloads into Earth orbit.
June 15th, 2009
Peeling stickers inspire new path for stretchable electronics
For some, there’s inspiration to be found in unremarkable daily minutia. A team of researchers who studied stickers peeling from windows say that what they’ve observed could lead to a new way to precisely control the fabrication of stretchable electronics.
Delamination demonstration - The tape detaches from the surface and forms blisters of uniform size and spacing (Credit: Donna Coveney)
A study published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week offers a new approach to designing stretchable circuits that would enable electronic devices to be embedded into clothing, bendable displays, surgical gloves, and other flexible materials. The wiring in the circuits would be less prone to damage as the material twists and deforms, solving an engineering challenge that has mired the development of flexible electronics.
“It’s something that’s around you all the time - but if you look at it a different way you can see something new,” says Pedro Reis, applied math instructor at MIT and senior author of the PNAS paper.
June 12th, 2009
Robotic ferret to detect hidden drugs and weapons
The monumental task of inspecting containers that come in to and out of seaports and airports may get a bit easier with a new type of robot being developed to detect drugs, weapons, explosives and illegal immigrants concealed in cargo containers.
Credit: Hammer411 via Flickr
Dubbed the ‘cargo-screening ferret,’ the device has been in development since early 2008 at the University of Sheffield, and is being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
According to a press release, the ferret (sorry no image available as of time of writing) will be the world’s first cargo-screening device able to pinpoint various illicit substances and the first designed to operate inside standard freight containers.
When placed inside a steel freight container, the ferret will attach itself magnetically to the top, and then automatically move around and seek out contraband using a suite of sensors that are more comprehensive and more sensitive than any currently employed in conventional cargo scanners. It will send a steady stream of data back to its controller.
June 8th, 2009
Heads up! Interactive data eyeglasses
A team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, Germany, is working on a device which incorporates eye tracking to influence the content presented to the viewer. Without having to use any other devices to enter instructions, the wearer can display new content, scroll through a menu or shift picture elements simply by moving her eyes or fixing on certain points in the image.
The data eyeglasses display information and respond to commands. Credit: Fraunhofer IPMS
“We want to make the eyeglasses bidirectional and interactive so that new areas of application can be opened up,” says Dr. Michael Scholles, business unit manager at IPMS.
June 4th, 2009
Billion-year ultra-dense memory chip developed
There’s always been an inverse relationship between density and durability when it comes to data storage. Today’s silicon memory chips contain a lot of density, but with a lifespan of just a few decades, they lack durability. Yet primitive forms of storage such as information carved in stone are highly durable, however, they are not dense. Now this long-standing negative correlation between density and durability has been blow to bits with the development of a new memory device that can pack a trillion bits of data into one square inch of medium and retain that data for a billion years.
Led by physicist Alex Zettl, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have created a digital electromechanical memory device that consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube. The shuttle can be moved reversibly via a low-voltage electrical write signal and can be positioned with nanoscale precision, forming the basis of a binary sequence.
Read the rest of this entry »
June 2nd, 2009
Agriculture ripe for change with robot farmhands
Farmers across the developed world did away with the backbreaking part of the work during the 19th century with the introduction of equipment like tractors and combines. Now, evolving technology is poised to make industrial agriculture greener and more efficient with the use of robots.
This tractor is fitted with a laser perception pod on top of its cab and a control system so it can navigate orchards autonomously (Credit: CMU/Tony Stenz)
It’s a real possibility according to Tony Stentz, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics institute. He recently told New Scientist three reasons why: first, mobile robots have now proved able to cope with complex outdoor environments; second, the price of production has fallen; and, finally, society should now see robot laborers as a benefit not a curse. (As for his last point, automating seasonal farmhand work is one thing, but the thought of unmanned tractors navigating a field is another as it may have some old-fashioned tractor operators up in arms.)
The technology that allows for mobile robots to find their way across unfamiliar, changing terrain such as groves of trees has its roots in DARPA autonomous car events. And the groundwork for a vision-based algorithm that guides a harvester by tracking the line between cut and uncut crop with a 3D laser ranging scanner, was developed over a decade ago by Stentz and his team.
May 26th, 2009
A 'simpler' invisibility cloak
Still far from what you’ve seen on Star Trek, the development of technology to cloak objects–currently too small to see anyway–is heating up. Researchers at Purdue University report that they’ve created a new type of invisibility cloak that is simpler than previous designs, works for all colors of the visible spectrum, and can cloak larger objects than before.
Credit: Purdue University
The team of engineers used a specially “tapered optical waveguide” to cloak an area 100 times larger than the wavelengths of light shined by a laser into the device, an unprecedented achievement considering that previous experiments have been limited to cloaking regions only a few times larger than the wavelengths of visible light.
Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer. Previously, he was the manager of marketing editorial at CBS Interactive, delivering client solutions on BNET, ZDNet, and TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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