February 2nd, 2010

Japanese machine transforms office paper into toilet paper

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 12:01 am

Categories: Energy & Environment, Engineering & Innovation

Tags: Toilet, Machine, White Goat, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Chris Jablonski

Aptly named “White Goat”, a machine created by Oriental, Co. Ltd is one of latest offspring of the eco movement.  According to sources,  it uses 40 sheets of standard A4 office paper and water to make one roll of toilet paper in roughly 30 minutes.

If the novelty turns heads, so does the price tag. White Goat is set to go on sale this summer for $100,000.  To break even requires 200,000 roles produced, which can take 11 years if operated non-stop, and that does not include the cost of operating the machine. For some corporate paper wasters, however, saving trees may be justification enough for such a machine, with or without the pro forma case.

As the video below reveals, the patent-pending White Goat operates by first cutting paper into ribbons with its built-in shredder. (Shredded paper can also be dumped into machine). The ribbons then move to a pulper where they dissolve in water and the resulting pulp is thinned out, dried, and rolled up into ready-to-use toilet paper which is dispensed from the opposite end of the machine.

(via DVICE)

January 17th, 2010

Texas scientists develop 'nanodragster'

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 2:14 pm

Categories: Engineering & Innovation, Nanotechnology

Tags: Vehicle, Scientist, Productivity, Manufacturing, Chris Jablonski

Scientists at Rice University’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology are reporting the development of a “nanodragster” that measures only 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. The research may speed the course toward development of a new generation of futuristic molecular machines.

The vehicle (pictured above to the left) resembles a hot-rod in shape (right) and can outperform previous nano-sized vehicles. In fact, it was the same Rice team that developed the world’s first nanocar– essentially a 4 by 3 nanometer arrangement of complex molecules with buckyball wheels (spheres created with 60 carbon atoms) that made it behave like a vehicle. The tiny car scooted around a gold surface when exposed to heat or an electric field gradient.

The original nanocar developed by researchers at Rice University (Credit: Y. Shira/Rice University)

But it had some drawbacks. The scientists had limited control of the car’s movement and the nanoscopic resolution tools available at the time (2005) for studying the car’s range of motions and capabilities were also constrained.

The new hot-rod–about half that size of the nanocar–delivers a performance boost by addressing some of these problems. The front end has a smaller axle and wheels made of special materials that roll easier. The rear wheels sport a longer axle but are still made of buckyballs, which provide strong surface grip. According to the scientists, these changes result in a “nanodragster” that can operate at lower temperatures than a regular nanocar and possibly has has better agility, paving the way for better molecular machines.

Such nano-machines may one day be used to transport cargo such as drugs or for manufacturing computer circuits and other electronic components.

James Tour, Kevin Kelly and colleagues detail their research in; “Molecular Machinery: Synthesis of a “Nanodragster”, a report published in ACS’ Organic Letters.

January 12th, 2010

2010 tech predictions: a futurist roundup

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 9:35 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Defense & Security, Energy & Environment, Engineering & Innovation, Health & Medicine, Leisure, Nanotechnology, Robotics, Science & Nature, Social Sciences, Space & Aerospace, Uncategorized, Wireless & Telecom

Tags: Chris Jablonski

Sure, you’ve already read enough tech predictions for 2010 and probably have some of your own. But there’s one subset of the tech community that makes a living prognosticating- futurists. So it’s worth a post to highlight a few thought-provoking and entertaining ideas from a few experts. (Note: I would’ve posted this a lot earlier but was in Brazil on vacation for the last few weeks).

Jump the Curve

#7: An amateur scientist using cheap supercomputers accessed through “the cloud” will make a major scientific discovery. Her discovery will have initially been dismissed by peer-reviewed journals but hailed by the growing number of “open-science” advocates.

#13: Hype surround algae’s promise as the “bio-fuel of the future” will grow hot after a breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology. Environmental advocates, however, will draw parallels between the advent of the “designer bacteria” (which is used to convert algae into fuel) and the creation of genetically modified organisms. The issue of “Frankenbugs” will gain traction in the media.

#19: A conservative state legislator will introduce legislation prohibiting healthy individuals (i.e. non-injured combat veterans) from using implanted brain-neural technology to control objects outside their body. The bill will die in committee but the author and other supporters vow to make it a campaign issue in 2010.

Read all of Jack Uldrich’s 2010 Technology Forecast & Predictions

Ross Dawson

1. Information Intensity
We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

5. Culture Jamming
Remix culture will surge, with everybody taking and jamming up slices of everything and anything to express themselves, while intellectual property law fails to keep pace. Every culture on the planet will reach everywhere – the only culture we will know is a global mashed-up emergent culture that changes by the minute.

9. Augmented Humans
More than ever before, we can transcend our human abilities. Traditional memory aids are supplemented by augmented reality glasses or contact lenses, thought interfaces allow us to control machines, exoskeletons give us superhuman power. Machines will not take over humanity… because they will be us.

Read all of Ross’ Top 10 trends for the 2010s: the most exciting decade in human history

Read the rest of this entry »

December 24th, 2009

Scientists create world's first molecular transistor

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:39 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation, Nanotechnology

Tags: Transistor, Molecule, Semiconductors, Hardware, Chris Jablonski

Scientists from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, have succeeded in creating the first transistor made from a single molecule.

Credit: Hyunwook Song and Takhee Lee

The team showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor. The researchers adjusted the voltage, allowing them to raise and lower the molecule’s energy states and demonstrated that it could be used exactly like a traditional transistor at the molecular level. The team published their findings in Nature.

“It’s like rolling a ball up and over a hill, where the ball represents electrical current and the height of the hill represents the molecule’s different energy states,” said Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale. “We were able to adjust the height of the hill, allowing current to get through when it was low, and stopping the current when it was high.” The result is similar functionality to regular transistors, but with a molecule a few atoms in size.

The work builds on previous research Reed did in the 1990s, which demonstrated that individual molecules could be trapped between electrical contacts.

While the new transistor is a scientific breakthrough, Reed conceded that practical applications such as smaller and faster “molecular computers”—if possible at all—are many decades away.

“We’re not about to create the next generation of integrated circuits,” he said. “But after many years of work gearing up to this, we have fulfilled a decade-long quest and shown that molecules can act as transistors.”

Remarkable yes. But is it the ultimate in electronic device miniaturization? Earlier this month, an international team from Finland and Australia reported the development of a single-atom transistor.

In recent years, engineers have been moving away from silicon to exotic materials such as graphene to slash transistor size, with 10 atoms the record last year. The molecular transistor reduces that figure down to the single digits, possibly just one nanometer in length.

December 20th, 2009

An LCD screen with multitouch and off-screen gestural control

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 3:08 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation

Tags: Controller, Computing, Chris Jablonski

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a working prototype of a bidirectional LCD (captures and displays images) that allows a viewer to control on-screen objects without the need for any peripheral controllers or even touching the screen. In near Minority Report fashion, interaction is possible with just a wave of the hand.

“This is a level of interaction that nobody’s ever been able to do before,” says Ramesh Raskar at MIT’s Media Lab, who created the prototype along with colleagues Matthew Hirsch and Henry Holtzman, as well as Douglas Lanman at Brown University.

The BiDI Screen, as it’s called, is based on LCD technology in which arrays of optical sensors are interlaced with a panel’s pixels to detect multiple points of contact with the surface. This enables touch screen interaction.  But to get the screen to see the world in front of it, the researchers displaced the sensor layer of photodiodes behind the liquid crystal layer.  The LCD screen works double duty, switching between display mode and capture mode in real time. In display mode, the LCD functions as normal with backlight and liquid crystals modulating to produce an image. When in capture mode the screen serves as a pinhole array to capture the angle and intensity of light passing to the sensor layer and the backlight is disabled. Read the rest of this entry »

December 15th, 2009

MIT updates bicycling with Copenhagen Wheel

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:01 pm

Categories: Computers & Internet, Energy & Environment, Engineering & Innovation, Leisure

Tags: Wheel, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Chris Jablonski

Today, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, MIT’s SENSEable City researchers debuted the Copenhagen Wheel, a high-tech bicycle wheel with a large red hub that packs a “veritable Swiss army knife’s worth of electronic gadgets and novel functions.”

The hub is laced with sensors that speak to a handlebar-mounted smart phone via Bluetooth. It can keep track of direction and distance traveled, provide stats on smog and traffic levels in the rider’s vicinity, the proximity of friends, and personal fitness.

But that’s not all. The wheel can store energy every time the rider puts on the brakes, and then give that power back to provide a boost when riding uphill or to add a burst of speed in traffic.

According to Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory and the Copenhagen Wheel project, the wheel uses a technology similar to the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) now commonly used in Formula One racing.

“When you brake, your kinetic energy is recuperated by an electric motor and then stored by batteries within the wheel, so that you can have it back to you when you need it. The bike wheel contains all you need so that no sensors or additional electronics need to be added to the frame and an existing bike can be retrofitted with the blink of an eye,” Ratti said.

The initial prototypes of the Copenhagen Wheel were developed along with company Ducati Energia and the Italian Ministry of the Environment.

It is expected that the wheel will go into production next year, with a tag price competitive with that of a standard electric bike.

Additional reading: Interview with Andrea Vaccari, research associate at MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory

December 12th, 2009

Manhattan Beach Project to reverse aging by 2029

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:37 pm

Categories: Engineering & Innovation, Health & Medicine, Nanotechnology, Science & Nature, Social Sciences

Tags: Longevity, Compound, Cell, Spindler, Mice, Hardware, Peripherals, Chris Jablonski

Human life expectancy may see a hockey stick growth curve in the coming years as a result of leaps made in fields such as molecular nanotechnology, gene therapy, robotics, and regenerative medicine.

Seizing the potential for radical longevity, an effort dubbed the “Manhattan Beach Project“, is a focused and targeted “all-out assault on the world’s biggest killer- aging,” according to its founder David Kekich, President/CEO of Maximum Life Foundation.

Sculpture of Methuselah, a 969 year-old man mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Credit: www.answersingenesis.org)

The project was spawned during an international scientific conference nine years ago in Manhattan Beach, California (hence the namesake that only in ambition is similar to the Manhattan Project).

It consists of a group of researchers and entrepreneurs that have for years been collaborating on a scientific road-map to intervene in the human aging process and are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.”

In November ‘09, Kekich organized a Longevity Summit that brought together a number of leading scientists, visionaries, and experts on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research and the implications of their discoveries. Their goal is to develop a scientific and business strategy to make human life extension a real possibility within the next two decades. Here’s a video of Kekich explaining the project.

Hosted by the Maximum Life Foundation and sponsored by the Life Extension Foundation, also a non-profit organization dedicated to longevity research, the summit opened with futurist Ray Kurzweil, who explained, “We are very close to the tipping point in human longevity. We are about 15 years away from adding more than one year of longevity per year to remaining life expectancy.”

Over the next three days, experts presented their latest research at a series of conference sessions. As H+ (The Manhattan Beach Project to End Aging by 2029 ) and Reason.com (The Methuslelah Manifesto) report, below are conference highlights: Read the rest of this entry »

December 3rd, 2009

Researchers rethink approaches to computer vision

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 12:09 am

Categories: Computers & Internet, Engineering & Innovation, Robotics

Tags: Researcher, Vision, Hardware, Graphics, Computer, Productivity, Strategy, Management, Chris Jablonski

Intel announced yesterday a 48-core chip that packs 1.3 billion transistors on a single processor. The computing power, according to Justin Rattner, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, will pave the way to machines that “see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities.”

But vast computing power is but one requisite to achieving an artificial visual system that’s truly perceptive, and it’s by far been easier to deliver than the other key component - the mimicry of biological neural processing.

“Reverse engineering a biological visual system—a system with hundreds of millions of processing units—and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,” said David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard. “It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.”

The challenge has led neuroscientists and roboticists to re-framed approaches. For instance, European researchers have recently developed an algorithm that enables a robot to combine data from both sound and vision to enable depth perception and to help isolate objects. Read the rest of this entry »

November 25th, 2009

British team chooses design for 1000 mph car

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 11:30 pm

Categories: Engineering & Innovation

Tags:

With a design finalized, the British team that holds the current land speed record plans to smash it with a hybrid jet-rocket propelled car they aim to take beyond 1,000 mph.

The 6-ton super sonic car (SSC), known as Bloodhound, has about the equivalent horsepower as 180 Formula 1 cars. It will be powered by a Eurofighter jet engine mounted above a hybrid rocket, and will be built in Bristol, UK.

The original configuration called for a 440 lb rocket mounted above a Eurofighter Typhoon engine, but the team discovered through modeling that the rocket would have to be doubled in size to provide the necessary thrust to overcome drag.  That size of engine would make the vehicle unstable. Therefore, the design team reversed the positions of the two engines. The reason for two power plants is because the jet engine provides the initial acceleration, while the rocket provides the additional thrust to reach the maximum speed. Read the rest of this entry »

November 22nd, 2009

The surgeons of tomorrow: Miniaturized robots that go inside you

Posted by Chris Jablonski @ 4:28 pm

Categories: Engineering & Innovation, Health & Medicine, Nanotechnology, Robotics

Tags: Bot, Robots, Emerging Technologies, Chris Jablonski

Before the advent of laparoscopic or keyhole surgery in the 70’s, operations such as a stomach bypass or gall bladder removal required large incisions and long periods for recovery. The next chapter further minimizes the invasiveness of surgical procedures via robots that are millimeters in size that infiltrate our bodies through the ears, eyes and lungs, to take tissue samples, deliver drugs, or install medical devices.

Brad Nelson, a roboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EHT) in Zurich, recently told New Scientist; “It’s not impossible to think of this happening in five years. I’m convinced it’s going to get there.”

Hurdles to overcome include the development of new mechanisms for propulsion and power supply on a miniature scale, which are also prerequisites to the loftier idea of nanoscale medical robots swimming in our bloodstream.

Read the rest of this entry »