Shape-changing plastic could give touchscreens real physical clicky keyboards

A few years ago, in a haptic technology conference. There was the usual array of silly gadgets that only technically fulfilled the haptic definition (a dog collar that buzzes when the dog leaves the house, a stylus that vibrates when you tap it) but buried way toward the back was a supposedly tactile touchscreen — and it worked! The device vibrated at various frequencies to basically knock your finger off the screen several times per second, effectively adjusting the friction between finger and glass. As I moved from a picture of concrete to a picture of ice, my finger seemed to slip accordingly, and while that might not be what you’d call “useful,” it certainly sold me on the concept: creative use of haptics can be more than just the Rumble Pak 2.0. It can fundamentally affect how we use these devices.

These sorts of haptic technologies are almost all trying to use vibration to simulate some other physical sensation, but what if we could actually change the friction of the surface, make it smoother or bumpier with real physical deformations? More to the point, what if we could make a keyboard that actually pops out of the screen, and which can be depressed as we type? Strategic Polymers claims it will bring a product to market next year that can do just that: pop up keys that actually click when clicked, and that do so with a ground-breaking millisecond response time.

Even Star Trek didn’t posit such advances some 300 years in the future, with even the Federation’s flagship using flat, chirpy touchscreens. The Strategic Polymers solution uses a new high-strain electromechanical material that can deform by “as much as 10%” and which responds quickly. Historically, we’ve had to choose one of those two virtues, getting either slow and meaningful responses, or quick and tiny ones. Here, Strategic Polymers claims, we’ve got a technology that will allow true, clickable keys to pop right out of the surface of your smartphone’s touchscreen, and to respond quickly and accurately. See an early video of the technology below.

The technology works via electrostriction, which is a property of every dielectric object in the world. By engineering this polymer to respond very specifically to an applied electric field, however, the researchers claim to be able to create all sorts of useful deformations — like, for instance, a couple of dozen square keyboard keys. By adjusting the applied electric field in response to touch, the screen can seem to move in response to pressure, though in reality it’s still only moving in response to the electric field, which is changing in response to touch. The result, if it all works as quickly and seamlessly as Strategic Polymers claims, would be a real physical keyboard on a fully functional touchscreen.

What is currently unclear, however, is how pre-programmed these physical features might need to be. It’s of course exciting to imagine a touchscreen that could take on a new physical controller layout for every game or application, put a rough strip down the right of the screen for a nice tactile scroll bar, or volume slider you can feel slide, or perhaps just an embossed top logo. Current info doesn’t make it clear if this will be possible, however, as the deformations might need to be built into the electroactive polymer; a keyboard could work because a reliable key layout could be built right into the polymer. The ExtremeTech logo is, unfortunately, much more up in the air.

One very interesting feature is the material’s ability to play sound. A speaker is just a highly controlled vibrating surface, really, one that creates patterns of tiny shockwaves that we interpret as sound. This haptic technology has a low enough response time that it can do this itself. Watch the video above to see how a this tech could turn just about any surface into a low-fi computer speaker.

The various layers of a touchscreen setup. Note that the LCD has 5+ layers of its own, too.

Thin and transparent, the new tech is billed as yet another in the steadily growing list of screen layers. It’s become a bit of design cliche to feature an exploded picture of a screen’s many and innovative layers, from light scattering glass to touchscreen films to, now, haptic top coats. This layer will have to be on surface of the screen, since it can’t very well push up through a layer of Gorilla Glass, and so the claims about the material’s durability will be absolutely key.

Virtually everyone who’s used a touchscreen keyboard has wished for this technology at one time or another. It calls to mind all sorts of wild and questionably useful applications, like a raised ring you can physically stick your thumb into and drag down to scroll, or a Google Maps with real topology. It’s the sort of advance that could finally drag Apple out of the “But it’s just a faster iPhone!” era, offering a the biggest step forward in touchscreen functionality since multitouch.

NASA working on faster-than-light space travel, says warp drives are ‘plausible’

Trekkies rejoice: while real breakthroughs in warp drive design haven’t happened yet, we’re moving closer to making faster-than-light travel truly feasible.

Researchers found that making adjustments to the design of a real-life warp drive first proposed by physicist Michael Alcubierre in 1994 significantly reduces the amount of energy required to power it.

Alcubierre’s design called for an American football-shaped spacecraft with a flat ring attached to the ship. Space time would warp around it, accelerating the ship to as fast as 10 times the speed of light without the ship itself ever breaking the speed of light. This would make trips to local stars a relatively quick jaunt: a trip to Alpha Centauri — some four light years away from Earth — would take just shy of five months.

Up until now, the biggest problem was that the Alcubierre warp drive required prohibitive amounts of energy to power it. That may no longer be true, say NASA researchers.

Dr. Harold “Sonny” White, of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was able to significantly reduce the amount of energy required by altering the shape of the ring around the ship from flat to more of a rounded donut. Instead of requiring a ball of antimatter the size of Jupiter to power the theoretical warp drive, only 500 kilograms are now required, or a ball about the size of the Voyager spacecraft. White says that if the intensity of the warp bubble is oscillated, the amount of energy is reduced even more.

This is certainly exciting news, but it’s important to remember that the true breakthrough — proof that Alcubierre’s designs actually work — do not exist. Dr. White and his team of researchers have set up a miniature version of the warp drive in their labs, attempting to create small warps in space and time. While certainly on a far smaller scale, White’s work may be the beginning of real-life warp drive.

Here’s the thing though: antimatter is horribly dangerous. Just a third of a gram of the stuff interacting with matter in the wrong way could release energy equivalent to the Hiroshima blast. That means White’s Alcubierre warp drive still requires the amount of energy equivalent to 1.5 million Hiroshimas — enough to wipe civilization off the Earth.

Regardless, if we’re ever going to reach for the stars, we need to think and do things that seem a little crazy. Dr. White seems to believe that attempting to get this to work is indeed something humanity should pursue.

“The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation,” Dr. White tells Space.com. “The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab.”

Researchers print flexible electronic tattoo directly onto human skin

From the research lab that brought us stick-on electronic tattoos, and recently the stretchable battery, we now have the first electronic sensor that has been printed directly onto human skin. These sensors can directly measure skin hydration and temperature, and electric signals from muscle and brain activity.

The skin-printable sensors, created by the Rogers research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are a natural evolution of the lab’s electronic tattoos. The electronic tattoos are circuits that are affixed to an elastic polymer backing, which is then stuck to the skin (pictured above). Like temporary tattoos, though, these electronic tattoos are easily washed off in the shower or swimming pool, making them unsuitable for extended use. Now, by removing the polymer backing and printing the sensor directly onto the skin, the researchers have made a device that is one thirtieth as thick and better at conforming to the natural bumpiness of skin. ”What we’ve found is that you don’t even need the elastomer backing,” John Rogers tells Technology Review. “You can use a rubber stamp to just deliver the ultrathin mesh electronics directly to the surface of the skin.”

Once on the skin, the researchers use a commercially available spray-on bandage to protect the electronics in a “very robust way.” Because of the skin’s natural exfoliation process, though, the device flakes off after two weeks — an inherent flaw of any surface-mounted skin-based electronics (epidermal electronics). To achieve a longer lifespan we will need to embed devices under the skin, like real tattoos.

As for how the Rogers group created a computer that’s flexible enough to move and stretch with your body, we look no further thanthe stretchable battery that the same researchers unveiled in February. In essence, the stretchable battery and electronic tattoos are standard computer circuits, fashioned from normal silicon processes — but each of the components are connected by special, serpentine wires that are capable of flexing and stretching gracefully (pictured right). In the case of the battery, which has a liquid electrolyte, the components are encased in stretchy silicone — but with this new electronic tattoo, your skin is the stretchy substrate.

Moving forward, the researchers say they will work on improving their flexible wireless charging circuitry (which debuted in the stretchable battery) and communications circuitry — after all, what good is an electronic tattoo that can’t connect to other sensors, or some kind of wearable computer/smartphone?

Eventually, the goal is to produce sensors and simple computers that might aid with healthcare (m-health), or more generally with quantified health/body hacking (using technology to track your body’s state and performance throughout the day). You can easily imagine an electronic tattoo that keeps track of a surgical wound and alerts doctors if it doesn’t heal as expected. On the elective front, you might install an electronic tattoo that tells you when your heart or brain activity is spiking, or interacts in interesting ways with other wearable sensors and computers that you might be wearing.

Your next smartphone might use sapphire glass instead of Gorilla Glass

Sapphire, the hardest natural substance after diamond, might soon be used to make smartphone screens. Sheets of sapphire glass are already used by the military to create transparent armor, but if a bunch of sapphire-synthesizing startups have their way, sapphire glass will soon be cheap enough for use in a wide range of consumer products, such as smartphones, tablets, and other ruggedized devices.

Sapphire is a transparent, crystalline form of aluminium oxide (alumina) that is extraordinarily hard, scratch-resistant, a melting point of 2,030C, and almost completely impermeable and impervious to caustic chemicals. In short, sapphire is a slightly weaker but far cheaper and more abundant version of diamond. In terms of real-world use, sapphire is about 10 times more scratch resistant than normal window glass, and much stronger than any other materials used in optics applications. It is this ruggedness that has led sapphire glass to be used in applications where normal glass just doesn’t cut it, such as bullet-proof glass, watches, and the front window on barcode scanners.

Pieces of GT Advanced Technologies sapphire glass. The one on the left is designed for an iPhone 5.

Most importantly, though, synthetic sapphire is relatively easy to make, though the exact processes used are usually proprietary. In general, it simply involves the melting of large amounts of aluminium oxide in a special furnace, and then letting it slowly cool to create a single crystal of flawless sapphire. Straight-up aluminium oxide creates a transparent crystal of sapphire, but if you want to create a specific gemstone, trace minerals are added — titanium and iron create the stereotypical blue sapphire, while chromium turns it into a ruby. Then, when you have a big crystal (pictured above), a diamond saw is used to slice it into sheets of glass.

At around three times the strength and scratch resistance of Corning’s Gorilla Glass, sapphire glass would make an almost perfect smartphone screen. There’s one caveat: according to a market analyst, a sheet of Gorilla Glass costs around $3, while the same piece of sapphire glass would cost $30. Thanks to increasing competition, though, the cost of sapphire glass is dropping. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a high-end smartphone (such as the iPhone) use a sapphire screen in the next few years. It’s worth noting that the iPhone 5 already uses sapphire glass to protect the rear camera lens, so Apple is certainly aware of sapphire’s potential.

Another option is to create very thin sheets of sapphire, which are then laminated onto a cheaper material. According to Technology Review, GT Advanced Technologies is going down this route. By acquiring Twin Creeks’ ion cannon technology, which creates very thin sheets of silicon from a large crystal of silicon for use in solar cells, GT hopes to produce sheets of sapphire that are thinner than a human hair. In the video above, you can see an iPhone that’s been retrofitted with a sheet of GT’s sapphire glass — its performance really is quite impressive.

Other companies in the US, Russia, and South Korea are also working on reducing the cost of sapphire glass, all with their own proprietary methods. Reaching viability won’t be easy, though: Corning isn’t going to simply sit still. Either way, with our growing reliance on mobile devices, it’s comforting to know that there are developments in the pipeline that will soon make cracked screens a thing of the past.

Researchers create fiber network that operates at 99.7% speed of light, smashes speed and latency records

Researchers at the University of Southampton in England have produced optical fibers that can transfer data at 99.7% of the universe’s speed limit: The speed of light. The researchers have used these new optical fibers to transfer data at 73.7 terabits per second — roughly 10 terabytes per second, and some 1,000 times faster than today’s state-of-the-art 40-gigabit fiber optic links, and at much lower latency.

The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second. In any other medium, though, it’s generally a lot slower. In normal optical fibers (silica glass), light travels a full 31% slower. Light actually travels faster through air than glass — which leads us neatly onto the creation of Francesco Poletti and the other members of his University of Southampton team: A hollow optical fiber that is mostly made of air. 

It might seem counterintuitive, transmitting light down fibers made primarily of air, but look around you: If light didn’t travel well through air, then you’d a hard time seeing. It isn’t like researchers haven’t tried making hollow optical fibers before, of course, but you run into trouble when trying to bend around corners. In normal optical fiber, the glass or plastic material has a refractive index, which causes light to bounce around inside the fiber, allowing it to travel long distances, or Remove the glass/plastic and the light just hits the outer casing, causing the signal to fizzle almost immediately. The glass-air interface inside each fiber also causes issues, causing interference and limiting the total optical bandwidth of the link.

The researchers overcame these issues by fundamentally improving the hollow core design, using an ultra-thin photonic-bandgap rim. This new design enables low loss (3.5 dB/km), wide bandwidth (160nm), and latency that blows the doors off normal optic fiber — light, and thus the data, really is travelling 31% faster down this new hollow fiber. To achieve the transmission rate of 73.7 terabits per second, the researchers used wave division multiplexing (WDM), combined with mode division multiplexing, to transmit three modes of 96 channels of 256Gbps. Mode division multiplexing is a new technology that seems to involve spatial filtering — rotating the signals with a polarizer, so that more of fiber can be used. As far as we’re aware, this is one of the fastest ever transmission rates in the lab. 

As for real-world applications, loss of 3.5 dB/km is okay, but it won’t be replacing normal glass fiber any time soon. For short stretches, though, such as in data centers and supercomputer interconnects, these speed-of-light fibers could provide a very significant speed and latency boost.

A Bulb That Can Turn Any Surface Into Touchscreen

Natan Linder has created an adavnced light system based on Augmented Reality named LuminAR that transforms any surface into interactive touch screen.

We all use table lamps at our study, but what if that lamp was able to transform your table into an interactive touch screen? Natan Linder, a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab has exactly done that. Linder has created an advanced light system named LuminAR that transforms any surface into interactive touch screen. LuminAR is an Augmented Reality system that projects images on any surface and can detect when anyone touches the projected image. Describing his project at the official site of MIT Media Lab, Linder said, “LuminAR reinvents the traditional incandescent bulb and desk lamp, evolving them into a new category of robotic, digital information devices. The LuminAR Bulb combines a Pico-projector, camera, and wireless computer in a compact form factor. This self-contained system enables users with just-in-time projected information and a gestural user interface, and it can be screwed into standard light fixtures everywhere. The LuminAR Lamp is an articulated robotic arm, designed to interface with the LuminAR Bulb.” Linder is a ten-year industry veteran and has worked for Sun Microsystems, and was the co-founder of Samsung Electronics Israel R&D Center and served as its Mobile R&D general manager. He was also an entrepreneur in Residence at Jerusalem Venture Partners, a leading VC in Israel. To know more about LuminAR click here.

Meet The World's Most Powerful 570MP Camera

Handsets with the Nokia Lumia PureView cameras may boast of an astounding count of 41 MP but a newly erected DEC (Dark Energy Camera) has somewhat shaken its reputation. To make things clear, this is not a camera phone that anybody can keep in his pocket but reportedly the most powerful sky-mapping machine. The DEC has captured and recorded light from 8 billion years ago.

The newest achievement may well hold within the answers to one of biggest unsolved mysteries of Astrophysics, such as why the expansion of the universe is speeding up, as reported by NDTV.

At the international Dark Energy Survey collaboration, scientists briefed about the Dark Energy Camera, a product that took eight years of planning and construction by a joint team of engineers, scientists and technicians working across three continents. The first pictures of the Southern sky were shot by the 570MP camera on 12 September.

The Dark Energy Camera was developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The gigantic camera is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which is the southern branch of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). “The achievement of first light through the Dark Energy Camera begins a significant new era in our exploration of the Cosmic Frontier,” James Siegrist, DOE associate director of science for high-energy physics was quoted as saying.

The Dark Energy Camera is claimed to be the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, able to see light from over 1,00,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each snapshot. The camera’s series of 62 charge-coupled devices has an unprecedented sensitivity to very red light.It also allows scientists from around the world to pursue investigations ranging from studies of asteroids in our own solar system to the understanding of the origins and the fate of the universe.

Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration will use the new camera to carry out the largest galaxy survey ever undertaken. The collected data will then be used to carry out probes on dark energy, studying galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing. This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment
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The past, present, and future of bionic eyes

Next-generation bionic eyes are practically here today. Imagine a blind person’s real-world conundrum trying to shop for one — they could schedule surgery for Nano Retina’s implant today and see their daughter’s wedding in 576-pixel clarity, but it would cost them their life’s savings. The Nano Retina 5000-pixel device could be ready tomorrow, or in another six months… and would be much more affordable. When the procedure involves assimilation of an electrode pincushion into the ganglionic tentacles of your retina, hardware upgrades are not as simple as popping in more RAM. What kind of decision matrix could be offered under such critical circumstances?

Cochlear implants, used to restore hearing, work phenomenally well when properly tuned and fitted. Most are refinements of the basic piece of hardware one might have sitting on their bookshelf — the graphic equalizer. The implant processes a single audio stream into bins of various sizes according to frequency, and then applies current to the corresponding frequency location in the cochlea, typically with a 16-spot linear electrode. The main function of these devices is to capture speech formants — the peaks in the frequency spectrum of the voice. The toughest challenge for the cochlear implant is to provide sound localization and source separation in noisy environments like a cocktail party.

Vision implants are much more complex. As any practiced photographer knows, the eye is more than a camera. The optic nerve does not feed the brain pixels. If you imagine your camera responding to auto-selected targets several times a second, gathering the full spectrum of light through its entire range of settings at each pause, and compressing the data onto a bandwidth- and energy-limited channel ideally matched to its receiver, you have some idea of what the retina accomplishes routinely.

The reason cochlear implants work so well is that the brain is just that good at making sense out of virtually any kind of signal it is given. If presented only with noise, or with nothing at all, the brain will eventually begin to manufacture hallucinations. If the implant signal contains even some distorted fragment of the original signal, it can be made to work convincingly. This is also the reason why retina implants can work without incorporating any knowledge of what the retina actually does in the healthy state.

These days researchers are trying to do a little better than the grainy images provided through our current implants. Signal processing techniques were developed in the Cold War era to track and target incoming missiles by extracting signals from noisy radar data. These same techniques are now used to convert the activity of groups of neurons in the motor cortex into a set of commands for moving a cursor, prosthetic device, or de-enervated limb in brain machine interfaces (BCIs). These methods and derivations of them can also be applied to incoming sensory data and can approximate what the retina actually does, without doing it in the same way.

Unfortunately, videos and TED talks are not the places where this kind of knowledge is typically transmitted in much depth. For that, one needs to look back to the work of the founding father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, and his eminently practical inspiration, Vito Volterra. After suggesting that helium be used instead of hydrogen in airships, to great success, Volterra shifted gears and came up with some methods to characterize complex systems. Wiener simplified Volterra’s equations and they are now widely used today in statistical techniques like linear regression analysis, and analysis of spike trains from neurons.

The 3D display that tracks your head for a true holographic effect

When you go to a movie projected in 3D, you’ll often see grown men and women swiping in the air as if they could touch the images floating in front of them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could actually interact with the objects in 3D space? Even better, what if the object in 3D space was viewable from multiple angles like a hologram? That’s what a company called Infinite Z is doing with its display and input device that goes by the name zSpace. This technology combines stereoscopic images with infrared cameras that actually track head and hand movements to construct a more realistic holographic effect.

For the zSpace illusion to work, you need to wear a pair of special glasses. Not only do the glasses perform the required image separation for stereoscopy, but they also have embedded infrared reflectors to help the system track your head. This allows you to move your head so that you can view a hovering object from different perspectives. The screen actually changes what is being displayed based on where you’re looking at it. This innovation allows the illusion of three dimensions to work much more effectively. When you add the ability to manipulate objects in 3D space with its special stylus, this stops being a gimmick. This actually has real-world uses now.

The zSpace is designed for professionals working in fields like 3D modeling, so it is priced accordingly. It’s available for $3,995, but the MIT Technology Review notes that people enrolled in Infinite Z’s developer program can buy a device for only $1,500. For those of you interested in developing software that takes advantage of this technology, an SDK is available for download alongside documentation and webinars covering relevant information.

This technology isn’t just useful for professionals, though. Browsing through a white paper written by Robert Earl Patterson [PDF], with help from Infinite Z, it’s obvious that the potential for interactive 3D displays is endless. The 3D technology in video game systems like the Sony PlayStation 3 or Nintendo 3DS is child’s play compared to the capabilities of this system. When these interactive 3D displays work their way downmarket, 3D gaming will actually make sense. When you can interact with a digital object as if it was real, that experience can lead to interesting and unique gameplay instead of the tacked-on 3D we have now.

Alternate reality and 3D immersion have been promised for a long time, and this is a big step forward. With traditional 3D technologies, the illusion is broken the second you start moving your head around. If this technology can get enough momentum in the high-end market, consumers will reap the benefits only a few years down the road. Now we wait for the price of this technology to drop low enough for the consumer market.

Sodium-air batteries could replace lithium-air as the battery of the future

The world of hardware reshapes itself as fast as it ever has nowadays. Pocket computers exponentially increase in power seemingly every few months, while our laptops can now fold completely in half and masquerade as a tablet. However, as far as hardware ever reaches, batteries always seem so stagnant. Now, though, promising research into sodium-air batteries could lead toward the battery revolution we’ve all been waiting for.

Aside from, for example, standard AA or AAA batteries, lithium-ion batteries are the go-to power source for our most prized mobile devices. They are rechargeable, and last an acceptable amount of time before cutting out right in the middle of an important phone call. Though our smatphones and tablets have an acceptable lifetime, sometimes you accept what you’re given rather than what you actually want. An iPhone 5 can last around 8 hours of 3G, LTE data use or talk time, or for 10 hours of video playback, or 40 hours of audio playback.

When you’re using some combination of all those features — as anyone with a smartphone and a long commute is fully aware — the phone’s battery life is woefully short. Because of the way a lithium-ion battery generates power — through chemical reactions — the amount of power generated has a ceiling. This means that at some point, a lithium-ion battery will be giving literally the maximum amount of power it can. A ceiling means that, eventually, our devices will require more power than the battery can give.

In order for a battery to work, it needs to exchange an electron, because that usually generates a form of energy that is harvestable. However, the weight of a material is an important factor when designing a battery, as, obviously, a heavier battery means a heavier, less desirable device. So, in order to generate energy from a light material, you turn to oxidation. Considering oxygen abounds, you don’t need to include something that will be the oxidation catalyst, which makes the battery lighter. This type of battery, rather than the usual suffix of -ion, carries the self-explanatory suffix of -air. Scientists theorize that, in part due to not requiring a catalyst in the battery, a higher yield of energy can be generated. Whereas a lithium-ion battery has a capacity of around 200Wh/kg, a lithium-air battery could reach all the way up to 3460Wh/kg.

Unfortunately, the chemistry behind lithium-air batteries is so complicated that researchers have begun shifting their focus to sodium-air batteries. Though the capacity of the sodium-air is much lower than the lithium-air, sitting around 1600Wh/kg, it’s at least significantly higher than a lithium-ion, and much easier to make than the lithium-air. One end of the battery has a sodium electrode, on which an electrolyte is sandwiched underneath a carbon electrode that oxygen can travel through. The electron travels around the battery, the ionic metal dissolves into the electrolyte which in turn travels to the carbon electrode and hits the oxygen.

Though this is still in an experimental form, researchers found that not only does the sodium-air hold more charge than a lithium-air battery, but is easier to charge as well. It was mentioned above that lithium-air has a theoretical density of more than double the sodium-air, but as it turns out, the sodium-air has a higher density in practice (that isn’t to say that, one day, lithium-air won’t reach its enormous density destiny).

At the moment, though, a sodium-air can only be charged around eight times before it dies for good. Hopefully, scientists will be able to figure out why that is, and bring us a battery that can power our mobile devices for long periods of time without us having to conserve the power after a long night out

German student creates electromagnetic harvester that gathers free electricity from thin air

A German student has built an electromagnetic harvester that recharges an AA battery by soaking up ambient, environmental radiation. These harvesters can gather free electricity from just about anything, including overhead power lines, coffee machines, refrigerators, or even the emissions from your WiFi router or smartphone.

This might sound a bit like hocus-pocus pseudoscience, but the underlying science is actually surprisingly sound. We are, after all, just talking about wireless power transfer — just like the smartphones that are starting to ship with wireless charging tech, and the accompanying charging pads.

Dennis Siegel, of the University of Arts Bremen, does away with the charging pad, but the underlying tech is fundamentally the same. We don’t have the exact details — either because he doesn’t know (he may have worked with an electrical engineer), or because he wants to patent the idea first — but his basic description of “coils and high frequency diodes” tallies with how wireless power transfer works. In essence, every electrical device gives off electromagnetic radiation — and if that radiation passes across a coil of wire, an electrical current is produced. Siegel says he has produced two versions of the harvester: One for very low frequencies, such as the 50/60Hz signals from mains power — and another for megahertz (radio, GSM) and gigahertz (Bluetooth/WiFi) radiation.

The efficiency of wireless charging, however, strongly depends on the range and orientation of the transmitter, and how well the coil is tuned to the transmitter’s frequency. In Siegel’s case, “depending on the strength of the electromagnetic field,” his electromagnetic harvester can recharge one AA battery per day. He doesn’t specify, but presumably one-AA-per-day is when he’s sitting next to a huge power substation. It makes you wonder how long it would take to charge an AA battery via your coffee machine, or by leeching from your friend’s mobile phone call.

As a concept, though, Siegel’s electromagnetic harvester is very interesting. On its own, a single harvester might not be all that interesting — but what if you stuck a bunch of them, magnetically, to various devices all around your house? Or, perhaps more importantly, why not use these harvesters to power tiny devices that don’t require a lot of energy? Sensors, hearing aids (cochlear implants), smart devices around your home — they could all be powered by harvesting small amounts of energy from the environment.

NASA’s cold fusion tech could put a nuclear reactor in every home, car, and plane

The cold fusion dream lives on: NASA is developing cheap, clean, low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology that could eventually see cars, planes, and homes powered by small, safe nuclear reactors.

When we think of nuclear power, there are usually just two options: fission and fusion. Fission, which creates huge amounts of heat by splitting larger atoms into smaller atoms, is what currently powers every nuclear reactor on Earth. Fusion is the opposite, creating vast amounts of energy by fusing atoms of hydrogen together, but we’re still many years away from large-scale, commercial fusion reactors. 

LENR is absolutely nothing like either fission or fusion. Where fission and fusion are underpinned by strong nuclear force, LENR harnesses power from weak nuclear force — but capturing this energy is difficult. So far, NASA’s best effort involves a nickel lattice and hydrogen ions. The hydrogen ions are sucked into the nickel lattice, and then the lattice is oscillated at a very high frequency (between 5 and 30 terahertz). This oscillation excites the nickel’s electrons, which are forced into the hydrogen ions (protons), forming slow-moving neutrons. The nickel immediately absorbs these neutrons, making it unstable. To regain its stability, the nickel strips a neutron of its electron so that it becomes a proton — a reaction that turns the nickel into copper and creates a lot of energy in the process.

The key to LENR’s cleanliness and safety seems to be the slow-moving neutrons. Whereas fission creates fast neutrons (neutrons with energies over 1 megaelectron volt), LENR utilizes neutrons with an energy below 1eV — less than a millionth of the energy of a fast neutron. Whereas fast neutrons create one hell of a mess when they collide with the nuclei of other atoms, LENR’s slow neutrons don’t generate ionizing radiation or radioactive waste. It is because of this sedate gentility that LENR lends itself very well to vehicular and at-home nuclear reactors that provide both heat and electricity.

According to NASA, 1% of the world’s nickel production could meet the world’s energy needs, at a quarter of the cost of coal. NASA also mentions, almost as an aside, that the lattice could be formed of carbon instead of nickel, with the nuclear reaction turning carbon into nitrogen. “You’re not sequestering carbon, you’re totally removing carbon from the system,” says Joseph Zawodny, a NASA scientist involved with the work on LENR.

So why don’t we have LENR reactors yet? Just like fusion, it is proving hard to build a LENR system that produces more energy than the energy required to begin the reaction. In this case, NASA says that the 5-30THz frequency required to oscillate the nickel lattice is hard to efficiently produce. As we’ve reported over the last couple of years, though, strong advances are being made in the generation and control of terahertz radiation. Other labs outside of NASA are working on cold fusion and LENR, too: “Several labs have blown up studying LENR and windows have melted,” says NASA scientist Dennis Bushnell, proving that “when the conditions are ‘right’ prodigious amounts of energy can be produced and released.”

I think it’s still fairly safe to say that the immediate future of power generation, and meeting humanity’s burgeoning energy needs, lies in fission and fusion  But who knows: With LENR, maybe there’s hope for cold fusion yet.

A Device that Generates Electricity from Human Respiration

With the advancement of technology in the field of medical science; The question of how to develop a better and permanent way to power electronic organ implant and organ assistance devices arises. The existing ones work on batteries so the patient has to undergo an operation every time for a battery replacement.

In recent times researchers have found ways to generate electricity from a person's blood sugar, and piezoelectric devices that generate electricity from muscle movement. Also devices that harvest energy from ambient wireless transmission waves.

Researchers from the university of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a small device that can generate electricity from human breathing. The team behind the project includes: Assistant Professor Xudong Wang, postdoctoral Researcher Chengliang Sun and graduate student Jian Shi.

How it works?

Now the device harvests energy from plastic microbelt (PVDF MB; ref. the picture above) that vibrates when passed by low-speed airflow such as in the case of  human respiration. These microbelts are made of a special plastic called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). Now the interesting thing is PVDF a not only a high quality plastic with exotic properties but also exhibits Piezoelectric properties, what that means is it produces small amounts of electricity under mechanical stresses or vibrations for that matter. 

The major challenge for the researchers was to create the device small and flexible enough and that is able to make use of the low airflow speed during normal respiration, typically about 2 m/sec of airflow speed. Another challenge was to determine the perfect thickness of the PVDF microbelts so that small vibrations due to airflow could produce a microwatt of electrical energy, that could be useful for sensors or other device implants. Wang’s team achieved this by using an ion-etching process to carefully thin the material while preserving its piezoelectric properties and mechanical strength.

The business end of the device is just the blue part or tubular channel shown in the picture, the green part is just a lung simulator. During testing, the device reached typical power levels in the order of millivolts, it reached up to 6 volt during maximum airflow speeds. Researchers believe that the device could one day act as a power source to implantable medical devices. 

The research was published in the September issue of the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

MIT's Energy Harvester Makes Electricity from Vibrations

The world is going the silicon way, with the increasing use of wireless equipment for remote sensing and data collection equipment in various industries; the problem that arises is the replacement of the batteries in the equipment, especially when the site is in remote and inaccessible locations like Oil pipelines, industrial machinery and bridges. 

The best solution to the problem is to harness the energy around the equipment itself;  like ambient light, electromagnetic radio-waves which are almost everywhere these days and mechanical vibrations. Mechanical vibration energy is pretty significant in industrial machinery, pipelines and bridges.

Harnessing the vibration energy could make replacing batteries redundant.

Researchers at MIT have designed a device that's the size of a U.S. quarter coin and harvests energy from low-frequency vibrations, such as those that might be felt along a pipeline or bridge or the humming of a machine. The tiny energy harvester technically known as a micro-electro-mechanical system called in short as MEMS, picks up a wider range of vibrations than existing designs and is able to generate 100 times the power of devices of similar size.

How it works?

Now these kind of vibration energy harvesters are nothing new, researchers have been using Piezoelectric material like quartz and other crystals to make such kind of devices. These piezoelectric material  naturally accumulate electric charge in response to mechanical stress applied on them. In recent years researchers have been using a piezoelectric material called PZT (Lead zirconate titanate) for engineering MEMS devices that generate small amounts of power.

In the exiting harvesters engineers use a cantilever approach for harvesting the vibration energy. A small microchip with layers of PZT is glued to the top of a tiny cantilever beam. As the chip is exposed to vibrations, the beam moves up and down like a wobbly diving board, bending and stressing the PZT layers. 

However the design has its limitation; The cantilever beam itself has a resonant frequency, a specific frequency at which it wobbles the most. Outside of this frequency range, the beam’s wobbling response drops off and as a result the amount of power that can be generated also reduces significantly. 

So something that produces power at various frequencies had to be designed to harvest power at the best levels.

Sang-Gook Kim, a member of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and Arman Hajati who conducted the research as a PhD student at MIT came up with a design that increases the device’s frequency range, or bandwidth, as a result maximizing the power density, or energy generated per square centimeter of the chip. Instead of taking the classic cantilever based approach, the team took a different route by engineering a microchip with a small bridge like structure that’s anchored to the chip at both ends. The researchers deposited a single layer of PZT to the bridge, placing a small weight in the middle of it.


In vibration testing the research team found that the designed generated electric power at a wide range of frequencies which amounts to 45 microwatts of power with just a single layer of PZT an improvement of two orders of magnitude compared to existing designs. This design also brings down the cost of manufacturing which gives it a major advantage.
For further development the team plans at optimizing the design to respond to lower frequencies and generate more power. Arman Hajati who is currently a MEMS development engineer at FujiFilm Dimatix says the target is to achieve at least 100 micro-watts of power which is enough power a network of smart sensors on a pipeline making them work forever without maintenance.

Source
Paper Ref.

Wave Disc Engine the next step in Combustion Engines

Internal Combustion Engines more or less have had the same basic design since the first time they were created, except for the Wankel engine also called the rotary engine which did not gain a lot of popularity in the auto industry due to its short coming of inefficiencies. With the new generation of Hybrid cars which utilize a combination of electric motors and combustion Engines there is a need to develop a new design of engines and move away from the of concept of piston cylinder and valves.

Researchers at Michigan State University have built a model prototype gasoline engine design that's unlike any other engine design seen before. It works on the principle of shock waves and utilizes what is called a 'shock wave generator', which is basically a disc/rotor having precisely designed wave-like pattern carved into channels.

How this engine works is; As the rotor spins, the channels allow the air-fuel mixture to enter into the system via central inlet ports. The rotor then spins, blocking the exit of gases. As a result the pressure inside the arrangement  builds ups and this generate a shock wave that compresses the mixture. This results in igniting the fuel and which further rotates the disc resulting in generation of power, the outlet opens due to rotation and let the hot gases escape. This process continues and keeps the engine running.

The man leading the Team behind the project is Dr. Norbert Muller an Associate professor of Mechanical engineering at the MSU. The major benefit of the engine is it has no peripheral moving parts. The engine doesn't require cooling system, transmission and the related fluids resulting in a lighter, more fuel-efficient  vehicle. The engine can be coupled with a generator and can produce electricity which can be stored in batteries from where it could be used to drive a Hybrid vehicle.

A conventional combustion engine typically only converts only 15% of its fuel energy into usable power. Dr. Muller says that the wave disc design could obtain an efficiency of 60% with the added benefit of reduced weight. If used in hybrid cars would result in 30% lighter and 30% cheaper vehicles then the existing plug in hybrids. With the added benefit of 90% less CO2 emissions.

The prototype was presented to the energy division of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), which is backing the Michigan State University Engine Research Laboratory with $2.5 million in funding. The team hopes to build  a car-sized 25-kilowatt (33.5 HP) version of the prototype ready by the end February 2012.

After all the good things said the project is still in theory and only on paper. A working prototype of the engine is yet to be seen only then the claims can be justified.

Hypersonic Sound- the future of sound

What is sound?

Sound as we hear it is a disturbance which is created in the air due to a vibrating body.

Now sound is classified into 3 basic types

1)      Infrasonic  (Less than 20Hz)

2)      Audible sound (20Hz to 20,000Hz)

3)      Ultrasonic sound (More than 20,000Hz)

Hypersonic  Sound

Now you might be wondering what is this Hypersonic  Sound..

Hypersonic  sound is a landmark and groundbreaking invention invented by an American inventor  Woody Norris. 

To explain it in a simple way, consider a light bulb in a dark room. When you turn on the light, naturally the whole room is light up. But when we talk about a projector or a laser for that matter we only see a focused beam of light from a source.Similarly a normal speaker creates sound and it’s audible across the whole area it reaches. Now getting back to Hypersonic sound we can say it’s similar to a beam of sound just like a laser beam! What I mean is the sound created by a Hypersonic speaker can be only heard if it is pointed towards your ears. i.e. if you come in the focus of the speaker. Isn’t it cool? If your watching T.V. with a hypersonic speaker, only the people coming in the focus of the speaker can hear the sound  everyone else around wont be able to hear any sound. 
(No more fights!!)

How it works?

It makes use of ultrasonic frequencies; they are very directional as their wavelength is very short.So Mr. Woody Norris figured a way to convert standard audio content to ultrasonic levels, this audio then demodulates in a certain way in the air and turns into audible sound. In a  Hypersonic  speaker there are billions of tiny speakers which create the focused sound unlike a normal speaker which just has a single speaker.

Applications 

This is a very great invention and can have great applications which we can’t even imagine. Mr. Norris also created a harmless weapon called LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device),which can emit discomforting sound to irritate the enemy and make him virtually paralyzed, without the need to injure or kill.Its alraedy in use in Iraq.This is can be very helpful in modern urban warfare. It also has  great applications in the entertainment industry. This is a new technology and its applications are still to be discovered completely. 
Mr.Woody also runs a company by the name  American technology corporation

Bridgestone unveils its Non Pneumatic (Airless) tire concept

The concept of pneumatic or inflatable tires dates back to 1888 when 'John Dunlop' invented the first air-filled tire for bicycles. Since then pneumatic tires have been put to use in a wide variety of automobiles and vehicles with varying sizes and capacities. However with the benefits comes the problem of maintenance and age. Add to that the accidents that happen around the world due to tire bursting in moving vehicles.

This past week at the 2nd Tokyo Motor Show 2011 in Japan, Japanese tire manufacture Bridgestone Corporation unveiled its new puncture-less air-free tires concept. Although the concept is not something very new, back in 2005 Michelin had showcased a similar kind of technology named TWEEL (i.e. Tyre/WhEEL). Since then there hasn't been any significant development until this one from Bridgestone.

The main difference that sets Bridgestone's airless tire different from Michelin's TWEEL is the kind of materials used for the development and the design.

The Bridgestone airless tire is made from reusable thermoplastic resin. The tire has a very minimum use of rubber which makes it more environment friendly. Bridgestone claims that the tire is made out of 100% recyclable material. The tire has a unique structure of spokes stretching along the inner sides of the tires supporting the weight of the vehicle and obviously there is no need for periodical refilling, what that means is the tires require less maintenance. At the same the worry of puncture is eliminated.

The main aim for Bridgestone is pursuing this technological development with the aim of achieving what it calls  a "cradle to cradle" process that aims to proactively maximizes the cyclical use of resources from worn tires into new tires by the use of recyclable resources. What that means is, these tires can be developed by using existing recycled materials.

The tire is still under development and testing. Bridgstone plans to put it in mass production and start sales in 2013.