Solar Storage, Brain Monitoring, City Spying

 

Portable brain monitoring

With the goal of getting EEG out of the laboratory, bio-engineers and cognitive scientists at UC San Diego have developed the first portable, 64-channel wearable brain activity monitoring system.

It’s comparable to state-of-the-art equipment found in research laboratories, the school says, and provides high-density brain activity data with a dry-electrode wearable EEG headset and a sophisticated software suite for data interpretation and analysis.

The portable device “has a wide range of applications, from research, to neuro-feedback, to clinical diagnostics… This is going to take neuroimaging to the next level by deploying on a much larger scale. You will be able to work in subjects’ homes. You can put this on someone driving.”

Here is the full announcement.

City-spying camera

The Simera camera system rides on a tethered balloon and can monitor an entire city from a single vantage point, Popular Mechanics reports — and the “unblinking sentinel will watch over the Olympic Games from high above Rio de Janiero this summer.”

Logos Technologies developed the core technology for American military forces. It creates “a Google Earth view of the city and updates it every second," the company says. It houses 13 cameras and captures gigabytes of data every second. “Simera can monitor an entire city-sized area at once, detecting vehicles and moving dismounts in near real-time. In addition, Simera provides operators with a readily accessible digital video recording of the entire field of view for later analysis.” It weighs 40 pounds.

Here is the full article.

Here's more information.

Testing an artificial pancreas 

People with type 1 diabetes must use finger-pricks to check their blood-sugar levels multiple times daily, and inject insulin manually, To eliminate those tasks, an artificial pancreas will work as “an adaptable, wearable network surrounding the patient in a digital treatment ecosystem.”

Developed at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, the pancreas will automatically monitor and regulate blood-sugar levels. To prove its safety and long-term efficacy, final testing in two clinical trials begins early this year.

The artificial pancreas has a reconfigured smartphone running advanced algorithms, linked wirelessly to a blood-sugar monitor and an insulin pump, as well as a remote-monitoring site.

Here is the full announcement.

Photonic Interconnects speed up processors

Significantly speeding up computing, transistors and optics can be built on the same chip without a major overhaul of the chip-making process, reports Ayar Labs.

The start-up from engineers at MIT, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado, Boulder use the standard CMOS process to build an IC containing 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components, Spectrum reports, which together provide all the logic, memory, and interconnection functions a processor needs.

Optical interconnects using light beams rather than copper wires to move data between microprocessors would overcome the bandwidth bottleneck inherent in wires, and take full advantage of the leaps in processor speed, Spectrum notes.

Ayar Labs hopes to be able to commercialize the technology within a couple of years.

Here is the full Spectrum article.

CNEt also reports in it here.

Polymer film stores solar heat

A new transparent polymer film provides a highly efficient method for storing the sun’s energy through a chemical reaction and releasing it later as heat, MIT reports.

The work by its researchers may be “the key to enabling long-term, stable storage of solar heat,” the university says. Storing heat in the form of a chemical change can retain energy indefinitely, whereas heat inevitably dissipates over time no matter how good the insulation around it.

The molecule remains stable in either of two different configurations. When exposed to sunlight, the energy of the light kicks the molecules into their “charged” configuration, and they can stay that way for long periods. Then, when triggered by a very specific temperature or other stimulus, the molecules snap back to their original shape, giving off a burst of heat in the process.

The new approach is the first based on a solid-state material, MIT adds, and the first based on inexpensive materials and widespread manufacturing technology.

Here is the full announcement.

(How many new solar power techniques have been featured here now? I saw this story while on hold with the power company to see why my electricity bill was three times higher than ever before…)

Material manipulates itself into hundreds of shapes

A heat-reactive polymer material can fold itself into hundreds of shapes.

It is the first material that can “remember” its shape and reset its memory to new ones. It “could lead to a new generation of reusable self-folding materials” Science Mag reports, “that could be useful for everything from medical implants to shape-shifting electronics.”

Current elastic shape memory materials can only memorize two or three shapes. The new polymer “is both plastic and elastic… and can fold between two shapes using elasticity, and change into other shapes using plasticity… It could also snap between them hundreds of times with little sign of fatigue.”

Here is the full article.

“Mystery material stuns scientists”

A “mysterious material” emits ultraviolet light and has insulating, electrical conducting, semiconducting, superconducting, and ferromagnetic properties.

Researchers were studying a sample of lanthanum aluminate film on a strontinum titanate crystal, Kurzweill AI reports. “The sample mysteriously began to glow, emitting intense levels of ultraviolet light from its interior. After carefully reproducing the experimental conditions, they tracked down the unlikely switch that turns UV light on or off: surface water moisture.”

The material could be used for transistors and chemical sensors.

Here is thefull article.

Half-solid, half-liquid material

A “self-adaptive” material heals itself, reports Rice University, where scientists have mixed up a new flexible composite with reversible self-stiffening properties.

The self-adaptive composite consists of sticky micron-scale rubber balls that form a solid matrix. The porous mass of gooey spheres quickly heals when cracked, over and over. “And like a sponge, it returns to its original form after compression,” the school adds. The biomimetic material can also change its inner structure, and adapt to external stimulation.

The SAC has potential for tissue engineering or lightweight structural applications, Rice adds.

Here's more information.

Microbots and magnetic fields

Using magnets, Purdue University scientists are controlling individual microrobots.

The system is aimed at advanced manufacturing and biomedical research. The microbots are about twice the size of a pinhead, and future models may be roughly the size of a dust mite.

The electromagnetic system contains an array of sixty-four magnetic microcoils generating local magnetic fields for simultaneous independent actuation of multiple microrobots. Independent movement of each robot allows for cooperative manipulation tasks, much as ants “all work together to perform tasks such as lifting and moving things,” the school reports. “The approach works at the microscale, and it will be the first one that can give truly independent motion of multiple microrobots in the same workspace because we are able to produce localized fields as opposed to a global field.”

Here's more information.

Better bulbs: efficient incandescents

Traditional light bulbs have been phased out in favor of more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs and light-emitting diodes — but new work at MIT and Purdue University might give the old-school incandescents a reprieve.

Incandescent bulbs heat tungsten to 2,700 degrees Celsius. More than 95 percent of the energy that goes into them is wasted, most of it as heat. Now “light recycling” can capture the infrared radiation and reflect it back to the filament to be re-absorbed and re-emitted as visible light.

The luminous efficiency of conventional incandescent light is between 2–3 percent; fluorescents (including CFLs) are 7–15 percent; commercial LEDs are 5–20 percent. The new two-stage incandescents could reach efficiencies as high as 40 percent, the researchers say.

The structures are a form of photonic crystal that is made of Earth-abundant elements and can be made using conventional material-deposition technology, the schools add.

Here is the full report.