SciTech #ScienceSunday Digest, 41/14.
OS for IoT, dynamic robot vision, particle detector app, printing displays, DNA nano-foundries, Watson APIs, fluid robot actuators, diabetes stem cells, engineering penises, automated drug screening.
1. New Operating Systems and Standards for The Internet of Things.
ARM announced the launch of a newly-developed Operating System, mbed, specifically designed for small, low-power devices and sensors that will constitute the Internet of Things http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/embedded-systems/the-internet-of-things-gets-a-new-os. In part this is an effort to help establish standards for IoT architectures and protocols so that all of these devices can better communicate to one another and get around fragmentation issues. Mbed is just 256KB, mostly open-source, and is hoped to enable devices with years of battery-life. Widely-distributed OS’s and suitable standards will also help accelerate and simplify IoT product development; it’s good to see a number of competitive pushes in this space.
2. Independent Robotic Agility with Dynamic Vision.
New dynamic vision camera sensors promise to provide flying drones and other robots with low-power, on-board enhanced maneuverability capabilities that can usually only be executed in controlled rooms covered in cameras and sensors with video data processed by large external computers http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/dynamic-vision-sensors-enable-high-speed-maneuvers-with-robots. Such a chip should allow drones to break free of these controlled environments and still execute precise aerial acrobatics for example. These Dynamic Vision System chips have low spatial resolution (prototype just 128×128 pixels) but incredibly high temporal resolution (low microseconds) to very rapidly track relative movements pixel by pixel.
3. Distributed Cosmic Ray Particle Detection: There’s An App for That!
A new app makes it possible to detect cosmic rays with your smartphone’s camera http://www.gizmag.com/physicist-smartphones-pocket-cosmic-ray-detectors/34121/. The app uses the camera’s CMOS sensor as a muon detector, an elementary particle that can emerge from the particle debris produced when a cosmic ray particle smashes into the upper atmosphere, by measuring the voltage spikes produced when a muon strikes the imaging sensor. The app takes images every couple of seconds and analyses the data to determine genuine detection events and exclude background noise. Developed primarily as an educational tool it is still pretty cool – I never would have thought I’d be carrying around a device that could detect cosmic rays.
4. Printing Thin-Film Flexible Touchscreen Displays on Almost Any Surface.
New printing techniques and inks allow for the rapid design and printing of cheap, simple, flexible, touchscreen displays with conventional printers onto many different types of surface http://gizmodo.com/how-to-print-a-super-thin-touchscreen-display-on-just-a-1643565689. The different inks are applied in different layers to sandwich the required dielectrics and phosphors between opaque and transparent conductors and you should check out this video for some application demonstrations PrintScreen: Fabricating Highly Customizable Thin-film Touch-Displays. This seems to be a great, versatile platform just waiting for an explosion of applications to develop and piggy-backing on further technical innovations in printing, inks (quantum dots?), power, control, and circuit design.
5. Metal Nanoparticles from DNA Origami Nanofoundries.
DNA origami techniques now allow the production of custom-designed 3D nanoscale molds that can be used to fabricate precisely shaped and sized metal nanoparticles http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/170/dna-nanofoundries-cast-customshaped-metal-nanoparticles. Molds are first designed on computer and then software calculates the optimal DNA sequence predicted to rapidly self-assemble into the 3D structure; a gold nanoparticle placed into the mold acts as a seed that grows from a surrounding chemical solution to fill the void with gold. The DNA mold can be left in place or removed and the nanoparticles demonstrated as part of the study were 25nm across. I’d like to see molds for nanoparticle Lego blocks with a range of different properties that can be programmably assembled.
6. IBM Launches Watson APIs.
IBM’s Watson machine intelligence service is now available to independent developers and third-party applications to call on via the newly released APIs http://www.infoworld.com/article/2822814/machine-learning/ibm-debuts-first-watson-machine-learning-apis.html. The services currently available include (i) language identification, (ii) machine translation, (iii) concept expansion, (iv) message resonance, (v) question and answer, (vi) relationship extraction, (vii) user modelling, and (viii) visualisation rendering. Lets hope these services start to translate into wider and publicly-accessible offerings of useful tools for people.
7. Fluid Actuators and Better Robot Arms.
Disney Research has developed a range of robot arms that are low mass but high speed and with a smooth range of motion, all powered by a novel fluid transmission system using air or water http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/beautiful-fluid-actuators-make-soft-safe-robot-arms. The group built the new system with the aim of overcoming or solving some of the problems and limitations that come with conventional pneumatics, hydraulics, and cable systems and operating with an accessible 100 to 160 psi. One of the key components is a rolling diaphragm cylinder used throughout the assembly and helping to provide a torque density equal or better than a geared servo motor.
8. Engineering Stem Cells to Cure Diabetes.
The series of steps needed to turn stem cells into the critical sugar-sensing, insulin-secreting beta cells of the pancreas that are needed but missing in type-1 diabetes has been discovered http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/10/melton-creates-beta-cells. The discovery of this six-step procedure was the result of a huge amount of study of when different beta cell genes were switched on and off in mice, frogs, and humans and then figuring out how to induce the correct sequence of changes in stem cells. The group can mass-produce hundreds of millions of patient-specific beta cells and plans to package these in an encapsulated device (to protect against immune attack) about the size of a credit card that could be implanted to cure a patient of their diabetes.
9. Tissue Engineering of Penises.
Prominent tissue engineering researcher Anthony Atala’s latest tissue engineering project involves the engineering of human penises http://www.wakehealth.edu/Research/Urology/Regenerative-Medicine/Engineered-Penile-Erectile-Tissue.htm. Carrying on from earlier studies in animals the group chemically strips donor penises of cells before seeding with an animal’s own cells into the collagen penis scaffold. Functional testing of implanted penis tissue revealed that erectile tissue maintained smooth blood flow, normal pressure, normal response to nitric oxide relaxation, normal vein drainage, and normal sexual function capable of producing offspring. While arguably not the most critical organ to engineer it is the first functional engineered solid organ demonstrated, will undoubtedly improve the lives of some men when it passes clinical trials and, given the blockbuster sales of viagra and other drugs, might well spur additional investment and development of general purpose tissue engineering capabilities.
10. High-Speed Screening of Biological Drugs.
Building on earlier technology developed for automated rapid capture, orientation, and imaging of zebrafish embryos, this new system is also able to inject each individual embryo with a different biological drug or drug delivery vehicle in order to assess and evaluate the performance of different drugs or technologies http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/high-speed-drug-screens-rna-delivery-0930. Such drug screens could involve different variations of RNA sequence, DNA sequence, protein structure, antibody structure, drug delivery effectiveness, etc. The proof-of-concept involved the screening of nanoparticle lipidoids (RNA delivery vehicles) and successfully demonstrated that some lipidoids that had performed badly in petri dishes managed to perform very well in the full animal and would otherwise been missed; other experiments confirmed a 97% performance correlation between zebrafish and rats and so validating the model’s usefulness.
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Almost missed this week; the most time-poor I’ve been all year aside from the trip to Singapore and Hong Kong.
