Teeny Tiny Tractor Beams

June 30, 2008

When I think "tractor beam," I think of spaceships with invisible gravity grips or UFOs with alien abductors. But scientists have come up with a theory suggesting that the capability is not simply science fiction. In the June issue of Physical Review B, researchers from Osaka Prefecture University in Japan describe how they used computer simulations and mathematical theory to predict the way a laser beam could draw small particles into its beam.

An article in Physical Review Focus gives a simple explanation (this is quantum mechanics after all):

"For example, with three particles arranged one above the next, and laser light shining from the side, the team discovered that the middle particle could be drawn toward the laser--the equivalent of the beach ball moving against the flow from the garden hose."

Pretty cool. The results have to proved in a lab, but if they hold fast, the technique could lead to new ways of pushing and pulling nanoparticles around in order to build things up one molecule at a time.

Illustration: Art Box Images

The Week (According to Me)

June 27, 2008

I've read and scanned hundreds of articles this week from some of the big technology mags and papers. Here are the stories that stood out for me. Let me know if I missed anything.

June 20 / The Engineer
Matching Tatoos
Researchers have created a system that could allow police to identify individuals by matching marks on their body with those stored in a computer database.

June 21 / Guardian
Boss Hu Avoids Tricky Questions In Online Chat
Chinese president, Hu Jintao, made his mark with a four-minute online debut in front of the world's biggest population of Internet users.

June 23 / Guardian
Contraceptive Pill Goes On Sale Online
Women will be able to order the contraceptive pill online from today without having to visit a doctor or clinic.

June 23 / Discovery News
Flying Saucer Craft Set to Fly
A new wingless, saucer-shaped aircraft is scheduled to take to the skies. Just don't call it a UFO.

June 23 / Guardian
Hydrogen Cars and Hot Air
The new breed of hydrogen fuel cell-powered auto isn't as environmentally friendly as you think

June 23 / New Scientist
PC Population Reaches a Billion as E-Waste Piles Up
The number of personal computers in use around the world has surpassed one billion, research firm Gartner reports.

June 23 / Technology Review
Curating Yourself Online
In the old days, the issue was keeping your data secret. Now, the challenge is making sure your data isn't mixed up with someone else's, and controlling it as it spreads out over the Web. This means managing and curating it.

June 24 / Wired
Greener Jet Engine Could Reduce Aviation's Carbon Footprint
One of the biggest names in aviation has developed a jet engine that is more efficient, less polluting and cheaper to use than almost everything else in the sky, and it could revolutionize an industry facing skyrocketing fuel prices and mounting pressure to clean up its act.

June 24 / The Engineer
100 miles per gallon
A experimental version of a 2006 Toyota Prius sedan modified by U.S. researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has achieved a record 100 miles per gallon.

June 24 / The New York Times
The High-Tech Job Capital Is…The Big Apple?
If you’re looking for a tech job in the United States, the best place to go is not Silicon Valley. It’s New York.

June 24 / Popular Science
Oscillate Wildly
Metronomes generally keep their own beat -- that's why we love them -- but when several get together, a compromise is hammered out.

June 24, 2008 / ScienceDaily
Building Giant 'Nanoassemblies' That Sense Their Environment
Researchers in Texas are reporting the design, construction, and assembly of nano-size building blocks into the first giant structures that can sense and respond to changes in environmental conditions.

June 25 / The New York Times
U.S. High Tech Said to Slip
The United States may be synonymous with the high-tech revolution, but it is in danger of losing its high-tech edge, according to Cybercities 2008, a report released Tuesday by AeA, a technology industry trade association.

June 26 / Guardian
Website Domain Names: Any Suffixes Could Be Possible After Landmark Vote
Icann, the organisation that regulates the internet domain name system, has passed a landmark vote to relax rules limiting web addresses to "top-level" suffixes, such as .com and .uk, a move that could see people and companies register almost anything they want.

June 26, 2008 / ScienceDaily
Cooperative System Could Wipe Out Car Alarm Noise
The persistent, annoying blare of an ignored car alarm may become a sound of the past if a cooperative, mutable and silent network of monitors proposed by Penn State researchers is deployed in automobiles and parking lots.

June 26 / Technology Review
Want to Enhance Your Brain Power?
Research hints that electrically stimulating the brain can speed learning.

The Future of Nano: Energy and Textiles

June 24, 2008

Nano has been on my mind lately, mostly because of Andrew Maynard's recent My Take on the Discovery Tech site, in which he discusses the need fund research into the risks associated with nanotech. It may have a dark side.

Recently, a marketing company called RNOS released a report about the growing market of nanotechnology. A great blog on Nanowerk summarizes the report, which costs an arm and a leg.

Some key points

• -the market for nanoparticles in the energy sector is poised to grow 59 percent by 2012 from 2006
• -nanotechnologies being used in textiles (think surface coatings and smart clothing) could grow more than 53 percent by 2012
• global spending on nanotechnology grew 29 percent in 2006
• nanotechnology investments by the government were initially led by Europe, North America and Japan. However, countries such as Russia, China, Brazil, Turkey and India have joined the trend and are making significant investments into the sector.

That kind of growth is simultaneously exciting and scary. Think of the many problems nanotech can solved. Energy being a biggie. But we know so little about the technology and the implications of it infused into our society. The promise of big profits will certainly plow this industry forward. I hope that we can find a way to keep up with the machine to ensure the technology's safety.

Image: Pulickel Ajayan, Rice University

The Week (According to Me)

June 20, 2008

Don't spend all that time scanning your RSS feed reader. Just read my list.

13 June 08 / The Atlantic
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Nick Carr writes about how the Internet is changing the way we think.

June 13 / Tech Crunch
Quillpill: A Twitter For Cell-Phone Novelists
Even if they could, few people have the time to write a book. But what if they could Twitter one? For all those aspiring novelists out there, Quillpill might be the app to get them started.

13 June 08 / Guardian
Where Are All the Older Female Geeks?
Since starting her blog, Natalie d'Arbeloff has found that she is not the only older woman in the cybervillage. But they are still in the minority. Come on, she says, what are you waiting for?

June 13 / Wired
Potential New Weapon Against TB: Free Cell Minutes
Researchers at MIT believe they've discovered a new weapon in the battle against tuberculosis: Free cell phone minutes. For years, doctors have struggled to get some TB patients to take all their medication, which generally involves a six-month regimen of multiple drugs. Now a student-led group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a way to use cell phones to let patients test themselves. And if the tests show patients are following doctor's orders, they get rewarded with free minutes.

June 13 / Wired
IBM's Drumming Car Reads Your Lips. Seriously
The people at IBM are hard at work developing technology we never knew we don't need -- a steering wheel that reads your lips, responds to your facial expressions and turns into a drum machine. Tapping out a beat on the steering wheel while jamming to your favorite tunes will never be the same again.

June 13 / Technology Review
Doubling Laptop Battery Life
Intel's new integrated power management could dramatically reduce power consumption in your laptop by shutting down operations not being used.

June 13 / Technology Review
You've Had a Genetic Test. Now What?
A new project aims to incorporate the results of genetic screening into medicine.

June 16 / Discovery
Robots to Become Lovers, Predict Researchers
Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer the stuff of science fiction -- researchers expect them to become reality within four decades.

June 16 / Science Daily
Using Brainwaves To Chat And Stroll Through Second Life: World's First
On 7th June 2008, Keio University succeeded in the world’s first demonstration experiment with the help of a disabled person to use brainwave to chat and stroll through the virtual world.

June 16 / Nanowerk
NASA nanotechnology research into shape-shifting airplanes
Aircraft of the future will not be built of traditional, multiple, mechanically connected parts and systems. Instead, aircraft wing construction will employ fully integrated, nanotechnology enabled embedded 'smart' materials and actuators that will enable aircraft wings with unprecedented levels of aerodynamic efficiencies and aircraft control.

June 17 / BBC News
Victim of Its Own Success
Life without the internet is unimaginable for the millions who use it every day. But one of the world's leading academics on the impact of the net warns we could be facing its destruction.

June 17 / New York Times
Philadelphia Revives Citywide Wi-Fi Project
Philadelphia revived an effort on Tuesday to provide free citywide wireless Internet access in a project to be run by a new group of investors. The city aims to provide free-of-charge outdoor Web access throughout its 135 square miles, which would be the largest area covered by public Wi-fi of any U.S. city.

June 17 / Webmonkey
Clock Browser Speeds with Webmonkey’s Stopwatch
With Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Safari all claiming “faster than ever” speeds with its latest versions, we started wondering which one is really the fastest. After loading some pages and scratching our heads, we hacked together a small JavaScript stopwatch to find out.

June 17 / Discovery
Talking Robofish to Swim in Puget Sound
Marine creatures have communicated with each other for millions of years. Now swimming robots can too.

June 18 / Scientific American
Hands On Computing: How Multi-touch Screens Could Change The Way We Interact With Computers and Each Other
Multi-touch computing could one day free us from the mouse as our primary computer interface, the way the mouse freed us from keyboards.

June 18 / Scientific American
Wi-Maxing That Wireless Internet Connection
A wireless technology called Wi-Max has a much bigger range than Wi-Fi, making it possible to supply wireless internet accessibility to large areas with a few base stations. Christopher Intagliata reports.

June 19 / Etherized
Snail (And We Do Mean Snail) Mail
A group of artists, whose URL reads "boredomresearch," have created Real Snail Mail, the world's first web mail service using live snails. Yep. Three snails (Cecil, Austin and Muriel) have been fitted with RFID chips and antennae that can pick up data from hardware located in their enclosure. You fill out an email form, hit send and they take things from there.

June 19 / Technovelgy
Never-Stop Rail Transit System Proposed
Taiwanese inventor Peng Yu-lun imagines a main track with a large commuter train that does not stop. The train is serviced by smaller train cars that drop off new passengers while picking up those who wish to leave the train.

June 19 / The Engineer
Solar System
A team from MIT has tested a prototype of a new solar power system that consists of a 12ft-wide dish made from a frame of thin, aluminium tubing and strips of mirror.

June 19 / Discovery
New 'Terminator' Robots Go in Harm's Way
IRobot, best known for their cute Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, has teamed up with Metal Storm, purveyors of the million-rounds-per-minute electric gun, to create a slick, Terminator-like war robot for the U.S. military.

June 19 / New Scientist
Scrapping MPG Could Boost Sales of Greener Cars
What sounds like an arithmetic brain teaser could in fact hold the key to reducing the amount of gas consumed by Americans – and by extension their CO2 emissions. Richard Larrick and Jack Soll of Duke University in the US say that a simple switch from expressing a car's fuel efficiency in miles per gallon (mpg) to gallons per 100 miles makes it much easier for people to assess how much money they could save on fuel.

Fly Like an Eagle

June 19, 2008

In our never-ending quest to emulate bird flight, researchers at NASA are working on technology that will enable planes of the future to fly like birds.

Instead of being built out of rigid steel and plastic composites, aircraft will be made of flexible, bendable materials embedded with sensors. Think of the sensors as nerves, akin to those in bird feathers. A wing that can sense changes on the wind can make adjustments to its wing shape to control flight. Such technologies are made possible by nanotechnology --specifically carbon nanotubes, which can serve as sensors.

Nanowerk has a great article this week about latest goings-on with NASA's Morphing Project at Langley Research Center.

I just wonder how or if such an aircraft could potentially affect the rising cost of airfare.

Acoustic Cloak Good for Airport-based Blogging

June 16, 2008

My flight back to Boston is about 2 1/2 hours delayed. I have a nice chair and a pretty good view of the western sky, where the sun is melting like an orange popsicle down behind terminal C. I'm in no rush. For the most part, everything is fine. For the most part. Because three chairs down some 20-something, purple-hoodie-wearing, giggling manicure is chatting it up with her dorm buddy about dis and dat and I got 28 minutes left on my Boingo Wi-Fi.

Wouldn't an acoustic cloak come in handy right about now? (See also an article in Technology Review.) Made from artificial composites, or meta-materials, a cloak could be engineered to produce specific acoustical effects, some of those redirecting unwanted, annoying sounds. Practically speaking, such materials could be made into sound proof walls, for example, or "put a sock in it" quiet curtains.

In the words of the woman who could receive a free mini-sailboat with the purchase of Nupont fiber woven bowls, "I want that."

Photo: New Journal of Physics

The Week (According to Me)

June 13, 2008

Starting today and every Friday hence, I'm going to post a summary of the coolest tech stories and blogs I came across over the past week. The post will be here and also on my website, Discovery Tech. This week: Engineered cells, shape-shifting cars, wirelessly networked cows, bacteria that eat plastic, and gold nanoparticles that block HIV caught my attention, among others. Enjoy

06 June 2008 / Wired
ITP: The Ultimate Sweet-Talking Jacket for Geeks
The CyranoSuit, uses a series of sensors embedded in the arms and chest to detect physical interaction with a woman and then a hacked receipt printer delivers romantic lines straight to the breast pocket.

07 June 2008 / Powrtalk
Un
The Man wants us to write about technology. Energy and technology. But sometimes we want to write about un-technology. About not doing things. Avoidance strategies. Nega-watts. Nega-barrels. Things that are related to energy but that are distinctly un-tech.

08 June 2008 / Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Wirelessly Networking Cows
U.S. researchers have developed a Walkman-like headset for cows. This device enables them to 'whisper wireless commands to cows to control their movements

09 June 2008 / New Scientist
Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift in the Lab
A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

10 June / Super Duper Sustainable Stuff
Los Angeles Has Got Some Balls. No, Really.
The the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power unloaded 400,000 black plastic "shade balls" into the 58-million-gallon reservoir to protect it--nearly one for every customer.

10 June 2008 / Wired
BMW Builds a Shape-Shifting Car Out of Cloth
Instead of steel, aluminum or even carbon fiber, the GINA Light Visionary Model has a body of seamless fabric stretched over a movable metal frame that allows the driver to change its shape at will.

10 June 2008 / Scientific American
The Midas Touch: Using Gold Nanoparticles to Block HIV
Researchers find that attaching 12 molecules of a drug compound to one gold nanoparticle restores the drug's ability to prevent HIV infection.

10 June 2008 / Scientific American
Scientists Close to Reconstructing First Living Cell
Harvard Medical School researchers report in Nature that they have built a model of what they believe the very first living cell may have looked like, which contains a strip of genetic material surrounded by a fatty membrane.

11 June 2008 / The Guardian
Can Mobile Phones Really Be Ssed to Cook Popcorn?
If four separate homemade videos on YouTube are to be believed, it's now possible to cook popcorn using the energy emitted from ordinary ringing mobiles.

11 June 2008 / Discovery News
Experiment Mimics Earth’s Spinning Core
By spinning a 26-ton steel sphere filled with boiling metal at about 90 miles an hour, Dan Lathrop, a scientist at the University of Maryland, hopes to unlock Earth's spinning magnetic heart.

11 June 2008 / New Scientist
Human Egg Makes Accidental Debut on Camera
These are the clearest pictures ever taken of what is the starting point of every human life: ovulation occurring inside a woman's body.

11 June 2008 / The Engineer
Towering Fuel Cell
The New York Power Authority (NYPA) has inked a $10.6m deal with UTC Power that will make the redeveloped World Trade Center the site of one of the largest fuel cell installations in the world.

12 June 2008 / Technovelgy.com
Bacteria Eats Plastic; What Could Go Wrong?
Microorganisms dine on polythene bags

12 June 2008 / Science Daily
U.S. Still Leads the World in Science and Technology
Despite perceptions that the nation is losing its competitive edge, the United States remains the dominant leader in science and technology worldwide, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

12 June 2008 / BBC
Thinking Up Beautiful Music
Musicians may soon be able to play instruments using just the power of the mind.

Photo: BMW

Locutus the Cowborg

June 12, 2008

When you think of wearable computing, a couple of things probably come to mind.

An iPod jacket, for example.

                                                                         

Or maybe some kind of vision display headset.

And that might remind you of Locutus of Borg.

But I'll bet "cow" never comes to mind.

Well, it does for the folks over at the USDA Agricultural Research Service. They've invented a Walkman-like headset for cows. They describe it as "Walkman-like." I would call it more 80s-boom-box-like. The headset, developed by animal scientist Dean Anderson, allows a person to whisper wireless commands to cattle to get them to move in particular directions or even self-corral from a distance. A communication scenario might go a little something like this:

ANDERSON: You don't need to graze here.
COWS: We don't need to graze here.

ANDERSON: These are not the droids you're looking for.
COWS: These are not the droids we're looking for.

ANDERSON: Go about your business.
COWS: We'll go about our business.

ANDERSON: Move along into the corral.
COWS: Let's move along into the corral.

Don't think of it as mind manipulation, though. Think of it as strongly suggesting. The idea is that smaller, less obtrusive headsets could be used on cows, in combination with GPS, as a kind of virtual fence. This way farmers could herd cows from a remote location and also prevent cattle from penetrating forbidden boundaries.

Microscopic Robots Work Together Differently

June 11, 2008

It's one thing to get microscopic robots to work together, performing the same function. It's quite another to get them to work together, by performing different tasks at the same time.

That's because controlling tiny robots is not easy. They're too small to accommodate microprocessors that would otherwise drive them in different ways. And it doesn't make practical sense to tether them to an external processor.

Bruce Donald and his team at Duke University seem to have found an interesting solution. Their microrobots -- each one shaped like a spatula and 100 times smaller than any previous designs -- receive the same electrical (wireless) signal, but use it to perform a different task.

I asked Prof. Donald how the robots do it. Here's his answer.
Donald: All robots receive the same power delivery and control signal. How can they behave differently then? The answer is, in a matter, analogous to the way that cells or proteins do. They'll receive the same signal but they respond differently because either they have different physics or have different stored internal state.  For example fundamental to the actuation of these devices are cantilevers at the microscopic scale. They can be built with different stiffnesses so that the voltages required to raise or lower them are different.

Me: How many can work together differently?
Donald: ...five (sometimes) and four (reliably).

The video below gives some good explanation and also shows the microrobots in action. According to Donald, the robots will eventually be sued to position very tiny electrodes -- made from carbon nanotubes -- into the brain neurons of animals to record neural activity, which would help scientists better understand how the brain works.

It seems to me, Donald has a pretty cool job and so I asked him what he likes best about it.
Donald: There are three things that are tied in coolness. First, I think what is valued most in my job is creativity. Creativity is what I value most as well so it's a good fit.  Second, working with young scientists from all over the world is stimulating and exciting. Third, since my laboratory focuses on basic biological and biomedical science, everything we are doing is ultimately important -- we hope -- to our understanding of disease mechanisms and human health.

For more info about the project, consult the other videos, figures, and papers at the top of this Web page.

Photo: Science Daily

Video here

Microscopic Robots in Your Blood

June 09, 2008

Well. It's happened. The world of micro-robots has finally entered the rap culture. The little fellers are wearing their jeans low to expose their microscopic boxer shorts, while sportin' some nano-bling. (Is "bling" still in?) This song is by the Australian band The Ruderalis, named after a wild strain of hemp. Enjoy.