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Fireflies Inspire Brighter LEDs

LEDs are bright, but they don't shine as bright as their potential. That's because when light emits from an LED, some of it gets reflected back inside. 

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To make LEDs brighter, researchers are taking a cue from the firefly. In fireflies, a chemical reaction makes the light, which then emits through the insect’s exoskeleton, called the cuticle. Covering the cuticle are tiny scales that each have jagged edges. Each scale is about 10 micrometers long and makes a little slope that reaches 3 micrometers high. Computer simulations showed that the light at those edges was brighter.

A team of scientists from Belgium, France, and Canada, led by Annick Bay, decided to do something similar with LEDs. They put a layer of light-sensitive material on top of LEDs and then using a laser, created a sawtooth pattern, with each “peak” about 5 microns high. The structure minimized the reflection and boosted the LED's brightness by 55 percent.

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The team isn’t the first to look at fireflies. But previous efforts had focused on the tiniest structures of firefly skin, those at the nanometer scale, comparable to the wavelengths of light. This time, scientists went bigger: they looked at structures that were a thousand times larger.

The papers describing the work appear in the journal Optics Express.

Credit: Optics Express

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Mussels Inspire Sensitive Tooth Treatment

If you have sensitive teeth, it's usually because the enamel and dentin on the surface is worn away, exposing the tissues -- and nerves.

Going sugar-free can help a bit, and there are toothpastes and mouth rinses that help alleviate the sensitivity. But enamel isn’t made up of living cells, so once it’s gone from a tooth, it’s gone for good.

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Quan-Li Li, Chun Hung Chu and a team at the Anhui Medical University and University of Hong Kong may have hit on a way to rebuild enamel and dentin even after enamel wears away completely. They used a substance similar to the one mussels use to stick onto rocks -- dopamine.

Teeth are layered. The outer part is the enamel and underneath is the dentin, which is the white part. To restore enamel that has worn off, it’s necessary to get minerals to stick to the dentin. That’s where the dopamine comes in.

Most people think of dopamine as a chemical in the brain, but it also works as a strong glue for mussels.

The researchers dipped bits of human teeth in an acid solution to wear away the enamel. Then they put them in a solution of dopamine. After they dried them off, they immersed the tooth bits in a solution of calcium carbonate, phosphate and fluoride. The result was restoration of the enamel surface after a week of immersion in the calcium carbonate mixture.

The dopamine, as it happened, allowed the minerals to bond to the dentin better and restored some of the hardness of the teeth, though not all of it.

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There is still some work to do on checking whether there is any toxicity -- the researchers say it shouldn't be too much of a problem, though, since the amounts are small. Thus far the tests have been on pieces of tooth in the lab rather than in a mouth. But if it works it could end up being a relatively simple treatment for all those folks for whom drinking hot tea or eating sugar is painful.

The team’s results were published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Via American Chemical Society.

Credit: Albert Bridge / Wikimedia Commons

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Five Big Innovations Predicted to Hit Home

Since 2006, computing giant IBM has been making annual predictions about which five innovations will change our lives in the next five years. This year, the company says the biggest impact will come from technological breakthroughs that augment our five senses.

These innovations will come as a result of cognitive computing. With this approach, computers are not programmed but instead use advanced algorithms and circuitry to learn through experiences, find patterns and correlations, create hypotheses and then remember the results -- just like humans do. Cognitive computing systems will be able to see, smell, touch, taste and hear the world in real-time and react accordingly and quickly in ways that will greatly improve our lives. Here are a few examples of what that might mean:

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1. SIGHT: Image recognition. Asking computers to look at a library of thousands of images could help a machine do what a human does intuitively. Forest scenes, for example, have a different distribution of colors than a cityscape. Once the computer learns what a forest is supposed to look like, a programmer will show it thousands of pictures of people doing something like hiking or picnicking. That way a computer can start to understand what a scene should look like without needing tags in the image.

If computers could recognize images in this way, then they can pick out what matters in them -- an important point if one is aggregating security camera video or using imaging devices to diagnose disease.

2. SOUND: Hearing and translation. For hearing, a similar issue arises: picking out what matters. Here computers are already pretty good, as speech recognition software has made a debut on our phones with apps such as Siri. But the same kind of pattern-learning systems could be applied to sounds as well as vision, and result in computers that can, for instance, understand baby-talk -- and maybe even analyze your mood by the tone of your voice. Wouldn't it be great if those customer service robots knew how annoyed you were?

3. TASTE: Flavor breakdown. Then there is taste. Designing a computer that can experience flavor can break down foods and understand why it is that some things taste good. That in turn can help chefs design nutritious food or come up with that perfect pairing of food and wine. (With any luck IBM will do better than the Nutrimatic).

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4. SMELL: Sensing dangerous chemicals. Computers could also learn to smell, picking up on gases that no human being would be able to detect. Breathalyzers can already pick up the alcohol content of your blood, but imagine one that could tell you if you had a kidney ailment or cancer. A machine that could pick up explosives or drugs the way dogs do would be very useful in port security -- and possibly put the K-9 units out of work.

5. TOUCH: Feeling from afar. Haptics already allow us to get some feedback -- there's a hand that transmits pressure, video games that transmit vibrations and touch screens let us control our devices. Take that one step further and you could actually feel the fabric of a suit on a clothing store's website -- no more having to go all the way there to try it on --  by using the vibration capabilities of your phone. Other uses could include remote medical diagnostics or even surgery.

It's all a part of making computers more human-like and also more useful. It might even change the way we use computers as profoundly as search engines and the Internet did. Of course, the question then arises: how human do we want our computers to be?

via IBM

Credit: IBM

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Hagfish Slime Makes Super-Clothes

 

Threads of hagfish slime, which the animals secrete when aggravated, could be woven to produce a material with the strength of nylon or plastic. Credit: randon D. Cole/CORBIS

One of the world’s creepiest creatures may be the source of new kinds of petroleum-free plastics and super-strong fabrics, according to research by scientists in Canada studying the hagfish, a bottom-dwelling creature that hasn’t evolved for 300 million years and produces a sticky slime when threatened. The gooey material is actually a kind of protein that turns into choking strands of tough fibers when released into the water.

A research team at Canada’s University of Guelph managed to harvest the slime from the fish, dissolve it in liquid, and then reassemble its structure by spinning it like silk. It’s an important first step in being able to process the hagfish slime into a useable material, according to Atsuko Negishi, a research assistant and lead author on the paper in this week’s journal Biomacromolecules.

“We’re trying to understand how they make these threads and how we can learn from that to make protein-based fibers that have excellent mechanical properties,” Negishi said. “The first step is can we harvest the threads. It turns out that is doable.”

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Negishi has been working with the hagfish for about four years in the laboratory, trying to understand some of the physical and chemical properties of the slime. The fish produces a protein which it releases into the water from glands along the side of its snake-like body. This video by researchers in New Zealand document how the hagfish is able to repel 14 attacks by predators, including several kinds of sharks.

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Negishi says the slime can be difficult to handle and there are plenty of reasons why most people, and fishermen, avoid them.

“They’re not the prettiest fish, they have big whiskers, they don’t have eyes,” Negishi said. “They don’t smell particularly nice either. They are wet clammy and wiggly. But they you appreciate what they are capable of doing and you respect them.”

As for the slime itself, Negishi says it smells like dirty seawater and has the consistency of snot.

“It feels like mucous but a little bit more wet,” she said. “If you hold the slime up into the air, the water will drip out of that and what you have leftover is something that is threadlike.”

The threads are made of intermediate filament, a protein in the same family as bone and nails. The hagfish threads are 100 times smaller than a human hair and have given the creature an evolutionary advantage as a unique defense mechanism. Negishi works in the laboratory of professor Douglas Fudge, director of the comparative biomaterials laboratory at the University of Guelph. Fudge says he thinks the hagfish slime threads could be woven to produce a material with the strength of nylon or plastic.

“What we’d like to see is synthetic petroleum-based fibers replaced by more sustainable ones,” he said.

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Fudge says it isn’t likely that the slime will be harvested from hagfish in large quantities. A better idea would be to figure out a way to transplant the slime-making genes into bacteria which can be cultured on an industrial scale. Researchers have been doing something similar with the protein that makes spider silk.

The research in Fudge’s lab is promising, according to Markus Buehler, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and expert in biological materials.

“It’s exciting to see that they have been able to go from studying the natural system to actually take it apart and reassemble them,” Buehler said. Still, obstacles remain. “Scaling it up to where you can make engineering products is still a way to go.”

Artificial Brain Mimics Human Abilities and Flaws

Content provided by Francie Diep, TechNewsDaily

Spaun's mistakes, not its abilities, are what surprised its makers the most. Credit: Seamartini Graphics, Shutterstock

Spaun, a new software model of a human brain, is able to play simple pattern games, draw what it sees and do a little mental arithmetic. It powers everything it does with 2.5 million virtual neurons, compared with a human brain's 100 billion. But its mistakes, not its abilities, are what surprised its makers the most, said Chris Eliasmith, an engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

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Ask Spaun a question, and it hesitates a moment before answering, pausing for about as long as humans do. Give Spaun a list of numbers to memorize, and it falters when the list gets too long. And Spaun is better at remembering the numbers at the beginning and end of a list than at recalling numbers in the middle, just like people are.

"There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture," said Eliasmith, who led the development of Spaun, or the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network. "It's definitely not on the same scale [as a human brain]," he told TechNewsdaily. "It gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do."

Eliasmith and his team of Waterloo neuroscientists say Spaun is the first model of a biological brain that performs tasks and has behaviors. Because it is able to do such a variety of things, Spaun could help scientists understand how humans do the same, Eliasmith said. In addition, other scientists could run simplified simulations of certain brain disorders or psychiatric drugs using Spaun, he said.

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Researchers have made several brain models that are more powerful than Spaun. The Blue Brain model at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in France has 1 million neurons. IBM's SyNAPSE project has 1 billion neurons. Those models aren't built to perform a variety of tasks, however, Eliasmith said.

Spaun is programmed to respond to eight types of requests, including copying what it sees, recognizing numbers written with different handwriting, answering questions about a series of numbers and finishing a pattern after seeing examples. 

Spaun's myriad skills could shed light on the flexible, variable human brain, which is able to use the same equipment to control typing, biking, driving, flying airplanes and countless other tasks, Eliasmith said. That knowledge, in turn, could help scientists add flexibility to robots or artificial intelligence, he said. Artificial intelligence now usually specializes in doing only one thing, such as tagging photos or playing chess. "It can't figure out to switch between those things," he said.

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In addition, artificial intelligence isn't built to mimic the cellular structure of human brains as closely as Spaun and other brain models do. Because Spaun runs more like a human brain, other researchers could use it to run health experiments that would be unethical in human study volunteers, Eliasmith said. He recently ran a test in which he killed off the neurons in a brain model at the same rate that neurons die in people as they age, to see how the dying off affected the model's performance on an intelligence test.

Such tests would have to be just first steps in a longer experiment, Eliasmith said. The human brain is so much more complex than models that there's a limit to how much models are able to tell researchers. As scientists continue to improve brain models, the models will become better proxies for health studies, he said.

Next Up: a Brain in Real Time

There's one major way Spaun differs from a human brain. It takes a lot of computing power to perform its little tasks. Spaun runs on a supercomputer at the University of Waterloo, and it takes the computer two hours to run just one second of a Spaun simulation, Eliasmith said.

So Eliasmith's next major step for improving Spaun is developing hardware that lets the model work in real time. He'll cooperate with researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and hopes to have something ready in six months, he said.

In the far future, people may find Spaun's humanlike flaws deliberately built into robot assistants, Eliasmith said. "Those kinds of features are important in a way because if we're interacting with an agent and it has a kind of memory that we're familiar with, it'll more natural to interact with," he added.

Eliasmith and his colleagues published their latest paper about Spaun today (Nov. 29) in the journal Science.

You can follow TechNewsDaily staff writer Francie Diep on Twitter @franciediep. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily, or on Facebook.

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Walking Bio-Bot Made WIth Cells, Gels

Humans build autonomous robots all the time, but they tend to be made of metal, plastic and need batteries. Now a team at the University of Illinois has built an antonomous robot made from plastic and living cells. Such a device could be used to detect chemicals in water, climb walls or react to certain elements in the water like a sensor.

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Engineering professor Rashid Bashir led a group of scientists that put a layer of heart cells from a rat on one side of a layer of hydrogel. The heart cells, being muscle cells, contract, and bend the whole thing. When they relax, it straightens out. The rhythmic expansion and contractraction allows the so-called bio bot to pull itself along.

Because the bio-bot is made of soft plastic and cells, it can be manipulated into shapes that aren't possible with metal. For example, Bashir's group made the polymer into a shape with two appendages -- one shaped like a wide square and for support and another shaped into a thin, flat shape that bends. When it "walks" it looks more like a swimming motion.

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Another feature is the way it's made: the hydrogel part was made in a 3D printer. By printing robot "parts" this way, it's possible to get a greater variety of shapes. It also means that designing new ones is a much quicker process, since the shaping is done on design software and the materials are simple to work with. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Credit: University of Illinois

 

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Tiny Dragonfly UAV Flies and Hovers to Spy

You'd probably recognize a quadrocopter or a swarmbot swooping in for a closer view, but a tiny dragonfly might escape your notice. A Georgia Tech spinoff is betting their unmanned aerial dragonfly vehicle will leave other micro flying bots in the dust.

The Atlanta-based company TechJet started as a spinoff from developments in Georgia Tech's Robotics and Intelligent Machines Department. One of their projects, called Dragonfly, was initially developed with $1 million in funding from the U.S. Air Force's Office of Scientific Research. Since then, the Dragonfly prototypes have become smaller and there are now five technology patents on the design.

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TechJet, led by cofounders Jayant Ratti and Emanuel Jones, pictures different Dragonfly versions being used for gaming, dynamic photography, home security and military surveillance. Inspired by the way real dragonflies can fly and hover, they developed a four-winged robot weighing less than one ounce that can do the same.

Each Dragonfly has stereoscopic vision, flight control systems and a camera-ready operating system, according to the company. TechJet will be offering different options for robotics elements such as wings and actuators through its website, depending on what the user wants to do. For example, one version could be made more stable with better endurance for aerial photography.

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TechJet is currently raising money through the site Indiegogo with the goal of delivering the robots starting early next year. Dragonfly packages range from around $100 to $500 and include Wi-Fi and cameras at the high end.

So if you see a strange-looking insect flying your way, just be careful before you swat at it. That dragonfly could be a spy.

Image: A prototype for TechJet's robot dragonfly in action. Credit: TechJet.

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Robo-Bee To Get Brain for Autonomous Flight

Autonomous robots can do reconnaissance for the military, fly in complex patterns and even explore other planets. But they aren't great at complex, open-ended problems. Military surveillance drones or NASA's Curiosity rover are both doing largely pre-programmed tasks.

Animals -- even insects -- are a lot smarter than robots, so scientists are constantly looking at ways of mimicking insect behaviors in robots. At the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex in the U.K., researchers are building a software model of a bee's brain.

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Called the "Green Brain," the software model will focus on how a bee sees and smells. With that, a robotic bee could be built that actually behaves like a real bee, rather than just flying on a pre-programmed path and carrying out instructions.

"The benefit of an autonomous model is clear when you have complex tasks you want to undertake," James Marshall, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield who is leading the three-year project, told Discovery News.

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If the programming works as the scientists hope, the robo-bee could do things like pinpoint the odor of a gas the way a bee looks for a certain flower. Ordinarily a robot could detect the gas and fly a pre-programmed pattern to find the source. But a bee doesn't have to be told to do that -- it learns from experience.

The brain simulations will use hardware from NVIDIA. Graphics processing unit accelerators, used in rendering complex three-dimensional images, will provide a lot of the computing power necessary to simulate a brain, even one as simple as a bee's. Marshall noted that once the program is complete, it will run on a large computer that transmits data to the flying robot, as it isn't yet possible to cram that much computing power into a small space.

Even a bee has a pretty sophisticated brain. So the problem of programming it will be broken up. The team will look at different functions of a bee's brain and simulate those and the interactions between them. Marshall said they hope that the bee behavior will emerge from that interaction.

The project is designed to shed light on how bees think and how artificial intelligence differs. Given that bees are vital to pollination of many crops, the recent stresses on bee populations are a big concern and any new knowledge about how bees navigate their environment would help. It might even be possible to make artificial pollinators. (It remains to be seen whether bees would complain about being replaced by robots).

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The actual flying machine -- the artificial bee -- is being designed by a group at Harvard working on an actual robotic bee. Prior to that, though, the bee brain program will be tested in a more conventional remote controlled flyer. "We'll be using a rather expensive executive toy," Marshall said.

Beyond that, the robo-bee type brain could even be used in a search and rescue drone, or a smarter reconnaissance vehicle. "A human rescuer isn't specifying step by step how to find people," Marshall said. "With an AI robot you don't have to specify how to solve a problem."

Credit: Henrik Trygg/Corbis

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Robot Tentacle Grips Gently

There are many designs for robotic hands, grippers, and even tentacles. But most are made from rigid materials, and as such, it's hard to make them grip things gently. Most have had to incorporate soft materials into the design -- but dexterity is still a challenge.

In a paper in Advanced Materials, a team from Harvard's Whitesides Research Group outlines a way to build a robot tentacle out of soft materials, powered by compressed air. Air-powered robots have appeared before, but in this case they wanted to get a tentacle that could move -- and grip –- in any direction.

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The mechanism is actually pretty simple: the tentacle has two layers. The inner layer is where the basic structure is, and the outer layer has chambers that can be filled with air. Filling a chamber on one side with air makes a tentacle bend away from that side and curl up. Each chamber can be filled independently.

Since it's made of soft material, this tentacle won't crush what it holds -- especially as the pressure in the air chambers can be adjusted accordingly.

It isn't the only soft-bodied robot tentacle project. In Europe, roboticists at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa have built a soft tentacle as part of the Octopus Project. The group is scheduled to deliver a real working model early next year.

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Meanwhile, the Harvard team has offered up several uses for such a tentacle, even all by itself. The central part could be filled with fiber optic cable and attached to a camera, similar to current laparoscopes, or it could be fitted with a hollow tube and a hypodermic needle, delivering drugs.

The video below shows an early prototype, which gives an idea of how it works.

via PhysOrg

Credit: Advanced Materials

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Shrew's Whiskers Get Robotic Touch

There are bionic eyes, ears and even noses and robots can see and hear even better than humans. But a sense of touch is still a challenge. So a group of European researchers turned to whiskers for inspiration.

Humans can sense quite a bit with their fingertips, but animals like cats and mice use whiskers as a touch sensor. One reason for looking to whiskers (otherwise known as vibrissae) is that they're more durable than skin-like sensors placed on robotic fingers, which get a lot of wear and tear. Whiskers are also good for dark places where a camera might not be able to see.

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Tony Prescott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, and Tony Pipe, of the Bristol Robotics Lab at the University of West England, led a $6.75 million study called the Biotact project to develop touch sensors. The result was a number of robotic systems that work something like whiskers and could enable robots to navigate spaces where cameras won't do any good.

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The researchers developed an artificial whisker that transmits vibrations to its base. A computer picks up those vibrations and can sense if a surface is rough, smooth, or if there's a corner. The system isn't just a passive sensor -- a set of small motors allows the whisker to be brushed up against something.

This is, not surprisingly, similar to how rodents and other animals sense with their whiskers. Mice and shrews move theirs at high speeds back and forth, for example, for continuous sensing. Part of the initial Biotact studies monitored that very behavior in Etruscan shrews, tracking how the animals moved their whiskers to pick up more sensory information.

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Another feature of the artificial whiskers is that they are easy to replace, and can be fitted to a wide range of devices. They can even work with toys such as Lego robots.

After designing the whiskers, the team built a "shrewbot" that can navigate by touch alone. It can even track a moving object with no visual input at all.

Meanwhile, there are more serious applications. Sending a robot that could sense its way into a fiery, smoke-filled building without having to bump into things is a much more efficient way of exploring the area. The Biotact team is also working on an aquatic version.

via CORDIS

Credit: University of West England

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