NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Baby Jumper Could Prevent Crib Death

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is every new parent's worst nightmare. To keep a close eye on a sleeping baby, some parents rely on a two-way baby monitor or move the crib into mommy and daddy's room. Others stay awake all night worrying and periodically checking on their infant.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration in Berlin propose a different solution: a suit that monitors a baby's breathing.

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It looks like an ordinary “onesie” or “romper suit” but with a major difference: it has commercially available sensors integrated into the cloth. The circuit board for the sensors is printed on polyurethane, which is flexible, stretchable and comfortable for the child. The polyurethane circuit board is contained in a fabric cover that can be removed so that the jumper can be washed separately. 

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The sensors monitor the movement of the chest and stomach by checking both the distance between two points on the chest and responding to strain. If there is a problem -- if the rhythm of breathing or number of breaths is wrong -- it will sound an alarm. It isn't clear what kind of alarm would sound yet; current proposals are for some kind of visual and auditory alert. It's easy to imagine a wireless system firing off a signal to a smartphone.

The circuits themselves are made of ordinary materials and don’t need any specialized manufacturing methods, so the costs can be kept down. Since the electronics are mounted on the polyurethane sheets  rather than being stitched into the fabric, it’s easier to place the components exactly where they need to be on the circuit board.

The idea is similar the Exmobaby suit that appeared early in 2012. The difference is the use of flexible electronics and that the Exmobaby’s ad copy says it’s designed to track emotional states, not operate as a true medical device.

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There are still challenges to mass-producing the suit. One is that polyurethane tends to change shape during the manufacturing process. Even so a number of companies are testing out ways to build them cheaply. 

Baby safety isn’t the only idea the Fraunhofer scientists came up with for their flexible electronics: they also looked at how to make pressure bandages that tell doctors and nurses where the best place to put them is, and even a bandage that can monitor the health of kidneys.

Via Fraunhofer Institute

Credit: Fraunhofer Institute / VERHAERT Masters in Innovation

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Stick-On Solar Cells Power Your Device

Solar cells are getting better at harvesting energy from the sun and turning that into electricity. But because they're made from plastic or glass, solar cells are bulky and stiff, which limits where they can be used. That's about to change. A group at Stanford University has made a photovoltaic cell that can be peeled off of a backing like a sticker and attached to any surface.

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The researchers, lead Xiaolin Zheng, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, started with the foundational material for conventional solar cells -- the silicon dioxide wafer. Silicon releases electrons when light hits it and its those electrons that are captured and used for electricity. Typically, the wafers are thick and stiff and not flexible at all. But Zheng and her team had a plan.

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First, they laid down a 300-nanometer film of nickel on top of the wafer. Next, they coated it with a protective plastic. The result was a super-thin layer of nickel and plastic on top of the silicon dioxide wafer. Those three layers are the necessary active ingredients of a working solar cell. But in this stage, the solar cell is still thick and rigid.

So, the research put a layer of thermal release tape on top. Then they then dipped the whole thing in room-temperature water. By tugging back on the thermal release tape, they were able to peel back a very thin, three-layered "sandwich" of plastic, nickel and silicon dioxide -- leaving behind most of the silicon dioxide wafer.

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The ultrathin three-layered sandwich was so thin that it could flex. And because the process removed only a nanometer-scale layer of silicon dioxide, the wafer could be used again in the same process to make more super-thin solar cell sandwiches. That would reduce waste at solar cell manufacturing plants.

But the researchers didn't stop there. Zheng's group then heated the solar cell to about 194 degrees Fahrenheit to make it soft enough to take on any shape and attach to any surface. In order to work, it would still need to be connected to electrodes and other components that would ultimately allow the harvested sunlight to be used as electricity.

The method Zheng and her team came up with would work on conventional electronics as well as unconventional ones, such as clothing. In the meantime, it will be nice to fuel a phone from the sun rather than worrying about battery life.

via Stanford University

Credit: Chi Hwan Lee, Stanford University

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Gel and Light Beam Could Starve Tumors

A gel that expands and contracts when hit with light could work to cut off the blood supply to a tumor.

Developed by Akira Harada, a professor of Macromolecular Science and his team at Osaka University in Japan, the gel could also be used inside a person's body to pump drugs in a specific location at a specific time.

The gel is made from a polymer called a hydrogel and two chemicals -- alpha-cyclodextrin and azobenzene -- that work similar to muscle-contracting enzymes in the body. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the gel expands. When exposed to red light, it contracts.

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Hitting a strip of the gel with UV light from different directions makes it bend away from the light. "Only the surface irradiated by UV absorbs the light, while the other side does not," Harada told Discovery News. "Therefore, the [strip of] gel bends. The same is true for irradiation by visible light." After exposure to UV light for 15 minutes, the gel formed curly shapes like spirals.

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The gel expands and contracts because of the way the two added chemicals change when the light hits them. When inside the gel, the cyclodextrin and azobenzene molecules are bound to each other and molecules that make up the gel. Ultraviolet light disturbs those bonds and changes the shape of the azobenzene molecule. The azobenzene breaks from the cyclodextrin. This allows the gel molecules to spread out, expanding the volume. Red light restores the molecules' original shapes, which makes them bind tightly again, which shrinks the gel.

Harada said that he was able to repeat the expansion and contraction at least five times without the gel losing its ability to do it, and there's no reason it couldn't continue.

Using the light to alter the chemical bonds and change the shape of the gel is new, said Albert Schenning, an associate professor of chemistry at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

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Using the gel in a medical situation might involve a doctor injecting the gel into a vein and then running an very thin optical fiber to the location to deliver the light. A gel laced with drugs would theoretically release them at the sight as it expanded. Or it could be expanded inside a blood vessel feeding a tumor to cut off the supply.

There is still some work to do. The reaction is still slow -- to get the gel to expand or contract took an hour. Schenning said future experiments might show how to speed that up.

Harada's work appears in the Dec. 11 edition of Nature Communications.

Photo: Blood vessels feed cancer cells, but a new technique could choke those vessels off and stop cancerous growth. Credit: Sciepro/Science Photo Library/Corbis

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Stretchy Electronics Made from Stiff 'Islands'

A checkerboard of rigid electronic components have been embedded into a flexible surface that can be stretched three times its normal length. The technique makes it possible to keep stiff circuit boards safe from kinks, while at the same making wearable flexible computers more feasible.

"We want to put this on something like rubber," André Studart told Discovery News. Studart is a professor of complex materials at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and one of the co-authors of the paper in Nature Communications outlining the work.

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Rather than try to make the electronics stretch, Studart and his colleagues decided to make a surface for the electronics to sit on that had both stretchy and stiff regions. The stretchy areas give the flexibility while the stiff regions protect the rigid electronic circuits. 

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The surface is comprised of polyurethane, the same substance used in skateboard wheels and floor coatings. Polyurethane can me made stiffer or softer depending on what it's mixed, or doped, with. The researchers used laponite, which is a kind of clay, and micrometer-sized bits of aluminum. The polyurethane doped with aluminum is stiffer than that with laponite, which in turn is stiffer than polyurethane not mixed with anything.

To make their polyurethane both stretchy and stiff, the team made a sheet of it that consisted of several layers. The bottom layer is the most flexible, and made of undoped polyurethane. The middle layer is made of polyurethane doped with laponite. The very top layer is the the most rigid, the one doped with aluminum. While the stretchiest layer on the bottom is a large sheet, the stiffer ones are laid down in cut-out squares and bonded to the undoped polyurethane layer.

The team tested the surface by installing an LED circuit on the stiff island. The LED stayed lit even when the sheet was stretched to 150 percent of its length.

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This isn't the only way to do flexible electronics. John Rogers, at the University of Illinois, has been working on several methods to stretch electronics, dissolve them and even stick them to skin. He said the work here is "a nice, new addition to the toolbox."

Rogers said his lab has been focused at the level of designing systems, which sometimes involves coming up with new ways to build semiconductors. In one case he used a serpentine pattern of metal wires, which could stretch like a spring on the surface of a balloon. "The latest work from Switzerland could have value in the context of an application of this sort, as an alternative to the interconnection wiring that we used."

Credit: Rafael Libanori, Randall M. Erb and André R. Studart

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Next Gen Power Suits Woven from Silicon Fiber

In the future, power suits may do more than command attention and exude confidence. They may actually charge your electronic devices.

A team of scientists led by John Badding, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University has made a solar cell into the shape of a fiber, which can be woven into fabric. That fabric could be turned into a garment that harnesses energy from the sun and turns it into renewable electricity.

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The researchers combined glass optical fibers with traditional photovoltaics normally used for rooftop solar panels. Both of these components are typically rigid and stiff. But Pier Sazio, a research fellow in optoelectronics at the University of Southampton and one of the co-authors, told Discovery News that silicon becomes flexible when it's very thin, while also retaining its strength. 

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To make the fiber, they mixed silicon with other elements, including boron and helium and then turned it into a hot, high-pressure gas. Next, they filled a thin, hollow fiber optic with the gas mixture. As it cooled, the silicon mixture formed three concentric layers.

The innermost layer, called the "p" layer, was positively charged and accepted electrons. The outermost layer, called the "n" layer, was negatively charged and had an excess of electrons. A middle layer between the two, called the "i" layer, was neutral.

As sunlight hits the fiber, photons knock electrons from the outermost "n" layer and send them into the "p" layer. That generates current, just like an ordinary solar celm, except this one is cylindrical rather than flat.

By attaching two small electrodes, one to the "p" layer and the other on the "n" layer, one would be able to extract the charge for power.

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Because the fiber is round, it's able to pick up sunlight from any angle. The thinness of the fiber -- on the order of 15 micrometers, which is about the same as acrylic -- allows it to be woven and twisted and turned into clothing that could power or charge a small electronic device. No surprisingly, the military has been interested: modern soldiers carry a lot of electronic gear and batteries are heavy.

The work appeared online on Dec. 4 and wil be in an upcoming print issue of Advanced Materials.

via Penn State, Advanced Materials

Credit: Badding, et. al, Pennsylvania State University

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Mysterious Material Remembers Its Shape

By TechNewsDaily Staff

A weird new lab-made substance acts like a liquid in air, but is solid in water. Credit: Luo Lab

A strange new substance acts like a liquid when exposed to air, but takes a solid shape when it's dunked in water.

The new stuff is a metamaterial, scientists' word for a lab-made material that has properties uncommon in nature. Even among metamaterials, however, this material is unusual -- it's composed of artificial DNA, while most metamaterials are composed of nonbiological chemicals such as silicon or copper. Its creators are calling it a "meta-hydrogel."

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In the future, metamaterials made of biological stuff could go into soft, flexible circuits, according to a statement from Cornell University, where the meta-hydrogel was made. Because they have pores in which drug molecules could fit, meta-hydrogels could help release medicines slowly inside the body, the statement said.  

Adding to its unusual properties, the new meta-hydrogel remembers its original shape. If it's made in a mold, it will return to its original, molded shape every time it's doused in water, even after researchers expose it to air -- and force it into its liquidlike state -- several times. The researchers made a video that shows the meta-hydrogel firming up into letters when a researcher adds water to it.

To get the meta-hydrogel to take on a new solid shape, the gel’s creators heat it to 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius) and set it in new molds.

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When a team of Cornell engineers first mixed the chemicals to make their meta-hydrogel, they didn't know it would act so strangely. "This was not by design," Dan Luo, the lead scientist in the research, said. Luo and his colleagues have used synthetic DNA to make hydrogels, or gels composed mostly of water, before. This time, they wanted to make a DNA hydrogel with a different microscopic structure. It was only after they created their meta-hydrogel that they discovered its unique abilities, the researchers wrote in a paper they published Dec. 2 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

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Plastic Could (Finally) Replace Glass

Everyone loves a good touch screen -- until it drops and gets cracked. The only other material that was feasible for them was plastic, but there wasn’t one that was strong and hard enough, until now.

Dai Nippon Printing, of Japan, unveiled a plastic that resists scratching as well as glass does and has the added bonus of being flexible. It would replace the glass covers that currently grace the fronts of smartphones.

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The display cover is actually comprised of separate layers: one is the resin that gives the display cover its hardness, while the other protects it from fingerprints. The company didn’t go into details about the composition of the plastic in its press release.

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How hard is the display? According to the company it has a “pencil hardness” of 9H, which means that a 9H pencil has a tough time scratching it; that’s comparable to many ceramics and enamels.

DNP also tested steel wool on it with a pressure of 7 pounds per square inch (500 grams per square centimeter) and found it still didn’t scratch after 200 scrapes.

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Hardness is only one part of it, though. The fact that it's plastic means that it's slightly flexible, and that in turn means it won’t shatter when dropped. Any smartphone  owner will appreciate that. Plastic is also lighter than the same volume of glass.

On top of all that, the flexibility allows a bendy display.

DNP has said they will be shipping samples in the first part of 2013, so it isn’t clear if any smartphone makers have signed on. But anything that makes un-crackable touch screens is a welcome development for the butterfingered among us.

Credit: Dai Nippon Printing

Via TechOn, Dai Nippon Printing (In Japanese)

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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.”

Coated Sapphire Is Invisible to Infrared Cameras

Infrared detectors are used to see objects otherwise hidden under cover of darkness. The dectors pick up the heat given off by living bodies, warm buildings and vehicles and reveal them as glowing objects when viewed through infrared goggles or cameras. If a building, body or vehicle is cold, the detector typically can't visualize it.

Now new technology from researchers at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences could turn infrared detection on its head. The technique not only makes hot objects appear cold to infrared detectors -- which could help hide soliders from their enemies at night -- but it can be also used to make an infrared camera so sensitive that even cold objects would look relatively bright.

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The researchers coated a millimeter-thick sheet of sapphire with a 180-nanometer layer of vanadium dioxide, which is used as an insulator. Next, they heated the layered material to 154 degrees Fahrenheit (68 degrees Celsius). At that temperature, the crystal structure of the vanadium dioxide became altered, changing it from an insulator to a metallic conductor.

When the scientists shone infrared light onto the altered material, they found it was a near-perfect absorber, soaking up 99 percent of the infrared light that hit it. It worked because the infrared light waves bounced off the sapphire get absorbed by the vanadium dioxide, and any light waves that escape destructively interfere with each other so that they cancel out.

When the scientists cooled the layers down, the materials returned to their former states.

Mikhail Kats, the lead author of the research, told Discovery News that vanadium dioxide, unlike other materials, absorbs infrared radiation differently depending on its temperature -- it can be tuned.

If one could coat a vehicle or building with this material, it would make the objects invisible -- or at least black -- to an infrared camera, since any infrared radiation emitted by the objects would be absorbed by the material before it could escape.

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And because the material is so sensitive to infrared light, it could also work as a detector. Any imaging device has to absorb light in order to translate it into electrical signals and make a picture. The more sensitive the sensor, the better the detector.

One big challenge was making the vanadium dioxide crystals pure enough. Any flaws would mean it lost its unique reaction to temperature.

The research appears in the latest issue of Applied Physics Letters.

via Harvard University

Credit: Harvard University / Kirill Nadtochiy

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Solar 'Funnel' Could Boost Energy Efficiency

Typical solar cells made of silicon miss out on a wide swath of energy shining from the sun.

But according to calculations made by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and China's Peking University and Xi'an Jiaotong University, poking a sheet of material just a molecule thin changes the material's atomic structure and improves its ability to harvest a broader spectrum of sunlight.

Conventional solar panels made of crystalline silicon are most sensitive to wavelengths of sunlight in the red end of the visible range or the near-infrared. Panels made of amorphous silicon are more sensitive to wavelengths of light in the blue range.

But the sun's peak wavelength is in the green part of the spectrum. Photons (light particles) from that wavelength of light do the best job at hitting atoms inside solar panels and knocking out the electrons that ultimately generate an electric current. If solar panels could be tuned to harvest a larger spectrum of sunlight, they'd generate more electricity and be more efficient.

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In this week's issue Nature Photonics, MIT professor Ji Lu and his colleagues have proposed a radical idea that turns a very thin sheet of material into a kind of “solar energy funnel” that takes advantage of elastic strain. The material is molybdenum disulfide, which is not typically made into a solar panel but has been experimented with as a semiconductor material for transistors. It's also in a certain class of substances called 'ultrastrength materials,' which can be stretched out of shape for long periods of time without breaking.

The technique involves poking the sheet of molybdenum disulfide with a microscopic needle. The pressure from the needle causes an elastic strain that not only takes on the shape of a funnel but increases in intensity toward the center.

Like silicon, molybdenum disulfide releases electrons when hit by sunlight. Stretching the material into a funnel shape varies its atomic structure from the edge to the center, and allows different parts of the sheet to respond to photons from different wavelengths of sunlight.

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This means a single sheet of material can actually work harder to collect more energy from the sun. In addition, because the sheet is funnel-shaped, the charged particles will tend to gather at the bottom of it -- moved there by electrostatic energy and not gravity. Having the electric charges all end up in one place is a lot more efficient than having them simply bouncing randomly around the sheet.

All this sounds good, but it hasn't been confirmed by real-world experiments; the calculations are all mathematical models. But the principle has been used before. IBM and Intel have both done experiments with elastic strains in silicon channels in transistors with some success.

Via MIT News

Credit: MIT News/ Yan Liang

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