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© 2011, 2012 Health Futures Digest
| 3-D images may show up on cell-phones before they show up on TVs. Where will the massive 3-D image files be stored? Perhaps on the 100 GB chip made possible by nanotechnology and the science of spintronics. And where will the extra power needed to display 3-D picture files, without draining your cell phone battery faster than ever, come from? Perhaps from clothes that generate electricity to power the cell phone and any other portable devices you carry.
A new technology for generating electricity by the activity of walking with a heavy backpack would be overkill for powering cell phones, even 3-D ones, but would be just right for powering the exoskeletons (which will enable us, among other things, to carry heavy backpacks) that will be reaching the market late this year or early next. A fuel cell for portable computers that is about ready for market will probably eventually be downsized to cell phone dimensions. (The only caveat is that its maker’s website was still “under construction” as of this writing.) At about the same time as wearable computing apparel appears in your wardrobe, the digital paper label on the bottles and boxes in your medicine cabinet could start explaining, in video and in the language of your choice, how to take your medicine. The medicine could pack power of its own, thanks to in-built nanomachines with the equivalent of Superman-like physical strength. If the medication label doesn’t speak your obscure language of choice, you could perhaps teach it via software that can learn the syntax and grammar of any human language, music, and the “language” of biology (protein folding, for example). * * *The technology underlying MRI can now be applied to “labs on a chip” to analyze the chemical components of a fluid or gas, though it is expensive, and might not be necessary, when we have fully mastered the electromagnetic spectrum. Already, an infrared torch shone on meat can tell if it is contaminated, and that’s nothing to what a T-ray torch could do. The Star Trek script writers didn’t know it at the time, but their “tricorder” probably used T-rays to instantly and non-invasively diagnose medical conditions in the spaceship’s crew members. (We’ve mentioned T-rays several times before, most recently in July of this year. |
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| 3-D Cell Phone Display
A new display signal processing chip enables cell phones and PDAs to be equipped with 3D displays for games, video, photographs, and other content, without glasses. The display screen uses a lenticular lens — an array of transparent lenses fixed on a standard LCD panel. The DSP chip enables real-time rendering and interweaving of 2D and depth information into a 3D image. Volume shipments to selected customers will start early next year. Researchers from Imperial College, Durham University, and the University of Sheffield have designed a memory chip that could store as much as 100GB of data in a way similar to that used by our neurons and axons to store memories. Nanotechnology and spintronics (which uses the magnetic ‘spin’ of electrons to perform the equivalent of electrical functions but at massively reduced scale) enabled them to construct a three-dimensional architecture for the chip — analogous to using cupboards instead of table tops (conventional 2-D chips) for storage. The team is now working with commercial partners to develop the technology and is currently building a more advanced demonstrator chip using full microchip manufacturing facilities. Konarka Technologies and Textronics, Inc., plan jointly to create prototype garments and fashion accessories that generate power for personal electronic devices. The resulting systems will be flexible and integrated in a way that will retain many of the qualities of conventional textiles, providing an overall consumer experience that is more like wearing a jacket or carrying a messenger bag than charging a device. Konarka’s added abilities to provide colored and patterned Power Plastic technology will allow for innovative aesthetic solutions, says a press release. A biomechanics expert at the Marine Biological Laboratory has built and tested a prototype “Suspended-load Backpack” that converts mechanical energy generated by walking with a heavy load into electricity, which can be used to feed the wearer’s electronic devices and eliminate the need to carry batteries. With loads from 44 to 84 pounds (20 to 38 kg), test subjects generated up to 7.4 Watts of power. The up-and-down motion of the body during walking causes the backpack’s spring-mounted frame to slide up and down on vertical rods, which motion drives a rack-and-pinion DC generator mounted on the frame. The backpack beneficially altered the gait of the test wearers, causing them to walk more efficiently and use less energy than anticipated. UltraCell Corporation has announce a fuel cell power source for portable electronic devices that has twice the energy density of lithium batteries. It generates hydrogen from methanol in a package about the size of a paperback book and weighing just 40 ounces. A 45-watt output version of the technology was developed for the military. The smaller commercial version will produce 25 watts and will be available in 2006. The system’s spent fuel canisters can be “hot swapped” to provide continuous power. It can also double as a battery charger. It generates no excess water. Siemens has exhibited low cost miniature color displays that can be printed onto paper or foil. They can show information about products, or even operating instructions for devices, directly on the packaging. “A pillbox, for example,” says an article at PhysOrg.com, “could display instructions for how it should be taken and provide this information in several languages with the push of a button. Admission tickets for trade shows could indicate the booths where various exhibitors are located. It’s also conceivable that small computer games will be on packages or that equipment boxes will display animations that give users step-by-step operating instructions when a button is pushed.” The displays are made of electrode arrays embedded in electrochromic materials that change color when an electrical voltage shifts charges in their molecules, causing them to absorb different wavelengths than in their original state. Siemens scientists are “optimizing” the electrochromic materials to be fast enough to show video. The displays are time-limited, however, because they obtain their energy from printable batteries, which last only a few months. An alternative may be to turn them into “passive” devices that draw their energy from an outside radio frequency source, as do passive RFID tags. The first displays will become available on the market in 2007. Scientists at the universities of Edinburgh, Groningen, and Bologna have built machines just two nanometers high yet able to convey the equivalent of massive boulders (microliter drops of the chemical diiodomethane) up the equivalent of a mountain — a one millimeter, 12 degree slope. An Edinburgh University press release said it was “the equivalent of a conventional mechanical machine using a millimetre displacement of pistons to lift an object twice the height of the world’s tallest building.” “Until now,” it continued, “molecular machines have operated in isolation within the laboratory, but this latest piece of research brings them into contact with the everyday world around us.” The machines could be useful for microfluidic lab chips, used for cemical analysis and medical diagnostis. They could also be used, said principal researcher David Leigh, “to make artificial muscles, surfaces that change their properties in response to electricity or light or even — one day in the future — to move objects about a room using a laser pointer.” Computers Learn to Speak in Tongues Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have created self-learning software able to scan text in many languages, and from the text alone infer the language’s underlying rules of grammar and syntax. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The software is also “proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics,” the lead researcher is quoted by UPI as having said. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley scientists have shown how nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) can be used with microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” devices to accurately and quickly determine the chemical composition of fluids and gases. “Microfluidic devices,” says a Berkeley Lab press release, “are essentially miniaturized chemistry laboratories, featuring a series of micrometer-sized channels etched into a chip in which nanoliter-sized samples of fluids can be analyzed. Such analyses can provide a wealth of information for biomedical and analytical chemistry studies. Because of their incredibly small sample sizes — thousands of times smaller in volume than a typical droplet — microfluidic “labs on a chip” are highly prized for providing rapid analysis at relatively low costs.” NMR improves on the current method of microfluidic analysis using fluorescent marker particles, which tend to perturb the flow and be injected only at a device’s inlet. NMR can be used at any point(s) in the circuit. The technology is ready to be applied to any existing microfluidic device, but the necessary NMR spectrometers are expensive. Alternatives to such spectrometers are being actively sought. British researchers have developed a technology involving infrared spectroscopy and genomic algorithms to identify spoiled meat in seconds. It takes hours using conventional methods, by which time “the carcasses could have been dressed and delivered to a retailer,” said this editor’s namesake, who helped develop the technology, which detects biochemicals produced when bacteria break down food — not the bacteria themselves. The technology emits an infrared beam, which bounces off the sample. The resulting spectrum shows the level of biochemicals. Software developed from genetic algorithms reads the spectral data and determines whether the meat is bad. The method has detected bacteria concentrations as low as one million for chicken (10 million would be low enough), and the researchers are working on beef and dairy products — probably necessary to persuade the food industry to buy the technology. A group of British universities and research institutions has been awarded approximately US$4 million to develop by 2008 a portable, battery-powered THz (terahertz) device the size of a flashlight to be used, among other things, for medical diagnosis. The technology is known; the challenge is essentially one of miniaturization. |
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