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Issue no. 9, 2009
Published: Mar 06, 2009 |
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 Bionic eye gives blind man sight | | Power source from human vibrations | | Canadian device allows deaf to 'hear' music through skin | | Lighting up the darkness in rural Africa | | 'Nanostitching' could strengthen airplane skins, more | | 3D printer brings animated movie stars to life |
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| Bionic eye gives blind man sight |
A man who lost his sight 30 years ago says he can now see flashes of
light after being fitted with a bionic eye. Ron, 73, had the
experimental surgery seven months ago at London's Moorfield's eye
hospital. He says he can now follow white lines on the road, and even
sort socks, using the bionic eye, known as Argus II.
Argus II uses a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send
captured images wirelessly to a tiny receiver on the outside of the eye.
In turn, the receiver passes on the data via a tiny cable to an array of
electrodes which sit on the retina - the layer of specialised cells that
normally respond to light found at the back of the eye. When these
electrodes are stimulated they send messages along the optic nerve to
the brain, which is able to perceive patterns of light and dark spots
corresponding to which electrodes have been stimulated. The hope is that
patients will learn to interpret the visual patterns produced into
meaningful images.
The bionic eye has been developed by US company Second Sight. So far 18
patients across the world have been fitted with the device. It is
designed to help people who have been made blind through retinitis
pigmentosa, a group of inherited eye diseases that cause degeneration of
the retina. |
| BBC News
Mar 04, 2009 |
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| Power source from human vibrations |
Tiny sensors with the ability to roam can be a great aid to doctors,
returning information from some hard-to-reach locations inside the body.
A problem arises however in powering these devices. Researchers at the
University of Perugia are proposing a solution in which devices
'harvest' the energy of natural vibrations inside the human body.
Although the principle of converting ambient noise into useful energy is
not a new idea, the researchers present a technique for 'broadband'
harvesting of a wide range of vibrations. To demonstrate the concept the
physicists took a piezoelectric beam and subjected it to both linear and
nonlinear oscillations. They claim that the nonlinear oscillators
yielded 4 to 6 times more energy than the linear ones.
Existing methods for energy harvesting have focussed on harvesting
vibrations at specific resonant frequencies. However, this approach is
not suitable for devices inside the human body where the majority of
ambient vibrations are distributed over a wide spectrum of frequencies.
The physicists designed an experiment to determine whether nonlinear
oscillators allow a larger energy harvest than linear oscillators.
Included in the experimental set-up was a steel pendulum mass, the swing
of which was controlled by magnets on either side of the tip. Attached
to the pendulum mass was a beam of piezoelectric material which was
clamped at the base and so flexed every time the pendulum swung. By
varying the distance between the magnets and the mass, the researchers
were able to facilitate both linear and nonlinear oscillations. |
| Physics World / Physical Review Letters
Mar 04, 2009 |
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| Canadian device allows deaf to 'hear' music through skin |
A chair that allows the hearing-impaired to experience music in a new
way will be featured at a concert in Toronto designed for deaf people.
The Emoti-Chair is a three-year venture developed at Ryerson
University's centre for learning technologies in conjunction with the
science of music, auditory research and technology (SMART) lab.
The idea is to treat the skin as a hearing membrane. One chair features
16 speakers embedded along the back and arms to stimulate the user's
tactile senses. Another prototype features 14 speakers but also includes
rocking motions that are activated when a certain drum is struck.
The Emoti-Chair does two things: It breaks the sound frequencies up so
that the user feels the piano through one speaker, the guitar through
another and so on. It also changes high-frequency sounds into something
that is detectable to a deaf person.
In the past, the only ways deaf people could experience music was to
feel sound waves passing through them, or to physically press their
hands or face to the speaker. |
| CBC News
Mar 04, 2009 |
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| Lighting up the darkness in rural Africa |
Dutch electronics firm Philips has partnered with KITE, a not-for-profit
Ghanaian organisation, to bring artificial light to villages that have
no electricity.
Only 19% of rural areas have electricity. The rest use kerosene lamps to
light their huts, which pollute, provide little light and are major fire
hazards. In addition, the low light levels makes it difficult to see
scorpions and snakes that make their way into people's homes at night.
Philips developed three different products for the villagers: a
solar-powered lantern, a reading light and a wind-up flashlight. The
products work because they all use LEDs; their low power consumption
means that the lantern charged during the day will light for seven
hours. The flashlight's bulb will for all practical purposes never burn
out, and the reading light's lower power consumption dramatically
reduces the need to change batteries.
The products, however, are costly - at USD 50 for the lantern, that
represents two months' salary for many people. But KITE hopes to get tax
relief from the government, which could cut the price by 40%. |
| International Herald Tribune
Mar 04, 2009 |
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| 'Nanostitching' could strengthen airplane skins, more |
MIT engineers are using carbon nanotubes to stitch together aerospace
materials in work that could make airplane skins and other products some
10 times stronger at a nominal increase in cost. Moreover, advanced
composites reinforced with nanotubes are also more than one million
times more electrically conductive than their counterparts without
nanotubes, meaning aircraft built with such materials would have greater
protection against damage from lightning.
The advanced materials currently used for many aerospace applications
are composed of layers, or plies, of carbon fibres that in turn are held
together with a polymer glue. But that glue can crack and otherwise
result in the carbon-fibre plies coming apart. As a result, engineers
have explored a variety of ways to reinforce the interface between the
layers by stitching, braiding, weaving or pinning them together. All of
these processes, however, are problematic because the relatively large
stitches or pins penetrate and damage the carbon-fibre plies themselves.
The MIT team developed processing techniques for creating nanotubes and
for incorporating them into existing aerospace composites. The polymer
glue between two carbon-fibre layers is heated, becoming more
liquid-like. Billions of nanotubes positioned perpendicular to each
carbon-fibre layer are then sucked up into the glue on both sides of
each layer. Because the nanotubes are 1000 times smaller than the carbon
fibres, they don't detrimentally affect the much larger carbon fibres,
but instead fill the spaces around them, stitching the layers together. |
| Eureka Alert / MIT
Mar 04, 2009 |
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| 3D printer brings animated movie stars to life |
A 3D printer - a machine that 'prints' small objects - has been used for
the first time to give the characters in an animated movie a far greater
range of facial expressions than has been possible before.
When fed with a design from a computer, a 3D printer gradually builds up
objects by depositing layer upon layer of material. The materials can be
plastic, nylon or metal powders, and each layer is set hard by a blast
from a laser before the next one is laid down.
These devices, which are mainly used for prototyping products, offer
major advantages over the traditional techniques for making the models
used in stop-motion films like Wallace & Gromit. Rather than
painstakingly hand sculpting every facial expression, animators can
instead 3D print many slightly different heads, says Martin Meunier, the
'creature supervisor' at Laika Entertainment in Portland, Oregon.
By laying down layers just 16 micrometres thick - far finer than a human
animator could sculpt - the printer offers greatly increased subtlety.
This allows animators to capture almost a quarter of a million
fine-grained facial expressions. 3D printers allow animators to capture
almost a quarter of a million facial expressions. |
| New Scientist
Mar 04, 2009 |
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