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Issue no. 9, 2009 Published: Mar 06, 2009
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

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	back to top

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	back to top

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	back to top

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	back to top

'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	back to top

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	back to top