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Image: UN Photo / Ky Chung

Issue no. 25, 2011 Published: Jul 15, 2011
Technology to crowd-source clean water
Inflatable antenna you can stick in your backpack
Inkjet printing produces high-performance transistors
Spinning heat sink could lead to faster computers
A new way to store the sun's heat
Actuated ankles make artificial feet fitter
Artificially grown tooth transplanted into mouse
Cloaking device edits out events in space time

Technology to crowd-source clean water
A device that crowd-sources water quality could help prevent the spread of diseases such as cholera. The Water Canary checks supplies in real-time, alerting users to possible infections. It is also able to upload the data, allowing scientists to monitor the location and movement of outbreaks. The device will be able to test for both micro-biological and chemical contaminations using spectral technology. It will provide instant information on whether the water is drinkable via a red or green light on the device. The device will be capable of wirelessly sending GPS-tagged data from any available network. Such information could prove invaluable for governments around the world keen to contain disease and environmental disasters. More than three million people die each year from water-related disease, according to the World Health Organisation. The project grew out of the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Programme, which focuses on human-centric technology design. The researchers are trying to get manufacturing costs to below USD 100 and hope eventually to give the units away for free.
BBC News Jul 13, 2011	back to top

Inflatable antenna you can stick in your backpack
A big issue in setting up satellite communications networks is the antennas - it takes time to set them up. In the wake of a big disaster cell networks can be damaged when the towers fall and take months to repair. For television crews and military units carrying a rigid satellite antenna can be a serious logistical problem, as even a metre-sized dish is quite heavy and difficult to transport. Enter GATR Technologies, which has designed an inflatable 1.2-metre satellite antenna that can fit into a backpack and be carried by a single person. The company's antenna looks something like a beach ball. It is a double-layered sphere with one layer a nylon mesh and the other made from sail material. The antenna is in the centre. The receiving dish divides the sphere's interior into two chambers and by applying pressure to one chamber you can push the antenna into a parabolic shape. The company already sells a larger, 2-metre version but this one is small enough to fit in an airline's hand luggage area when folded. GATR says the military is the major customer, though the company also hopes to get some interest from television crews who don't want to go through the trouble of packing an entire satellite-link system up when they travel to areas without roads.
New Scientist Jul 14, 2011	back to top

Inkjet printing produces high-performance transistors
A new inkjet-based printing technique for making high-performance, single-crystal thin-film transistors has been developed by a team of researchers in Japan. The room-temperature process could be used to make large-area printed electronics, including flexible displays, solar cells, electronic paper and sensor sheets. High-purity single crystals have been crucial in advancing semiconductor microelectronics, and devices with the highest performance invariably contain single-crystal interfaces. Printing techniques, such as inkjet technology, show promise for making large-area and flexible electronic devices and work by depositing patterns on a substrate using inks made of semiconductor materials. One major problem with inkjets is that the deposited materials have poor crystalline properties, which reduces charge-carrier mobility in the material and ultimately degrades device performance. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba have come up with a new printing process that combines a semiconductor ink and a crystallization ink into one. The first is a semiconductor in a solvent and the second, an 'antisolvent' - a liquid in which the semiconductor is insoluble. The method produces exceptionally uniform, single-crystal or polycrystalline thin films that grow at the liquid-air interface on a substrate.
PhysicsWorld / Nature Jul 14, 2011	back to top

Spinning heat sink could lead to faster computers
Air-cooled heat exchangers haven't changed much in 40 years. A disk absorbs heat from a computer's processor and transfers it to a row of attached metal fins. A fan stirs up the air around the heat sink. But only about five per cent of that energy provides a cooling effect. That is because a pesky layer of stagnant air clings to the fins, insulating them like a blanket. Spinning the fan faster helps, but it also makes computers intolerably noisy. These limitations impact processing speed. Chips can run faster, but the fans cannot cool them fast enough to prevent overheating. But now the 'Sandia Cooler' has been developed at Sandia National Laboratories. In this new design the fan is the heat sink. Bands of metal blades rotate above the heat source atop a thin cushion of air. Centrifugal forces roil that air to facilitate heat transfer. They also compress the layer of stagnant air against the blades, reducing that insulating effect. Cool outside air pushes away dust as it flows through the centre of the spiral and out the sides. If the new fans become widely adopted, its developers estimate total US electricity consumption could drop by about seven per cent.
New Scientist Jul 12, 2011	back to top

A new way to store the sun's heat
A novel application of carbon nanotubes, developed by MIT researchers, shows promise as an innovative approach to storing solar energy for use whenever it's needed. Storing the sun's heat in chemical form-rather than converting it to electricity or storing the heat itself in a heavily insulated container-has significant advantages, since in principle the chemical material can be stored for long periods of time without losing any of its stored energy. The problem with that approach has been that until now the chemicals needed to perform this conversion and storage either degraded within a few cycles, or included the element ruthenium, which is rare and expensive. The new material is made using carbon nanotubes in combination with a compound called azobenzene. The resulting molecules, produced using nanoscale templates to shape and constrain their physical structure, gain new properties that aren't available in the separate materials, according to the researchers. Not only is this new chemical system less expensive than the earlier ruthenium-containing compound, but it also is vastly more efficient at storing energy in a given amount of space-about 10,000 times higher in volumetric energy density making its energy density comparable to lithium-ion batteries.
R&D Magazine Jul 13, 2011	back to top

Actuated ankles make artificial feet fitter
A bionic foot with a battery pack could put the spring back in the step of people who wear leg prostheses. Prosthetics company iWalk and an MIT team have designed a bionic ankle that uses energy from a battery to push the foot forward as the person wearing it takes a step. When people walk, their calves and ankles do 80% of the work. As the pace picks up, muscles in the ankles take on more of the load, to push the leg away from the ground and move the body forward. But the prostheses that people with leg amputations wear today are only designed to support the weight of the body and the wearers burn more energy while walking than they would with a natural leg. The spruced-up foot design from the MIT Media Labs' Biomechatronics Group contains a battery that is activated while the person wearing it takes a walk. It builds on previous designs of the powered ankle that the lab and others have built, but now it is condensed down into a small size. In earlier versions of the foot, all the electronics and batteries were carried separately in a backpack. But this foot is about the size and shape of a real leg. It weighs 2 kilograms, the average weight of the leg of a person who weighs 80 kilos. The prosthesis has been tested with several test subjects who usually wear commercial non-automated prostheses, to see how fast people walked, and how comfortably and easily they could do it. Further work will go toward making the bionic foot lighter and more stable, but in the meantime, iWalk is making plans to manufacture and sell this design.
MSNBC / Proceedings of the Royal Society B Jul 12, 2011	back to top

Artificially grown tooth transplanted into mouse
It may be time to redefine the concept of false teeth. A tooth grown from embryonic cells has been successfully transplanted into the jaw of a mouse. The transplant is a step towards providing artificial replacements for donor organs that are in short supply. To create the tooth, researchers at Tokyo University of Science in Japan took cells destined to become teeth from mouse embryos. The cells were implanted into an adult mouse, beneath a membrane that surrounds the kidney. Two months later, the cells had developed into a molar complete with a periodontal ligament – fibres that attach the tooth to bone. The team extracted the tooth and implanted it into the jawbone of another mouse. Within 30 days, blood vessels and nerves surrounded the transplant which functioned as if it were a native tooth.
New Scientist / PLoS One Jul 12, 2011	back to top

Cloaking device edits out events in space time
Cloaking devices are a staple of science fiction. Bend light around an object in just the right way and it will appear to blink out of existence. However, there are many ways to hide something, and a bending light is just one of them. Researchers are proposing a similar way to pinch open the fabric of space-time and edit out entire events before the light reaches its audience. Like editing a movie, this new technology could snip events out of time by bending reality around the events, according to a new paper by optical physicists Martin McCall and Paul Kinsler. In contrast to cloaking that bends light, all of the light headed toward an object actually hits its target. In essence, it travels like cars on a highway. The spacing between the cars depends on how they move relative to one another. If a heavy rain suddenly begins to beat down on a section of traffic, the cars will lose pace with those ahead and a gap will open between them. This is what the team propose doing with light. By speeding up the photons in front and slowing down the ones behind, a dark space opens up. Reversing the process would bring the light back into formation and stitch the gap. However, anything that happened in the dark would stay off the record. If scientists could do all of this before a beam of light reached a detector or a human eye, then an edited image would seem completely continuous.
MSNBC Jul 13, 2011	back to top