| From: Savant | 2/20/2016 10:01:39 AM | | | | | | Sodium Ion batteries...progress
cleantechnica.com
Sodium-Ion Energy StorageAs we often say here at CleanTechnica, everything has impacts, and while battery EV technology solves a global warming conundrum, it also involves the use of hazardous materials.
Specifically, the sodium-ion energy storage solution proposed by the Karlsruher Institute team would replace the cobalt used in conventional lithium-ion batteries:
Sodium-ion batteries are not only far more powerful than nickel-metal hydride or lead acid accumulators, but also represent an alternative to lithium-ion technology, as the initial materials needed are highly abundant, easily accessible, and available at low cost.
It would also enable Germany to put its massive amounts of agricultural waste to more productive use, providing the kind of green twofer that extractive industries can’t achieve.
That could explain why US researcher John Goodenough, who is credited with inventing the lithium-ion battery, has been moving on to sodium-ion energy storage. The last time we checked in, he was experimenting with a Lord-of-the-Ringsy sounding mineral called eldfellite with an eye on commercial development.
It’s been a long road — back in 2008, our sister site Gas2.org predicted the replacement of lithium-ion with sodium-ion batteries — but it looks like things are starting to move along. A research team from France also appears ready to crack the sodium-ion code.
For its part, the Karlsruhe team is aiming primarily at the stationary energy storage market, but at least one company, Faradion, has introduced a sodium-ion electric bike as a first step to commercializing the technology for larger vehicles.
Here in the US, the company SimpliPhi has come up with a non-cobalt energy storage solution to challenge the Tesla Powerwall stationary battery (if SimpliPhi doesn’t ring a bell, think LibertyPak and you’re on the right track).
Speaking of Tesla, would or could the forthcoming Tesla Gigafactory convert to new energy storage technology if something superior does emerge? Elon, JB, and crew have said it could. If you have more thoughts about that, leave us a note in the comment thread. |
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| From: Savant | 2/22/2016 2:04:13 AM | | | | | | Medical/Bionic Kidney Replacement /Implantable kidney replacement is part nano-tech, part living cells, powered by heart
Feb 21, 2016 | Health, Technology
Vanderbilt University Medical Center nephrologist and Associate Professor of Medicine Dr. William H. Fissell IV, is making major progress on a first-of-its kind device to free kidney patients from dialysis. He is building an implantable artificial kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by a patient’s own heart.
“We are creating a bio-hybrid device that can mimic a kidney to remove enough waste products, salt and water to keep a patient off dialysis,” said Fissell.
Fissell says the goal is to make it small enough, roughly the size of a soda can, to be implanted inside a patient’s body.
NanotchnologyThe key to the device is a microchip.
“It’s called silicon nanotechnology. It uses the same processes that were developed by the microelectronics industry for computers,” said Fissell.
The chips are affordable, precise and make ideal filters. Fissell and his team are designing each pore in the filter one by one based on what they want that pore to do. Each device will hold roughly fifteen microchips layered on top of each other.
But the microchips have another essential role beyond filtering.
“They’re also the scaffold in which living kidney cells will rest,” said Fissell.
Living kidney cellsFissell and his team use live kidney cells that will grow on and around the microchip filters. The goal is for these cells to mimic the natural actions of the kidney.
“We can leverage Mother Nature’s 60 million years of research and development and use kidney cells that fortunately for us grow well in the lab dish, and grow them into a bioreactor of living cells that will be the only ‘Santa Claus’ membrane in the world: the only membrane that will know which chemicals have been naughty and which have been nice. Then they can reabsorb the nutrients your body needs and discard the wastes your body desperately wants to get rid of,” said Fissell.
Avoiding organ rejection Because this bio-hybrid device sits out of reach from the body’s immune response, it is protected from rejection.
“The issue is not one of immune compliance, of matching, like it is with an organ transplant,” said Fissell.
How it works The device operates naturally with a patient’s blood flow.
“Our challenge is to take blood in a blood vessel and push it through the device. We must transform that unsteady pulsating blood flow in the arteries and move it through an artificial device without clotting or damage.”
Fluid dynamics And that’s where Vanderbilt biomedical engineer Amanda Buck comes in. Buck is using fluid dynamics to see if there are certain regions in the device that might cause clotting.
“It’s fun to go in and work in a field that I love, fluid mechanics, and get to see it help somebody,” said Buck.
She uses computer models to refine the shape of the channels for the smoothest blood flow. Then they rapidly prototype the new design using 3-D printing and test it to make the blood flow as smoothly as possible.
Future human trials Fissell says he has a long list of dialysis patients eager to join a future human trial. Pilot studies of the silicon filters could start in patients by the end of 2017.
“My patients are absolutely my heroes,” said Fissell. “They come back again and again and they accept a crushing burden of illness because they want to live. And they’re willing to put all of that at risk for the sake of another patient.”
Federal investment The National Institutes of Health awarded a four-year, $6 million grant to Fissell and his research partner Shuvo Roy from the University of California at San Francisco. The two investigators are longtime collaborators on this research. In 2003, the kidney project attracted its first NIH funding, and in 2012 the Food and Drug Administration selected the project for a fast-track approval program. The work is supported by NIH grant 1U01EB021214-01.
The National Kidney Foundation reports that in 2012, Federal Medicare dollars paid more than $87 billion caring for kidney disease patients (not including prescription medications).
Desperate need Transplant of a human kidney is the best treatment for kidney failure, but donor kidneys are in short supply. According to the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, although more than 100,000 patients in the United States are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, last year only 17,108 received one.
In all, the National Kidney Foundation says more than 460,000 Americans have end-stage renal disease and every day, 13 people die waiting for a kidney.
scienceblog.com |
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| From: Savant | 2/23/2016 2:11:15 AM | | | | | | By Y10k, They'll need more of these>360 TB storage, laser 5D in glass
Eternal 5D data storage could record the history of humankindPublished: 18 February 2016 Eternal 5D data storage
Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.
Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.
The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records.
The technology was first experimentally demonstrated in 2013 when a 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D.
Now, major documents from human history such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton’s Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible, have been saved as digital copies that could survive the human race. A copy of the UDHR encoded to 5D data storage was recently presented to UNESCO by the ORC at the International Year of Light (IYL) closing ceremony in Mexico.
 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded into 5D optical data The documents were recorded using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and intense pulses of light. The file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres (one millionth of a metre).
The self-assembled nanostructures change the way light travels through glass, modifying polarisation of light that can then be read by combination of optical microscope and a polariser, similar to that found in Polaroid sunglasses.
Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.
Professor Peter Kazansky, from the ORC, says: “It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations. This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”
The researchers will present their research at the photonics industry's renowned SPIE—The International Society for Optical Engineering Conference in San Francisco, USA this week. The invited paper, ‘5D Data Storage by Ultrafast Laser Writing in Glass’ will be presented on Wednesday 17 February.
The team are now looking for industry partners to further develop and commercialise this ground-breaking new technology. |
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| From: Savant | 2/23/2016 2:31:58 AM | | | | | | Samsung S7 launch/360 deg. cam/VR headset/eco system--proprietary stuff..(which I don't like, in general)
Samsung launches Galaxy S7, S7 Edge and VR camera
Samsung launched the Galaxy S7 and curved screen S7 Edge, it's latest flagship smartphones on Sunday,
and made another big push into the virtual reality (VR) space as it looks to new areas of growth amid a
slowing smartphone market.
The Galaxy S7 series will be available for pre-order from March 11. Customers in select countries will get a
free GearVR headset when they order their phone.
The South Korean electronics giant has made some key improvements on several aspects of the S7 device
including:
More at: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/19/samsung-launches-galaxy-s7-s7-edge-and-gear-360-vr-camera-at-mwc.html
The South Korean electronics giant has made some key improvements on several aspects of the S7 device including:
- A 12 megapixel camera which it claims lets more light in allowing for a picture that is 95 percent brighter than the Galaxy S6 as well a faster autofocus
- An "always-on display" where a part of the screen remains constantly on but at a low power level, draining less battery power
- A bigger battery compared with the Galaxy S6 which allows for 13 to 15 hours of high-definition video playback
- 5.5 inch screen on the S7 Edge and 5.1 inch display on the S7
- A faster processor and better graphics card specifically to enhance mobile gaming
- Expandable memory
- Dust and water resistant
On the Galaxy S7 Edge, Samsung has improved the use of the edge capability. It has a feature that lets you put specific contacts and apps to be accessed quickly. But it has also introduced a new features called "Task Edge" which allows you to put specific tasks to be carried out quickly, such as immediately accessing the selfie camera or going straight to the message thread of a specific contact.
Getty Images
A Samsung Galaxy S7 is seen during its worldwide unveiling on February 21, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.
Unveiling the device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung also touted the improved processing speeds allowing for better gameplay. The company unveiled specific gaming features such as the ability to lower the performance of a game - such as Candy Crush - which doesn't require high graphics in order to save battery. It also has introduced tools to allow you to take pictures and video of your game while in-play and upload those to social sites.
"If you work in a shop selling phones, they have given you a reason for you to sell the S7 over the iPhone. The Galaxy S7 has expandable memory, better battery, it's got a good camera, they are ticking all the boxes if you are selling it side by side with the iPhone," Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC by phone.
Samsung has stabilized its mobile division which was under pressure in 2014, being attacked by low-cost Chinese players and Apple at the high-end. Its recent spate of handsets have sold well and its remains the number one smartphone player in the world. However, the overall smartphone market is slowing and Samsung warned of a tougher 2016.
Gear 360 VR camera launched
With smartphones becoming increasingly commoditized and margins continuing to remain tough, manufacturers are looking to new areas to drive growth. As such, Samsung also took the wraps off a new camera which can film in 360 degrees.
Aptly named the Gear 360, the little ball shaped device has two lenses allowing people to take either 180 degree or full 360 pictures and video. An app on Samsung's Gear S7 and S7 Edge smartphones allows a user to stitch the pictures together into a full virtual reality image. Previously, this was a complex process, but Samsung has managed to wedge this into their latest handset.
Arjun Kharpal
Users can immediately upload this to platforms like YouTube and Facebook which can now support 360 degreevideo. And of course, Samsung has its own Gear VR headset at $99. The hope for the electronics titan is that it gets people creating user-generated content to stoke the adoption of VR. And handily, with the millions of users on Facebook and YouTube, there is a big distribution for VR content which will help Samsung's cause.
Wood said Samsung has in recent years been guilty of copying competitors but is now "market-making and innovating".
Virtual reality has been touted as the next major area for growth with VR headset shipments forecast to grow 15 times to 96 million units by 2020, at a value of $14.5 billion, according to CCS Insight.
As well as a product in its own right for Samsung, the Gear 360 could also push people to upgrade to its latest flagship handsets.
"The Gear 360 is excellent timing for Samsung because there is a lot of interest in all types of VR at the moment and the Gear 360 is a good halo device to position Samsung as a leader in the space and drive consumers to upgrade phones so they can enjoy the Gear VR experience as it requires a new phone," Ian Fogg, head of mobile at IHS, told CNBC.
"It helps Samsung persuade consumers that now is the time to upgrade their existing device."
From VR to cars
Like Apple has done with services such as Apple Music or Apple Pay as well as other devices like Macbooks, Samsung is trying to get consumers to stick in its ecosystem. This is the aim by offering a VR camera which only works with Samsung devices. The company has also been attempting to push other areas including connected devices in the home and in the auto space.
"We've invested in other systems in smart homes and cars and we keep investing. We do believe that this is to be looked at as a new galaxy, a new era of how we interface with our smartphone and all the other devices that gravitate around it, be it in the home, be it on the road, there are still many more things we can do," Jean-Daniel Ayme, vice-president of mobile at Samsung Electronics Europe, told CNBC. |
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| From: Savant | 2/23/2016 2:36:47 AM | | | | | | FLIR thermal imaging, rugged, water resistant phone/Bullit
* Given history, you know dudes will be using it to thermal image girlz in the bars..
Bullitt
A British company has unveiled what it is billing as the "world's first" smartphone with a built-in thermal imaging camera, a feature it claims will be in 50 percent of models on the market in five years.
Bullitt took the wraps off its Cat S60 smartphone on Thursday a 4.7 inch so-called "rugged phone" which can withstand a fall onto concrete from 1.8 meters high and can survive for an hour underwater at a depth of 5 meters. The thermal camera is made by U.S. firm FLIR.
The U.K.-based firm designs and manufactures the phone which then has the branding of construction equipment maker Caterpillar on it. Bullitt said that the lack of innovation in current smartphones will help its Cat S60, which will retail for $599, gain appeal among consumers
"At the moment we are in a bit of a lull. If you look back at the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Edge, it's a hell of a product but in terms of innovation we are taking incremental steps," Pete Cunningham, senior product manager at Bullitt, told CNBC at an interview.
"We believe you will see this technology in mainstream products and this is a gamechanging step for the industry."
Use by firefighters, police
The company announced the product ahead of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week and outlined a number of use cases for the thermal pictures.
One example described by Cunningham involved a firefighter being able to use the device to navigate through a smoke-filled room to see where the fire is and avoid it. Another example outlined involved a law enforcement officer being able to prove when a vehicle was last driven, for example by seeing how hot it is.
Your phone could soon have a 1-week battery life
The Cat S60 is clearly aimed for industrial use but Cunningham said thermal imaging could be of interest to consumers and expects it to be in 50 percent of models made by manufacturers in five years' time. He said that the consumer market is however "secondary" for the company and it will have the ability to carve a "niche" while focusing on industrial use cases.
"The things that this will be used for have not been discovered yet. When the camera was first in a phone I'm sure the first use case wasn't selfies. This technology has never been in a phone before and users will see what they want to do with it," Cunningham said, explaining the appeal of the thermal imaging.
Thermal sensors in future phones?
Thermal imaging has been available on smartphones before but users had to buy an accessory to clip onto the device. This sensor is integrated.
As the smartphone market slows and devices become more generic, analysts said that Bullitt could capture the "long tail" of users looking for a different experience. Other companies from Wileyfox to OnePlus are trying to carve their own niches, for example.
While analysts said that Bullitt won't be making mass-market appeal smartphones, the technology showed off could lay the groundwork for mainstream players to adopt.
"This is a beachhead for future technology and as all smartphone markets look to add new innovations to differentiate, they will look at these sensors and others like ultraviolet sensors and others," Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC.
"We are going to see an explosion of sensors in devices that will create meaningful applications." |
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| From: Savant | 2/23/2016 2:51:08 AM | | | | | | LG..modular smartphone, rolling security cam, 360cam VR, and more
30
SHARES
COMMENTSStart the Discussion
Arjun Kharpal
LG has released a "modular" smartphone which allows users to replace parts of the phone, as well as a camera that can roam your house, in a bid to turn around its struggling mobile operation.
The South Korean electronics company took the wraps off the G5 handset at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday which includes the following features:
- 5.3 inch display
- Two front cameras that allow a user to take a 180 degree picture
- An 8 megapixel selfie camera
- A removable battery
The modular design allows a user to detach the battery and replace it as along with other accessories. LG showed off the LG Cam Plus, a device that can clip onto your phone and give it functionality similar to a traditional camera. It has a wheel to scroll as well as a button that can be pressed to take a picture.
Arjun Kharpal
LG also collaborated with Bang & Olufson to release the HiFi Plus, an amplifier that can also clip onto the phone to enhance the quality of audio coming from the device.
The handset manufacturer has had a difficult few months: Its mobile division reported a 48.3 billion won ($38.9 million) loss in 2015 under stiff competition from the likes of Apple, Samsung and Huawei.
LG will be hoping the G5 can reverse its fortunes. Analysts said the device marks a clear push by LG to appear innovative in the eyes of consumers, but mounting a challenge against the major smartphone players could be a challenge.
"LG has clearly decided that this is the year it wants to step up and make itself more prominent again, as it's been quiet and the fact they are having the biggest press event they have ever done, that speaks volumes in terms of the scale of investment," Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC by phone.
"But the challenge is where do they sit alongside Apple and Samsung who have consistently outspent them in terms of marketing and have a significant market position. It's a big mountain to climb but they have some innovative products to support that."
LG’s VR push
A new smartphone was not the only device launched by LG. The electronics firm also unveiled:
- The LG 360 Cam, a handheld camera that allows people to take 360 degree video
- The LG 360 viewer, a virtual reality (VR) headset that look like glasses
- The LG Rolling Cam, a small soccer ball-sized device that can be controlled via a smartphone and roam around the house. It has a camera built in which can be used for surveillance when you are away from the property. It also allows a user to control anything in the house using infrared such as the TV.
Arjun Kharpal
As the global smartphone market slows down, LG is looking towards new areas for growth, much like many of its competitors. The LG Rolling Cam is a device that attempts to take advantage of the ever-connected home, while the 360 Cam and 360 Viewers are LG's attempt to gain a strong foothold in the nascent VR market.
Virtual reality has been touted as the next major areas with VR and augmented reality headset shipments forecast to grow 15 times to 96 million units by 2020, at a value of $14.5 billion, according to CCS Insight.
LG will be hoping the release of the modular G5 with accessories as well as the new virtual reality devices, will help open up new revenue streams and create a ecosystem around its devices.
"For us, the G5 is the heart of the playground, but as I mentioned we believe people are getting their fun not from smartphones but other tech," Andy Coughlin, head of LG Mobile U.K. and Ireland, told CNBC in an interview.
"We are trying to put the smartphone back in the heart of that tech, in terms of the smart home and the internet of things, the smartphone is the thing we have all the time, so why wouldn't you want to control your heating or car through it?"
Higher margins?
Analysts said that the modular approach to the G5 along with the new devices could help LG open up higher margin opportunities.
"The reason that handset companies are so focused on wearables and other accessories, is that accessories have always been a high-margin opportunity and with the smartphone market becoming so cut-throat it's hard to have high margins and accessories are a massive opportunity," Ian Fogg, head of mobile at IHS, told CNBC by phone.
"As devices get smarter, all new categories open up. It's no longer about earphones, there are all sorts of new categories coming through. There aren't any incumbent leaders in any of these categories. It's all to play for and the margins on many of these devices is going to be significantly better than the margins on the smartphone business." |
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| From: Savant | 2/26/2016 1:54:52 PM | | | | | | in the Y10K, water shortage will be an issue... this material *might* help http://www.sciencemag.org/news/sifter/nature-inspired-material-can-pull-water-out-thin-air
*prolly works better w/THICK air...lol...could possibly be used as a dehumidifier w/o need for electricity...
---------------
All over the world, people live in environments where water is hard to come by. Now, The Atlantic reports, researchers have developed a material that can condense water out of the air—inspired by three completely different species. Based on the water-collecting shell of the Namib desert beetle (pictured), the surface is full of tiny bumps where droplets form. But these have to be directed elsewhere on the surface, to make room for more droplets. The researchers’ solution was to borrow surface structures from cactus spikes and use a water-repelling material based on the slippery rim of pitcher plants. Combining these three innovations creates a surface that can continually harvest water vapor, the study in Nature reports. If the technology can be made more durable and produced cheaply, it could be used for water collection in deserts—and in industrial and energy applications where efficient condensation is a must.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/drawing-inspiration-from-nature-to-harvest-water-from-the-air/470547/
How Evolution’s Innovations Can Help Scientists Yank Water Out of the Air Scientists create fog-harvesting material based on beetle backs, cactus spines, and a meat-eating plant.
If you learned that scientists have blended a darkling beetle, a cactus, and a carnivorous pitcher plant, you might imagine some unholy creation that’s all spines and scuttling legs and digestive enzymes. Instead, what Kyoo-Chul Park has made looks like … nothing at all. It’s not even alive—just a non-descript material covered in microscopic bumps. But this seemingly unremarkable surface has a remarkable ability—it excels at yanking water out of the air.
As a graduate student at MIT, Park worked on large mesh panels that could be erected in foggy areas and provide surfaces for the airborne water to condense upon. These “fog-catchers” are being tested in Chilean hillsides, as ways of providing drinking water to people in these extremely arid and remote places. When Park later moved to Joanna Aizenberg’s lab at Harvard University, he became interested in darkling beetles—animals that had come up with the same fog-catching idea, millions of years ago.
The beetles live in southern Africa’s Namib Desert, which gets less than a centimeter of rain every year. There is water here, however, in the form of fog that blows in from the Atlantic Ocean on the west. The beetles harvest the fog by sitting in it and pointing their abdomens skywards, allowing water to condense on their bodies and trickle down into their mouths. In this way, they drink their fill in one of the driest places in the world.
Many scientists have shown that the beetles have microscopic tricks for catching fog. Their backs are covered in little bumps made from water-attracting substances, with flat, water-repelling valleys between them. The bumps attract moisture and allow droplets to form, while the valleys channel the collected water away. These chemical patterns certainly help, but Park wondered if the bumps themselves, absent any water-attracting substances, might be important.
When he fashioned artificial bumps that match those on the beetle’s back, he found that water droplets would quickly grow on top of them, even if they were coated with water-repelling chemicals. And the smaller and more tightly curved the bumps, the faster the droplets grew. That’s fine, but it creates a problem for a would-be water-collecting surface: The droplets quickly max out the capacity of the bumps and stop growing. Park came up with two solutions.
“This beautiful experiment however shows that artificial surfaces inspired by nature can go beyond it.”First, he changed the bumps from spheres into rectangular pillars, with flat tops and curved edges. Now, droplets start condensing on the edges but eventually merge in the central plateau, freeing up the edges for yet more condensation.
Second, Park drew inspiration from cacti, whose spines are also excellent water-harvesters. By adding a ramp to his microscopic pillars, which allows the growing droplet to roll off, he was able to once again free up space for more condensation.
Park also coated the ramp with a material inspired by pitcher plants. These carnivorous plants trap insects in their vase-shaped leaves whose rims are exceptionally slippery; bugs that walk over them lose their footing and fall into the pool of digestive fluids below. In earlier work, Aizenberg developed a material based on the microscopic structure of the pitcher’s traps—an ‘omniphobic’ surface that repels water, ice, blood, crude oil, and even bacteria. She called it SLIPS—Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surface—and Park used it to line his ramps.
Together, these features produced a material that collects more than ten times more water than other state-of-the-art surfaces. Droplets form more quickly, reach larger sizes, and roll away more rapidly; they’ll even do so against gravity. All three features—the bumps, the ramps, and the SLIPS—are important; lose any one of them, and the material collects noticeably less water.
SLIPS Technologies, a Cambridge-based company that Aizenberg co-founded, is now trying to commercialize these surfaces. Collecting water in deserts is an obvious application. “In arid environments, there’s a lot of evaporation,” explains Park. “If we can’t collect water with fast growth and transport, we’ll lose it.” He adds that the super-condenser surfaces are also useful for power plants, desalination plants, and other operations whose heat exchangers rely on efficient condensation.
Daniel Beysens, a physicist who studies condensation at ESPCI ParisTech, says that the team’s work is impressive, but that only one of the three “bio-inspired” aspects—the SLIPS—reflect their natural counterparts. In reality, he says, droplets form more effectively between a darkling beetle’s bumps than on top of them, and they rarely run down from the tip of a cactus’s spines to their base.
Still, that doesn’t matter. “This beautiful experiment however shows that artificial surfaces inspired by nature can go beyond it, leading to new properties that are paradoxically not found in nature,” Beysens adds. “The next necessary step will be to make those surfaces robust to aging, unaffected by the unavoidable industrial or atmospheric pollution and contamination that is found in real life: a new challenge.” |
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| From: Savant | 3/8/2016 11:46:15 AM | | | | | | In the Y10K, Cyborgs will control....Brain Implant project...Darpa
& the Harvard guy, Pinker, will be long forgotten...along w/the guru that said 'ten megs of storage will be all we'll ever need'....lol.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/07/politics/pentagon-developing-brain-implants-cyborgs/
*Seriously....he really said this>>>??? "A spokesman for DARPA told CNN that the program is not intended for military applications."
Washington (CNN)The U.S. military is spending millions on an advanced implant that would allow a human brain to communicate directly with computers.
If it succeeds, cyborgs will be a reality.
The Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), hopes the implant will allow humans to directly interface with computers, which could benefit people with aural and visual disabilities, such as veterans injured in combat.
The goal of the proposed implant is to "open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics" according to DARPA's program manager, Phillip Alvelda.
In January, DARPA announced it plans to spend up to $62 million on the project, which is part of its Neural Engineering System Design program.
Read More
The implant would be small -- no larger than one cubic centimeter, or roughly the size of two stacked nickels -- according to DARPA.
The implantable device aims to convert neurons in the brain into electronic signals and provide unprecedented "data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world," according to a DARPA statement announcing the new project.
DARPA sees the implant as providing a foundation for new therapies that could help people with deficits in sight or hearing by "feeding digital auditory or visual information into the brain."
A spokesman for DARPA told CNN that the program is not intended for military applications.
RELATED: U.S. military is on its way to getting its Iron Man
But some experts see such an implant as having the potential for numerous applications, including military ones, in the field of wearable robotics -- which aims to augment and restore human performance.
Conor Walsh, a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Harvard University, told CNN that the implant would "change the game," adding that "in the future, wearable robotic devices will be controlled by implants."
Walsh sees the potential for wearable robotic devices or exoskeletons in everything from helping a medical patient recover from a stroke to enhancing soldiers' capabilities in combat.
The U.S. military is currently developing a battery-powered exoskeleton, the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, to provide superior protection from enemy fire and in-helmet technologies that boost the user's communications ability and vision.
The suits' development is being overseen by U.S. Special Operations Command.
In theory, the proposed neural implant would allow the military member operating the suit to more effectively control the armored exoskeleton while deployed in combat.
However, Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Harvard, was skeptical of the proposed innovation, calling the idea a "bunch of hype with no results."
He told CNN, "We have little to no idea how exactly the brain codes complex information" and cited the problems from foreign objects triggering brain inflammation that can cause serious neurological issues.
Pinker described "neural enhancement" for healthy brains as being a "boondoggle," but he suggested that there could be some benefit for people suffering from brain-related diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
In its announcement, DARPA acknowledged that an implant is still a long ways away, with breakthroughs in neuroscience, synthetic biology, low-power electronics, photonics and medical-device manufacturing needed before the device could be used.
DARPA plans to recruit a diverse set of experts in an attempt to accelerate the project's development, according to its statement announcing the project.
Pinker remained skeptical, however, telling CNN: "My guess is that it's a waste of taxpayer dollars." |
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