The Handheld Ultrasound

The Handheld Ultrasound
The stethoscope of the 21st century may have arrived. On Oct. 20, GE unveiled the Vscan, a medical imaging tool as compact as a cell phone and as powerful as a large ultrasound console. Doctors can use it to look inside a patient's body and instantly see fluid around the heart, for example, or a baby in the breech position. In a field where minutes can make the difference between life and death, the Vscan — not yet commercially available — could improve the way medicine is practiced everywhere, from cutting-edge ERs to makeshift village clinics.

See the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdmohNERH1c
Read more at: http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/10/21/2009-10-21_oh_baby_new_handheld_ultrasound_gadget_looks_like_ipod_flip_phone_combo.html

Fold your cardboard speakers

The Foldable Speaker
Taking an entertainment center on the road can be a pain, as even the smallest portable speakers weigh a pound or two and take up valuable space. Chicago-based OrigAudio has come up with an ingenious solution: self-powered, 1-watt speakers made of heavy-duty recycled paper. Assembly is easy: simply fold the paper into a 3-in. (7.6 cm) cube. For travel, unfold it and slip the flat sheet into your laptop sleeve. Sold through the company's website, Origaudio.com, and at select retailers, the speakers ($16 a pair) can be hooked up to any audio device with a headphone jack. Part of the proceeds supports the nonprofit Music National Service, which brings music to public schools and low-income communities. Origami has never sounded so good.

Check out the speakers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQdLV6EB5RY&feature=player_embedded
Read more: http://asia.cnet.com/crave/2009/10/16/foldable-cardboard-speakers-from-origaudio/

EnergyHub Dashboard

The Smart Thermostat
A couple of years ago, Seth Frader-Thompson was driving a Prius. Priuses have little screens on the dashboard that tell you what gas mileage you're getting, in real time, as you drive. It crossed Frader-Thompson's mind that houses should have something similar. So he built the EnergyHub Dashboard, a little device, with a screen, that can talk wirelessly to your furnace and your various appliances and let you know exactly how much electricity (or gas) each one is using and how much it's costing you. It can also turn appliances on and off and raise or lower the temperature in your house so you can rein in the real power hogs. EnergyHub is currently partnering with utilities for trials and will be available direct to consumers in early 2010.

Read more: http://earth2tech.com/2008/12/19/smart-home-startup-energyhub-to-sell-its-gear-mid-2009/

Flyvertising

Eichborn - Banners on flies (for real) - ambient, Germany
Jung von Matt just invented flyvertising. At the recent Frankfurt book convention they attached banners to 200 flies and set them loose to do their jobs as miniature sky ads around the convention center. In German, it's called a Fliegenbanner. Fliegenbanner, what a silly word.

No flies were harmed during this stunt. But a lot of people laughed.

The weight of the banner itself, attached with a string and some sticky stuff that allowed it to eventually fall off without harming the fly, was so that the fly could fly with it, but not very high and they kept landing on visitors.

Check the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldC7FQiUJ6s&feature=player_embedded

Wheelchair with Vision

This smart wheelchair has laser vision
Spletzer, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, recently received a five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a robotic wheelchair that navigates on its own, with no human guidance or remote control, through a crowded city.

Armed with high-fidelity lasers and detailed maps, the “smart” wheelchair will avoid stationery objects like parking meters and light poles as well as “random events” like pedestrians and bicyclists. It will transport users who may not be able to see or walk to their doctor’s appointments, to the pharmacy, to the grocery store.
Helping robots see with lasers

In order to “see” and respond to its environment as it navigates around a city, says Spletzer, a robot must possess two things: sensors that detect and recognize familiar landmarks and a database with maps that show where those landmarks will be.

Spletzer and his students have taken a cue from Google Street View, which allows Internet users to take virtual tours of distant cities, block by block and building by building, by looking at thousands of stored images. These images are of little use to robots equipped with lasers, says Spletzer, because robots do not see what humans see. But the concept is applicable to the robotic wheelchair. Spletzer and his students are fitting the robotic wheelchair with a low cost LIDAR (an acronym for light detection and ranging) laser similar to, but much less expensive than, those that enabled Little Ben to detect other vehicles, highway lane markers and the edge of the pavement. They have made high-fidelity, 3-D laser maps of portions of South Bethlehem and of the Stabler Arena parking lot on Lehigh’s Goodman Campus. The team’s robotic wheelchair, guided by LIDAR but not GPS devices, has traversed a 1-kilometer route and arrived at its destination to within an accuracy of 20 centimeters.

“We have a server vehicle drive around and make a hi-fi 3-D map of the environment,” says Spletzer. “The robotic wheelchair can download this map and navigate the environment, halfway in the real world, halfway in the virtual world.

“The robot identifies landmarks—trees, poles, building faces and corners—in the real world and looks for them in the laser map. Once it finds them, it will be able to accurately estimate its position in the real world. It doesn’t need GPS, because of the accuracy of the server vehicle maps and because of the LIDARs.”

Read more at: http://www.physorg.com/news177062541.html

Leaf Log

British inventor's green idea of using leaves to make fire logs
An inventor has come up with a new green fuel - logs made from leaves. With one million tonnes of leaves falling from British trees every year, Peter Morrison decided to harness the waste and turn it into energy. By collecting and compacting the dead matter, his company has turned them into environmentally-friendly ‘logs’ to burn in open fires and wood stoves.

The logs, said to be 70 per cent carbon neutral, are also being considered by bosses of a major power station to cut their carbon emissions. Each log, weighing 2lb 10oz, is made from about a binliner-full of leaves. It generates more heat than wood and burns for longer.

Now the company - BioFuels International Limited (BIFL) - has started supplying the 11in-long logs, which burn for about three hours, to shops such as B&Q. Mr Morrison says that as well as being cleaner and greener than burning wood or coal, the leaf logs are very efficient, creating 28,000 kilojoules of energy compared to 29,000 produced by the finest grade coal. The leaves come from parks across the Heart of England. After being harvested by the likes of Birmingham City Council, Walsall Borough Council, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council and the University of Birmingham, BIFL collects the leaves and turn them into logs.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1226943/British-inventors-green-idea-using-leaves-make-logs.html#ixzz0XH5CBXL1

Buy your customized newspaper

Billed as Europe's first "personalised paper", "niiu", a newspaper tailored to readers' individual wishes and delivered to their door before 08:00 am, made its first appearance in Berlin on Monday.
Customers of the paper choose what topics they want to read about -- be it sport, politics, fashion or any from a wide choice -- and receive news only on their chosen subject collated together and delivered like any other paper.

Articles are pulled together from major German papers such as Handelsblatt, Bild and Tagesspiegel, foreign titles such as the International Herald Tribune or the New York Times, as well as major blogs and Internet news sources.

For the right to print their news, "niiu" pays a licence to these papers, which in turn reach a younger audience, as "niiu" is aimed mainly at students, who pay 1.20 euros (1.79 dollars) to get their news fix. Non students are expected to stump up 1.80 euros.

The two German entrepreneurs who came up with the idea were delighted with their first day in business, having launched the concept in mid-October. More than 1,000 people have already signed up on the Internet to receive the "niiu", said Wanja Oberhof, 23, one of the founders. "That has exceeded all our expectations," he told AFP. "It's not just students, the interest is much wider," he added. The pair hopes to be printing 5,000 copies in the next six months, first in Berlin before rolling it out nationwide.

At a time when newspapers globally are struggling with competition from Internet news sources, the founders acknowledge that "niiu" is a risky venture. However, they said that young people were tired of trawling the web for news and would pay for the tailored service their paper offers. Eventually, clients will be able to choose the length of the paper delivered -- for example, eight pages on a busy Monday morning but 60 pages on a Friday when there might be more time to read. Initially, however, the paper consists of 16 pages.

Read more at: http://forum4editors.com/2009/10/a-brand-niuu-day-for-the-printed-newspapers-is-coming/
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4899459,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf

Aircraft that can see for themselves

Aircraft that can see for themselves (w/ Video)
Australian researchers have made two important advances in the development of unmanned aircraft capable of seeing for themselves as they fly fast and low over dangerous terrain.

A team from the The Vision Centre and Queensland Brain Institute has developed highly effective new visual systems inspired by honey bees and how they navigate successfully around the landscape, despite their tiny brains.

The two innovations, one of which provides stereo vision to enable aircraft to see their way around obstacles in very low-level flight, and the other which controls the aircraft’s attitude by watching the horizon, offer light, low-cost, highly-efficient technologies for use in unmanned aircraft (UAVs).

Both will be unveiled for the first time at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, in St Louis, USA from October 11-15. Richard Moore and his colleagues at The University of Queensland node of the ARC Vision Centre, based at the Queensland Brain Institute, have developed a stereo system employing two cameras and two sophisticated, highly curved mirrors, for observing the terrain as it flows beneath the aircraft. The cameras feed back information on height and distance to the terrain and its obstacles in a steady flow.

“You know how things that are close seem to speed by, whereas things farther away seem to travel more slowly,” Richard said.

"Our design eliminates that distortion, enabling us to use the flow of optical data from all parts of the landscape in view to navigate the aircraft, even if it is moving very fast.”

Read more and see video at: http://www.physorg.com/news173621893.html

Touch-free Computing

Touch-free Computing: Microsoft's new user interface uses hand gestures in the air and tracks eye movement.
Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie is doing the rounds at a number of prestigious colleges in the States showing off Microsoft’s vision for technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. Of course, one must use the latest in natural user interfaces for this task.
A feature of this year’s tour appears to be a next-generation computer – one that docks and undocks from a transparent glass display and allows for not only pen and voice input as you’d come to expect from natural user interfaces, but also incorporates touchless gestures and eye-tracking to interact with the information at hand.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid3924348001?bctid=48751387001

Gorillapod: wrap your camera on any tree or railing

A flexible tripod with over two dozen flexible joints that bend and rotate, allowing a camera to be mounted on almost any surface.

The Gorillapod lets you take your pocket camera to places it has never been before to get the shot you want. Hang your camera from the branch of a tree, wrap it round a railing, or leave it dangling from a door knob - the Gorillapod’s ball and socket type joints bend and twist almost 360 degrees so the legs can be contorted into a variety of different positions.

It’s the brainchild of inventor and visionary JoeBen Bevirt who first came up with idea in the late 1990s whilst at Stanford University. He took a course called Integrated Design for Marketing and Manufacturability and was part of a group of students given the task of coming up with a better tabletop tripod. He designed one with flexible legs and called it Gorillapod, but it stayed at the concept stage for years as after graduation he initially pursued other activities. Gorillapod came swinging back into his life in 2004. A friend had continually been pestering him to turn it into a product, and so he embarked on the project whilst learning about manufacturing in China. “I thought it shouldn’t be too hard, so I worked on a prototype and it turned out to be a fair bit more challenging. The first couple of manufacturers that I worked with gave up because the injection moulding tooling to make the socket joints was tricky, and it took more time and capital than I expected. But it turned out to be incredibly worth it.”

Major Improvements

For Gorillapod to become a marketable commodity many improvements had to be made on the original Stanford design. And even when they were completed there were still many more refinements that had to be attended to until Bevirt was happy with the results. He says that he has a “scrappy iterative approach” to inventing. “Basically you build lots of prototypes and you test them and do it again and again and again and figure out what works and what doesn’t work. You build lots of different concepts and compare and contrast them, and you take the good things from one and couple with another.” And what comes out at the other end is a viable product.

A patent was filed via his patent attorney and in 2005 Bevirt created a company called Joby as a vehicle for all the inventing he wants to do. Gorillapod was the first product, and it has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It is sold through national and international retailers as well as via the company website and has spawned further products using the same flexible Gorillapod idea; so now there are Gorillamobile stands for mobile devices and a Gorillatorch - a hands-free flashlight.

World's First solar-powered Flight

Pioneering Swiss solar-powered plane rolled out
An aircraft dubbed 'Solar Impulse', HB-SIA prototype, is rolled out of a hangar for an initial series of stationary tests involving engines and electromagnetic interference in Duebendorf aerodrome near Zurich.
All four sun-fuelled electric motors were switched on for the first time under open skies after the completed high-tech plane was pushed out of the hangar. "With its engines running at full power, it gave the impression of wanting to get off the ground straightaway... but it won't be long now before we release the brakes and let it roll its first few metres," said Andre Borschberg, co-founder and chief executive of Solar Impulse.

The ultralight single seater with the wingspan of an Airbus A380 airliner is being prepared for a maiden flight over the coming weeks when weather conditions allow. Solar Impulse staff said the slender craft, which only weighs as much as a medium-sized car (1,600 kilogrammes, 3,527 pounds), needs particularly clear conditions and less than a light breeze (three knots) for its first excursion in the air. It is due to make a few airborne hops down the runway at the Dubendorf airbase before December 20.

Borschberg said the aircraft was venturing into new flying territory. "Compared to its weight and size, it is lighter than the best performing gliders," he explained.

The prototype, which is slightly smaller than the craft that is expected to fly around the world, was first unveiled while it was being built in its hangar in June. It is primarily aimed at testing the cutting edge technology used to build and control the aircraft, and to fly through the night.

A first non-stop 36 hour flight through darkness is planned in Switzerland from spring 2010, with the prospect of a five stage flight around the world in 2012.

Air bags in back seat belts of SUV

Ford to put air bags into back seat belts of SUV

Ford's inflatable seat belts are designed for the rear seat. Air bags have long been mounted in the steering wheel, dashboard and sides of vehicles. Now, they're in the seat belts. Ford Motor Co. plans to introduce seat belt-mounted air bags in the back seat of the 2011 Ford Explorer sport utility vehicle, which will hit the market next fall. Ford says it's the first automaker to mass produce the technology.
The belts have a cylindrical air bag that stretches from the buckle to the shoulder and fits inside a pocket sewn into the belt. The car sends a signal that releases the bag, which inflates more gently than a front air bag, so it's safer for children.

Srini Sundararajan, the Ford engineer who was chiefly responsible for developing the device, says the wider belts and bags help distribute crash forces across the occupant's chest, so there's less chance of serious injury. It also supports the head and neck.

"The top two lifesaving devices today are the seat belt and the air bag. This combines them into one great feature," Sundararajan said. Ford has been working on the technology for a decade and had to overcome numerous challenges bringing it to market.

Front air bags are powered by a device that generates hot gas. They deploy very quickly because they need to cover a greater distance before they reach the driver or passenger. Seat belt air bags don't have that distance to cover, so they can deploy more gently, using cold gas technology, although Srini said they're still fully deployed in a tenth of a second.

Read more at: http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=AP&date=20091105&id=10661000
Check out the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN5htEaRk4A&feature=player_embedded

Not an artificial limb, but a real hand.

SmartHand: an artificial hand which can give the wearer the FEEL of a real hand.

In one sense, our hands define our humanity. Our opposable thumbs and our hands' unique structure allow us to write, paint, and play the piano. Those who lose their hands as a result of accident, conflict or disease often feel they've lost more than mere utility. A new invention from Tel Aviv University researchers may change that. Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand of TAU's Department of Engineering, working with a team of European Union scientists, has successfully wired a state-of-the-art artificial hand to existing nerve endings in the stump of a severed arm. The device, called "SmartHand," resembles ― in function, sensitivity and appearance ― a real hand.

Robin af Ekenstam of Sweden, the project's first human subject, has not only been able to complete extremely complicated tasks like eating and writing, he reports he is also able to "feel" his fingers once again.

In short, Prof. Shacham-Diamand and his team have seamlessly rewired Ekenstam's mind to his SmartHand. Prof. Shacham-Diamand's contribution to the project, on which TAU collaborated with Sweden's Lund University, is the interface between the body's nerves and the device's electronics. "Perfectly good nerve endings remain at the stem of a severed limb," the researcher says. "Our team is building the interface between the device and the nerves in the arm, connecting cognitive neuroscience with state-of-the-art information technologies." Prof. Shacham-Diamand runs one of the top labs in the world for nano-bio-interfacing science: the Department of Electrical Engineering ― Physical Electronics Lab under the Bernard L. Schwartz Chair for Nano-scale Information Technologies. "Our challenge," remarks Prof. Shacham-Diamand, "was to make an electrode that was not only flexible, but could be implanted in the human body and function properly for at least 20 years."

The artificial SmartHand, built by a team of top European Union scientists, will belong to Ekenstam, the test subject, as long as he wishes. "After only a few training sessions, he is operating the artificial hand as though it's his own," says Prof. Shacham-Diamand. "We've built in tactile sensors too, so the information transfer goes two ways. These allow Ekenstam to do difficult tasks like eating and writing." Ekenstam told a television interviewer, "I am using muscles which I haven't used for years. I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, as I don't have them anymore. It's amazing."

This particular multi-million dollar project focused on hands, but the TAU/EU team could also have built bionic legs to be wired to the brain. The team first chose to build a hand, however, because of its unique challenges. "The fingers in the hand are the most complex appendages we have," Prof. Shacham-Diamand observes. "The brain needs to synchronise the movement of each digit in a very complicated way."

With the help of the TAU team, the SmartHand project was able to integrate recent advances in today's "intelligent" prosthetic hands with all the basic features of a flesh-and-blood hand. Four electric motors and 40 sensors are activated when the SmartHand touches an object, not only replicating the movement of a human hand, but also providing the wearer with a sensation of feeling and touch.
While the prototype looks very "bionic" now, in the future SmartHand scientists plan to equip it with artificial skin that will give the brain even more tactile feedback. The researchers will also study amputees equipped with the SmartHand to understand how to improve the device over time.

Now your domain name can be in Hindi- not English

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the approval of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in languages other than English. The non-profit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on Latin characters in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - or ICANN - voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea's capital. The decision by the board's 15 voting members was unopposed and welcomed by applause and a standing ovation. It followed years of debate and testing.
"This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world," Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's CEO, said ahead of the vote.

Domain names - the Internet addresses that end in ".com" and other suffixes - are the key monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English - A-Z - as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.

Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the Internet to be truly multilingual.

Read more at: http://www.physorg.com/news176099055.html
Now your domain name can be in Hindi- not English

Color-changing roof tiles

Color-changing roof tiles absorb heat in winter, reflect it in summer

A team of recent MIT graduates has developed roof tiles that change color based on the temperature. The tiles become white when it's hot, allowing them to reflect away most of the sun's heat. When it's cold they turn black and absorb heat just when it's needed.

The team's lab measurements show that in their white state, the tiles reflect about 80 percent of the sunlight falling on them, while when black they reflect only about 30 percent. That means in their white state, they could save as much as 20 percent of present cooling costs, according to recent studies. Savings from the black state in winter have yet to be quantified.

The team, which the students call Thermeleon (rhymes with chameleon, because of its color-changing property), was one of the competitors in this year's Making and Designing Materials Engineering Contest (MADMEC). Nick Orf PhD ’09, a member of the Thermeleon team, explains that he and his teammates originally tried to develop a color-shifting roof tile using a system of mixed fluids, one dark and one light, whose density would change with temperature: the dark substance would float to the top when it was cold, and white would float when it was hot. But the system proved too complicated, and instead they hit on a simpler, less expensive method.
Now, they use a common commercial polymer (in one version, one that is commonly used in hair gels) in a water solution. That solution is encapsulated — between layers of glass and plastic in their original prototype, and between flexible plastic layers in their latest version — with a dark layer at the back.

When the temperature is below a certain level (which they can choose by varying the exact formulation), the polymer stays dissolved, and the black backing shows through, absorbing the sun's heat. But when the temperature climbs, the polymer condenses to form tiny droplets, whose small sizes scatter light and thus produce a white surface, reflecting the sun's heat.
Read more at: http://www.physorg.com/news174209373.html