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Microsoft Surface is a prime example of how natural user interfaces can change the way we interact with computers. As designers and developers, one challenge with creating natural user interfaces for multi-touch devices such as Microsoft Surface or Windows 7 is getting around the old ways of thinking and old habits for interface design. Joshua Blake from InfoStrat decided to tackle this problem by creating SurfaceCube. SurfaceCube is a simple 3-D puzzle game for Microsoft Surface which he designed to illustrate as many as the Surface Interaction Guidelines as possible. I had the opportunity to sit down with Joshua and discuss SurfaceCube and the thinking behind some really interesting design decisions that makes it stand out as a natural user interface. We also briefly discuss Joshua’s upcoming book about natural user interfaces and multi-touch development, Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight, due Fall 2010 (since recording this interview, the book titled was updated). As a special offer to Channel 9 readers, you can use the following coupon to order the book through the Manning Early Access Program and read the chapters as Josh writes them. Coupon code channel9y is good for 35% off Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight when ordered through manning.com, and expires on April 24, 2010.

Clearly the most attractive super hero power for nanotechnology at the moment is invisibility. Last month we had a nano-enabled coating that managed to make aircraft invisible to radar. Now we have a metamaterial consisting of fishnet-like film containing holes about 100 nanometers in diameter that could serve as an invisibility cloak. While I personally might be persuaded to choose Spider-like climbing abilities for my nano-enabled super hero power, invisibility does pose an attractive option. However, invisibility is far from the point of this research conducted at the Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University and appears in the August 5th edition of the journal Nature.

Nikki Graziano's intriguing integration of mathematical curves into her photography sparked a Radar discussion about the relationship between mathematics and the real world. Does her work give insight into the nature of mathematics? Or into the nature of the world? And if so, what kind of insight? Mathematically, matching one curve to another isn't a big deal. Given N points, it's trivial to write an N+1 degree equation that passes through all of them. There are many more subtle ways of solving the same problem, with more aesthetically pleasing results: you can use sine functions, wavelets, square waves, whatever you want. Take out a ruler, measure some points, plug them into Mathematica, and in seconds you can generate as many curves as you like. So finding an equation that matches the curve of an artfully trimmed hedge is easy. The question is whether that curve tells us anything, or whether it's just another stupid math trick.

Experimental microbial fuel cells could turn bacteria into batteries that generate electricity from biomass. The key to this technology is the ability of bacteria to transfer electrons to their surroundings—for example, to the anode of a microbial fuel cell. But if the organisms have to be in direct contact with the anode, such devices would have to have extremely large surface areas. Researchers from Aarhus University, in Denmark, report today in the journal Nature that bacteria appear to conduct electricity while separated by several millimeters, at least a thousand times as far apart than previously demonstrated. The naturally occurring electric currents, if confirmed, would allow bacteria spaced at least 12 millimeters apart to communicate electrically. The discovery might lead to new paths to treating infection and a better understanding of microbial ecosystems.

One of the biggest commercial applications of spintronics in computing to date has been the use of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), the material phenomenon that makes possible the huge storage capacity of today’s hard disk drives. In the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, GMR was cited as the first big commercial application for nanotechnology. But extending the commercial application of spintronic-enabled systems beyond read heads for HDDs has proven to be a difficult task. One need only look at the seemingly endless travails of NVE Corporation, which in its financial results still shows it greatest revenue growth in contract research as opposed to product sales. While recent research from a team of researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Hamburg in Germany may not turn around the fortunes of spintronics in the short term, it does provide a way to better characterize the spin of electrons and thereby promises better ways of exploiting it for electronics applications. The researchers are reporting in Nature Nanotechnology that they have for the first time been able to create images of the spin direction of electrons.

This year's annual New York press briefing by the Edison Electric Institute, the organization representing investor-owned utilities, naturally was devoted to the smart grid, the hot topic of the day. Most notable, actually, was the absence of anything really new to report, which confirmed expectations that the smart grid will begin to prove itself next year at the earliest--or not. This was not the first EEI briefing devoted to smart grid prospects. Last year's briefing was devoted almost entirely to the smart meter avalanche, and a year or two before that much was made of Xcel Energy's SmartGridCity experiment in Boulder, Colorado. I reminded EEI president Thomas Kuhn of the Boulder briefing and pointed out that the experiment appears now to have been a failure. Kuhn did not dispute that and said it appears the problem in Boulder was that the target population was just too affluent: Despite the known green-mindedness of Boulderites, a major factor in Xcel's selecting the small city for its smart grid test run, it seems most of them do not care all that much about the modest monetary savings they stand to make from paying attention to electricity usage signals.

A shielded transformer is a two-winding transformer, usually delta"star connected and serves the following purposes: Voltage transformation from the distribution voltage to the equipment's utilization voltage. Converting a 3-wire input power to a 4-wire output thereby deriving a separate stable neutral for the power supply wiring going to sensitive equipment. Keeping third and its multiple harmonics away from sensitive equipment by allowing their free circulation in the delta winding. Softening of high-frequency noise from the input side by the natural inductance

Researchers at Purdue University have developed a new design employing carbon nanotubes and small copper spheres that wicks water passively towards hot electronics that could meet the challenges brought on by increasing frequency speeds in chips. The problem of overheating electronics is well-documented and in the past the issue has been addressed with bigger and bigger fans. But with chip features shrinking below 50 nanometers the fan solution is just not cutting it. The Purdue researchers, led by Suresh V. Garimella, came up with a design that uses water as the coolant liquid and transfers the water to an ultrathin thermal ground plane. The design naturally pushes the water through obviating the need for a pump and through the use of microfluidic design is able to boil the water fully, which allows the wicking away of more heat.

Bipedal humanoid robots can step over obstacles and negotiate stairs where their wheeled counterparts cannot, but this comes with the risk of falling down.  Naturally, humanoid robots will never be accepted in society if they break when they fall down.  The bigger the robot, the more likely it is that it will damage itself during a fall and be unable to get up. In 2003 the HRP-2P was the first full-scale humanoid that could fall over safely and get back up, and so far remains alone; not even Honda’s ASIMO can do this.  As soon as it detected that it was falling, the HRP-2P would bend its knees and back, which helped to reduce the ground impact.  This motion, called “UKEMI”, is quite similar to how the SONY QRIO would react when falling over to reduce the risk of damaging its components.

Events such as natural disasters, military actions, and public safety threats have led to an increased need for robust robots — especially ones that can travel across complex terrain in any dimension. The ability to scale vertical building surfaces or other structures offers unique capabilities in military applications such as urban reconnaissance, sensor deployment, and setting up urban network nodes. SRI's novel clamping technology, called compliant electroadhesion, has enabled the first application of this technology to wall-climbing robots that can help with these situations.  As the name implies, electroadhesion is an electrically controllable adhesion technology. It involves inducing electrostatic charges on a wall substrate using a power supply connected to compliant pads situated on the moving robot. SRI has demonstrated robust clamping to common building materials including glass, wood, metal, concrete, etc. with clamping pressures in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 N per square cm of clamp (0.8 to 2.3 pounds per square inch). The technology works on conductive and non-conductive substrates, smooth or rough materials, and through dust and debris. Unlike conventional adhesives or dry adhesives, the electroadhesion can be modulated or turned off for mobility or cleaning. The technology uses a very small amount of power (on the order of 20 microwatts/Newton weight held) and shows the ability to repeatably clamp to wall substrates that are heavily covered in dust or other debris.

Flavor just got some competition. Smell and taste are known to converge to produce the best and worst of culinary experiences, but new research suggests that information received through the nose can also be altered by noise. If confirmed, this newfound union could have potent olfactory and gustatory implications.

Ice Energy has a novel solution for the electricity challenges of the 21st century: Make Popsicles. Put another way, the company wants to freeze water at night in refrigerator-like boxes adjacent to commercial air conditioners and then thaw it during the day, when power demand is highest. This would theoretically allow AC-hungry commercial buildings in warm climates to cut energy use during heat waves, by shutting air conditioners down while still providing cool air to buildings from melting ice. After seven years of development and testing, the Windsor, Colo.-based company signed an agreement recently with the Southern California Public Power Authority here to deploy some 6,000 Popsicle-making units at 1,500 locations in the utility's service territory around Los Angeles. Ice Energy says the units, called Ice Bears, will lead to a 30 percent fuel reduction for the utility through avoided use of so-called peaker generation plants, which are only turned on when demand is highest.

Not so long ago, artists routinely made their own paints using all sorts of odd ingredients: clay, linseed oil, ground-up insects—whatever worked. It was a crude and rather ad hoc process, but the results were used to create some of the greatest paintings in the world. Today I and other scientists are developing our own special paints. We’re not trying to compete with Vermeer or Gauguin, though. We hope to create masterpieces of a more technical nature: optoelectronic components that will make for better photovoltaic cells, imaging sensors, and optical communications equipment. And we’re not mixing and matching ingredients quite so haphazardly. Instead, we’re using our blossoming understanding of the world of nanomaterials to design the constituents of our paints at the molecular level.

In what comes as a bit of a surprise, Fuji Soft Inc.’s new humanoid robot platform for hobbyists and researchers has been given the name PALRO (pal + robot).  Naturally we feel this name is a superb choice!  Sales to research institutions will begin on March 15th, 2010 with a general release following later in the year.  The robot combines Fuji Soft’s software prowess with an open architecture which will give developers plenty of room to experiment. PALRO stands 39.8cm (15″) tall and weighs 1.9kg (3.5 lbs), and here’s the good news: it costs 298,000 JPY ($3300 USD).  Considering PALRO has 20 DOF, a camera, 4 directional microphones, a speaker, LED arrays in its head and chest, 4 pressure sensors in each foot, 3-axis gyro sensor, an accelerometer, and an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU, it is priced very competitively.  A comparative robot kit like Vstone’s Robovie-PC for example, costs $1100 USD more and doesn’t have such a fancy exoskeleton.

March 19, 2010: When the sun sets on Saturday, March 20th, a special kind of night will fall across the Earth. It's an equal night. Or as an astronomer would say, "it's an equinox." It's the date when the sun crosses the celestial equator heading north. Spring begins in one hemisphere, autumn in the other. The day and night are of approximately equal length. To celebrate the occasion, Nature is providing a sky show. It begins as soon as the sky grows dark. The Moon materializes first, a fat crescent hanging about a third of the way up the western sky. Wait until the twilight blue fades completely black and you will see that the Moon is not alone. The Pleiades are there as well. The Moon and the Pleiades are having a close encounter of rare beauty. There's so little space between the two, the edge of the Moon will actually cover some of cluster's lesser stars. According to David Dunham of the International Occultation Timing Association, this is the best Moon-Pleiades meeting over the United States until the year 2023. Right: A similar Moon-Pleiades conjunction photographed by Marek Nikodem of Szubin, Poland, in July 2009.

Tiny semiconductor dots could lead to a new type of circuit based on magnetism rather than current flow. At least that’s the hope of researchers who’ve made the dots and are hoping to build them into a workable device. ”We want to make it into a so-called nonvolatile transistor,” says Kang Wang, head of the Device Research Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles. Such a ”spintronic” transistor would retain its logic state in the absence of current and require less power to switch a bit, reducing the electrical power required by a computer chip by as much as 99 percent. Wang’s research, supported in part by Intel, was published in March in the online version of Nature Materials. Where electronic transistors rely on the presence or absence of current to register the ones and zeros of digital logic, spintronic transistors depend on ”spin,” a quantum characteristic of the electron. Picture the electron as a rotating globe. When the north pole is pointing upward, that’s spin up; when pointing the other way, it’s spin down. When the spins of most electrons are aligned, the material is magnetic. When their spins are random, the material isn’t. An applied current can align or randomize the spins, allowing for spin-based switches.

The animal world has been a source of inspiration for many robotic designs as of late, as who better to ask about life-like movements than mother Nature herself? Up until now, though, these designs had been mostly focused on small critters, like cockroaches, and simulating properties such as adaptability and speed. But what happens when we start looking at bigger and stronger animals? Like, say, an elephant? Well, Festo’s Bionic Handling Assistant is what happens. This innovation might seem like just another robotic arm at first glance, but the video demonstrates quite vividly how this design is such a big improvement over previous versions. Modeled after the elephant’s mighty trunk, this arm possesses great dexterity, flexibility and strength; operating with smooth, yet firm motions, and can pick up and move any kind of object from one place to another. It’s FinGripper fingers give it “an unparalleled mass/payload ratio”, and it has no problem twisting, assembling and disassembling things, such as the experimental toy in the video.

In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency’s scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped. An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine. A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant. Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. “You watch them in nature, they’ll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece.”