Group items tagged

ESA involvement in device central to neutrino speed measurement

he drone of speakers who won't stop is an inevitable experience at conferences, meetings, cinemas and public libraries.  Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, both in Japan, present a radical solution: a speech jamming device that forces recalcitrant speakers into submission. 

...must...not...make...the...obvious...ACT...meeting...joke...

Unfortunately it won't work when it is most needed .... Read this: "Their tests also identify some curious phenomena. They say the gun is more effective when the delay varies in time and more effective against speech that involves reading aloud than against spontaneous monologue. Sadly, they report that it has no effect on meaningless sound sequences such as "aaaaarghhh".

Physicists in the US have made the first ultrathin flat lens. Thanks to its flatness, the device eliminates optical aberrations that occur in conventional lenses with spherical surfaces. As a result, the focusing power of the lens also approaches the ultimate physical limit set by the laws of diffraction.

Really nice indeed! The new flat ultrathin lens is different in that it is a nanostructured "metasurface" made of optically thin beam-shaping elements called optical antennas, which are separated by distances shorter than the wavelength of the light they are designed to focus. These antennas are wavelength-scale metallic elements that introduce a slight phase delay in a light ray that scatters off them. The metasurface can be tuned for specific wavelengths of light by simply changing the size, angle and spacing between the nanoantennas. "The antenna is nothing more than a resonator that stores light and then releases it after a short time delay," Capasso says. "This delay changes the direction of the light in the same way that a thick glass lens would." The lens surface is patterned with antennas of different shapes and sizes that are oriented in different directions. This causes the phase delays to be radially distributed around the lens so that light rays are increasingly refracted further away from the centre, something that has the effect of focusing the incident light to a precise point.

future of reading on mobile devices? probably not but still nice

Development of biodegradable batteries to power medical devices that you could inject into the human body, for example to do medical checkup, drug delivery etc

Evolutionary Robotics, as practised by biologists. Here's the link to John Long's book, mentioned in the article: Darwin's Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007QXVRZG/

The principle behind that is Nantenna.

this is fantastic!!!! waiting of somebody to make this happen since years The size of the gap is critical because it creates an ultra-fast tunnel junction between the rectenna's two electrodes, allowing a maximum transfer of electricity. The nanosized gap gives energized electrons on the rectenna just enough time to tunnel to the opposite electrode before their electrical current reverses and they try to go back. The triangular tip of the rectenna makes it hard for the electrons to reverse direction, thus capturing the energy and rectifying it to a unidirectional current. Impressively, the rectennas, because of their extremely small and fast tunnel diodes, are capable of converting solar radiation in the infrared region through the extremely fast and short wavelengths of visible light - something that has never been accomplished before. Silicon solar panels, by comparison, have a single band gap which, loosely speaking, allows the panel to convert electromagnetic radiation efficiently at only one small portion of the solar spectrum. The rectenna devices don't rely on a band gap and may be tuned to harvest light over the whole solar spectrum, creating maximum efficiency. Through atomic layer deposition, Willis has shown he is able to precisely coat the tip of the rectenna with layers of individual copper atoms until a gap of about 1.5 nanometers is achieved. The process is self-limiting and stops at 1.5 nanometer separation The size of the gap is critical because it creates an ultra-fast tunnel junction between the rectenna's two electrodes, allowing a maximum transfer of electricity. The nanosized gap gives energized electrons on the rectenna just enough time to tunnel to the opposite electrode before their electrical current reverses and they try to go back. The triangular tip of the rectenna makes it hard for the electrons to reverse direction, thus capturing the energy and rectifying it to a unidirectional current. Impressively, the rectennas, because of th

Waves of electrons have been bent backward in a sheet of graphene, allowing physicists to focus electrons the way a lens focuses light. Electrons coursing through a sheet of carbon atoms exhibited negative refraction, bending at angles not seen in nature. By exploiting this unusual bending, the researchers created a lenslike device to focus the electrons to a tiny point. The new technique could help physicists learn how to manipulate electrons in the tight confines of miniaturized electronic devices, where the particles often behave like waves.

"The mind reader is Gerwin Schalk, a 39-year-old biomedical scientist and a leading expert on brain-computer interfaces at the New York State Department of Health's Wads­worth Center at Albany Medical College. The 28Austrian-born Schalk, along with a handful of other researchers, is part of a $6.3 million U.S. Army project to establish the basic science required to build a thought helmet-a device that can detect and transmit the unspoken speech of soldiers, allowing them to communicate with one another silently." ...

This reminds me... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/

should we have another look at this type of technology?

This is about biological and technical hygromorphs, i.e. structures that change shape according to humidity. Next to pine cones, there is also a cool study on wheat awns which drill themselves into the soil just by daily variance of air humidity. Biomimetics would be passively controlled acutators or humidity driven valves in space station to open/close dehumidification devices.

Interesting, but only an abstract... do you have the full paper ?

Not yet. There is also some other nice mechanism of wheat awns and how they use changes in humidity to anchor in soil. Would maybe fit with the above mentioned work of oisin.

thin flexible sheets that can transmit electrical energy to nearby devices without the need for direct electrical contact.

reminds me of our small study a few years ago ... why didn't we come up with this idea?

Spectral dispersion of light on a finite-size surface plasmon polaritonic (SPP) crystal has been studied. The angular wavelength separation of one or more orders of magnitude higher than in other state-of-the-art wavelength-splitting devices available to

The vibrissae of rats (et al) are examined and transferred to robotic devices for orientation and tactile exploration.

Next astronaut suit: Electronic systems that offer elastic mechanical responses to high-strain deformations are of growing interest because of their ability to enable new biomedical devices and other applications whose requirements are impossible to satis