It’s been almost a year since Bill Gates put out his $100,000 call for better, high-tech condoms, and we haven’t found a new defacto standard yet. But Firaz Peer and Andrew Quitmeyer of Georgia Tech have a potential solution, if you’re OK with putting electrodes on your manparts.
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In the race to create a better battery, scientists have gazed longingly at silicon, prized for its ability to hold copious energy during charging. The material has a significant drawback, however: it likes to expand during said charging, causing it to eventually crack and become useless. However, scientists at Stanford’s SLAC laboratory have developed silicon electrodes that repair themselves, inspired by — of all things — the latest research into robotic skin. They created a silicon polymer with weak chemical bonds which attract each other when the material cracks, allowing it to regain its shape in a few hours (as pictured above). The team managed a respectable 100 discharge cycles with a battery that used the material, a promising start but still far from their goal of 3,000 cycles for an electric vehicle. You can add that to the growing pile of promising battery tech that may amount to something, some day — but at least the odds keep getting better.
Filed under: Misc, Peripherals, Alt
Via: Forbes
Source: Nature
Some would say the internet already lets us share every minute detail of our thoughts, much to our followers’ dismay. Duke University isn’t deterred by our behavior — if anything, it just took oversharing literally by connecting two rats’ minds in an experiment, first in a lab and ultimately online. Electrodes attached to the brain of a host “encoder” rat in Brazil processed the motor-oriented mental activity for a desired behavior, such as pressing a lever on cue, and converted it into a signal that was then received by a “decoder” rat as far away as Duke’s US campus. The majority of the time, the decoder rat performed the same action as the encoder. Researchers also found that rewarding the encoder alongside the decoder created a virtuous loop, as treating the first rat for a job well done focused its attention and improved the signal strength.
We’re not sure that Vulcans would endorse this kind of mind meld, though: apart from immediately depriving the decoder rat of self-control, prolonged testing led to the same rodent developing additional sympathetic reactions to the encoder. There’s also concerns that the test was too binary and didn’t reflect the complexity of the whole brain. All the same, Duke’s study is proof enough that we can export brainwaves in a meaningful way.
Via: Discovery News
Source: Nature
Those wearing bionic hands and similar prostheses often suffer a frustrating disconnect when they can touch an object but can’t feel it, even if they’re using direct neural control. The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and allies in Project TIME have developed a hand that could clear that psychological hurdle. The design implants electrodes directly in key nerves that not only allow motor input, but deliver real sensory feedback from the artificial appendage — including needle pokes, much to the test subject’s chagrin. An early trial (seen above) kept the enhanced hand separate from the wearer and was limited to two sensations at once, but an upcoming trial will graft the hand on to a tester’s arm for a month, with sensations coming from across much of the simulated hand. EPFL hopes to have a fully workable unit ready to test in two years’ time, which likely can’t come soon enough for amputees wanting more authentic physical contact.
Filed under: Science
Source: Project TIME, The Independent
You could monitor your sleep using the science of actigraphy but, as we’ve learned, accelerometers don’t always make for the best slumber trackers. The real deal stuff, used by scientists, requires all sorts of electrodes, which are a tad cumbersome and tend to yank out hair. Sony is proposing a system that removes the glue and sticks the sensors in your pillow. This is according to a patent application the company filed that proposes, among other things, an advanced alarm clock that monitors brain waves to detect when you enter and leave REM sleep. One particular example has it guiding users though an efficient power nap, by starting a timer once they’ve started dozing and only waking them once they’ve come out of a deeper sleep state. The proposed alarm could take any number of forms, from a buzzer, to a flashing light or bed shaking motor. To dig through the application for yourself hit up the source link.
Filed under: Sony
Source: USPTO
Women have the ultimate trump card when it comes to dealing with pain: they give birth. And since men have no idea what giving birth even feels like, we really don’t know how painful it really is. Maybe it’s all a big conspiracy (kidding!). Maybe it’s not that bad (of course it is!). Well, two men attached themselves to a machine that simulates labor pains and um, it ain’t pretty. It looks torturously gruesome. Thank you women everywhere. Thank you. More »
One of the last times we saw the concept of a self-recharging battery, it was part of a high-minded Nokia patent whose ideas still haven’t seen the light of day. Researchers at Georgia Tech are more inclined to put theory into practice. Starting from a regular lithium-ion coin battery, the team has replaced the usual divider between electrodes with a polyvinylidene difluoride film whose piezoelectric nature produces a charging action inside that gap through just a little pressure, with no outside voltage required to make the magic happen. The developers have even thumbed their noses at skeptics by very literally walking the walk — slipping the test battery under a shoe sole gives it a proper dose of energy with every footstep. At this stage, the challenge mostly involves ramping up the maximum power through upgrades such as more squeezable piezoelectrics. Georgia Tech hasn’t progressed so far as to have production plans in mind; it’s nonetheless close enough that we could see future forms of wearable computing that rarely need an electrical pick-me-up.
Filed under: Wearables, Science
Georgia Tech develops self-charging battery that marches to the owner’s beat originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 04:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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So Apple could be working on an iPhone with a thinner display, you say. Look what we have here, possibly in the nick of time: it’s a newly granted Apple patent for a screen with in-cell touch, where the LCD and touch recognition are integrated into one panel instead of stacking up in separate layers. Apple’s implementation would slim things down by either having electrodes share duties, both driving the display and taking finger input, or stuffing two electrodes into each pixel to accomplish the same goal. The net effect isn’t just one of squeezing a device into a thinner chassis; the company also envisions costs coming down by reducing the number of parts and streamlining the manufacturing process. As envisioned, the screen looks like an ideal fit for a significant revamp of Apple’s mobile display technology, although we’d be careful about assuming that this or any in-cell touch implementation is a lock for potentially imminent iOS hardware. Apple first filed the patent in early June 2007, before the original iPhone had even marched into a retailer — display technology has come a long way since then.
Filed under: Cellphones, Displays
Apple gets patent for in-cell touch display with impeccable timing originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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