You’re filming a sports game. An argument breaks out between players, and you zoom in to get a closeup of the action. The crowd goes wild, shouting and booing. Now, you zoom the audio in to hear what the players are saying to each other, despite the din. Impossible? Not with Squarehead’s Audioscope.
Squarehead’s new system is like bullet-time for sound. 325 microphones sit in a carbon-fiber disk above the stadium, and a wide-angle camera looks down on the scene from the center of this disk. All the operator has to do is pinpoint a spot on the court or field using the screen, and the Audioscope works out how far that spot is from each of the mics, corrects for delay and then synchronizes the audio from all 315 of them. The result is a microphone that can pick out the pop of a bubblegum bubble in the middle of a basketball game, as you can see in this video.
The Audioscope is the invention of two Norwegian physicists Morgan Kjølerbakken and Vibeke Jahr. Speaking to New Scientist, Kjølerbakken says that “If we correct the audio arriving at three microphones then we have a signal that is three times as strong. Doing the same thing with 300 microphones can make a single conversation audible even in a stadium full of sports fan.”
Audio from all microphones is stored in separate channels, so you can even go back and listen in on any sounds later. Want to hear the whispered insult that caused one player to lose it and attack the other? You got it.
Catching taunts from foul-mouthed players is one application, but Audioscope could be used for more sinister purposes, too. Deployed at public gatherings, the super-mics could be zoomed in to eavesdrop on conversations between suspicious persons, or pretty much anyone the cops want to listen in on. Are you scared yet?
Two University of Manchester scientists were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their pioneering research on graphene, a one-atom-thick film of carbon whose strength, flexibility and electrical conductivity have opened up new horizons for pure physics research as well as high-tech applications.
Graphene Close-Ups
Graphene is one of the strongest, lightest and most conductive materials known to humankind. It’s also 97.3 percent transparent, but looks really cool under powerful microscopes. See our gallery of graphene images.
It’s a worthy Nobel, for the simple reason that graphene may be one of the most promising and versatile materials ever discovered. It could hold the key to everything from supersmall computers to high-capacity batteries.
Graphene’s properties are attractive to materials scientists and electrical engineers for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it might be possible to build circuits that are smaller and faster than what you can build in silicon.
But first: What is it, exactly?
Imagine “crystals one atom or molecule thick, essentially two-dimensional planes of atoms shaved from conventional crystals,” said Nobel winner Andre Geim in New Scientist. “Graphene is stronger and stiffer than diamond, yet can be stretched by a quarter of its length, like rubber. Its surface area is the largest known for its weight.”
Geim and his colleague (and former postdoctoral assistant) Konstantin Novoselov first produced graphene in 2004 by repeatedly peeling away graphite strips with adhesive tape to isolate a single atomic plane. They analyzed its strength, transparency, and conductive properties in a paper for Science the same year.
Super-Small Transistors
The Manchester team in 2008 created a 1-nanometer graphene transistor, only one atom thick and 10 atoms across. This is not only smaller than the smallest possible silicon transistor; Novoselov claimed that it could very well represent the absolute physical limit of Moore’s Law governing the shrinking size and growing speed of computer processors.
“It’s about the smallest you can get,” Novoselov told Wired Science. “From the point of view of physics, graphene is a goldmine. You can study it for ages.”
The energy applications of graphene are also extraordinarily rich. Texas’s Graphene Energy is using the film to create new ultracapacitators to store and transmit electrical power. Companies currently using carbon nanotubes to create wearable electronics — clothes that can power and charge electrical devices — are beginning to switch to graphene, which is thinner and potentially less expensive to produce. Much of the emerging research is devoted to devising more ways to produce graphene quickly, cheaply and in high quantities.
Optical Devices: Solar Cells and Flexible Touchscreens
A Cambridge University team argues in a paper in September’s Nature Photonicsthat the true potential of graphene lies in its ability to conduct light as well as electricity. Strong, flexible, light-sensitive graphene could improve the efficiency of solar cells and LEDs, as well as aiding in the production of next-generation devices like flexible touch screens, photodetectors and ultrafast lasers. In particular, graphene could replace rare and expensive metals like platinum and indium, performing the same tasks with greater efficiency at a fraction of the cost.
High-Energy Particle Physics
In pure science, according to Geim, graphene “makes possible experiments with high-speed quantum particles that researchers at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, can only dream of.” Because graphene is effectively only two-dimensional, electrons can move through its lattice structure with virtually no resistance. In fact, they behave like Heisenberg’s relative particles, with an effective resting mass of zero.
It’s slightly more complicated than this, but here’s a quick and dirty explanation. To have mass in the traditional sense, objects need to have volume; electrons squeezed through two-dimensional graphene have neither. In other words, the same properties that makes graphene such an efficient medium for storing and transmitting energy also demonstrate something fundamental about the nature of the subatomic universe.
Redemption sounds like the kind of credit card you would want with you at the Pearly Gates, ready to slip a bribe to the doorman, Saint Peter, to let you come inside. It is not. The Redemption is a payment device, cunningly disguised as a credit card.
The point of the redemption is to combine your actual credit card account with in-store points you earn for purchases. The device, which looks exactly like a regular credit card, has a couple of buttons on the front. Go into a store where you have sufficient points saved up and you can hit the Redemption button to pay with those points (hence the otherwise rather biblical name). If you choose to pay normally, press the other button. Whichever you choose, a light will blink on to tell you which option you picked. The sales clerk just swipes your card in the normal way.
The Redemption, from Dynamics Inc, will work with any magnetic-strip reader. When you pay with points, the new balance of points for that particular account is written back to the strip. The card can be used with multiple store accounts, meaning you can ditch all the plastic store-cards filling up your wallet.
The card has undergone trials with Citi Cards, and will expand next month. The Redemption joins a rather more essential smart credit card called Hidden. Announced this past September, the Hidden has five buttons on its face. The owner must key in a PIN to reveal a hidden section of the card-number and simultaneously activate the card.
The Redemption is clearly a missed opportunity. It should have been rolled out in churches and used to pay money for the collection during mass. For every dollar donated, you’d get a point that could be redeemed when you finally head upstairs.
The Longreach Buoyancy Deployment System has just won the James Dyson Award. Its dull name rather obscures just how cool it is. The Longreach is a bazooka that fires life-belts up to 500-feet, targeting drowning-victims and saving their lives.
Using the Longreach, a rescuer can remain safely on ship or shore and deploy multiple life-belts at the press of a button. The “Rescue Packages” are made from expandable foam, and stay in fireable bullet shapes until they hit the water, whereupon they puff up into a circular buoyancy aid with a gap at one side. The resulting device also has lights so rescuers can find you in the dark.
The system is designed to be small and reliable, and as foam is used instead of inflateable tubes, puncturing at any stage is impossible. The launcher also comes equipped with flares so the operator can light up the night to better target victims. The Longreach is about to go into field tests with Surf Life Saving NSW, Australia.
The James Dyson Award, run by the inventor of the see-through vacuum-cleaner, was created to “encourage and inspire the next generation of design engineers.” It also has an insanely simple, and yet extremely difficult brief: “Design something that solves a problem.” The Longreach certainly does that.
SiGNa’s fuel-cell powered electric bike will run for 60 miles on a single charge. More impressive is that it runs on water.
The bike itself is really just a showcase for the fuel-cell tech from the energy company. The cells uses sodium silicide in the form of a sand-like powder. Add this to water and it “instantly creates hydrogen gas.” This hydrogen is then used to generate electricity. Because no hydrogen is stored, the cells are safe, and excess electricity is stored in batteries for an extra boost when you get to a hill. The cartridges are hot-swappable and are fully recyclable.
The main advantage (apart from the safety aspect) is that you can just swap-in a new cartridge when you need it, instead of having to stop to recharge (the units weigh around 1.5-pounds each, less than most batteries). You also get better range: a battery-powered bike typically gets 20 to 30-miles on a charge. The downside is infrastructure: you can find a power-outlet pretty much anywhere in the world. Try finding a compatible fuel-cell in a backwater general-store.
The current units can be designed to put out anything from 1-Watt to 1-Kilowatt. Their futire is probably not in electric bikes but in bigger transportation. Imagine driving your car into the gas-station, popping the hood and swapping in a fuel-cell, just Like Doc Brown drops a tube of plutonium into his time-traveling DeLorean.
Pre-orders for the cells are being taken by SiGNa. For a bike, you’ll probably have a long wait. Full, technical press release below.
SiGNa Unveils The Most Energy Dense Power Solution For Electric Bicycles Power system produces clean, safe and portable hydrogen power – zero air pollution
NEW YORK – October 5, 2010 — The race to create a hydrogen-based portable power platform sped forward when SiGNa Chemistry, Inc. demonstrated its new ultra-high-performance range extender at the Interbike International Trade Expo. This ground-breaking power platform produces hydrogen gas instantaneously and then converts the hydrogen to electricity using a low-cost fuel cell. The extender creates up to 200W of continuous power; excess energy is stored in a lithium battery for use in more energy-intensive acceleration and hill climbing conditions. A unique attribute is the high level of inherent safety as demonstrated by 3 days of continuous operation at Interbike. The hydrogen is produced at low pressure (50% the pressure of a soda can) and the only emission is water vapor.
For the rider, the extender triples the range of their e-bike with minimal additional weight. Existing e-bikes have a range of up to 20 miles without pedaling; SiGNa’s system reaches up to 60 miles without pedaling for each carried fuel cartridge. The energy density of each SiGNa cartridge is more than 1,000 Watt-hours/kilogram compared to advanced Li-ion batteries at approximately 65 Watt-hours/kilogram. The fuel cartridges are hot-swappable, lightweight (< 1.5 pounds) and inexpensive, making this a realistic solution for any e-bike owner.
“The extender uses inherently-safe reactive metal powders to produce electric power. By integrating SiGNa’s hydrogen-generation technology with an e-bike, we have demonstrated an unprecedented power solution with no greenhouse gas emissions,” says Michael Lefenfeld, President and CEO of SiGNa Chemistry, Inc. SiGNa’s range extender was demonstrated on a Pedego® electric bicycle, but it is directly compatible with most electric bicycle models.
Sodium silicide makes this portable power system possible. Sodium silicide is a safe, air-stable reactive metal powder that instantly creates hydrogen gas when it comes into contact with water. Any type of water can be used including potable water, polluted water, sea water, or even urine. Once the fuel cartridge is depleted, the rider is left with an environmentally-safe byproduct (sodium silicate) that is fully contained in a disposable or reusable cartridge.
SiGNa has adapted its award-winning powders for use in many industrial applications including pharmaceuticals and oil refining. Since sodium silicide is safe, inexpensive and easily transportable, the portable power market is a natural fit. Says Lefenfeld, “SiGNa’s portable-power system overcomes two key challenges with using hydrogen for transportation applications – adequate hydrogen storage and safe transport. SiGNa has begun by developing a system that provides power to e-bikes; we envision this platform will become a primary or back up power source for many transportation applications.” SiGNa’s portable power platform can be utilized in any standalone application that require from 1 W to 1 kW of power including generators, lawn mowers, golf carts, and consumer electronics. Pre-orders are being taken now at sales@signachem.com.
When I saw this Raytheon XOS 2 suit, I immediately thought of the scene in Iron Man 2 where a poor “volunteer” soldier is almost broken in two, his body snapped and wrung by an experimental exoskeleton he is wearing. So you can see how surprised I was to see Agent Phil Coulson from Iron Man wearing it in this YouTube video.
The XOS 2 is an upgrade to the original XOS built for military use by contractor Raytheon. It is lighter, faster and uses half the power of the XOS, and – according to one of the uninjured test-soldiers – lets you press 200-pounds or do pushups with 150-pounds on your back without even feeling it. Check this thing out:
While the suit is clearly perfect for fighting, when it makes it into service in five years it will be used just like Ripley’s power-loader in the movie Aliens. A tethered, full-body XOS would be used for loading weapons and supplies (and, of course, fighting Alien queens in airlocks). A pants- only version, encircling legs and waist, could be used in the field to help troops carry heavy loads.
After seeing that soldier twisted like a pretzel in Iron Man 2, I have had an irrational fear of exoskeletons. But I’d love to take this one out for a spin. Imagine doing sports with this thing: you’d slug every ball out over the stadium walls.
For more on exoskeletons in the military in general, and suspiciously timely celebrity appearances in particular, check out the coverage over at our sister blog Danger Room.
A recent Apple patent and a strongly worded report from the National Research Council suggest that the future of biometrics lies with personalization, not security.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week granted Apple a patent for biometric-sensor handheld devices that recognize a user by the image of his or her hand. In the not-too-distant future, anyone in the house could pick up an iOS device — or a remote control or camera — and have personalized settings queued up just for them.
The patent (which Apple first applied for in 2005) protects handheld devices with one or more “touch sensors” — buttons, touchscreens or other interfaces — on any of the device’s surfaces. These sensors can take a pixelized image of a user’s hand, match it to a corresponding image on file, and configure the device’s software and user profile accordingly.
It’s a very different use of biometrics than we’ve seen in the movies. Hand and retina scanners have been touted for years as a futuristic gatekeepers to high-security buildings. This is usually a much-embellished version of their real-world use by businesses and government agencies for whom secrecy is a big deal. In the wider world, tiny fingerprint scanners have been built into laptops, but they aren’t widely used for the simple reason that they don’t work reliably enough.
But while they might be insufficient for security, biometrics might work just fine for personalization. Suppose my family shares a future-generation iPad that supports multiple user profiles and a version of this sensor technology. When my wife or I pick it up, the mail application displays each of our inboxes separately. When our young son picks it up, only games and other approved applications are available. If guests or intruders pick it up, a guest profile would make none of your personal information immediately available to them.
Now, an important caveat: The personal-profile dimension of this technology would frankly be stronger than the security implications. You could outwit a 3-year-old, but not a determined hacker. You could hide a sensitive e-mail from a snooping house guest, but not a practiced identity or information thief.
This “soft security” approach may actually be the right approach for technology companies to take with biometrics. Last week the National Research Council issued a report (sponsored by the CIA, Darpa and the Department of Homeland Security, among others) on the state of the art of automated biometric-recognition security. The report argues that existing technologies as implemented are inherently fallible, and that more research and better practices are needed before they can be relied upon in high-security contexts.
Joseph N Pato, HP Labs distinguished technologist and chair of the “Whither Biometrics?” committee that wrote the report, wrote that we’ve been misled by spy-movie fantasies about palm-and-retina-scanning doors: “While some biometric systems can be effective for specific tasks, they are not nearly as infallible as their depiction in popular culture might suggest.”
Thinking for a moment about Apple’s user-sensitive iPad shows the limitations of biometric recognition systems. What if I put my hands in the wrong place, or can’t get the device to load the proper profile? What happens when my son grows up and his hands get bigger? Image-based recognition systems have to be probabilistic, with a certain amount of give, or they won’t work at all.
In fact, when the security thresholds are set too high, the committee found that the sheer number of false alarms led users to ignore them altogether — definitely a dangerous result, but one familiar to anyone who’s disabled an uncooperative smoke alarm or software “security feature.” And even in such high-security cases, an individual’s biometric traits can be publicly known or accessed, in much more prosaic and less gruesome ways than the cinematic fantasy of cutting off a hand or pulling out an eyeball.
Nope — the biometric future probably isn’t a world of impregnable security corridors protected by perfect technology that only the perfect hack can defeat. Instead, it’s a media player that — 90 percent of the time — knows your son likes Curious George more than your Office spreadsheets. Actually, that isn’t too bad.
Meet the Levytator, the world’s first escalator that can go around corners. Thanks to its curved, interlocking steps, the Levytator can snake across hillsides, departure lounges and shopping malls in any shape the architect likes.
It gets better. Normal escalators runs the steps back up or down by pulling them underneath the steps you’re standing on. The Levytator, as you can see in the video, has all of its steps exposed at all times, with the same chain looping around for a descent, giving one escalator instead of two. Furthermore, “The steps can follow any path upwards, flatten and straighten out, and descend once more, all with passengers on board.” This opens up the possibility of a moving theme-park tour, for example.
The patented design was invented by Professor Jack Levy of the City University, London. I wonder at which point the Professor realized that combining his name with the word escalator would be both inevitable and awesome?
There are a couple of problems. One, as pointed out in a rare, lucid YouTube comment, is getting the moving handrail to follow the bendy course of the steps. The other is a human trouble. If you have ever been on an escalator that flattens out momentarily mid-climb, then you’ll know it can be quite disorientating. Add swooping curves into the mix and you might get a lot of dizzy, tumbling passengers.
Aman Behal’s automated robotic arm functioned perfectly. Outfitted with sensors that could “see” objects, grasp them with enough force to hold but not crush them, and return them to the user, it easily outperformed the same arm under manual control on every quantitative measurement.
Except one. The arm’s users — patients with spinal cord injuries in an Orlando hospital — didn’t like it. It was too easy.
“Think about the Roomba,” Behal told Wired.com. “People like robots, and they like them to work automatically. But if you had to watch and supervise the Roomba while it worked, you’d get frustrated pretty quickly. Or bored.”
This wasn’t what Behal had expected. This was the new sensor’s system first time in the field; the user satisfaction survey was supposed to be one more data point, secondary to measuring the performance of the device itself. But it made his team rethink their entire project.
Behal’s arm is just one in a long line of robotic arms aimed at giving paraplegics and quadriplegics greater freedom and mobility. Recent advances have made robot arms far more sensitive, powerful, and realistic than ever before. In many cases the enhancements depend on software that allows the robot arms to take simple commands (or even signals from the user’s brain) and translate them into complex movements involving multiple motors without requiring their users to specify the exact movements of each servo. But in this study, Behal found that there’s such a thing as too much automation.
Behal, an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, had initially used the arm in a 2006 study at the University of Pennsylvania funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. In addition to weakening physical control, MS often impairs attention and memory, and the complexity of the arm’s controls overwhelmed them. At that time, the arm’s sensors and AI were much more limited, and users were mostly frustrated by its complicated controls.
For these patients, according to Behal, something that might seem as simple as scratching their heads was a prolonged struggle. They needed something that took the guesswork of movement, rotation, and force out of the equation.
The quadriplegics at Orlando Health were the opposite. They were cognitively high-functioning, and some had experience with computers or video games. All had ample experience using assistive technology. Regardless of the extent of their disability or whether they were using a touchscreen, mouse, joystick, or voice controls, they preferred using the arm on manual. The more experience they had with tech, the happier they were.
It didn’t matter that the arm performed faster and more accurately when it was fully automated. Users were actually more forgiving of the arm when they were piloting it. If the arm made a mistake on automatic mode, they panned it. Harshly. (“You see a big vertical spike downward,” when that happened, Behal said.) On manual mode, the users learned how to operate it better — and how to explain their problems with the device to someone else.
To users accustomed to navigating the world in a wheelchair — and frequently having to explain how their chair worked to others — this made the arm both more familiar and more useful. It felt less like an alien presence, and more like a tool: a natural extension of the body and the will.
This feeling is essential for anyone’s satisfaction using technology, but particularly so for disabled users, according to John Bricout, Behal’s collaborator and the associate dean for Research and Community Outreach at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work.
“If we’re too challenged, we get angry and frustrated. But if we aren’t challenged enough, we get bored,” said Bricout. He’s seen this repeatedly with both disabled and older adults.
In an interview with Wired.com, he expanded on this, drawing on psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of flow: “We stay engaged when our capabilities are matched by our challenges and our opportunities,” Bricout said. If that balance tilts too far to one direction, we get anxious; if it tilts to the other, we get bored. Match them, and we’re at our happiest, most creative, and most productive.
Behal and Bricout hadn’t anticipated, for example, that users operating the arm using the manual mode would begin to show increased physical functionality.
“There’s rehabilitation potential here,” Bricout said. Thinking through multiple steps to coordinate and improve physical actions “activated latent physical and cognitive resources… It makes you rethink what rehabilitation itself might mean.”
For now, Behal, Bricout and their team plan on repeating their study with a larger group of users to see if they can replicate their results. They’re also going back to users with MS, and perhaps traumatic brain injuries, early next year. Colleagues at other institutions are experimenting with the arms with even more diverse disabled populations.
The engineering team has already given the robotic arm a “voice” that announces its actions and makes it feel more responsive and less alien, even on automatic mode. They’re revamping the software interface again, including exploring the possibility of adding haptic feedback, so users can feel when the robotic arm can grasp an object — or the user’s body itself. If you’re going to scratch your head, the fingertips benefit from touch almost as much.
“You have to listen to users,” Behal said. “If they don’t like using the technology, they won’t. Then it doesn’t matter how well it does its job.”
In the latest episode of “stop teaching them so much,” scientists have created a humanoid robot that teaches itself how to accurately hit a target with a bow and arrow.
The cute, childlike robot, named iCub, was designed by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology. Armed with a bow, an arrow, a cute (if politically incorrect) Native American headdress and a complicated computer algorithm, the robot learns from his missed shots iteratively, until he makes the bull’s-eye.
The task of firing an arrow, the researchers say, was picked for its inherent and obvious reward, and simultaneous marriage of motor control with image processing. Nothing to do with arming a bunch of human-hating robots to the teeth, allegedly.
ICub uses a learning algorithm called ARCHER, or Augmented Reward Chained Regression, which implements a camera to process the bull’s-eye image, and his previously fluffed attempts, to figure out the perfect angle, force and trajectory to make the winning shot.
The first iteration of iCub hit the bull’s-eye, standing three and a half meters from the target, in eight attempts. Here’s hoping the next few iterations don’t whittle it down to two or three trials while replacing the bow with a shotgun.
It’s the latest robot at the technology institute in Italy that learns complicated tasks through a series of iterative trial-and-error attempts. Earlier this year, the same institute taught a Barrett WAM 7 robotic arm to flip pancakes. That one took a slightly more lengthy 50 trials to master.
The archery-mastering iCub will be presented at the Humanoids 2010 conference in Tennessee this December. According to the conference’s program, he’ll be joined by a passenger carrying a biped, musical conducting robots, a Mini-Humanoid Pianist and a robot that can play table tennis.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
