Hasta La Gadget!

The Western World keeps cutting its science research budget because of the economic crisis. As China rises—funneling tons of money into science—our obtuse politicians don’t realize that, without pure research, they are sentencing us to irrelevance and oblivion. More »

Apple claims that its iPhone 4 “retina display” has pixels so small the human eye can’t distinguish one from the other. Researchers at the University of Michigan say they can beat that pixel density by an order of magnitude — and make screens that are simpler to make and more efficient to illuminate too.

The technology — called plasmonic nanophotonics — works a little like the rainbow, if light were refracted through nano-thin metal grates instead of raindrops. Vary the spacing between the grates, and white light appears in different colors. Instead of the multiple layers of glass, metal polarizers, and filter sheets in a conventional LCD, the polarizer is the color filter. The whole color component of the screen is a three-layer all-metal dielectric stack.

The energy savings are potentially tremendous. According to Michigan engineering professor expert Jay Guo, only about 5 percent of the backlight in an LCD screen actually reaches our eyes. This means we could use the technology in optical chip-to-chip communications, or even fiberoptics without the fiber. It could also be used to make high-efficiency, high-resolution projectors, or flexible color screens.

And yes — it does allow for the production of extremely tiny color pixels, less than 10 microns. That U of M logo in the first image above? It’s about 12 x 9 microns, or 1/6 the width of a human hair.

University of Michigan via R&D Magazine. Images courtesy of the University of Michigan and Apple.

See Also:

• Pictures: Kindle and iPad Screens Under Microscope
• iPhone 4's 'Retina' Display Claims Are False Marketing
• IPhone 4 'Retina Display' Suffering from Discolored Blobs
• Display Expert: iPhone 4 Resolution 'Significantly Lower' Than …
• Floating Nanosheets Could Be the Plywood of Nanotechnology

Electricity might not grow on trees, but it is freely available in the air — provided you know how to catch it. Such is the contention presented by Dr. Francesco Galembeck of Brazil’s University of Campinas at the 240th annual American Chemical Society shindig. He and his crew have shown how tiny particles of silica and aluminum phosphate become electrically charged when water vapor is passed over them. This aims to prove two things: firstly, that airborne water droplets do carry an electric charge, and secondly, that metals can be used to collect that charge. Detractors have pointed out that Dr. Galembeck’s team may be generating the droplets’ electrical charge by the act of pumping the air over the metals — which might imply you couldn’t practice this technique with still, humid air — while there’s also the rather large caveat that the little electricity they were able to collect from vapor was a hundred million times less than what you could obtain from a solar cell of equivalent size. Still, it’s another new door unto a potential alternative energy source and we don’t ever like having to close those.

Continue reading Airborne electricity is ripe for the picking, claim researchers

Airborne electricity is ripe for the picking, claim researchers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After Microsoft’s Surface multitouch table premiered, early implementations were limited: retail stores, hotels, restaurants, bored executives goofing off in board rooms, and university researchers modeling totally kickass Dungeons & Dragons games.

But why waste your time controlling virtual armies of NPC henchmen when you can control REAL armies of tiny robots? Or giant ones? That’s the Doctor Doom move. You don’t even need to peek at your WWDDD? bracelet from inside your hideous metal mask.

Nobody at the UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab (as far as I know) has a hideous metal mask. And they haven’t even built the robots yet — so this is still at the D&D level of virtual awesomeness/villainy, not cartoonish super-villainy.

But there’s important, amazing, yet simple tech at work in this proof-of-concept demo. The researchers use multitouch to send the robots scurrying around to execute commands, but also to pan and zoom a map of where they’re operating, create virtual subcontrollers, and display text and video data, all within the same interface.

The lab’s work focuses (among other things) on human-robot interaction, robot vision, interactive learning, and disaster response. The ease-of-use of multitouch controls is clearly valuable in all of those scenarios. As Evan Ackerman gushes at BotJunkie, “It’s not even that there’s anything that innovative going on here, strictly… It’s just that Surface is able to merge existing hardware and existing controls into a new interface, which makes all the difference.” Ackerman also notes that very little innovation in robotics research is happening at the UI level; the fact that a consumer/commercial product can be introduced on this end solves a slew of practical problems for existing robotics, not to mention potentially putting control of the technology in the hands/fingertips of many more people.

Now imagine if this research merged with the retail applications of Surface already in use. You go to a bar, touch a table, order a drink — and a robot navigates the room and brings it to you.

From UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab via the Microsoft Robotics Blog and BotJunkie.

See Also:

• D&D + Microsoft Surface = Unheard-of Levels of Radness
• First Look: Microsoft Milan Surface Computer — A Table That Knows What’s On It
• Microsoft to Install Surface Systems in AT&T Stores
• Microsoft Shows Off Surface in Sheraton Hotels
• Quadrocopters Work Together to Lift Loads, Destroy Mankind
• Robo Spiders Are Multilegged Mechanical Marvels
• Gallery: Robot Bartenders Sling Cocktails for Carbon-Based Drinkers

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For as spectacular as hydrogen fuel cells are on paper, they haven’t been able to replace combustion engines in vehicles. Or much of anything else, really. But thanks to Signe Kjelstrup at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, the tried-and-true fuel cell is getting a serious boost. Kjelstrup’s crew determined that by using less platinum in a cell, a substantial increase in efficiency and a significant decrease in cost could be achieved. The new design relies on an architecture that’s “modeled on the bronchial structure of the lungs to supply hydrogen and oxygen gas to their respective electrodes,” which is said to help “spread the gases more uniformly across the catalyst than current channel designs and provides a greater surface area so less platinum is needed.” It’s still early on in the discovery process, though, and there’s certainly no solid word on when this will reach a point where widespread implementation is feasible. Seventh-generation Prius, perhaps?

Lung-inspired hydrogen fuel cell skimps on platinum, sees efficiency boost originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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