Really can't even imagine this thing but now its possible using ultrasonic waves

Ultrasound scans are often a standard part of prenatal care. Recent advances in technology now offer clinicians and parents more detailed 3D images of the fetus in real-time. Three-dimensional scanning sends in sound waves from a few different angles and a composite still image is produced that shows surface depth and volume. Now another dimension has been added – time. Real-time viewing capabilities have been added into the equation by 4D ultrasound techniques, so that live images of the fetus moving around can be seen on the screen.

As the long-term effects of repeated ultrasound exams on the fetus are still a bit of a gray area, how often such things take place is generally up to the healthcare provider. Shiue looked into the risks and concerns associated with ultrasound scanning while researching her thesis project at the University of South Wales, and told Gizmag that "in compliance with ultrasonic regulations outlined by the British Medical Ultrasound Society, I have proposed limitations on the usage of my device to a fixed frequency (10 MHz), maximum scanning time (20 minutes every 24 hours), and countdown time be apparent on screen with friendly notifications, not 'warnings'."

The parents themselves, working with their healthcare provider, would be likely to impose their own limits on the use of such a device – one interviewee revealing to the designer that a likely usage window would be 5 to 10 minutes before bedtime, to coincide with a period of high fetal activity.

PreVue would utilize upcoming e-textile technologies to incorporate the viewing screen and electronics into the device. Recent innovations like the bendy micro-LED arrays created by researchers at the University of Illinois and the work undertaken by the STELLA project offer only a glimpse of things to come. It shouldn't be too long before such things start to make regular military, medical or commercial appearances.

The device would also operate in two image modes – one for general diagnostic purposes and the other with enhanced resolution for more domestic settings. Although its primary use would be as a means of bonding enhancement rather than medical examination, Shiue says that "the user should still seek professional advice if anything is uncertain."

While safety concerns surrounding the use of ultrasound for prenatal care continue to be raised, the fact is that 4D scanning is being offered now and the personal approach offered by a device like PreVue may well be a viable alternative to the impersonal – and perhaps stressful – conditions of an examination room.

In the meantime, PreVue has been entered into the 2011 Australian Design Award/James Dyson Award competition.

Festo creates SmartBird flying robotic seagull

Festo has added to its robotic menagerie with the creation of a robotic seagull that weighs just 450 g (15.87 oz) and boasts a wingspan of 1.96 m (6.4 ft). Dubbed the SmartBird, the ultralight flying robot was inspired by the herring gull and can take off, fly and land autonomously, without the help of any additional drive systems.

In creating the SmartBird, Festo says it has succeeded in deciphering the flight of birds. The robot's wings not only beat up and down, with a lever mechanism increasing the degree of deflection to increase from the torso to the wing tip, but also twist at specific angles along their length in the same way that a real bird's do so that the leading edge is directed upwards during the upward stroke.

Directional control is achieved through the opposing movement of the robot's head and torso sections, which is synchronized by means of two electric motors and cables. This enables it to bend aerodynamically, with simultaneous weight displacement, and is responsible for the SmartBird's agility and maneuverability.

As with a real bird, the SmartBird's tail isn't just for show either. It produces lift and functions as both a pitch elevator and yaw rudder. In addition to stabilizing the robot in a similar way to an aircraft's conventional vertical stabilizer, the tail also tilts to initiate left and right turns and rotates about the longitudinal axis to produce yaw.

Packed inside the SmartBird's torso are the battery, engine and transmission, the crank transmission and control and regulation electronics. Wing position and torsion can be monitored via two-way ZigBee protocol radio communication and can be adjusted and optimized in real time during flight.

Festo says developing the SmartBird has provided insights that will help it in a variety of areas. The robot's minimal use of materials and lightweight construction will help increase efficiencies in resource and energy consumption, while the functional integration of its coupled drive units have provided ideas the company says it can transfer to the development of hybrid drive technology. Additionally, analysis of its flow characteristics during development has provided insights into ways to optimize future designs. Another plus is that it won't try and steal your chips at the beach.

Via IEEE Spectrum

New battery technology may allow for complete recharging within minutes

 

Of all the criticisms of electric vehicles, probably the most commonly-heard is that their batteries take too long to recharge – after all, limited range wouldn't be such a big deal if the cars could be juiced up while out and about, in just a few minutes. Well, while no one is promising anything, new batteries developed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign do indeed look like they might be a step very much in the right direction. They are said to offer all the advantages of capacitors and batteries, in one unit.

"This system that we have gives you capacitor-like power with battery-like energy," said U Illinois' Paul Braun, a professor of materials science and engineering. "Most capacitors store very little energy. They can release it very fast, but they can't hold much. Most batteries store a reasonably large amount of energy, but they can't provide or receive energy rapidly. This does both."

The speed at which conventional batteries are able to charge or discharge can be dramatically increased by changing the form of their active material into a thin film, but such films have typically lacked the volume to be able to store a significant amount of energy. In the case of Braun's batteries, however, that thin film has been formed into a three-dimensional structure, thus increasing its storage capacity.

Batteries equipped with the 3D film have been demonstrated to work normally in electrical devices, while being able to charge and discharge 10 to 100 times faster than their conventional counterparts.

To make the three-dimensional thin film, the researchers coated a surface with nanoscale spheres, which self-assembled into a lattice-like arrangement. The spaces between and around the spheres were then coated with metal, after which the spheres were melted or dissolved away, leaving the metal as a framework of empty pores. Electropolishing was then used to enlarge the pores and open up the framework, after which it was coated with a layer of the active material – both lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride batteries were created.

The system utilizes processes already used on a large scale, so it would reportedly be easy to scale up. It could also be used with any type of battery, not just Li-ion and NiMH.

The implications for electric vehicles are particularly exciting. "If you had the ability to charge rapidly, instead of taking hours to charge the vehicle you could potentially have vehicles that would charge in similar times as needed to refuel a car with gasoline," Braun said. "If you had five-minute charge capability, you would think of this the same way you do an internal combustion engine. You would just pull up to a charging station and fill up."

Braun and his team believe that the technology could be used not only for making electric cars more viable, but also for allowing phones or laptops to be able to recharge in seconds or minutes. It could also result in high-power lasers or defibrillators that don't need to warm up before or between pulses.

For the first time in history, two planets have been discovered that share the same orbit.

The pair of planets are part of a four-planet solar system called KOI-730. They orbit a sun-like star, one 60 degrees ahead of the other, with a full revolution taking 9.8 days. The reason this phenomenon is possible is because there are two gravitational "sweet spots" called Lagrange points along a planetary body's orbit where another body can share the same orbit. These points are located 60 degrees ahead of and 60 degrees behind the orbiting object.
This even occurs within our solar system - group of asteroids called Trojans inhabit the Lagrange points of Jupiter's orbit! The existence of this pair of planets also supports an existing theory that the moon was formed by the collision of the Earth and a Mars-sized planet that once shared its orbit.

Researchers demonstrate self-repairing chip

As chips continue to get smaller, the technological possibilities just get larger. One of the trade-offs of miniaturization, however, is that smaller things are also often more fragile and less dependable. Anticipating a point at which chips will become too tiny to maintain their current level of resilience, a team of four companies and two universities in The Netherlands, Germany, and Finland have created what they say could be the solution – a chip that monitors its own performance, and redirects tasks as needed.

"Because of the rapidly growing transistor density on chips, it has become a real challenge to ensure high system dependability," said Hans Kerkhoff of The Netherlands' University of Twente, and part of the CRISP (Cutting-edge Reconfigurable ICs for Stream Processing) consortium. "The solution is not to make non-degradable chips, it's to make architectures that can degrade while they keep functioning, which we call graceful degradation."

In order to make that graceful degradation possible, the CRISP chip incorporates multiple cores. Different tasks are assigned to different cores, by a built-in resource manager. The connections of those cores are continuously tested, and when a fault is detected, the task assigned to that core is simply reallocated to another one.

Although the chip itself isn't actually any stronger, it can function at full capacity for a longer period of time.

CRISP's self-testing, self-repairing chip was recently demonstrated at the DATE2011 conference in Grenoble, France.

Japan earthquake may have shortened length of days and shifted Earth’s axis

Using a complex model to perform a theoretical calculation based on a U.S. Geological Survey, Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has determined that by changing the distribution of the Earth's mass, the earthquake that devastated Japan last Friday should have sped up the Earth's rotation, resulting in a day that is about 1.8 microseconds (1.8 millionths of a second) shorter.

The calculations, which will likely change as the data on the Japan quake is further refined, have also been used to examine the effects of other recent quakes. Gross estimated that last year's 8.8 earthquake in Chile shortened the length of a day by about 1.26 microseconds, while similar calculations revealed the 9.1 magnitude Sumatran quake of 2004 shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds. Just how much an earthquake affects the Earth's rotation depends on the magnitude of the quake, its locations and details of how the fault slipped.

Gross's calculations also indicate the Japan quake should have shifted the position of the Earth's figure axis by about 17 cm (6.69 in), towards 133 degrees east longitude. Not to be confused with the Earth's north-south axis, the figure axis is that about which the Earth's mass is balanced. While the slight shift will cause the Earth to wobble a bit differently as it rotates, it won't cause a shift of Earth's axis in space, which can only be affected by external forces such as the gravitational pull of the sun, moon or planets.

Gross points out that the changes to the Earth's rotation and shift of its axis aren't anything to be worried about. "Earth's rotation changes all the time as a result of not only earthquakes, but also the much larger effects of changes in atmospheric winds and oceanic currents," he said. "Over the course of a year, the length of the day increases and decreases by about a millisecond, or about 550 times larger than the change caused by the Japanese earthquake. The position of Earth's figure axis also changes all the time, by about one meter (3.3 feet) over the course of a year, or about six times more than the change that should have been caused by the Japan quake."

Although scientists are able to measure the larger effects of the atmosphere and ocean on the Earth's rotation, the changes due to earthquakes have been too small to measure as the computed change in the length of a day caused by earthquakes is much smaller than the accuracy with which scientists can currently measure changes in the length of a day.

However, the effects from the 9.0 magnitude Japan quake, which is the fifth largest since 1900, may actually be large enough for scientists to observe. This is because the position of the figure axis can be measured to an accuracy of about five cm (two inches), so the 17 cm shift from the Japan quake may be observable if the scientists can adequately remove the larger effects of the atmosphere and ocean from the equation.

Disposable endoscopic camera is the size of a grain of salt

Tiny video cameras mounted on the end of long thin fiber optic cables, commonly known as endoscopes, have proven invaluable to doctors and researchers wishing to peer inside the human body. Endoscopes can be rather pricey, however, and like anything else that gets put inside peoples' bodies, need to be sanitized after each use. A newly-developed type of endoscope is claimed to address those drawbacks by being so inexpensive to produce that it can be thrown away after each use. Not only that, but it also features what is likely the world's smallest complete video camera, which is just one cubic millimeter in size.

The prototype endoscope was designed at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration, in collaboration with Awaiba GmbH and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering.

Ordinarily, digital video cameras consist of a lens, a sensor, and electrical contacts that relay the data from the sensor. Up to 28,000 sensors are cut out from a silicon disc known as a wafer, after which each one must be individually wired up with contacts and mounted to a lens.

In Fraunhofer's system, contacts are added to one side of the sensor wafer while it's still all in one piece. That wafer can then be joined face-to-face with a lens wafer, after which complete grain-of-salt-sized cameras can be cut out from the two joined wafers. Not only is this approach reportedly much more cost-effective, but it also allows the cameras to be smaller and more self-contained – usually, endoscopic cameras consist of a lens at one end of the cable, with a sensor at the other.

The new camera has a resolution of 62,500 pixels, and it transmits its images via an electrical cable, as opposed to an optical fiber. Its creators believe it could be used not only in medicine, but also in fields such as automotive design, where it could act as an aerodynamic replacement for side mirrors, or be used to monitor drivers for signs of fatigue.

They hope to bring the device to market next year.

New technique developed to identify authors of anonymous emails

 

Concordia University professor, Benjamin Fung, has developed an effective new technique to determine the authorship of anonymous emails (Image: Concordia University)

 

 

There might be many harmless reasons for sending anonymous emails – confessing your undying love for someone, seeking anonymous advice, or simply playing a joke on a friend – but there are also plenty of harmful reasons – making threats against someone, distributing child pornography or sending viruses, just to name a few. While police can often use the IP address to locate where an email originated, it may be harder to nail down exactly who sent it. A team of researchers claims to have developed an effective new technique to determine the authorship of anonymous emails that can provide presentable evidence in courts of law.

In an attempt to combat the increase of cybercrimes involving anonymous emails, Benjamin Fung, a professor of Information Systems Engineering at Quebec's Concordia University and an expert in data mining, and his colleagues set about developing a novel method of authorship attribution based on techniques used in speech recognition and data mining, which involves extracting useful, previously unknown knowledge from a large volume of raw data. Their approach relies on identifying frequent patterns and unique combinations of features that recur in a suspect's emails.

The technique works by first identifying the patterns found in emails written by the subject. Any of these patterns which are also found in the emails of other subjects are then filtered out, leaving patterns that are unique to the author of the emails being analyzed. These remaining frequent patterns then constitute what the researchers call the suspect's 'write-print' – a distinctive identifier akin to a fingerprint.

"Let's say the anonymous email contains typos or grammatical mistakes, or is written entirely in lowercase letters," says Fung. "We use those special characteristics to create a write-print. Using this method, we can even determine with a high degree of accuracy who wrote a given email, and infer the gender, nationality and education level of the author."

Fung and his colleagues tested their technique by examining the Enron Email Dataset – a collection containing over 200,000 real-life emails from 158 employees of the Enron Corporation. Using a sample of 10 emails written by each of 10 subjects – 100 emails in all – they were able to identify authorship with an accuracy of 80 to 90 percent.

"Our technique was designed to provide credible evidence that can be presented in a court of law," says Fung. "For evidence to be admissible, investigators need to explain how they have reached their conclusions. Our method allows them to do this."

Yill is one wheely useful mobile office energy storage unit

The Yill mobile energy storage unit
Although HP and others are breaking new ground in notebook battery life, there are times when you might find yourself away from the grid for a bit longer than your laptop battery can last. A mobile energy storage unit like Yill, from Germany's Younicos, is said to be capable of autonomously meeting the power needs of a computer workstation for between two and three days on a single charge of its own quick-charge batteries. Deployment of the drum-like power houses throughout an office could even help save energy bills.

   

There are numerous reasons why you might consider using something like Yill. You may find yourself having to work for a few days in a remote location where a stable supply of power cannot be guaranteed. You might generate your own electricity from renewable resources, such as photovoltaic panels, and want to spend more time completely off-grid, even during days without sunshine. As a designer, you might want to minimize heat loss in a new office by eliminating the elevated floors or suspended ceilings usually needed for extensive cabling.

The standalone power storage unit is said to be capable of meeting the energy needs of a small mobile office for two to three days before its own rechargeable lithium titanium battery needs some juice. The battery pack benefits from quick recharge times (about four hours) and a long operating life. Yill can supply devices with up to 300 Watts of electricity, and stores about 1 kWh of energy.
Younicos says that when Yill needs some energy, it can be plugged into a charging station that draws power from renewable energy sources, or from the grid. Its 20.8-inch (530 mm) diameter wheels and a pull-out handle also give it mobility.

The Yill mobile energy storage unit, designed by Werner Aisslinger, will be launched during Milan Design Week from April 12 to 17.