Science & Technology in 2014

New self-filling water bottle harvests drinking water from the air

Austrian designer Kristof Retezar has invented a new device for your bike that collects the moisture contained in the atmosphere, condenses it and stores it as fresh drinking water. 

A new self-filling water bottle has been invented that can not only serve as a nifty device for long bike tours and races, but could also offer a new method of fresh water collection in parts of the world where groundwater sources are hard to come by.

Developed by industrial designer Kristof Retezar from Austria’s University of Applied Arts, the new device - called the ‘Fontus’ - works best in humid weather, which allows it to condense the moisture in the air into safe, fresh drinking water. Experiments have shown that under the right weather conditions, it can produce 0.5 Litres of water in just under an hour.

"My goal was to create a small, compact and self-sufficient device able to absorb humid air, separate water molecules from air molecules and store water in liquid form in a bottle,” says Retezar at the James Dyson Award website.

Retezar says he was inspired to invent the device as something that could be beneficial to some of the 2 billion people in more than 40 countries that live in regions where clean and safe sources of water are scarce. According to the UN, by the year 2030, 47 percent of our global population will be living in areas of high water stress. So he decided to take a 2,000-year-old technology - ancient civilisations from Asia and Central America were some of the first to employ it - that taps into some of the 13,000 kilometres cubed of fresh water held in the Earth’s atmosphere. 

Retezar explains how it works at the James Dyson Award website:

In order to achieve condensation, one must cool hot, humid air down. The device has a small cooler installed in its centre called Peltier Element. This cooler is divided in two: When powered by electricity, the upper side cools down and the bottom side gets hot. The more you cool the hot side down, the colder the upper side will get. Consequently, these two sides are separated and isolated from each other.

The air enters the bottom chamber at a high speed when moving forward with the bike and cools the hot side down. Moreover, when the air enters the upper chamber it is stopped by little walls perforated non-linearly, reducing its speed in order to give the air the needed time to lose its water molecules.

Once the water molecules have been extracted, the droplets flow through a pipe and accumulate in a bottle. This bottle can be easily loosened from its holder for drinking, and any kind of PET 0.5 L bottle will fit.

The Fontus has been entered into theJames Dyson Award, which is an annual, international design competition, and a win could provide Retezar with the capital to jettison his design to the market.

The Audio Tooth

"The Audio Tooth Implant is a radical new concept in personal communication. A miniature audio output device and receiver are implanted into the tooth during routine dental surgery. These offer a form of electronic telepathy as the sound information resonates directly into the consciousness."

This nuclear battery could power your smartphone forever.....

Your next smartphone or electric vehicle might be powered by a nuclear battery instead of your usual lithium-ion cell thanks to a breakthrough made by University of Missouri researchers. This is bad news for those of you who think that WiFi signals are bad for your health — especially if they’re received by a smartphone situated near your head or gonads — but great news for all of the people who value all-day battery life ahead of increased radiation exposure. The world could probably do with reduced fertility rates anyway, right?

First, just to put your mind at rest: This nuclear battery doesn’t contain a mini nuclear fission reactor — that would be insane (at least given our current grasp of nuclear power generation, anyway). Instead, this battery, developed by Baek Kim and Jae Kwon at the University of Missouri, uses the betavoltaic process to generate electricity. A betavoltaic device, as the name implies, is fairly similar a photovoltaic device — but instead of generating electricity from photons, it generates electricity from beta radiation — i.e. high-energy electrons that are emitted by radioactive elements. A betavoltaic device is constructed in almost exactly the same way as a photovoltaic cell: a piece of silicon (or other semiconductor) is wedged between two electrodes, and when radiation hits the semiconductor it produces a flow of electrons (voltage, electricity).

“But surely having a battery, and thus a mobile device, packed full of radioactive material is a bad idea” I hear you say. And usually, yes, you’d be right. What makes a betavoltaic battery somewhat safe is that beta radiation can be easily stopped with a thin piece of aluminium; gamma radiation, on the other hand, has so much penetrative power that it can only be stopped by a big lump of lead (or other dense metal). This doesn’t mean that beta radiation in itself is safe — it can cause cancer and death — but it’s much easier to control. Just make sure the betavoltaic nuclear battery casing is more than a couple of millimeters thick — and don’t drop it. Ever.

Anyway, back to the University of Missouri’s battery. Basically, Kim and Kwon’s nuclear battery consists of a platinum-coated titanium dioxide electrode, water, and a piece of radioactive strontium-90. Strontium-90 (Sr-90) radioactively decays with a half-life of 28.79 years, producing an electron (beta radiation), an anti-neutrino, and the isotope yttrium-90. Y-90 itself has a half-life of just 64 hours, decaying into more electrons, anti-neutrinos, and zirconium (which is stable). The best thing about using strontium-90 as a fuel is that it produces almost no gamma radiation — so, as far as radioactive materials go, it’s pretty safe and easy to handle. (Still, there’s no avoiding the fact that it’s used extensively in medicine, both for radiotherapy of cancer, and as a radioactive tracer.)

While betavoltaic batteries are fairly old hat — they powered some of the earlier pacemakers, before more advanced chemistries such as lithium-ion arrived — the Missouri researchers say that their addition of water is a key breakthrough. Not only does water absorb a lot of the energy of the beta radiation (in high quantities it’s damaging to the betavoltaic semiconductor), but the beta radiation also splits the water molecules, producing free radicals and electricity.

“Water acts as a buffer and surface plasmons created in the device turned out to be very useful in increasing its efficiency,” Kwon says. “The ionic solution is not easily frozen at very low temperatures and could work in a wide variety of applications, including car batteries and, if packaged properly, perhaps spacecraft.” [Research paper: doi:10.1038/srep05249 - "Plasmon-assisted radiolytic energy conversion in aqueous solutions"]

Ultimately, even if beta radiation can be quite easily contained, I doubt we’ll ever see commercial nuclear batteries. Those headlines about exploding lithium-ion batteries are already scary enough; I can’t imagine Apple or Samsung will ever open themselves up to even worse headlines/lawsuits. (“Smartphone owner dies from acute radiation sickness after dropping his phone”.) There’s also the distinct possibility of terrorists creating a dirty bomb from all of that strontium-90 (which itself isn’t cheap, incidentally).

For now, nuclear batteries will probably only be used in military and space applications, where extreme longevity outweighs any risks. Still, it’s nice to dream of a smartphone or other mobile device that never once needs recharging…

World-first experiment achieves direct brain-to-brain communication in human subjects

For the first time, an international team of neuroscientists has transmitted a message from the brain of one person in India to the brains of three people in France.

The team, which includes researchers from Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in France, has announced today the successful transmission of a brain-to-brain message over a distance of 8,000 kilometres. 

"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways,” said one of the team, Harvard’s Alvaro Pascual-Leone in a press release. "One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"

The team achieved this world-first feat by fitting out one of their participants - known as the emitter - with a device called an electrode-based brain-computer (BCI). This device, which sits over the participant’s head, can interpret the electrical currents in the participant’s brain and translate them into a binary code called Bacon's cipher. This type of code is similar to what computers use, but more compact. 

"The emitter now has to enter that binary string into the laptop using her thoughts,” says Francie Diep at Popular Science. "She does this by using her thoughts to move the white circle on-screen to different corners of the screen. (Upper right corner for "1," bottom right corner for "0.") This part of the process takes advantage of technology that several labs have developed, to allow people with paralysis to control computer cursors or robot arms."

Once uploaded, this code is then transmitted via the Internet to another participant - called the receiver - who was also fitted with a device, this time a computer-brain interface (CBI). This device emits electrical pulses, directed by a robotic arm, through the receiver’s head, which make them ‘see’ flashes of light calledphosphenes that don’t actually exist. 

"As soon as the receivers' machine gets the emitter's binary message over the Internet, the machine gets to work,” says Diep. "It moves its robotic arm around, sending phosphenes to the receivers at different positions on their skulls. Flashes appearing in one position correspond to 1s in the emitter's message, while flashes appearing in another position correspond to 0s.

Exactly how the receivers are recording the flashes so they can translate all those 0s and 1s isn’t clear, but it could be as simple and writing them down with an actual pen and paper.

While it’s not clear at this stage what the applications for this technology could be, it’s a pretty incredible achievement. Oh, and the messages they transmitted? The conveniently brief and friendly, “Hola” and “Ciao”. 

The team published its research in the journalPLOS One. 

Scientists engineer bacteria to produce renewable, engine-ready propane gas

Researchers have successfully engineered E. coli to generate renewable, engine-ready propane, which is a major sustainable fossil fuel replacement candidate.

Propane has huge potential as a replacement for our rapidly dwindling fossil fuels because we already have a market for it - it's one of the main components in LPG (liquid petroleum gas), which we use in vehicles and heating. But right now it’s only produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing and petroleum refining, both of which are very unsustainable practices.

Now researchers from the Imperial College London in the UK and the University of Turku in Finland have proved that propane can be produced sustainably, by showing that the harmless gut bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) can be engineered to make renewable propane.

To turn the bacteria into propane-producing machines, the scientists interrupted the biological process that turns fatty acids into cell membranes. The researchers used three novel enzymes to channel the fatty acids along a different biological pathway, resulting in the bacteria producing engine-ready, renewable propane instead of cell membranes. The results are published in Nature Communications.

Their goal is now to insert this engineered production line into photosynthetic bacteria, which harvest energy from the sun, so that one day they’ll be able to directly convert solar energy into chemical fuel. The E. coli in this experiment were powered by sugar. The scientists also need to scale up the process - right now they’re producing 1,000 times less propane from the reaction then they would need to make the process commercially viable.

"Although this research is at a very early stage, our proof of concept study provides a method for renewable production of a fuel that previously was only accessible from fossil reserves,” said Patrik Jones, a synthetic biologist and one of the authors of the paper from the Imperial College London, in a press release.

“Although we have only produced tiny amounts so far, the fuel we have produced is ready to be used in an engine straight away. This opens up possibilities for future sustainable production of renewable fuels that at first could complement, and thereafter replace fossil fuels like diesel, petrol, natural gas and jet fuel.”

The researchers chose to make the E. coliproduce propane as opposed to gasoline or other fossil fuels, because propane can easily be converted from a liquid to a gas. The bacteria cells produce propane gas, but then the researchers can cheaply and easily transform this into a liquid that can be stored and transported.

"Fossil fuels are a finite resource and as our population continues to grow we are going to have to come up with new ways to meet increasing energy demands. It is a substantial challenge, however, to develop a renewable process that is low-cost and economically sustainable. At the moment algae can be used to make biodiesel, but it is not commercially viable as harvesting and processing requires a lot of energy and money. So we chose propane because it can be separated from the natural process with minimal energy and it will be compatible with the existing infrastructure for easy use,” said Jones.

The scientists are now trying to better understand what’s going on behind the scenes of the production process to make the process more efficient. "I hope that over the next 5-10 years we will be able to achieve commercially viable processes that will sustainably fuel our energy demands,” said Jones.

MEMS Piezoelectric GYROSCOPE

Tracking the position of an object is an important engineering problem that finds many application areas including military, industrial, medical, and consumer applications. This problem is effectively solved with gyroscopes, and these sensors find the orientation and angular velocity Knowing linear acceleration and angular velocity in three dimensions is enough to track the motion of the system with the help of additional mathematical operations. solved with gyroscopes, and these sensors find the orientation and angular velocity Knowing linear acceleration and angular velocity in three dimensions is enough to track the motion of the system with the help of additional mathematical operations. MEMS piezoelectric gyroscope is an inertial sensing integrated circuit that measures the angle and rate of rotation in an object or system. Programmable for targeted applications, this technology relies on three dimensional axes of sensing, which are X (pitch), Y (roll), and Z (yaw). In this paper, we have reported the design and simulation of MEMS piezoelectric gyroscope by COMSOL Multiphysics.

http://scholarsresearchlibrary.com/EJAESR-vol3-iss2/EJASER-2014-3-2-8-12.pdf

'Optical fibre' made out of thin air.

Lasers were used to create a column of low-density air surrounding a core of higher-density air that acted like a conduit to channel light (USAF)

Scientists say they have turned thin air into an 'optical fibre' that can transmit and amplify light signals without the need for any cables.

In a proof-of-principle experiment they created an "air waveguide" that could one day be used as an instantaneous optical fibre to any point on earth, or even into space.

The findings, reported in the journal Optica, have applications in long range laser communications, high-resolution topographic mapping, air pollution and climate change research, and could also be used by the military to make laser weapons.

"People have been thinking about making air waveguides for a while, but this is the first time it's been realised," says Professor Howard Milchberg of the University of Maryland, who led the research, which was funded by the US military and National Science Foundation.

Lasers lose intensity and focus with increasing distance as photons naturally spread apart and interact with atoms and molecules in the air.

Fibre optics solves this problem by beaming the light through glass cores with a high refractive index, which is good for transmitting light.

The core is surrounded by material with a lower refractive index that reflects light back in to the core, preventing the beam from losing focus or intensity.

Fibre optics, however, are limited in the amount of power they can carry and the need for a physical structure to support them.

Light and air

Milchberg and colleagues' made the equivalent of an optical fibre out of thin air by generating a laser with its light split into a ring of multiple beams forming a pipe.

They used very short and powerful pulses from the laser to heat the air molecules along the beam extremely quickly.

Such rapid heating produced sound waves that took about a microsecond to converge to the centre of the pipe, creating a high-density area surrounded by a low-density area left behind in the wake of the laser beams.

"A microsecond is a long time compared to how far light propagates, so the light is gone and a microsecond later those sound waves collide in the centre, enhancing the air density there," says Milchberg.

The lower density region of air surrounding the centre of the air waveguide had a lower refractive index, keeping the light focused.

"Any structure [even air] which has a higher density will have a higher index of refraction and thereby act like an optical fibre," says Milchberg.

Amplified signal

Once Milchberg and colleagues created their air waveguide, they used a second laser to spark the air at one end of the waveguide turning it into plasma.

An optical signal from the spark was transmitted along the air waveguide, over a distance of a metre to a detector at the other end.

The signal collected by the detector was strong enough to allow Milchberg and colleagues to analyse the chemical composition of the air that produced the spark.

The researchers found the signal was 50 per cent stronger than a signal obtained without an air waveguide.

The findings show the air waveguide can be used as a "remote collection optic," says Milchberg.

"This is an optical fibre cable that you can reel out at the speed of light and place next to [something] that you want to measure remotely, and have the signal come all the way back to where you are."

Australian expert Professor Ben Eggleton of the University of Sydney says this is potentially an important advance for the field of optics.

"It's sort of like you have an optical fibre that you can shine into the sky, connecting your laser to the top of the atmosphere," says Eggleton.

"You don't need big lenses and optics, it's already guided along this channel in the atmosphere."

Indian scientists have bred a mango that has no seed.

Seedless mangoes will be the next big thing when it comes to fruit.

Mangoes are an excellent source of calcium, vitamins A and C, antioxidants and potassium. But eating one often results in a huge mess—the seed is just too big and because of that one usually ends up with mango stains everywhere. So Indian fruit scientists came up with a solution—a sweet and juicy, seedless mango.

A team of researchers led by V.B. Patel, chairman of the Horticulture Department at the Bihar Agriculture University (BAU) in India, developed it using hybrids of the mango varieties Ratnaand Alphonso.

The seedless mango has been dubbed Sindhu and trials are underway in different locations across India, reports India Today. And it's less fibrous than regular mangoes, a yellowish pulp and weighs an average of 200 grams.

BAU’s vice chancellor M.L. Choudhary mentioned that the university has plans to make the new variety available to mango growers during the next season. “The seedless variety also has good export potential. The university would provide quality plants to mango growers in 2015 to exploit the export market,” he added.

Seedless mangoes in your local produce section? We can’t wait to taste it.

Solar cell emits own light source.

An overachieving material known as Perovskite could act as a solar cell by day, light source by night, scientists have found.

In an exciting solar breakthrough, scientists have discovered that a material known as Perovskite is not only capable of converting sunlight into electricity, it also emits its own light source.

The discovery was published in Nature Materials this week, and could lead to shop front signs, lamps and even mobile devices and tablets that soak up power from the Sun during the day and then light up at night.

The researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore found that Perovskite, which was already one of the most promising materials for creating high-efficiency, cheap solar cells, is also highly suited for making lasers of different frequencies. The material is five times cheaper than current silicon-based solar cells.

In a press release, physicist Sum Tze Chien explained that he made the disovery by chance when he asked his postdoc Xing Guichuan to shine a laser on a new hybrid Perovskite solar cells they're currently developing and they started glowing brightly.

“By tuning the composition of the material, we can make it emit a wide range of colours, which also makes it suitable as a light emitting device, such as flat screen displays.”

A Solar-Powered Drone Designed To Fly For Five Years Nonstop

Titan Aerospace will test a drone that could track hurricanes, spot pirates, and more.

If a drone never had to land, it could track hurricanes, spot pirates and smugglers, follow animal migrations, and even act as an auxiliary GPS. In essence, it would be a geostationary satellite without the expense of going to space. Later this year, the company Titan Aerospace will test a drone that could do just that. The Solara 50, named for its 50-meter wingspan, will fly at 65,000 feet—above most other aircraft and above weather that could disturb its flight and block the sun, its source of power. Titan will market it as an “atmospheric satellite."
Don't believe us? Watch the video below.

Single chip device to provide real-time 3-D images from inside the heart, blood vessels.

A single-chip catheter-based device that would provide forward-looking, real-time, three-dimensional imaging from inside the heart, coronary arteries and peripheral blood vessels is shown being tested.

Researchers have developed the technology for a catheter-based device that would provide forward-looking, real-time, three-dimensional imaging from inside the heart, coronary arteries and peripheral blood vessels. With its volumetric imaging, the new device could better guide surgeons working in the heart, and potentially allow more of patients' clogged arteries to be cleared without major surgery.

The device integrates ultrasound transducers with processing electronics on a single 1.4 millimeter silicon chip. On-chip processing of signals allows data from more than a hundred elements on the device to be transmitted using just 13 tiny cables, permitting it to easily travel through circuitous blood vessels. The forward-looking images produced by the device would provide significantly more information than existing cross-sectional ultrasound.

Researchers have developed and tested a prototype able to provide image data at 60 frames per second, and plan next to conduct animal studies that could lead to commercialization of the device.

"Our device will allow doctors to see the whole volume that is in front of them within a blood vessel," said F. Levent Degertekin, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This will give cardiologists the equivalent of a flashlight so they can see blockages ahead of them in occluded arteries. It has the potential for reducing the amount of surgery that must be done to clear these vessels."

Details of the research were published online in the February 2014 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control. Research leading to the device development was supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health.

This is a single-chip catheter-based device that would provide forward-looking, real-time, three-dimensional imaging from inside the heart, coronary arteries and peripheral blood vessels is shown on the tip of a finger. A microscope image of the device is shown behind it.

"If you're a doctor, you want to see what is going on inside the arteries and inside the heart, but most of the devices being used for this today provide only cross-sectional images," Degertekin explained. "If you have an artery that is totally blocked, for example, you need a system that tells you what's in front of you. You need to see the front, back and sidewalls altogether. That kind of information is basically not available at this time."

The single chip device combines capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) arrays with front-end CMOS electronics technology to provide three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and intracardiac echography (ICE) images. The dual-ring array includes 56 ultrasound transmit elements and 48 receive elements. When assembled, the donut-shaped array is just 1.5 millimeters in diameter, with a 430-micron center hole to accommodate a guide wire.

Power-saving circuitry in the array shuts down sensors when they are not needed, allowing the device to operate with just 20 milliwatts of power, reducing the amount of heat generated inside the body. The ultrasound transducers operate at a frequency of 20 megahertz (MHz).

Imaging devices operating within blood vessels can provide higher resolution images than devices used from outside the body because they can operate at higher frequencies. But operating inside blood vessels requires devices that are small and flexible enough to travel through the circulatory system. They must also be able to operate in blood.

Doing that requires a large number of elements to transmit and receive the ultrasound information. Transmitting data from these elements to external processing equipment could require many cable connections, potentially limiting the device's ability to be threaded inside the body.

Degertekin and his collaborators addressed that challenge by miniaturizing the elements and carrying out some of the processing on the probe itself, allowing them to obtain what they believe are clinically-useful images with only 13 cables.

"You want the most compact and flexible catheter possible," Degertekin explained. "We could not do that without integrating the electronics and the imaging array on the same chip."

Based on their prototype, the researchers expect to conduct animal trials to demonstrate the device's potential applications. They ultimately expect to license the technology to an established medical diagnostic firm to conduct the clinical trials necessary to obtain FDA approval.

For the future, Degertekin hopes to develop a version of the device that could guide interventions in the heart under magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Other plans include further reducing the size of the device to place it on a 400-micron diameter guide wire.

Carbon dioxide from exhaust fumes used to make new chemicals.

To stop global warming, most governments are advocating reducing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂), a greenhouse gas, put into the atmosphere. But some argue that such action won’t be enough – we will need to remove CO₂ already present.

The reduction of CO₂ is a big challenge, as it requires large amounts of renewable energy. Until then, short-term solutions to remove CO₂ from fossil fuel power plants is becoming necessary, including carbon capture and storage (CCS). The other option is to use the storage part, as new research from Korea shows, and to use CO₂ directly from exhaust gases to make new chemicals.

Catch me if you can

Carbon capture involves the “capture” of CO₂, either by a chemical or physical process. Often CO₂ from a exhaust gas stream is captured by nitrogen containing compounds called amines. The reaction results in the formation of solid chemicals. These can be heated, allowing the CO₂ to be released, which can then be compressed, transported and stored in geological features, such as depleted oil fields, or used as raw material in chemical factories.

Although trees and some microbes can capture CO₂ and use it as fuel, humans have struggled to replicate the process on a large scale. Most chemical reactions involving CO₂ require expensive catalysts, high temperatures, or high pressures to make it react. The most common use of CO₂ as a chemical feedstock is in the formation of urea, which is found in around 90% of the world’s fertilisers.

In the new research, published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, Soon Hong and colleagues from the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea have caught CO₂ from exhaust gas and used it for many reactions that make useful chemicals. One type is called alkynyl carboxylic acid, which has many uses such as making food additives. The other, cyclic carbonate, is used to make polymers for cars and electronics. Cyclic carbonates can also be used in place of phosgene, which is a very reactive and highly toxic chemical that is used as a starting material to make a wide variety of useful products.

Hong also used highly pure CO₂, which is sold at a high price and required lots of energy to make, in the same chemical reactions and found there was hardly any difference in the final yield (the amount of product formed minus wastage).

Use me if you do

Like CCS technologies, Hong passes exhaust fumes through a solution of amines, where CO₂ is captured and other gases pass unreacted. Then the resulting salt is heated to yield pure CO₂ for chemical reactions. Hong can recycle the amine solution at least 55 times without loss in yield.

In another research paper just published in Nature Communications, Matthias Beller and colleagues at the University of Rostock in Germany show a new reaction that can use CO₂. The reaction is called alkene carbonylation, and it usually required the use of carbon monoxide (CO), which, as home detectors know well, is a highly toxic and flammable gas.

CO₂ has previously been used in the synthesis of carboxylic acids by using diethylzinc as one of the drivers of the reaction. But diethylzinc is flammable in air. Using the reaction Beller can make chemicals are found in varnishes and paints. The researchers carried out a number of reactions but most importantly confirmed that the source of the newly formed C-O bond was CO₂. This work shows CO₂ can be used as a viable alternative to carbon monoxide in carbonylation reactions and increasing the importance of CO₂ in the chemical industry.

While this is good news, these advances don’t offset the energy needed to trap and use CO₂. They will help increase the demand of CO₂ at industrial scale, and may then drive CCS and renewable energy technologies to become cheaper.

Researchers build world's most powerful terahertz laser chip.

University of Leeds researchers have taken the lead in the race to build the world's most powerful terahertz laser chip.

A paper in the Institution of Engineering and Technology's (IET) journal Electronics Letters reports that the Leeds team has exceeded a 1 Watt output power from a quantum cascade terahertz laser.

The new record more than doubles landmarks set by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and subsequently by a team from Vienna last year.

Terahertz waves, which lie in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves, can penetrate materials that block visible light and have a wide range of possible uses including chemical analysis, security scanning, medical imaging, and telecommunications.

Widely publicised potential applications include monitoring pharmaceutical products, the remote sensing of chemical signatures of explosives in unopened envelopes, and the non-invasive detection of cancers in the human body.

However, one of the main challenges for scientists and engineers is making the lasers powerful and compact enough to be useful.

Professor Edmund Linfield, Professor of Terahertz Electronics in the University's School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: "Although it is possible to build large instruments that generate powerful beams of terahertz radiation, these instruments are only useful for a limited set of applications. We need terahertz lasers that not only offer high power but are also portable and low cost."

The quantum cascade terahertz lasers being developed by Leeds are only a few square millimetres in size.

In October 2013, Vienna University of Technology announced that its researchers had smashed the world record output power for quantum cascade terahertz lasers previously held by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Austrian team reported an output of 0.47 Watt from a single laser facet, nearly double the output power reported by the MIT team. The Leeds group has now achieved an output of more than 1 Watt from a single laser facet.

Professor Linfield said: "The process of making these lasers is extraordinarily delicate. Layers of different semiconductors such as gallium arsenide are built up one atomic monolayer at a time. We control the thickness and composition of each individual layer very accurately and build up a semiconductor material of between typically 1,000 and 2,000 layers. The record power of our new laser is due to the expertise that we have developed at Leeds in fabricating these layered semiconductors, together with our ability to engineer these materials subsequently into suitable and powerful laser devices."

Professor Giles Davies, Professor of Electronic and Photonic Engineering in the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: "The University of Leeds has been an international leader in terahertz engineering for many years. This work is a key step toward increasing the power of these lasers while keeping them compact and affordable enough to deliver the range of applications promised by terahertz technology."

Credit card-sized device could analyze biopsy, help diagnose pancreatic cancer in minutes.

Pancreatic cancer is a particularly devastating disease. At least 94 percent of patients will die within five years, and in 2013 it was ranked as one of the top 10 deadliest cancers.

Routine screenings for breast, colon and lung cancers have improved treatment and outcomes for patients with these diseases, largely because the cancer can be detected early. But because little is known about how pancreatic cancer behaves, patients often receive a diagnosis when it's already too late.

This prototype of a microfluidic device has both curved and straight channels for transporting tissue biopsies. The silicon material is lightweight, flexible and transparent. Credit: University of Washington

University of Washington scientists and engineers are developing a low-cost device that could help pathologists diagnose pancreatic cancer earlier and faster. The prototype can perform the basic steps for processing a biopsy, relying on fluid transport instead of human hands to process the tissue. The team presented its initial results this month (February 2014) at the SPIE Photonics West conference and recently filed a patent for this first-generation device and future technology advancements.

"This new process is expected to help the pathologist make a more rapid diagnosis and be able to determine more accurately how invasive the cancer has become, leading to improved prognosis," said Eric Seibel, a UW research professor of mechanical engineering and director of the department's Human Photonics Laboratory.

The new instrumentation would essentially automate and streamline the manual, time-consuming process a pathology lab goes through to diagnose cancer. Currently, a pathologist takes a biopsy tissue sample, then sends it to the lab where it's cut into thin slices, stained and put on slides, then analyzed optically in 2-D for abnormalities.

The UW's technology would process and analyze whole tissue biopsies for 3-D imaging, which offers a more complete picture of the cellular makeup of a tumor, said Ronnie Das, a UW postdoctoral researcher in bioengineering who is the lead author on a related paper.

"As soon as you cut a piece of tissue, you lose information about it. If you can keep the original tissue biopsy intact, you can see the whole story of abnormal cell growth. You can also see connections, cell morphology and structure as it looks in the body," Das said.

The research team is building a thick, credit card-sized, flexible device out of silicon that allows a piece of tissue to pass through tiny channels and undergo a series of steps that replicate what happens on a much larger scale in a pathology lab. The device harnesses the properties of microfluidics, which allows tissue to move and stop with ease through small channels without needing to apply a lot of external force. It also keeps clinicians from having to handle the tissue; instead, a tissue biopsy taken with a syringe needle could be deposited directly into the device to begin processing.

Researchers say this is the first time material larger than a single-celled organism has successfully moved in a microfluidic device. This could have implications across the sciences in automating analyses that usually are done by humans.

Das and Chris Burfeind, a UW undergraduate student in mechanical engineering, designed the device to be simple to manufacture and use. They first built a mold using a petri dish and Teflon tubes, then poured a viscous, silicon material into the mold. The result is a small, transparent instrument with seamless channels that are both curved and straight.

The researchers have used the instrument to process a tissue biopsy one step at a time, following the same steps as a pathology lab would. Next, they hope to combine all of the steps into a more robust device – including 3-D imaging – then build and optimize it for use in a lab. Future iterations of the device could include layers of channels that would allow more analyses on a piece of tissue without adding more bulk to the device.

The UW researchers say the technology could be used overseas as an over-the-counter kit that would process biopsies, then send that information to pathologists who could look for signs of cancer from remote locations. Additionally, it could potentially reduce the time it takes to diagnose cancer to a matter of minutes, Das said.

IBM opens the door to 400Gbps internet.

IBM has developed a technology that it claims is a significant step towards achieving internet speeds of between 200 and 400 Gigabits per second.

Swiss researchers from the company have developed an ultra-fast and energy efficient analog-to-digital converter (ADC), in what IBM claims is a move towards allowing datacentres to share information at four times the speed possible today.

At these speeds 160GB, the equivalent of a two-hour, 4K ultra-high definition movie or 40,000 songs, could be downloaded in only a few seconds. ADCs are needed to enable complex digital equalization across long-distance fibre channels.

The device, developed by IBM with researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, was presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco today.

The ADC demoed today is only a lab prototype, but an earlier version of the design has been licensed to Semtech Corp, which expects to use it in long distance fibre channel products and advanced radar systems, to be released later this year.

As global internet traffic grows, future networking standards have to support higher data rates. For example, in 1992, 100 gigabyte of data was transferred per day, whereas today, traffic has grown to two exabytes per day, a 20 million fold increase.

While the ADC is only part of the network infrastructure needed to achieve the higher speed of data transmission required, IBM researcher Pier Andrea Francese said developing this ADC was a significant step.

"It's a building block. Once the data is in a digital domain things are downhill. ADC is essentially the gatekeeper between the digital and the analog world. Without an ADC you are not able to open this door," he said.

What is also important, said Francese, is that the ADC can work at these speeds without pushing energy consumption to unacceptable levels.

"You have to enable yourself to do it in a way that is efficient in terms of power, which is important if you want to present a solution where you can deploy millions of them," he said.

The ADC can also be manufactured using a process similar to that used to make microprocessors today - Semtech's chip will be made using a 32 nanometer silicon-on-insulator CMOS process - so will not require substantial new investment to be manufactured in large quantities.

The 64 GS/s (giga-samples per second) chips for Semtech will be manufactured at IBM’s 300mm fab in East Fishkill, New York.

The chip's core includes a wide tuning millimeter wave synthesizer enabling the core to tune from 42 to 68 GS/s per channel with a nominal jitter value of 45 femtoseconds root mean square. The full dual-channel 2x64 GS/s ADC core generates 128 billion analog-to-digital conversions per second, with a total power consumption of 2.1 Watts.

The ADC was developed by IBM and its partners as part of their work for the Astron consortium to build technologies that will support the Square Kilometre Array.

The SKA will be an array of up to 3,000 radio telescopes that will gather cosmic emissions in an attempt to see the universe a few hundreds of million years after the Big Bang - further back in time than any telescope has glimpsed.

In excess of an exabyte - more information than passes across the internet in 24 hours - is expected to be gathered by the SKA every day following its completion in 2024.

The prototype ADC is a possible candidate to allow the SKA to transport the signals fast and at very low power — a critical requirement considering that thousands of antennas will be spread over 3,000 kilometres.

The technological details of the latest ADC have been published in a paper with the EPFL, entitled, "A 90GS/s 8b 667mW 64× Interleaved SAR ADC in 32nm Digital SOI CMOS".

Creating Life in Concrete: The Forests of the Future.

If you stop for a moment and look around, you’ll notice something troubling. As each year passes, more and more Earth is consumed by humanity. Forests fall to make way for cars and roads, homes and businesses, skyscrapers and cities. But some people are trying to reverse this trend. Case in point: In Milan, Italy, there is a pair of residential towers that are currently being built, and soon they will host more than 900 trees on 8,900 square meters of terraces.

Forest under construction.

This is just one attempt to bring a little bit of nature back into our lifeless cities. Ultimately, this effort will not only beautify our most populated spaces, it will help all of the insects and other creatures that have been forced to conform to our encroaching concrete.

Future projection of the forest.

Of course, a lot of time and effort went into planning this. We had to be sure that the trees would be able to survive, that they would have the soil and nutrients that they need to stay healthy.  The design was also tested in a wind tunnel in order to ensure the trees would not fall over (or fall off!) as a result of high winds. Learn more at the video below.

Google To Lease And Restore NASA's Famous Hangar One.

The hangar once housed the U.S. Navy's dirigibles.

Hangar One once held 1930s-era dirigibles, including the U.S.S. Macon. You could fit three Titanics in there, side by side, a NASA historic preservation officer once told Air & Space magazine. And now, Google is taking over the lease for the airfield where Hangar One sits, and plans to restore the historic building, too.

We've wondered before what would happen to Hangar One. NASA was responsible for it, and for Moffett Federal Airfield, but the hangar required expensive renovations to make it safe for people and the environment. As the structure aged, its siding began leaking toxins into the San Francisco Bay. The U.S. Navy, which agreed to take responsibility for the toxic siding, once considered tearing the whole thing down.

But locals rallied to save the hangar, so NASA asked for bids for the lease. A subsidiary of Google, many of whose principals already park their private jets at Moffett, won the bid. (The Navy has since removed Hangar One's outer skin, although preservationists worry exposing the hangar's skeleton to the elements is bad for it.)

Google will restore Hangar One and two other hangars at the field, among other projects, Wiredreports. The new lease is a part of an "expansion binge" on Google's part, San Jose Mercury Newsreports. The deal also shows the tight relationship between the private company and NASA, Wired concludes. Google has leased other land from NASA for research facilities and conducts quantum computing experiments with NASA's Ames Research Center.

INTERNATIONAL T2.

India is proud to present the world's best airport. Narrated by Amitabh Bachchan , "T2 : Where Dreams Take Flight" is an exploration of the passion and philosophy that guided the T2 project. The film below takes viewers on a journey of discovery of the new terminal.