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.

Bionic Hand Restores Touch In Real Time.

For the first time, scientists have reactivated an amputee’s sense of touch through a new, advanced bionic hand.

Mind Meld! Top Brain-Controlled Techs

Danish amputee Dennis Aabo Sørensen lost his left hand nine years ago in a fireworks accident. Since then, he’d been using a commercial prosthetic that enabled him to grasp objects but not feel them. Enter professor Silvestro Micera and his team from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy.

Micera, who specializes in biomedical engineering, heads up the Translational Neural Engineering Laboratory and the Institute of Bioengineering at EPFL. He and his colleagues developed an artificial hand for Sørensen that seems to come straight out of science fiction.

The scientists outfitted the prosthetic with sensors that can measure and convert the tension from artificial tendons into an electrical current. They also added sophisticated computer algorithms to turn the electrical current into an impulse that nerves in Sørensen’s arm would be able to receive and interpret.

Last year Sørensen underwent surgery to implant transneural electrodes in his left arm. Then the bionic hand was connected to these electrodes. During subsequent tests, Sørensen was able to feel an object while holding it in his new hand, despite being blindfolded and wearing ear plugs. He could sense the shape as well as whether it was soft or hard — in real time.

This marks a first in neuroprosthetics, according to Micera. The team just published their findings in the journal Science Translational Medicine (abstract).

5 Major Advances in Robotic Prosthetics

“I could feel things that I hadn’t been able to feel in over nine years,” Sørensen said in a press release. Although commercially available sensory-enhanced prosthetics are still years away, this hand is pulling us into a bionic future.