Car Ultrasound Could Save Fuel.

 When one hears the word "ultrasound" the last thing that comes to mind is auto maintenance. But if the researchers at the University of Sheffield's Department of Mechanical Engineering have their way, it will be one of the best methods of finding out just how energy efficient a car engine really is.

Their technique provides key details about the pistons, which are housed in sealed chambers. Pistons are at the heart of a combustion engineand are responsible for the spark that produces the power that's transmitted to the crank shaft and ultimately the wheels. Understanding how the oil works inside this sealed chamber is important for improving a car's fuel efficiency. For example, adding too much oil can be wasteful and it can get burnt in the engine, increasing emissions. Not enough oil will wear the metal engine parts.  

Usually, engineers use computer models to estimate efficiency. But mechanical engineering professor, Rob Dwyer-Joyce, thought ultrasound might provide a better picture. He attached sensors to the outside of the cylinder wall and then used an ultrasound machine to transmit pulses into the sealed cylinder. The sound waves bounced back to the sensors and Dwyer-Joyce was able to measure and record what's going on with the oil inside.

In a press release, Dywer-Joyce said, "Our method will allow engine manufacturers to adjust lubrication levels with confidence and ensure they are using the optimum level for any particular engine, rather than over-lubricating to ensure engine safety."
Dywer also pointed out that this method isn't only good for vehicle energy efficiency measurement, it could also be used on the larger engines that deep water marine vessels use. The research team is currently seeking industrial partners to make this into a commercial product.

Luna-Trips: Upstart Firm Plans to Sell Round-Trip Journeys to the Moon .

Golden Spike, helmed by former NASA officials, wants to return human explorers to the lunar surface--for a price.
   WASHINGTON, D.C.—A private spaceflight company that has been operating in secret for two years announced yesterday an ambitious plan to launch manned missions to the moon.
The company, named Golden Spike after the ceremonial railway spike that marked the completion of the first transcontinental railway, would send two-person crews to the lunar surface and back at a cost of $750 million per passenger. If the plan comes to fruition, the first astronauts to step out of a Golden Spike lander could be the first human beings to set foot on the moon since the final Apollo mission in 1972.
Golden Spike's plans rank among the most audacious privately funded space exploration missions ever proposed. The company said its first launch would cost $7 billion to $8 billion but that subsequent trips would be much cheaper, at roughly $1.5 billion. That is less than many robotic missions launched by national space agencies, Alan Stern, president and CEO of the new company, said during a press conference here. "We estimate that there are 15 to 20, or more, expeditions of this type out there," involving nations interested in lunar science but lacking the capability to send astronauts, he said. Stern, who is also the former head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate and the principal investigator of the New Horizons robotic mission now en route to Pluto, said he believed tourists and commercial businesses (such as mining companies) would also be potential customers.
Golden Spike intends to have the first customers on the moon by 2020, a plan that hinges on the use of currently existing (or "soon to be existing") launch vehicles, spacecraft and technologies.
So far, though, the plan remains in the realm of the hypothetical. Golden Spike needs to raise $8 billion before its first rocket lifts off. To fill the company coffers, the firm expects to draw on ticket presales as well as on marketing and advertising. Given the international flavor expected of the missions, "we expect these expeditions to be the equivalent of the Olympics," Stern said. "Think of the advertising time; the naming rights—it's a very important part of our business." Stern would not release details on the company's financials, but acknowledged that "we need to sell a bunch" of seats. "If we sell three or four, we're completely upside down."
Gerry Griffin, chair of the Golden Spike board and former director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, concurred. "I don't think there are any technological issues," Griffin said. "It's going to be financial."
Nevertheless, returning to the moon has so far proved both expensive and difficult. Under former Pres. George W. Bush, NASA had planned to put astronauts back on the moon by 2020 as part of the Constellation Program. But budget and technology-development issues have left Constellation dead in the water. And NASA's next-generation Space Launch System is nowhere near operational.
Consequently, no launch vehicle today stands ready to take people to the moon and back, although the Falcon Heavy rocket built by private spaceflight firm SpaceX, which is currently in testing, may fill the void. Golden Spike wrote a concept paper that has been accepted for publication in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics's Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets that discussed using the Falcon Heavy in the context of a moon mission, but Stern cautioned that no official announcement has been made as to which launch vehicle the new company will use.

The Golden Spike announcement came just a day after a National Research Council report concluded that NASA lacked direction and in fact had a mission statement so "generic" it could apply to any government research agency. The timing of the lunar reveal was notable in at least one other respect, arriving as it did one day before the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 17, the last mission to deliver astronauts to the moon.
In a statement responding to Golden Spike's announcement, a NASA spokesperson said: "This type of private sector effort is further evidence of the timeliness and wisdom of the Obama administration's overall space policy—to create an environment where commercial space companies can build upon NASA's past successes, allowing the agency to focus on the new challenges of sending humans to an asteroid and eventually Mars."
As NASA targets other destinations, the potential benefits for lunar science—if Golden Spike can realize its lofty ambitions—are huge. Stern argued that the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity spent four years on Mars before delivering as much science as Apollo 17 accomplished in a few days with two humans (including a trained geologist) on the moon.
In addition to Stern and Griffin, Golden Spike counts among its advisers politician Newt Gingrich, former House Science Committee Chair Bob Walker, former Space Shuttle Program Chief Wayne Hale, a Star Trek set designer, and Nancy Conrad, founder of the Conrad Foundation and widow of Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad.
Conrad, speaking from the audience at the press conference, said that her late husband had become very interested in commercial spaceflight near the end of his life. "If I could imagine what he'd be doing right now if he were here," she said, "he'd probably be clicking his heels."

Blade Runner: 18-Rotor "Volocopter" Moving from Concept to Prototype.

It may look "nutty" and like a "blender," but the designers say the craft could challenge helicopters.

Inventor and physicist Thomas Senkel created an Internet sensation with the October 2011 video of his maiden—and only—test flight of a spidery proof-of-concept 16-rotor helicopter dubbed Multicopter 1. Now the maker of the experimental personal aviation craft, the European start-up e-volo, is back with a revised "volocopter" design that adds two more rotors, a serial hybrid drive and long-term plans for going to 100 percent battery power.

The new design calls for 1.8-meter, 0.5-kilogram carbon-fiber blades, each paired with a motor. They are arrayed around a hub in two concentric circles over a boxy one- or two-person cockpit.

After awarding the volocopter concept a Lindbergh Prize for Innovation in April, Yolanka Wulff, executive director of The Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation, admitted the idea of the multi-blade chopper at first seems "nutty." Looking beyond the novel appearance, however, she says, e-volo's concept excels in safety, energy efficiency and simplicity, which were the bases of the prize.

All three attributes arrive thanks largely to evolo’s removal of classic helicopter elements. First, the energy-robbing high-mass main rotor, transmission, tail boom and tail rotor are gone. The enormous blades over a normal chopper's cabin create lift, but their mass creates a high degree of stress and wear on the craft. And the small tail rotor, perched vertically out on a boom behind the cabin, keeps the helicopter's body from spinning in the opposite direction as the main blades, but it also eats up about 30 percent of a helicopter's power.

The volocopter's multiple rotor blades individually would not create the torque that a single large rotor produces, and they offer redundancy for safety. Hypothetically, the volocopter could fly with a few as 12 functioning rotors, as long as those rotors were not all clustered together on one side, says Senkel, the aircraft's co-inventor and e-volo's lead construction engineer.

Without the iconic two-prop configuration, the craft would be lighter, making it more fuel efficient and reducing the physical complexity of delivering power to the top and rear blades from a single engine. Nor would the volocopter need an energy-hungry transmission. In fact, "there will be no mechanical connection between the gas engine and the blades," Senkel says. That means fewer points of energy loss and more redundancy for safety.

E-volo's design eliminates the dependence on a single source of power to the blades. As a serial-hybrid vehicle, the volocopter would have a gas-fueled engine, in this case an engine capable of generating 50- to 75 kilowatts, typical of ultralight aircraft. Rather than mechanically drive the rotors, the engine would generate power for electric motors as well as charge onboard lithium batteries. Should it fail, the batteries are expected to provide enough backup power so the craft could make a controlled landing.

Whereas helicopters navigate by changing the pitch of the main and tail rotor blades, the volocopter's maneuverability will depend on changing the speed of individual rotors. Although more complex, it is more precise in principle to control a craft using three to six redundant microcontrollers (in case one or more fails) interpreting instructions from a pilot using a game console–like joystick—instead of rudder pedals, a control stick and a throttle.

Wulff's first impression about the volocopter's design is not uncommon. E-volo's computer-animated promotional videos of a gleaming white, carbon-fiber and fiberglass craft beneath a thatch of blades recall the many-winged would-be flying machines of the late 19th century. This point is not lost on Senkel.

"I understand these skeptical opinions," he says. "The design concept looks like a blender. But we really are making a safe flying machine."

6 Electronic Devices You Can Control with Your Thoughts.

From toys to mind monitoring, brain-computer interface options are already on the market.
BCI (brain–computer interface) has long been a favorite of sci-fi movies (paging Professor Xavier!). However, some early BCI products are already for sale. Unfortunately, this isn't the dawn of BCI—it's the pre-dawn. These products are crude, imprecise and sometimes frustratingly nonresponsive—that's how it goes with EEG-based headsets, which pick up only the faintest electroencephalographic echoes of neural activity through the skull. (Beware, in particular, of the toys, which garner Amazon reviews ranging from wildly polarizing to absolutely scathing.) But these technologies are based on real BCI principles, and when they work, they're a fascinating glimpse of mind–machine merging mergers to come. (Below are representative online prices, such as those found on Amazon.)
Star Wars Science Force Trainer ($35): This toy includes a wireless headset, ping-pong ball and a clear plastic tube with a fan beneath. As you concentrate, your brain activity turns up the fan so that it blows a ping-pong ball up a tube. Yoda's voice guides you: "Reach out with your feelings! Use The Force. Do or do not; there is no try."

Mindflex ($47): Mattel's game is another ball-in-an-air-column setup. This time the object is to guide the ball through hoops, hurdles, funnels and a seesaw. You control the fan power, and therefore the height of the foam ball, with your thoughts; you control the ball's horizontal movement through the course with a knob.

Mindflex Duel ($44): For about the same price, you can buy a two-headset version of the Mindflex. In some games, your concentration controls the fan strength—as in the original game; in others, it controls the lateral movement of the sliding fan, so that you and a buddy can have a kind of "think of war" battle.

Neural Impulse Actuator ($107): This "brain mouse" is marketed as a Windows game-playing accessory that lets you control game functions with your thoughts. You can assign it to trigger left-clicks, for example, or to make your character walk or shoot.

MindSet ($199): This $199 headset, from NeuroSky, is a traditional Bluetooth headset, suitable for Skype calls and so on. But it's also an EEG headset, a somewhat less frivolous one than the games described above. The software includes a simple "brain-wave monitor" app, but the real potential lies in the developer kit, which allows programmers to come up with their own MindSet-driven software.

EPOC ($299): Emotiv's $299 headset is the most serious consumer option yet. The wired headset has 16 contacts, and you're supposed to wet them with saline solution for better contact. As a result, the sensitivity is far superior to what you get from the dry-connection, single-contact headsets. The company includes a few starter games and monitors to get you going—but here again, the real promise is the software development kit.

In short, most of the consumer BCI offerings so far fall under the headings "Gimmick" and "Quick Novelty Wear-Off Factor." But sometimes it's not about how well the bear dances—it's that the bear can dance at all.

How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?

  

Forget voice control or gesture recognition: gadgets may soon link directly to our brains.
Okay, great: we can control Our phones with speech recognition and our television sets with gesture recognition. But those technologies don't work in all situations for all people. So I say, forget about those crude beginnings; what we really want is thought recognition.
As I found out during research for a recent NOVA episode, it mostly appears that brain-computer interface (BCI) technology has not advanced very far just yet. For example, I tried to make a toy helicopter fly by thinking “up” as I wore a $300 commercial EEG headset. It barely worked.
Such “mind-reading” caps are quick to put on and noninvasive. They listen, through your scalp, for the incredibly weak remnants of electrical signals from your brain activity. But they're lousy at figuring out where in your brain they originated. Furthermore, the headset software didn't even know that I was thinking “up.” I could just as easily have thought “goofy” or “shoelace” or “pickle”—whatever I had thought about during the 15-second training session.
There are other noninvasive brain scanners—magnetoencephalography, positron-emission tomography and near-infrared spectroscopy, and so on—but each also has its trade-offs.
Of course, you can implant sensors inside someone's skull for the best readings of all; immobilized patients have successfully manipulated computer cursors and robotic arms using this approach. Still, when it comes to controlling everyday electronics, brain surgery might be a tough sell.
My most astonishing discovery came at Carnegie Mellon University, where Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell have been using real-time functional MRI scanners to do some actual mind reading—or thought recognition, as they more responsibly call it.
As I lay in the fMRI, I saw 20 images on the screen (of a strawberry, skyscraper, cave, and so on). I was instructed to imagine the qualities of each object. The computer would try to figure out, from every two objects, the sequence of the two images I had just seen (whether strawberry had come before skyscraper, for example). It got them 100 percent right.
It turns out that, regardless of our native language or personal history, the same parts of our brain “light up” when we think of certain nouns. For “strawberry,” we might think “red,” “eat” or “hold in one hand.” The computer knows which brain areas are active for which qualities. The system can also guess what number you're thinking of or which of 15 emotions you're feeling.
Now, much needs to happen before we can change TV channels just by thinking “CBS.” In these early days, most BCI research is focused on how to help the disabled move or how to detect lies. And that work is raising plenty of questions about ethics, privacy and credibility. There will be other questions when thought recognition does come to gadgets. What happens if you get distracted when you're mind dictating an e-mail? Who wins if your spouse and you think about two different channels? And who's going to submit to an MRI to adjust music volume?
Just, who runs the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon, isn't worried about that part. “Our machine is a monster,” he told me. But “someday some biophysicist is going to develop some far smaller device, probably operating on a different principle.” At this point, it is too early to see where BCI will land or even when it will take off. And that's fine. After all, when somebody invented the wheel, he or she probably didn't imagine Acela trains, roller coasters or skateboards right away.
Still, I've had my mind read, and I'm a believer. There's something brewing, and millions of dollars are being poured into the effort to refine it. The next great interface breakthrough may tap into the electrical device you were born with.