A small Photo Voltaic solar panel provides power for the micro controller, sensors, various valves, etc.
the project s website says. Harvard s Kevin Ma spoke to Business Insider about the team s progress in building the bee-size robot since publishing its Science paper last year.
Then there are a whole host of issues to work out dealing with wireless communications s
#New LED light technology sheds light on the future of food LED growing lights, delivering sunlight whatever the weather.
Set up by two former Google employees, it used remote sensing and other cartographic techniques to map every field in America (all 25m of them) and superimpose on that all the climate information that it could find.
By 2010 its database contained 150 billion soil observations and 10 trillion weather-simulation points.
The Climate Corporation planned to use these data to sell crop insurance. But last October Monsanto bought the company for about $1 billionne of the biggest takeovers of a data firm yet seen.
Monsanto, the world largest hybrid-seed producer, has a library of hundreds of thousands of seeds,
and terabytes of data on their yields. By adding these to the Climate Corporation soil-and-weather database,
it produced a map of America which says which seed grows best in which field, under what conditions.
Fieldscripts uses all these data to run machines made by Precision Planting, a company Monsanto bought in 2012,
Monsanto, loaded with data, can plant a field with different varieties at different depths and spacings, varying all this according to the weather.
to boost its farm-data business. The benefits are clear. Farmers who have tried Monsanto system say it has pushed up yields by roughly 5%over two years,
The seed companies think providing more data to farmers could increase America maize yield from 160 bushels an acre (10 tonnes a hectare) to 200 bushelsiving a terrific boost to growersmeagre margins.
But the story of prescriptive planting is also a cautionary tale about the conflicts that arise when data entrepreneurs meet old-fashioned businessfolk.
it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farmingheir core competence. However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method.
They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused.
the prescriptive-planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms and run them in competition with the farmers;
or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets,
and control their data; that companies may not use the information except for the purpose for
Also, once data have been sent and anonymised, farmers might be said no longer to own them, so it is not clear
to negotiate with the data providers. Another worry is that, since the companies have not yet made the data fully ortable farmers may become locked into doing business with a single provider.
To assuage all these concerns the Climate Corporation has set up a free data storage service for farmers,
which others cannot access without the farmerspermission. New niche data-management firms are entering the market,
which should help make it more competitive. For the time being, though, the biggest companies will dominate prescriptive planting.
They collect the most comprehensive data and make better use of them than anyone else.
And that raises a problem which affects big data in all its forms. Prescriptive planting could boost yields everywhere,
But its success depends on service providers persuading users (farmers or patients) to trust them. If the users think they are taking a disproportionate share of the risks
while firms are getting an excessive chunk of the benefits, trust will remain in short supply
you probably think about electronics products like televisions and computers. Thanks to its CT and other diagnostic imaging machines and technology, Toshiba has made a name for itself in the healthcare industry, too.
when each technology will be scientifically viable (the kind of stuff that Google, governments and universities develop),
Equipment telematics: Allows mechanical devices such as tractors to warn mechanics that a failure is likely to occur soon.
Collars with GPS, RFID and biometrics can automatically identify and relay vital information about the livestock in real time.
By pre-computing the shape of the field where the inputs are to be used, and by understanding the relative productivity of different areas of the field,
Further understanding of crop variability, geolocated weather data and precise sensors should allow improved automated decision-making and complementary planting techniques.
which together would monitor, predict, cultivate and extract crops from the land with practically no human intervention.
Synthetic biology is about programming biology using standardized parts as one programs computers using standardized libraries today.
#$150 smartphone spectrometer can tell the number of calories in your food If you wanted to look up the calorie content of a specific food you are eating you could take it to a lab and run it through a spectrometer.
however, wants to make it easy as running an app and pairing a bluetooth dongle. The SCIO is a handheld device that pairs with a smartphone through Bluetooth LE being developed by Consumer Physics
an Israel-based startup funded by Kholsa Ventures. It based on near-infrared spectroscopy, which means it reflects light onto an object,
but Kickstarter backers pledging over $300 will receive two years of guaranteed app upgrades. While scientists and researchers use near-infrared spectroscopy on a regular basis,
Consumer Physics will offer both Android and iphone apps, and also hopes to develop a platform upon
In a few seconds, the associated smartphone app will take the spectrometer reading, send it to SCIO servers,
analyze it and compare it to a database of known spectral signatures, and display the information in an easy-to-understand manner.
In turn, the readings provided by users will make the spectral signature database more complete. Consumer Physics has developed three different applications for identifying food, medicines, and plants.
During a short demo, I saw the module return the percentage of fat and number of calories per 100 grams of cheese.
It closer to the size of a smartphone camera module, and could one day be included in a variety of forms,
Developer kits available through the Kickstarter for $200 offer barebones SCIO modules and come with CAD designs for 3d printers.
in addition to developing the hardware, is also populating the first databases and apps that work with the SCIO,
hopefully other companies will build their own apps, using the developer kit available from Kickstarter.
Other companies working in the portable spectrometer space have used also the technology to track calories eaten and nutritional intake through a user sweat.
#New 3d printed materials lighter than water and as strong as steel A Nanoscribe 3d printer can print models of the Empire state building in a space the width of a human hair using precision lasers.
Watching the machine build through thelens of an electron microscope is otherworldlybut the printer s potential runs beyond microscale model making.
believe such 3d printers may help craft a new generation of materials lighter than water and strong as steel.
Now, there s the Nanoscribe 3d printer. The printer s mirror-focused laser shines on and hardens a droplet of liquid plastic on a slide.
A computer moves the plate under the laser, selectively hardening it, layer by layer, to match a digital 3d model.
Once complete, the excess liquid is washed away, leaving a pristine structurewith features a few millionths of a meter across.
Microscale 3d printing is still new, but it s quickly progressing. In 2012, researchers at the Vienna University of Technology 3d printed a race car and cathedral smaller than a dust mite.
it s a fascinating peek into a future where information technologies may direct the fabrication of amazing newmicroarchitectural materials.
it may not be the only new computer-enabled approach to materials research. In a recent article, Scientific American predicted supercomputerswill yield a Golden age of materials science.
The article went on to note that the powerful modeling capabilities of supercomputers and the principles of quantum mechanics are together allowing scientists to build virtual materials atom by atom.
from the filament in a light bulb to the silicon in a computer chip. Whether we 3d print them
#Precision farming Gains Global Foothold (Op-Ed) Lloyd Treinish leads the environmental science team in the Industry Solutions Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research center.
A co-developer of IBM's Deep Thunder precision agriculture system he contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices:
which uses extensive data from a farmer's field and the surrounding region to help predict weather conditions
While collecting real-time data on weather soil health of crops and air quality is important as is the availability of equipment
At IBM we developed a precision agriculture weather-modeling service using Deep Thunder our Big data analytics technology for local customized high-resolution and rapid weather predictions.
It gathers data from sensors placed throughout fields that measure the temperature and moisture levels in soil and surrounding air.
The system then combines the field data with a diversity of public data from the National oceanic and atmospheric administration the National aeronautics and space administration and the U s. Geological Survey and private data from companies like Earth Networks.
A supercomputer processes the combined data and generates a four-dimensional mathematical model derived from the physics of the atmosphere.
By combining supercomputing and Big data analytics with other technological innovations even farmers with modest means can bolster production and profits.
#Honda Smart home produces more energy than it uses Wouldn it be great if your house produced more energy than it consumed?
Panasonic Eco Ideas House, with solar, a fuel cell, battery backup and a plug-in Toyota prius, has stood long next to a company headquarters in Tokyo,
but now it getting more serious with the Honda Smart home on the campus of the University of California at Davis
The house (incorporating elements of Honda's Smart home System, below) is furnished fully, and a UC-Davis employee is going to live in it for at least three years.
"Honda Smart home The house design is pleasant enough, but you won see its green features just by looking at it.
Michael Koenig, Honda Smart home project leader, said that converting DC to AC wastes energy, so this is a DC-based project.
condom-reinventing Microsoft cofounder didn actually drink human excrement Sedro-Woolley-produced sewage sludge at its finest.
Gates himself describes the waste-to-water process on his Gates Notes blog: I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin.
and operated using a micro-entrepreneurial model where local residents would benefit economically from the facilities. he processor wouldn just keep human waste out of the drinking water;
Nature News A transparent, flexible electrode made from graphene could see a one-atom thick honeycomb of carbon first made just five years ago replace other high-tech materials used in displays.
and Hong says that makes the material ideal for use in applications such as portable displays.
and his colleagues used computer simulations to create a model of the protein shell of the virus that causes the disease,
But it would be dauntingly expensive to maintain servers and staff to analyse the data
and identify mutations that might be causing the undiagnosed diseases that afflict his clients families.
So Jalas, the centre s director of genetics resources and services, has outsourced parts of the analysis. He uploads his clients sequencing data to cloud-computing software platforms
And the cloud-based interfaces let him collaborate with doctors in Israel without worrying about repeatedly transferring data on slow Internet connections."
) Doctors will increasingly want to use sequen#cing data to guide decisions about patient care, but might not necessarily want to invest in staff
and software to make sense of those data.""It s a huge unmet need, says David Ferreiro, a biotechnology analyst with investment bank Oppenheimer & Company in New york,
and analysis software that by 2016 could top $4#billion per year, according to BCC Research, a market-research company in Wellesley,
which provides genetic analysis software on its cloud-based platform and allows users to upload and run their own algorithms.
Source: BCC Researchother firms offer a range of approaches. Seven Bridges Genomics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
aims to be accessible to people with no expertise in bioinformatics, and provides access to free tools for designing custom-made analysis pipelines.
Ingenuity Systems in Redwood City, California, allows users to upload a list of mutations in a person s genome,
He says that they will have to prove that their products are better than freely available software
Last year, Illumina opened Basespace Apps, a marketplace for online analysis tools to be used on data uploaded to the company s own cloud-computing platform.
and hospitals to analyse data. But one of the biggest questions will be how deeply analysis companies can reach into medical settings,
and clinical geneticists may be uneasy about uploading data to the cloud.""It s your licence and your lab that go on the line
says Elizabeth Worthey, director of genomic informatics at the Human and Molecular genetics Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
Bina Technologies in Redwood City sells a server that can sit in a customer s own data centre
and is optimized to run genome-analysis software. Knome of Cambridge Massachusetts, announced last year that it plans to sell $125, 000 genome-analysis machines for use in customers labs (see Nature 490,157;
the range of customers who need to interpret sequence data is growing, and each has their own needs."
Lockheed has proven technologies and the most nodule-bed data. Polymetallic nodules form over thousands of years on the sea floor, through processes that are still not fully understood;
Data are so far sparse on the degree to which the operations would threaten deep-sea life such as sediment-dwelling sea cucumbers, worms and small crustaceans,
) Craig Smith, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will lead an initial assessment of seafloor life for Lockheed s project, gathering baseline data for the potential harvest zone
Hadrian begins by using computer-aided design (CAD) to determine the precise placement of every brick in a given structure to within one hundredth of an inch.
The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks.
#Beating battery drain Stream video on your smartphone or use its GPS for an hour or two and you ll probably see the battery drain significantly.
As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features battery life has become a concern.
Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone s battery last perhaps twice as long
The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones antennas.
Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage eating away power more than any other smartphone component and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations#and wasting
This means smartphone batteries lose longevity and base stations waste energy and lose money. But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones)
and a shoebox-size module (for base stations) based on nearly a decade of MIT research to essentially switch gears to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed cutting the waste.
and a former associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who co-invented the technology. That turns out to be the key to keeping the efficiency very high.
When trialed in a base station last year Eta Devices module became the first transmitter for 4G LTE networks to achieve an average efficiency greater than 70 percent Dawson says.
Eta Devices has entered also conversations with major manufacturers of LTE-enabled smartphones to incorporate their chips by the end of next year.
Dawson says this could potentially double current smartphone battery life. Besides battery life Dawson adds there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency.
Eta Devices approach could lead to smaller handset batteries for example and even smaller handsets since there would be less dissipating heat.
and Twitter to name a few. In the mobile marketeta Devices commercial success is in part a product of engineering ingenuity intersecting with business acumen at MIT.
The AMO technology was a new transmitter architecture where algorithms could choose from different voltages needed to transmit data in each power amplifier
This could be done on the transmitting and receiving end of data transfers. This caught the eye of Astrom who had come to MIT after working in the mobile industry for 10 years looking for the next big thing.
At the time I was suffering as everyone else was from my iphone running out of battery at lunchtime Astrom says.
The iphone was only a year old but you could see how much data traffic would explode.
Fleshing out a business plan from an i-Teams draft the two professors earned a Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation grant in 2009 allowing for the first demonstration of the hardware showing a 77 percent gain in efficiency over standard systems.
A paper detailing the technology was presented at that year s IEEE Radio frequency Integrated circuits Symposium. That Deshpande Center grant was big in terms of the funding
and connecting us with local venture capitalists and really helping with being in that business mindset Dawson says.
#Spinning out a company has been the best way to validate the technology especially with novel power-electronics hardware Dawson says.
Future-proofing technologytoday Eta Devices major advantage is that its technology is able to handle ever-increasing data bandwidths.
A few major smartphone manufacturers are now using envelope tracking (ET) which adjusts voltage to power amplifiers on the fly.
But by adjusting that voltage continuously ET efficiency falls apart for 4G LTE and 802. 11ac (Wifi) wireless standards even up to 20 MHZ bandwidth.
ETADVANCED in contrast already accommodates ultrahigh bandwidths used by newer communication standards such as LTE Advanced (up to 80#megahertz) and the next-generation Wifi standard (up to 160 megahertz).
) Prepping for future communication standards is one thing that s helped the company thrive Dawson says.
In introducing new hardware you not only have to be better than the product of today
#Untangling how cables coil The world fiber-optic network spans more than 550,000 miles of undersea cable that transmits e-mail, websites,
and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or tangle in any part of this network can significantly slow telecommunications around the world.
Now engineers at MIT, along with computer scientists at Columbia University, have developed a method that predicts the pattern of coils
and tangles that a cable may form when deployed onto a rigid surface. The research combined laboratory experiments with custom-designed cables
At Columbia, computer scientists adapted a source code used for simulating animated hair and, incorporating the parameters of the MIT experiment,
and data loss. e now have a set of design guidelines that allow you to tune certain parameters to achieve a particular pattern,
so a lot of algorithms we develop, we need to think about geometry. Grinspun had upgraded previously a code he developed to simulate hair to model the flow of viscous fluids like honey.
so we thought that we should port some of his algorithms into engineering, and test if these patterns can be predicted,
has developed a platform hardware, software, and cloud services that lets manufacturers pick and choose various components
and application-specific software to add to commercial drones for multiple purposes. The key component is the startup Linux-based autopilot device,
a small red box that is installed into all of a client drones. his is responsible for flying the vehicle in a safe, reliable manner,
and acts as hub for the components, so it can collect all that data and display that info to a user, says Downey, Airware CEO,
who researched and built drones throughout his time at MIT. To customize the drones customers use software to select third-party drone vehicles and components such as sensors, cameras, actuators,
and communication devices configure settings, and apply their configuration to a fleet. Other software helps them plan
and monitor missions in real time (and make midflight adjustments), and collects and displays data. Airware then pushes all data to the cloud,
where it aggregated and analyzed, and available to designated users. If a company decides to use a surveillance drone for crop management, for instance,
it can easily add software that stitches together different images to determine which areas of a field are overwatered
or underwatered. hey don have to know the flight algorithms, or underlying hardware, they just need to connect their software or piece of hardware to the platform,
Downey says. he entire industry can leverage that. Clients have trialed Airware platform over the past year including researchers at MIT,
who are demonstrating delivery of vaccines in Africa. Delta Drone in France is using the platform for open-air mining operations,
search-and-rescue missions, and agricultural applications. Another UAV maker, Cyber Technology in Australia, is using the platform for drones responding to car crashes and other disasters,
and inspecting offshore oilrigs. Now, with its most recent $25 million funding round Airware plans to launch the platform for general adoption later this year,
viewing companies that monitor crops and infrastructure with drones that require specific cameras and sensors as potential early customers.
when Downey, who studied electrical engineering and computer science, organized an MIT student team including Airware chief technology officer, Buddy Michini 7, SM 9,
even though you could change the software, Downey says. A five-year stretch at Boeing as an engineer for the U s. military A160 Hummingbird UAV and as a commercial pilot put Downey in contact with drone manufacturers, who,
he found, were still using black boxes or open-source designs. hey were basically facing the same challenges we faced as undergrads at MIT,
the development of a standard operating system for drones is analogous to Intel processors and Microsoft DOS paving the way for personal computers in the 1980s.
Before those components became available, hobbyists built computers using software that didn work with different computers.
At the same time, powerful mainframes were only available to a select few and still suffered software-incompatibility issues.
Then came Intel processors and DOS. Suddenly engineers could build computers around the standard processor and create software on the operating system,
without needing to know details of the underlying hardware. ee doing the same thing for the drone space,
Downey says. here are 600 companies building differing versions of drone hardware. We think they need the Intel processor of the drones,
if you will, and that operating system-level software component, too like the DOS for drones.
The benefits are far-reaching, Downey says: rone companies, for instance, want to build drones and tailor them for different applications without having to build everything from scratch,
he says. But companies developing cameras, sensors, and communication links for drones also stand to benefit,
he adds, as their components will need only to be compatible with a single platform. Additionally, it could help the Federal aviation administration (FAA) better assess the reliability of drones;
Congress recently tasked the agency with compiling UAV rules and regulations by 2015. This could also help promote commercial drone use in the United states,
and every drone has different software and electronics, it good for the FAA if all of them had reliable and common hardware and software,
he says. e think it valuable for everybody. n
#A new way to model cancer Sequencing the genomes of tumor cells has revealed thousands of mutations associated with cancer.
To investigate the potential usefulness of CRISPR for creating mouse models of cancer the researchers first used it to knock out p53 and pten
Many models possiblethe researchers also used CRISPR to create a mouse model with an oncogene called beta catenin
pulling it slightly toward the leak site. That distortion can be detected by force-resistive sensors via a carefully designed mechanical system (similar to the sensors used in computer trackpads),
and the information sent back via wireless communications. Detecting leaks by sensing a pressure gradient close to leak openings is a novel idea
Chatzigeorgiou says, and key to the effectiveness of this method: This approach can sense a rapid change in pressure close to the leak itself, providing pinpoint accuracy in locating leaks.
which houses computers for automation and control, and expandable 20,000-gallon treatment units. In these units, microbes called xoelectrogensexecute a unique process, electromethanogenesis which is being used for the first time ever in treating wastewater.
Depending on several site factors, this produces anywhere from 30 to 400 kilowatts of electricity. Treated wastewater exits the reactor with 80 to 90 percent of pollutants removed,
Ecovolt, on the other hand, is applicable to a range of sites, and has demonstrated a more robust treatment process,
and provides real-time data thanks to using exoelectrogens as sensors. hese bugs are generating electricity,
But the core technology began as a bit of aerospace ingenuity and has since found its way back to space.
which excites electrons that flow through the thylakoid membranes of the chloroplast. The plant captures this electrical energy
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011