DARPA engineers and scientists at Johns hopkins university Applied Physics laboratory first inserted electrodes into the patient motor cortex.
The hand contains sensors that can detect when pressure is being applied to its fingers, and converts this pressure into electrical signals that the brain implant reads.
and volunteered to get electrode implants saw improvement in their scores on memory tests, DARPA said.
They received small electrode arrays placed in brain regions involved in the formation of declarative memory, according to DARPA.
Now a team led by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a flexible electronic sensor that can measure blood flow on top of the skin or
The devices are made from a thin array of metallic wires that are oriented around a central sensor
The researchers have not yet tested the sensors abilities when implanted below the skin as the devices would need to be totally wireless in order for that to make probable sense.
#Open-source Soil Sensors: Vinduino As California fourth straight year of drought forces farmers to cut back on water use,
one California vineyard-owner has taken a DIY approach to creating a sensor-driven water conservation system.
The project so far includes instructions for making your own soil moisture sensors (based on the gypsum mineral found in plaster of paris;
building a handheld Arduino-based device for taking sensor readings; and creating Arduino-based irrigation valves,
water pressure sensors and data loggers for controlling and monitoring the vineyard irrigation system. In prototype stage is networked a,
solar-powered sensor reading station that can report Vinduino sensor data via the Thingspeak platform.
Van der Lee future plans include designing a network hub for collecting readings from multiple sensor stations,
Van der Lee says that one of his primary motivations for building Vinduino was to innovate on commercial soil monitoring systems that typically rely on readings from a single sensor.
Vinduino uses three sensors at different depths to get a better handle on the way water moves through the soil at each measurement point.
together with low cost gypsum soil moisture sensors, provides all that
#Plug Your Toaster Into the Sun Sunport lets you use solar power at homeithout the panels.
and the bpay chip to make contactless payments Wearers can buy anything £30 and under in the U k. Wearers can add funds to their digital wallet using a mobile app or through an online portal.
as they do in computer chips. As a semimetal, graphene naturally has no bandgaps, making it a challenge for widespread industry adoption.
"For use in electronic devices, the semiconductor industry is interested primarily in three faces of a germanium crystal.
and image sensor, cost less than $3, 000 to construct. At production levels upwards of 10,000 units,
reflectors, and USB detectors, combined with the all-plastic housing and lenses will allow for future versions of the prototype to be mass-produced.
#A otdevelopment for ultra-cold magnetic sensors Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, is a noninvasive technique for investigating human brain activity for surgical planning or research,
The most sensitive commercial magnetic sensors require a single SQUID kept at 4. 2 Kn incredibly chilly temperature that is usually maintained with expensive and difficult to handle liquid helium.
"We believe there should be an immediate interest in the entire SQUID community for the potential replacement of their existing superconducting magnetic sensors based on single SQUIDS operating at 4. 2 K with our SQUID arrays operating at 77 K,
they provide a magnetic sensor that is very cost effective, considering that operation of SQUIDS at 4. 2k requires the use of liquid helium-4,
but rarely on a surface. his way we can build electrodes out of it, he said. t should be easy to integrate into devices.
including computer chips and other optoelectronic components.""Our results demonstrate relatively fast modulation from fundamentally slow phosphorescent light emitters,
One example could be optical communications networks on computer chips. Prototype on-chip networks have used semiconductor lasers as light emitters.
They can modulate very quickly, but they have downsides. Semiconductors can't be grown directly on a silicon chip,
for example--makes for bulky systems that take up a lot of real estate on a chip. What's more, semiconductor lasers are not particularly efficient.
There's still more work to be done to get such a system up to a speed that would be useful on a chip,
Linbo3 is used in many electronic devices dealing with high-frequency signals such as cell phones or radar installations.
and some are familiar with the different magnetic phases that store data in our electronic devices and the liquid crystalline phases that are used to create an image on certain electronic displays,
F Capture would enable motion capture without body sensors and could track actorsmovements even if they are behind furniture or walls.
F Capture would enable motion capture without body sensors and could track actorsmovements even if they are behind furniture or walls.
'fluffy'carbon electrode made from graphene (comprising one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms), and additives that alter the chemical reactions at work in the battery,
a positive electrode, a negative electrode and an electrolyte,''said Dr. Tao Liu, also from the Dept. of Chemistry,
the negative electrode is made of graphite (a form of carbon), the positive electrode is made of a metal oxide, such as lithium cobalt oxide,
and the electrolyte is a lithium salt dissolved in an organic solvent. The action of the battery depends on the movement of lithium ions between the electrodes.
Li-ion batteries are light but their capacity deteriorates with age, and their relatively low energy densities mean that they need to be recharged frequently.
By precisely engineering the structure of the electrode, changing it to a highly porous form of graphene,
%The highly porous graphene electrode also greatly increases the capacity of the demonstrator, although only at certain rates of charge and discharge.
Other issues that still have to be addressed include finding a way to protect the metal electrode
which are generally harmful to the metal electrode.""There's still a lot of work to do, "said Liu."
which an electrode used for splitting water absorbs solar photons while at the same time improving the flow of electrons from one electrode to another.
"Excited electrons When building a sun-capturing electrode, scientists aim to use as much of the solar spectrum as possible to excite electrons in the electrode to move from one state to another,
where they will be available for the water-splitting reaction. Equally important, but a separate problem entirely, the electrons need to move easily from the electrode to a counter-electrode,
creating a flow of current. Until now, scientists have had to use separate manipulations to increase photon absorption
if they heated an electrode made of the semiconducting compound bismuth vanadate to 350 degrees Celsius
Nitrogen's role Galli and former graduate student Yuan Ping, now a post-doc at Caltech, found that the nitrogen was acting on the electrode in several ways.
This meant that more of the solar energy could be used by the electrode.""Now we understand what's going on at the microscopic level,
which acres of mirrors precisely reflect sunlight onto a solar receiver. That energy has been used to heat a fluid that in turn drives a turbine to produce electricity.
#Electronic skin sensors to control mobile gadgets A skin-worn sensor that turns the human body into a touch sensitive surface for controlling mobile devices has been developed by scientists in Germany. iskin is made from biocompatible silicone rubber
with pressure-sensitive sensors that are stuck to the skin of the users, allowing them to use their own body to control mobile devices.
The sensor is capable of detecting touch input pressure even when being stretched or bent. With the current prototypes;
But our sensor is a flexible and stretchable sensor, so it can cover many locations.
which makes up the sensor. This is then sandwiched between two clear sheets of silicone.""The sensor is made out of biocompatible silicone and carbon-doped silicone.
So there are carbon particles inside the silicone which make it conductive so we can use it for electronics,
although the technology could evolve to use integrated microchips. Weigel also hopes that it could one day be possible to incorporate an energy harvesting system that would power iskin via the wear's body.
while also serving as the sensor net that sends touch, temperature and pain signals to the brain.
Ultimately she wants to create a flexible electronic fabric embedded with sensors that could cover a prosthetic limb
The top layer in the new work featured a sensor that can detect pressure over the same range as human skin,
and rubbers as pressure sensors by measuring the natural springiness of their molecular structures. They then increased this natural pressure sensitivity by indenting a waffle pattern into the thin plastic
This allowed the plastic sensor to mimic human skin, which transmits pressure information as short pulses of electricity, similar to Morse code, to the brain.
allowing more electricity to flow through the sensor, and those varied impulses are sent as short pulses to the sensing mechanism.
a flexible electronic circuit that could carry pulses of electricity to nerve cells. Bao's team has been developing flexible electronics that can bend without breaking.
Bao's team envisions developing different sensors to replicate, for instance, the ability to distinguish corduroy versus silk,
And the inkjet printing fabrication process suggests how a network of sensors could be deposited over a flexible layer and folded over a prosthetic hand."
#Artificial'skin'Provides Prosthetics With Sensation Using flexible organic circuits and specialized pressure sensors, researchers have created an artificial skin"that can sense the force of static objects.
A particular challenge was creating sensors that can"feel"the same range of pressure that humans can.
Thus, on the sensors, the team used carbon nanotubes molded into pyramidal microstructures, which are particularly effective at tunneling the signals from the electric field of nearby objects to the receiving electrode in a way that maximizes sensitivity.
Transferring the digital signal from the artificial skin system to the cortical neurons of mice proved to be another challenge,
and initiatives-it can be reached through low-power radios, small antennas, and computer laptops if you have the technical know-how.
#Flexible skin sensors turn your body into a digital touch panel The rise of wearable technology is inevitably leading towards our clothes becoming the next touch-enabled smart accessories,
co-developer Martin Weigel of Saarland University in Germany told Matthew Stock at Reuters. ut our sensor is a flexible and stretchable sensor,
The researchers say that iskin could be used as a remote control mechanism for other sorts of digital devices,
features a sensor created by sandwiching a conductive carbon black powder between two sheets of silicone.
the sensor is able to distinguish between two different pressures, with resistive (firm) and capacative (light touches potentially enabling different sorts of user control.
"The trick in getting them to be nearly transparent is in making them really thin-the electrodes are just 80 nm
"How did they make the electrodes so thin? Back in 2013, the main component of the electrolyte for the battery's positive electrode was lithium iron phosphate,
and for the electrolyte used for the negative electrode, they used lithium titanate and lithium hexafluorophosphate-both
of which are used commonly in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. For the prototype that was put on display in Tokyo last month,
they altered the transparent oxides used for the negative electrode to achieve incredibly thin, transparent electrodes.
They did this by placing electrode arrays onto a paralysed volunteer sensory cortex-a region in the brain that responsible for identifying
and pressure sensors in the arm that connect back into the sensory cortex give the wearer the sensation that they are touching something,
Loaded with highly sensitive torque sensors, the device could detect changes in pressure as they are applied to the fingers,
Not only have previous attempts at light-based computer chips turned out to be quite volatile, theye all required power to store data,
"The chip is built by placing on a small section of GST on top of a silicon nitride ridge-known as the waveguide
including as exceptionally strong components in personal electronic devices, in space exploration vehicles, and as hydrogen storage materials in next generation batteries,"he added.
Another possible application is in sensors that measure magnetic fields l
#Watch: Paralysed man walks again via brain waves rerouted to his legs A paraplegic man who was paralysed for five years has walked again on his own two feet,
and transmitted to electrodes attached to the subject knees, triggering movement in the leg muscles.
"The technology used is called an inverter system, which has been installed at the Cloudesley Road substation on the Victoria line.
Another benefit of the inverter system is that by collecting up the energy and turning it into electricity
#Australian engineers just built a quantum logic gate in silicon for the first time For decades, researchers have been trying to build a computer that harnesses the enormous potential of quantum mechanics.
by creating a quantum logic gate in silicon-the same material that today's computer chips are made from.
which means they now have the ability to build the world's first quantum processor chip and, eventually, the first silicon-based quantum computer.
Right now, regular computer chips store information as binary bits, which are either in a 0 or 1 state.
what's known as a logic gate-a building block of all digital circuits, which takes two input values
Quantum logic gates have been built in the past, but they've all used exotic materials, which isn't compatible with today's silicon-based computer infrastructure.
A silicon quantum logic gate was the last physical building block remaining to be built in order to create a silicon-based quantum computer."
"Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs,
which rely on more exotic technologies, "project leader Andrew Dzurak said in a press release.""This makes the building of a quantum computer much more feasible,
"The challenge in building quantum logic gates is the fact that, in order to get two qubits to'talk'to each other,
The team overcame this by effectively copying the setup of traditional chips. In that setup, binary bits are defined by tiny semiconductor devices known as transistors.
The team then showed that they could use metal electrodes on these transistors to control the qubits
creating a functioning logic gate. The researchers have patented already a design"for a full-scale quantum computer chip that would allow for millions of our qubits,
Once we have a silicon quantum chip, we'll then be able to build a functioning quantum computer,
#New electronic sensor can detect ovarian cancer in your breath Your breath says more about you than you might think-not just how inebriated you are or
A new type of sensor that can'sniff out'traces of ovarian cancer in a patient's breath has been developed by researchers in Israel,
The sensors in the breathalyser are looking for volatile organic compounds (VOCS) in the breath samples:
By applying electrodes and a voltage to the resulting film, patterns can be identified, which are matched then up to various diseases."
She also says there's still room for improvement in making the sensors smaller and more sensitive before they're ready for clinical use.
and smartphones, was reached by using a'fluffy'carbon electrode made from graphene. What's more, by changing the chemical mix from earlier versions of lithium-air batteries,
as electrical vehicles and personal electronic devices become more ubiquitous in our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly necessary to have more efficient systems for localized electrical power generation and effective cooling mechanisms.
The paper sensor emerges from the printer ready to use, like ph paper. The implications are significant,
Like silicon, they can be semiconducting in nature, a fact that is essential for circuit boards, and they can undergo fast and highly controllable electrical switching.
shorts the circuit and throws a wrench into the gears of any potential electronic device. In fact, according to University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign professor John Rogers, the purity needs to exceed 99.999 percent--meaning even one bad tube in 100,000 is enough to kill an electronic device."
"If you have lower purity than that, "he said, "that class of materials will not work for semiconducting circuits."
Low temperature plasmas are formed by applying a high electric field across a gas using an electrode, which breaks down the gas to form plasma.
a single chip can provide enough data for a statistical analysis of how the cells respond in an experiment.
#New understanding of electromagnetism could enable'antennas on a chip'A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge have unravelled one of the mysteries of electromagnetism,
which could enable the design of antennas small enough to be integrated into an electronic chip.
These ultra-small antennas--the so-called'last frontier'of semiconductor design--would be a massive leap forward for wireless communications.
The purpose of any antenna, whether in a communications tower or a mobile phone, is to launch energy into free space in the form of electromagnetic or radio waves,
however, is that antennas are still quite big and incompatible with electronic circuits --which are ultra-small
"Antennas, or aerials, are one of the limiting factors when trying to make smaller and smaller systems,
dielectric resonators are used already as antennas in mobile phones, for example.""In dielectric aerials, the medium has high permittivity,
"Working with researchers from the National Physical Laboratory and Cambridge-based dielectric antenna company Antenova Ltd, the Cambridge team used thin films of piezoelectric materials, a type of insulator
'which leads to a pattern of electric field lines radiating out from a transmitter, such as a two wire system in which the parallel geometry is broken,
The electromagnetic radiation emitted from dielectric materials is due to accelerating electrons on the metallic electrodes attached to them
ubiquitous computing where almost everything in our homes and offices, from toasters to thermostats, is connected to the internet.
and the ability to fit an ultra-small aerial on an electronic chip would be a massive leap forward.
Gallium arsenide-based amplifiers and filters are already available on the market and this new discovery opens up new ways of integrating antennas on a chip along with other components."
"It's actually a very simple thing, when you boil it down, "said Sinha.""We've achieved a real application breakthrough,
to adhere to the metal electrodes. Initially working with Lew Meixler on a federal Cooperative Research and development Agreement in the Plasma Surface Laboratory, she solved the problem by treating the metal (steel or titanium) with a plasma.
"A study about the device will appear in an upcoming issue of the scientific journal Sensors,
Here, the'knob'is applied the voltage to a small electrode placed above the atom.""The findings suggest that it would be possible to locally control individual qubits with electric fields in a large-scale quantum computer using only inexpensive voltage generators, rather than the expensive high-frequency microwave sources.
and published April 10 in the inaugural volume of the new AAAS journal Science Advances, found that the sensors in smartphones
the GPS (Global positioning system) receivers in a smartphone can detect the permanent ground movement (displacement) caused by fault motion in a large earthquake.
The authors found that the sensors in smartphones and similar devices could be used to issue earthquake warnings for earthquakes of approximately magnitude 7 or larger,
but consumer electronics are increasingly common, crowd-sourced EEW has significant potential.""The U s. earthquake early warning system is being built on our high-quality scientific earthquake networks,
to test a pilot hybrid earthquake warning system comprising stand-alone smartphone sensors and scientific-grade sensors along the Chilean coast."
"The use of mobile phone fleets as a distributed sensor network--and the statistical insight that many imprecise instruments can contribute to the creation of more precise measurements--has broad applicability including great potential to benefit communities where there isn't an existing
Although several researchers have explored diverse stretchable electronics, due to the absence of the appropriate device structures and correspondingly electrodes,
and hyper-stretchable elastic-composite generator (SEG) using very long silver nanowire-based stretchable electrodes. Their stretchable piezoelectric generator can harvest mechanical energy to produce high power output (4 V) with large elasticity (250%)and excellent durability (over 104 cycles.
These noteworthy results were achieved by the non-destructive stress-relaxation ability of the unique electrodes as well as the good piezoelectricity of the device components.
For instance, invisible rods could be used as supports for a miniature antenna complex connecting two optical chips.
and placed the film over a square of Cycom 5320-1. They connected electrodes to the film,
"By combining electrodes, such as those used to treat Parkinson's disease, with this micropump, it may be possible to use this technology to treat patients with epilepsy who are resistant to conventional treatments,
and the possibility of combining this high-technology system with the microchip they previously developed in 2013.
The chip would be used to detect the imminent occurrence of a seizure in order to activate the pump to inject the drug at just the right moment.
Light-controlled molecule switching Dr. Artur Erbe, physicist at the HZDR, is convinced that in the future molecular electronics will open the door for novel and increasingly smaller--while also more energy efficient--components or sensors:"
The diarylethene needs to be attached at the end of the nanowires to electrodes so that the current can flow."
which can be used in the manufacture of magnetic field sensors. VTT's third application trial involved the prevention of microwave reflection.
Some implications of this research are obvious--like using portable electronic devices for longer before charging
the researchers created a hybrid system that can switch between several LED transmitters installed on a ceiling,
The receivers are small photodiodes that cost less than a dollar each and could be connected through a USB port for current systems,
"The process can be expanded to biomedical sensor and solar-cell areas, "Ishihara said, "and will also realize stretchable--and even edible--electronics
#Ultra-sensitive sensor detects individual electrons In the same Cambridge laboratory in the United kingdom where The british physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897,
European scientists have developed just a new ultra-sensitive electrical-charge sensor capable of detecting the movement of individual electrons."
and its authors predict that these types of sensors, dubbed'gate sensors, 'will be used in quantum computers of the future to read information stored in the charge or spin of a single electron."
"We have called it a gate sensor because, as well as detecting the movement of individual electrons, the device is able to control its flow
as if it were an electronic gate which opens and closes, "explains Gonzlez Zalba. The researchers have demonstrated the possibility of detecting the charge of an electron with their device in approximately one nanosecond,
This has been achieved by coupling a gate sensor to a silicon nanotransistor where the electrons flow individually.
a field in which the new gate sensor can offer its advantages s
#Researchers add a new wrinkle to cell culture Using a technique that introduces tiny wrinkles into sheets of graphene,
This makes it easier for potentially coupling the terahertz waves to a wave guide on a microchip
The liquid nanolaser in this study is not a laser pointer but a laser device on a chip,
By analyzing the spectral signals captured by a special sensor they installed at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass."
This effectively proved that these three-atom-thick semiconducting films can be made into multilevel electronic devices of unsurpassed thinness.
but the survey-grade antennas these systems employ are too large and costly for use in mobile devices.
The breakthrough by Humphreys and his team is a powerful and sensitive software-defined GPS RECEIVER that can extract centimeter accuracies from the inexpensive antennas found in mobile devices--such precise measurements were not previously possible.
The researchers anticipate that their software's ability to leverage low-cost antennas will reduce the overall cost of centimeter accuracy,
Humphreys and his team have spent six years building a specialized receiver, called GRID, to extract so-called carrier phase measurements from low-cost antennas.
GRID currently operates outside the phone, but it will eventually run on the phone's internal processor.
During the experiments, 192 electrodes in each monkey's motor and premotor cortex began measuring brain activity the moment that the targets appeared on screen.
"A detailed understanding of the fundamental charge transport properties of the material is essential for detector developments."
The Limits of Conventional Radiation Detectorssemiconductor radiation detectors are devices that measure ionizing radiation by collecting radiation-generated charge carriers in the semiconductor between electrodes under a bias voltage.
Conventional semiconductor detectors such as germanium and silicon require low temperatures to operate which limits their applications outside of laboratories.
For example, germanium detectors must be cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature (about 77 Kelvin or-196 degrees Celsius) to produce spectroscopic data.
making it difficult and expensive to incorporate in commercial detectors. Researchers are still searching for a material with improved performance
Moreover, the detector materials need to have excellent carrier transport efficiency to make sure radiation-generated charges effectively diffuse through the crystal
and reach the electrodes. Enter thallium sulfide iodide. Thallium sulfide iodide is an emerging semiconductor compound that has attracted attention in recent years for room-temperature radiation detection,
low melting temperature and so on, suggest that thallium sulfide iodide is a good candidate for fabricating new generation room-temperature radiation detectors with improved performance and lower cost than previous detectors,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011