With rising innovations in batteries and advanced power inverters and motors Hynes backed into a technological solution with retrofitted electric powertrains.
however, require that a disk-shaped transmitter about an inch in diameter be affixed to the skull,
with a wire snaking down to a joint microphone and power source that looks like an oversized hearing aid around the patient ear.
Adaptive reuse Existing cochlear implants use an external microphone to gather sound, but the new implant would
instead use the natural microphone of the middle ear, which is almost always intact in cochlear-implant patients.
A middle-ear implant consists of a tiny sensor that detects the ossiclesvibrations and an actuator that helps drive the stapes accordingly.
The new device would use the same type of sensor but the signal it generates would travel to a microchip implanted in the ear,
which would convert it to an electrical signal and pass it on to an electrode in the cochlea.
Lowering the power requirements of the converter chip was the key to dispensing with the skull-mounted hardware.
Chandrakasan lab at MTL specializes in low-power chips, and the new converter deploys several of the tricks that the lab has developed over the years,
such as tailoring the arrangement of low-power filters and amplifiers to the precise acoustic properties of the incoming signal.
But Chandrakasan and his colleagues also developed a new signal-generating circuit that reduces the chip power consumption by an additional 20 to 30 percent.
The key was to specify a new waveform the basic electrical signal emitted by the chip,
Heidi Nakajima, the researchers have demonstrated also that the chip and sensor are able to pick up
and process speech played into a the middle ear of a human cadaver. t very cool,
Another imaging technique, known as magnetoencephalography (MEG), uses an array of hundreds of sensors encircling the head to measure magnetic fields produced by neuronal activity in the brain.
These sensors offer a dynamic portrait of brain activity over time, down to the millisecond, but do not tell the precise location of the signals.
and therefore accumulate less charge in the detector while brighter regions would reflect more light
Filtering out noisethe photon registered by the detector could however be a stray photodetection generated by background light.
could be used in medical imaging and collision-avoidance detectors for cars, and to improve the accuracy of motion tracking
which the location of objects is calculated by how long it takes a light signal to reflect off a surface and return to the sensor.
Conventional cameras see an average of the light arriving at the sensor, much like the human eye, says James Davis, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa cruz. In contrast,
#Creating synthetic antibodies MIT chemical engineers have developed a novel way to generate nanoparticles that can recognize specific molecules, opening up a new approach to building durable sensors for many different compounds
In the past, researchers have exploited this phenomenon to create sensors by coating the nanotubes with molecules, such as natural antibodies, that bind to a particular target.
The MIT team found that they could create novel sensors by coating the nanotubes with specifically designed amphiphilic polymers polymers that are drawn to both oil and water, like soap.
and could be used to create sensors to monitor diseases such as cancer, inflammation, or diabetes in living systems. his new technique gives us an unprecedented ability to recognize any target molecule by screening nanotube-polymer complexes to create synthetic analogs to antibody function,
Synthetic antibodies The new polymer-based sensors offer a synthetic design approach to the production of molecular recognition sites enabling, among other applications, the detection of a potentially infinite library of targets.
Moreover, this approach can provide a more durable alternative to coating sensors such as carbon nanotubes with actual antibodies,
In the new paper, the researchers describe molecular recognition sites that enable the creation of sensors specific to riboflavin, estradiol (a form of estrogen),
It might be a job for efficient spray cooling f we can figure out how to fit a system into the small space inside electronic devices.
These devices consist of microfluidic channels engraved on tiny chips, but current versions usually require a great deal of extra instrumentation attached to the chip,
limiting their portability. Much of that extra instrumentation is needed to keep the particles flowing single file through the center of the channel,
The beam-stabilization system on the space terminal is based on inertial sensors which can be scaled to work even at the most distant planets.
And the ground receiver is based on arrays of small inexpensive telescopes that are coupled fiber to highly efficient superconducting nanowires a photon counting technology that was brought to its high state of maturity by joint MIT and Lincoln Lab teams.
It has been known for years that laser communications have the potential to deliver much higher data rates and use smaller space terminals than radio-based systems.
Then the Laboratory did the more detailed full-system design the detailed design of the three modules that make up the space terminal and the detailed design of the primary ground terminal.
Electrodes record the angular displacement and torque at the joint, which researchers use to calculate the ankle stiffness.
as well as surface electrodes attached to the ankle four major muscles. The robot was connected to a video display with a pixelated bar that moved up and down
and made it a thrombin sensor. The system consists of iron oxide nanoparticles which the Food and Drug Administration has approved for human use coated with peptides (short proteins) that are specialized to interact with thrombin.
and conductive electrodes to carry electrical signals. These polymer templates, which can have dimensions on the scale of inches,
of which could then be monitored with embedded electrodes. At the same time, one or more drugs could be injected into the brain through the hollow channels,
Electrodes recorded the activity of these identified neurons during animal behaviors. Mice naturally love sucrose similar to humans loving sugar-rich sodas
HVAC system efficiency is affected by the system itself, by household behavioral factors such as thermostat and window usage and
about 20 nanometers in size the same size range as the smallest features that can now be produced in microchips.
This could lead to chips that combine optical and electronic components in a single device, with far lower losses than when such devices are made separately and then interconnected,
#Toward tiny, solar-powered sensors The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards he Internet of thingsthe idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment,
and even livestock would have embedded their own sensors that report information directly to networked servers,
however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes or, even better,
this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.
All of those operations also share a single inductor the chip main electrical component which saves on circuit board space
the chip power consumption remains low. e still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,
To control the current flow across their chip, El-Damak and her advisor, Anantha Chandrakasan,
whose regulation is the very purpose of the chip. Since that voltage is fixed, the variation in timing has to come from variation in capacitance.
El-Damak and Chandrakasan thus equip their chip with a bank of capacitors of different sizes.
who leads a power conversion development project as a fellow at the chip manufacturer Maxim Integrated. f youe only coming in with a small amount,
he adds. t really kind of a full system-on-a chip for power management. And that makes it a little more complicated
In this so-called low battery, the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid
while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles.
e realized that a better way to make use of this flowable electrode technology was to reinvent the lithium ion manufacturing process. nstead of the standard method of applying liquid coatings to a roll of backing material,
the new process keeps the electrode material in a liquid state and requires no drying stage at all.
thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent.
Having the electrode in the form of tiny suspended particles instead of consolidated slabs greatly reduces the path length for charged particles as they move through the material a property known as ortuosity.
A less tortuous path makes it possible to use thicker electrodes, which, in turn, simplifies production
While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle electrodes that can crack under stress the new formulation produces battery cells that can be bent,
equipped with cameras and sensors, that can be tossed into potentially hazardous areas to instantly transmit panoramic images of those areas back to a smartphone. t basically gives a quick assessment of a dangerous situation,
There are plans to add sensors for radiation, temperature and carbon monoxide in future models. For this first manufacturing run, the startup aims to gather feedback from police,
#Major step for implantable drug-delivery device An implantable, microchip-based device may soon replace the injections
Earlier this month, MIT spinout Microchips Biotech partnered with a pharmaceutical giant to commercialize its wirelessly controlled, implantable,
microchip-based devices that store and release drugs inside the body over many years. Invented by Microchips Biotech cofounders Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering,
and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, the microchips consist of hundreds of pinhead-sized reservoirs,
each capped with a metal membrane, that store tiny doses of therapeutics or chemicals. An electric current delivered by the device removes the membrane,
and osteoporosis. Now Microchips Biotech will begin co-developing microchips with Teva Pharmaceutical, the world largest producer of generic drugs,
Microchips Biotech says these microchips could also improve medication-prescription adherence a surprisingly costly issue in the United states. A 2012 report published in the Annals of Internal medicine estimated that Americans who don stick to prescriptions rack up $100 billion to $289 billion
Microchips Biotech will continue work on its flagship product, a birth-control microchip, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
Cima, who now serves on the Microchips Biotech board of directors with Langer, sees this hormone-releasing microchip as one of the first implantable rtificial organsecause it acts as a gland. lot of the therapies are trying to chemically trick the endocrine systems Cima says. e are doing that with this artificial organ we created. ild ideasinspiration for the microchips came in the late 1990s,
when Langer watched a documentary on mass-producing microchips. thought to myself, ouldn this be a great way to make a drug-delivery system??
Langer says. He brought this idea to Cima, a chip-making expert who was taken aback by its novelty. ut being out-of-this-world is not something that needs to stop anybody at MIT,
Cima adds. n fact, that should be the criterion. o in 1999, Langer, Cima, and then-graduate student John Santini Phd 9 co-founded Microchips,
and invented a prototype for their microchip that was described in a paper published that year in Nature.
This entrepreneurial collaboration was the first of many for Cima and Langer over the next decade.
For years, the technology underwent rigorous research and development at Microchips Biotech. But in 2011, Langer and Cima,
and researchers from Microchips, conducted the microchipsfirst human trials to treat osteoporosis this time with wireless capabilities.
In that study, published in a 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine, microchips were implanted into seven elderly women,
Results indicated that the chips delivered doses comparable to injections and did so more consistently ith no adverse side effects.
combined with ongoing efforts in contraceptive-delivery microchips, led Cima to believe the microchips could someday,
essentially, be considered the first artificial glands that could regulate potent hormones inside the body. This may sound like a wild idea ut Cima doesn think so.
The chip ends an endocrine or chemical signal instead of an electrical signal. EMS innovationsmicrochips Biotech made several innovations in the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing process to ensure the microchips could be commercialized.
A major innovation was enabling final assembly of the microchips at room temperature with hermetic seals. Any intense heat during final assembly, with hermetic sealing, could destroy the drugs already loaded into the reservoirs
which meant common methods of welding and soldering were off-limits. To do so, Microchips Biotech modified a cold-welding ongue and grooveprocess.
This meant depositing a soft, gold alloy in patterns on the top of the chip to create tongues, and grooves on the base.
By pressing the top and base pieces together, the tongues fit into the grooves, and plastically deforms to weld the metal together. ach one of these reservoirs,
Cima says. here was no precedent for that. he company has also found ways to integrate electronics into the microchips to shrink down the device.
the company could refine the microchips to be even smaller, yet carry the same volume of drugs. his means making the drugs take up more volume than the electrical and other components,
#Tiny wires could provide a big energy boost Wearable electronic devices for health and fitness monitoring are a rapidly growing area of consumer electronics;
one of their biggest limitations is the capacity of their tiny batteries to deliver enough power to transmit data.
as the electrodes in tiny supercapacitors (which are essentially pairs of electrically conducting fibers with an insulator between).
At the moment, the coin-sized batteries used in many small electronic devices have limited very ability to deliver a lot of power at once,
Now MIT spinout Cambridge Electronics Inc. CEI) has announced a line of Gan transistors and power electronic circuits that promise to cut energy usage in data centers, electric cars,
and the inverters that convert the battery power to drive the electric motors. The silicon transistors used today have constrained a power capability that limits how much power the car can handle.
#Sensor Sunday: Doggie Wearables Monitoring Shoppers and Catching TV While You Doze off In the past two years there been a boom in talk around the Internet of things and Wearables.
People are putting more sensors into cities, into their homes and onto themselves. Interest in the quantified self and home automation are on the rise.
A lot of talk has gone into the sensors in cameras that enable quicker focusing and better colours.
The proliferation of fingerprint sensors is expected to rise with companies like Samsung Apple and Mastercard adopting the technology.
Biometric sensors are getting smaller and the ease with which data can be analyzed and shared is improving.
Already, much of the world interacts with sensors on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Gartner released their predictions on where sensor technology is headed.
They predicted that y 2017,30 percent of smart wearables will be inconspicuous to the eyeand y 2016,
biometric sensors will be featured in 40 percent of smartphones shipped to end users With the way technology is developing and the increasing consumer demand,
wee looked at new sensor technology and new ways that sensors are being used. More news comes in every week.
Wel keep it coming into the new year, but here the last roundup for 2014. Looking at Shoppers in a New Way Looking at Shoppers in a New Way This year,
The data from the sensors can show if the dog is under unusual stress or if a chronic health condition may be worsening.
Mark Waugh) Two teenagers from Manchester have developed a 3d printed wristband with embedded sensors that can detect
The junctions between p-and n-type semiconductors are the building blocks of electronic devices. Put together in sequence these p-n junctions form transistors which can in turn be combined into integrated circuits microchips and processors.
Chemically doping graphene to achieve p -and n-type version of the material is possible but it means sacrificing some of its unique electrical properties.
but manufacturing and placing the necessary electrodes negates the advantages graphene's form factor provides.
These properties can lead to new electronic devices that are more robust and multifunctional. The finding has the potential to increase graphene's use in computers as in computer chips that use electronic spin to store data.
Study results appeared online earlier this month in Physical Review Letters. The magnetic insulator Shi and his team used was yttrium iron garnet grown by laser molecular beam epitaxy in his lab. The researchers placed a single-layer graphene sheet on an atomically smooth layer of yttrium iron garnet.
They sandwiched these patterns between electrodes to make bright QD LEDS. Patel also reported on the team's future efforts.
In addition to paving the way for improved consumer electronics, this technology could also have specific uses in industrial and military applications.
This forms the foundation of an electronic device. However, researchers have struggled to isolate purely semiconducting carbon nanotubes,
The team's most recent advance also brings the field closer to realizing carbon nanotube transistors as a feasible replacement for silicon transistors in computer chips and in high-frequency communication devices,
Products that use silica-based nanoparticles for biomedical uses such as various chips drug or gene delivery and tracking imaging ultrasound therapy and diagnostics may also pose an increased cardiovascular
and using indium-doped tin oxide as electrode. However such substrate is not flexible and the relatively high resistance of ITO electrode will compromises the OPV device performance.
Comparatively an aluminum foil substrate has the advantages of excellent conductivity flexibility cost-effectiveness and roll-to-roll processibility.
In the recent past a team of Princeton professors including Mcalpine created a bionic ear out of living cells with an embedded antenna that could receive radio signals.
or biological cells or to create antennas or photonic components. For this work we focused on creating nanostructures using photosensitive polymers
#Nanoparticle network could bring fast-charging batteries (Phys. org) A new electrode design for lithium-ion batteries has been shown to potentially reduce the charging time from hours to minutes by replacing the conventional graphite electrode with a network of tin-oxide nanoparticles.
Batteries have called two electrodes an anode and a cathode. The anodes in most of today's lithium-ion batteries are made of graphite.
they are suitable for building sensors to measure hydrogen peroxide. This chemical damages nerve cells and apparently plays a role in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
"A subcutaneous sensor could save diabetes patients from having to constantly prick their fingers"thinks Ensinger.
transistors for flexible electronics high-efficiency light-emitting diodes resonator-based mass sensors and integrated near-field optoelectronic tips for advanced scanning tip microscopy.
which are used commonly in consumer electronics. In a study published in the journal ACS Nano researchers showed how a coating that makes high capacity silicon electrodes more durable could lead to a replacement for lower-capacity graphite electrodes.
Understanding how the coating works gives us an indication of the direction we need to move in to overcome the problems with silicon electrodes said materials scientist Chongmin Wang of the Department of energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Thanks to its high electrical capacity potential silicon is one of the hottest things in lithium ion battery development these days Replacing the graphite electrode in rechargeable lithium batteries with silicon could increase the capacity tenfold making
When charging lithium infiltrates the silicon electrode. The lithium causes the silicon electrode to swell up to three times its original size.
Possibly as a result of the swelling or for other unknown reasons the silicon fractures and breaks down.
Researchers have been using electrodes made up of tiny silicon spheres about 150 nanometers wide#about a thousand times smaller than a human hair#to overcome some of the limitations of silicon as an electrode.
No one understood if the oxide layer interfered with electrode performance and if so how the rubbery coating improved it.
Such devices are used in everything from heavy industry to consumer electronics. The findings were published just in Nano Energy by scientists from the OSU College of Science OSU College of Engineering Argonne National Laboratory the University of South Florida and the National Energy technology Laboratory in Albany Ore.
Most commercial carbon supercapacitors now use activated carbon as electrodes but their electrical conductivity is very low Ji said.
They are being used in consumer electronics and have applications in heavy industry with the ability to power anything from a crane to a forklift.
Flexibly bound molecules at the microscope tip can be utilized as tailor-made sensors and signal transducers that are able to make the atomic structure visible nevertheless.
In the last few years, such atomic sensors have also proven useful for work with atomic force microscopes.
Then, in May 2014, scientists from the University of California, Irvine, showed for the first time that these sensors can also be used to improve signals in a related imaging mode known as inelastic electron tunnelling spectroscopy.
it is the vibration of the sensor molecule against the microscope tip that reacts sensitively to the surface potential of the scanned sample."
They posses a high surface area for better electron transfer which can lead to the improved performance of an electrode in an electric double capacitor or battery.
Nanoporous metals offer an increased number of available sites for the adsorption of analytes a highly desirable feature for sensors.
#Breakthrough in flexible electronics enabled by inorganic-based laser lift off Flexible electronics have been touted as the next generation in electronics in various areas ranging from consumer electronics to bio-integrated medical devices.
The high temperature processes essential for high performance electronic devices have restricted severely the development of flexible electronics because of the fundamental thermal instabilities of polymer materials.
and then fabricating ultrathin inorganic electronic devices e g. high density crossbar memristive memory on top of the exfoliation layer.
and then subsequently transferred onto any kind of receiver substrate such as plastic paper and even fabric.
First they made a sandwich composed of two metal electrodes separated by a two-nanometer thick insulating layer (a single nanometer is 10000 times smaller than a human hair) made by using a semiconductor technology called atomic layer deposition.
The technology we've developed might just be the first big step in building a single-molecule sequencing device based on ordinary computer chip technology said Lindsay.
Previous attempts to make tunnel junctions for reading DNA had one electrode facing another across a small gap between the electrodes
Our approach of defining the gap using a thin layer of dielectric (insulating material between the electrodes
and gives DNA molecules room to pass the electrodes. Specifically when a current is passed through the nanopore as the DNA passes through it causes a spike in the current unique to each chemical base (A c T or G) within the DNA molecule.
Engineers develop innovative process to print flexible electronic circuits More information: Inorganic#Organic Hybrid Nanoprobe for NIR-Excited Imaging of Hydrogen sulfide in Cell Cultures and Inflammation in a Mouse Model.
#Paper electronics could make health care more accessible Flexible electronic sensors based on paper an inexpensive material have the potential to some day cut the price of a wide range of medical tools from helpful robots
Scientists have developed now a fast low-cost way of making these sensors by directly printing conductive ink on paper.
Scientists have fabricated already paper-based point-of-care diagnostic tests and portable DNA detectors. But these require complicated and expensive manufacturing techniques.
Hu's team wanted to develop a way to print it directly on paper to make a sensor that could respond to touch or specific molecules such as glucose.
The team concluded their durable lightweight sensor could serve as the basis for many useful applications.
Touch pad sensors on a variety of paper substrates can be achieved with optimized silver nanowire tracks.
#Quantum dot technology makes LCD TVS more colorful energy-efficient If LCD TVS start getting much more colorful and energy-efficient in the next few years,
it will probably be thanks to MIT spinout QD Vision, a pioneer of quantum dot television displays.
QD Vision has developed an optical component that can boost the color gamut for LCD televisions by roughly 50 percent,
Replacing the bulb In conventional LCD TVS pixels are illuminated by a white LED backlight that passes through blue, red,
LCD TVS equipped with Color IQ produce 100 percent of the color gamut, with greater power efficiency than any other technology. he value proposition is that you are not changing the display,
LCD TVS made with Color IQ are just as colorful but are made for a few hundred dollars less
on implementing quantum dots into electronic devices. In a study funded by MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Coe-Sullivan, QD Vision cofounder Jonathan Steckel Phd 6,
Along with Color IQ-powered LCD TVS, Amazon released a quantum dot Kindle last year, and Asus has a quantum dot notebook. nd there nothing in between that quantum dots can address,
if biochar a byproduct of the a process that converts plants materials into biofuel could be used in place of expensive activated carbon to make electrodes for supercapacitors.
The technique that treats biochar electrodes for supercapacitors can also be used in making displays explained Fan who was a research scientist at Wintek more than 10 years ago.
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