#Smart Highway: Solar power Bike path Opens In Netherlands This Week On November 12, 2014, The netherlands will proudly open up the world first public solar powered road.
the bike path will also provide energy to the town. Collective-Evolution notes that the solar panels embedded in the concrete bike path are not as efficient as panels installed on homes
because they cannot be adjusted to the position of the sun. Of course, the solar panels on the smart highway cover about 75 yards of roadway which is slightly more than you can fit on a roof.
The netherlands TNO research institute also gave the road a nonadhesive finish and built it at a slight tilt
and will be able to produce enough energy to power three homes. The smart highway, officially called Solaroad by TNO, is just the beginning of Netherland solar transition.
David lynch is bringing Twin peaks back to television. The award winning director caused Twitter mayhem last week
when he sent out a cryptic tweet about some amn good coffee. It been a little
May the forest be with you. According to Hit Flix, Twin peaks will return for nine episodes.
The two countriesleaders are reported to have talked via telephone on Tuesday. This is first time a presidential level discussion has happened since the Cuban revolution.
Held captive for five years, Gross was convicted for dissident after being caught smuggling cell phones to Cuba small Jewish population.
The Boeing 777 was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members when it left Amsterdam on its way to Kuala lumpur International airport.
The airline did say in a Facebook post that it lost contact with flight MH17 over Ukraine airspace.//
js. src=//connect. facebook. net/en us/all. js#xfbml=1; fjs. parentnode. insertbefore (js fjs;(
document'script''facebook-jssdk';/'//> A reporter in East Ukraine spotted the wreckage and an official with the Russian Emergency Ministry told Gawker that bodies from flight#MH17 were scattered over a 10 mile radius.#BREAKING:
Reuters correspondent on the scene in Eastern Ukraine sees burning wreckage of air plane bodies on groundreuters World(@Reutersworld) July 17 2014photos of the wreckage have started also showing up on Twitter.
User Matevznovak has been posting photos of the debris to his account. These pictures have not been verified as authentic.
Flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine by Nadezhda Chernetskaya pic. twitter. com/z4bydeovcp legionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine.
Don t know what part of the plane is this. pic. twitter. com/kniwpcyfsglegionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine More photos pic. twitter. com/Xjaqytnidv legionar
(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine by Nadezhda Chernetskaya pic. twitter. com/nrokr3svtulegionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez
#Donetsk#Ukraine by Nadezhda Chernetskaya pic. twitter. com/2o0sgvnjbe legionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014a video was posted also to Youtube that reportedly shows smoke from the wreckage rising over the hill.
Spacex's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are scheduled now to blast off from Cape canaveral Air force station in Florida at 4: 47 a m. EST (0947 GMT) Saturday.
You can watch the launch live here on Space. com, courtesy of NASA TV and Spacex, beginning at 3: 30 a m. EST (0830 GMT.
#A Tunable Liquid Metal Antennas for Tuning in to Anything Tuning in is getting to be complicated a thing.
The Internet of things will need more microwave bands with shorter wavelengths. Cell phones are need already to link to GPS and Wi-fi services on top of 4g and other cellular networks.
And in the future theyl likely also have to contend millimeter-wave bands for 5g services. All those need antennas of different lengths and shapes to accommodate the sometimes widely spread wavelength bands.
Monopole antennas, consisting of a single conducting rod, transmit maximum power when their length corresponds to half the wavelength of the RF signal,
but for devices operating at different wavelengths this becomes a problem.""The present solution is to have a switchable filter bank along with switchable and/or multi-band antenna, ays Jacob Adams,
an engineer at North carolina State university. hese solutions take up a lot of space and a single widely tunable element has the potential to replace several of these fixed components."
"He and colleagues describe in today's issue of the Journal of Applied Physics just such an element:
a liquid metal antenna that can continuously adapt to different wavelengths by changing its length inside a capillary.
Such antennas have been developed in the past but with little success because they rely on pneumatic pumps for controlling the length in the capillary,
making integration into electronics difficult. Instead of external pumps, the NC State researchers used a voltage to control the amount of liquid metal allowed to flow into a capillary.
Michael Dickey, a chemical engineer at NC State, discovered that a voltage across the interface of a liquid metal,
such as an alloy of gallium and indium, combined with an electrolyte could cause the liquid metal to spread
or to contract, depending on whether the voltage is positive or negative. A positive voltage causes the formation of an oxide layer on the metal,
lowering the surface tension and allowing it to flow easily, while a negative voltage removes this oxide layer,
causing the metal to contract, resisting flow. The researchers used the electrochemical control of the fluidity of the liquid metal to coax it into and out of a capillary.
Their setup resembled a fever thermometer, where the length of the mercury column in a capillary is controlled by the thermal expansion of the mercury in a reservoir connected to the capillary.
But instead of temperature the engineers used voltage. Tuning the voltage allowed them to control the length of the metal column in the capillary.
For centimeter-wavelengths, liquid metal antennas would remain separate elements in the circuitry, but for millimeter waves they could be integrated on microfluidic chips,
says Adams. However even larger liquid metal antennas could be useful in defense communications and radar systems that use bands ranging from a few megahertz to tens of gigahertz,
says Adams."While a single tunable element will probably never be able to cover this entire range,
they could potentially cut down on the'antenna farms'found on large defense platforms, such as on ships and planes,"says Adams
#Monitor Diabetes From Your Smart Watch My son, Evan, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in August 2012.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that attacks the pancreas and prevents insulin production. The body needs insulin to transport glucose from the blood to the cells.
Synthetic insulin is used to manage type 1 diabetes, but it doesn work as quickly as human insulin.
Determining the right dose of insulin for a given meal carbohydrate content becomes an all-consuming balancing act.
Too little insulin and blood sugar skyrockets, causing potentially life-threatening complications. Too much insulin and blood sugar plunges to dangerous levels.
The shock of the diagnosis continued to set in over the next few months as my wife, Laura,
and I attempted to figure out how to keep a 4-year-old alive and happy.
Eight to 12 finger-prick checks to measure blood glucose and 4 to 8 shots of insulin a dayhese became the course of our days and nights.
I was drawn soon to continuous glucose monitors (CGMS. These report blood glucose levels every 5 minutes, thanks to a small radio transmitter attached to a fine sensor wire that runs under the skin (the wire is replaced weekly, the transmitter every six months.
Finger checks can give you the information that a CGM can, such as the rate of change of glucose levels.
This data could be vital, not only to Evan immediate care but also his long-term health. We purchased a Dexcom G4 CGM in February 2013
The receiver costs US $400, and it another $400 for each transmitter. Sensor wires cost $99.
We were no longer flying blind between finger checks. We could merge the data from the G4 with reams of nutrition data we had been collecting
and thus fine-tune Evan insulin dosing. But dropping Evan off at day care triggered a wave of panic:
We were once again in the dark. I wanted usaura, the school nurse, and meo be able to see his glucose level at any moment
and get alerts when it was headed out of range. At the time, Dexcom didn provide remote access,
but I knew that the Dexcom G4 receiver could furnish glucose data via its USB port.
Dexcom own Windows software was pulling data in this way, and fortunately, Dexcom supplied an API (application programming interface) library as part of its software installation.
It took about 3 hours to code A c#program that polled the receiver and uploaded the data to a Google spreadsheet.
We sent Evan to day care with a small laptop equipped with the receiver. While he was in his classroom,
we could see his blood glucose via either a simple website or an ios app I threw together.
It was life changing, as it allowed Evan some freedom from the typical type 1 diabetes regimen at day care.
Still, when Evan went out for recess or long walks, putting him out of range of the laptop receiver,
we were blind again. Thus began my work on a truly ambulatory solution, based on a smartphone rather than a laptop.
My family primarily uses ios devices, but power limitations and closed frameworks made hooking up the receiver to an iphone far more difficult than to an Android phone.
I got a Motorola Droid Razr M phone and once I had the basic USB enumeration downo my phone could eethe receiver
when it was plugged in started decoding the G4 communication protocol. Using the same C# program as before,
I ran commands and captured the USB traffic as it flowed between my computer and the receiver.
With this data, I wrote an Android app to extract glucose data and upload it to our Google spreadsheet via the cellular network.
In my excitement, I tweeted my discovery. What happened next was incredible. Another iabetes dad, Lane Desborough, contacted me.
He wanted to build a similar system for his son. I shared my C# program with him
and continued to refine the Android app over the summer, in preparation for Evan return to school.
Lane created Nightscout, a Web app with predictive alerts. These alerts are based on glucose levels uploaded to a database built using the open-source Mongodb platform.
Lane transformed my system into a tool that anyone could use. While Dexcom has released subsequently Share, a proprietary remote-monitoring system, it works only with ios devices.
By having reverse engineered the G4 communication protocol and created an open online database system, we can access the data on a wider range of equipment.
For example, I picked up a Pebble smart watch the first day they were available at retailers
and within a few hours, I had written software that lets me see Evan glucose level at a glance.
Lane and I (along with Ross Naylor) continued to collaborate, and in early 2014, we made the C# uploader, Android app, Pebble watch,
and Nightscout code open source. Subsequently, better software engineers than I have improved the code and made it easier to use;
a Facebook group for Nightscout, set up by Jason Adams, now has nearly 12,000 members, and our code made the semifinal round for the 2014 Hackaday Prize.
While remote monitoring may seem invasive, it is in fact liberating. Evan can play more, learn more,
and simply do more, because his life is disrupted far less by the demands of diabetes.
We can mitigate most hyper -and hypoglycemic events without interrupting his day. I am proud to have taken back some of
what we lost that day in August 2012 and blessed to know that my little boy diabetes has helped so many others.
This article originally appeared in print as IY Diabetes Remote Monitoring.
#Cheap Earthquake Warning Systems While predicting earthquakes remains a dream, scientists have developed early warning-systems systems that give people precious seconds to run out of buildings
or take cover. Such systems are in place in Japan and Mexico. The U s. Geological Survey (USGS) is testing a system that gave a 5-to 10-second warning when a temblor hit California Napa valley in 2014.
That kind of warning might have saved hundreds of lives when a 7. 8-magnitude earthquake devastated Nepal on 25 april.
Earthquake-warning systems come at a high price, though, too high for countries like Nepal and others in quake-prone zones in South Asia,
the Caribbean, and Central and South america. But researchers are now working on more affordable, crowdsourced warning systems based on low-cost sensors and cellphone electronics.
Today alert systems deploy networks of hundreds of expensive, extremely sensitive seismic sensors that detect energy waves,
along with GPS sensors to detect permanent ground movement due to the motion of the geological fault that triggers the earthquake.
Battalgazi Yildirim, founder of Zizmos, based in Palo alto, Calif.,thinks he can get as goodr in some cases even betterarthquake data from a network of cheap sensor packages.
These are made up of microelectromechanical accelerometers attached to inexpensive off-the-shelf cellphone equipment that manages data gathering
and communication. he sensor packages used by the USGS cost about US $30, 000 each,
he says. ee putting out sensors that cost $100 each to build. The network should have virtually no installation or maintenance costs,
because Yildirim plans to rely on the kindness of the crowd. Zizmos asks for volunteers to donate a tiny bit of interior wall space
and a power outlet to host a sensor package, which is about the size of a deck of cards.
With a $150, 000 research grant from the National Science Foundation the company was to launch a trial this May,
after this issue went to press, involving 268 sensors distributed in California. When a sensor detects a rumble,
it will send information about the time of the event and the magnitude of the shaking to a cloud-based server;
algorithms will check reports from neighboring sensors to determine whether the vibration was localay, from a truck going byr felt elsewhere.
If the latter, the system will calculate a hypothetical epicenter for the earthquake, the original time of the event,
and an estimated magnitude. For earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 4. 0, it will issue an alert.
Benjamin Brooks, a geophysicist with the USGS, has a different crowdsourcing approach in mind. Why not tap into the GPS sensors in people phones and navigation systems, he says.
GPS-equipped cellphones are ubiquitous in developing countries, and such a crowdsourced system would offer early warning at practically no cost. country like Nepal,
with high earthquake hazards and minimal resources, is where a crowdsourcing approach would be most effective,
Brooks says. In research presented in the journal Science Advances two weeks before the Nepal quake hit, Brooks and his colleagues tested the ability of consumer-grade GPS devices to detect earthquakes.
They subjected a Google Nexus smartphone and a commercial GPS module to displacements ranging from 10 centimeters to 2 meters.
Both GPS sensors picked up the smallest motion. Next, the researchers performed simulations using data from a hypothetical magnitude-7 earthquake in northern California and from the real 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake that hit Tohoku-oki
Japan. They simulated smartphone responses based on census data around the earthquake epicenters and recorded a phone as triggered
if it and its four nearest neighbors measured more than 5 cm of movement. If at least 100 phones were triggered,
the system declared an earthquake. It took fewer than 5, 000 smartphones to detect the simulated California earthquake within 5 seconds,
giving enough time to warn San francisco and San jose. For the Japan quake, which had an offshore epicenter,
detection occurred at just over 80 seconds, too slow for the closest onshore towns but in enough time to issue a warning to Tokyo. adly,
on the Wednesday before the Nepal earthquake I had a discussion with a Nepalese colleague about proposing precisely such an approach,
Brooks says. here would be challenges in terms of cellphone service in such a mountainous region, but we think it would be doable there eventually. d
#Full HD Voice Will Soon Give Your Phone an Audio Upgrade HD Voice, the first major upgrade to telephone sound quality since the vacuum-tube era, has finally become widely availableust in time for a new generation of phone service called Full-HD Voice to take its place.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, Fraunhofer IIS (Institute for Integrated circuits) demonstrated a system based on a combination of powerful standard algorithms that can encode
and decode in real time the full audio spectrum to 20 kilohertz in stereo. Switching to Full HD
which could be done in many devices as early as next year, would also mark the complete merging of voice into the mobile data stream, a goal long in the making.
Full-HD Voice converts speech into packets that can flow through the Internet along with data traffic, incorporating algorithms that can recover from packet loss,
which turns today Voice over internet Protocol (Voip) calls into choppy, unintelligible hash. The technology includes algorithms that encode music and other nonspeech audio,
sounds that are mangled typically by codes optimized to squeeze many voice calls into narrow slices of the spectrum.
Because Full-HD Voice carries the whole audio spectrum calls sound as if everybody in the same room;
you can even hear soft background sounds, like the faint clatter of fingers on a keyboard.
And the powerful coding-decoding (codec) software can run as a smartphone app. e want to bring telephony into the 21st century,
just as HD television has done for video, says H p. Baumeister, director of Fraunhofer IIS U s. branch, in San jose,
Calif. There no doubt that voice telephony still has a foot in the 20th century. Modern landline phones have a frequency range of 300 to 3, 400 hertz,
a standard based on Bell labs studies of the requirements for intelligible speech dating back to the 1920s.
That range cuts off high frequencies needed to discriminate between consonants such as f and s but it fit the limited bandwidth of old analog copper phone lines.
In 1988, the International Telecommunication Union approved the G. 722 standard for HD Voice, which allows digital phone lines to carry 50 to 7, 000 Hz.
But it was used little because it would have required upgrading the landline phone network. The first three generations of cellular phones instead retained the 3, 400-Hz narrowband landline audio,
but they often sounded worse because of the way they compressed speech to squeeze more calls into the limited mobile spectrum.
See hy Mobile Voice Quality Still Stinksnd How to Fix It IEEE Spectrum, October 2014.
The broader bandwidth of the Internet allowed Skype and some other Voip services to carry 7, 000-Hz HD Voice,
but Voip calls into the phone network have been limited to 3, 400 Hz. Most 4g smartphones include dedicated circuits running algorithms to code
and decode 7, 000-Hz HD Voice, but they can connect at that rate only if both phones and every link between them can handle the signals.
In practice, that means it works only between 4g phones on the same carrier. Full HD will be able to bridge the audio gap regardless of the network
or the device connected to it. The technological heart of Full-HD Voice is called a standard the Enhanced Voice Services (EVS codec.
Its speech compression algorithms are more complex and powerfulthan those used for the decade-old HD Voice system,
and it can squeeze stereo speech spanning the whole audible range into data rates as low as 9. 6 kilobits per second.
The codec also includes other algorithms developed to compress music. The separate algorithms are vital
because speech and music are compressed in different ways. Voice compression typically relies on algorithms called code-excited linear prediction (CELP),
which is built on the physics underlying the human vocal system. CELP can reduce the data rate of voice signals by about a factor of 10. hat coding did a good job on speech
but was terrible on everything else, says Richard Stern, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie mellon University, in Pittsburgh.
Music-compression algorithms, such as the MP3 and AAC codecs used for streaming audio, are optimized for human auditory perception.
For example, the algorithms don bother to accurately reproduce the soft components of sounds likely to be masked by louder sounds at other frequencies and times.
That method can represent a wider range of sound, but it requires more bits per second than a speech-based codec,
Stern says. The new EVS codec is a hybrid, containing algorithms for both voice and music,
and it switches between them as needed. The new voice algorithms are substantially more complex than those of the decade-old 7, 000-Hz codec.
Rather than being developed around characteristics of specific languages, as earlier codecs were, these are nearly language independent.
The music part is the latest low-latency version of the AAC algorithm, developed for real-time streamed communications.
Called AAC-ELDV2, it delivers CD-quality stereo sound in a stream of only 32 kb/s by transmitting one stereo channel plus a lower-data-rate signal that represents the difference between that channel
and the other stereo channel. An important feature of the combined package says Baumeister, is that EVS is the first codec designed to compensate for packet loss.
Such losses degrade voice quality and are inevitable on IP networks such as 4G LTE. To verify performance of the codec and its loss tolerance, Fraunhofer IIS and 11 partnersncluding Ericsson, Huawei, Qualcomm,
and Samsungpent millions of euros on human listening tests. Full-HD Voice quality was possible even at data rates as low as 9. 6 kb/s. The processing power of modern smartphone chips is a key enabler for the new codecs.
They can be implemented in digital signal processing chips as the 7 000-Hz codecs in 4g smartphones are,
or as apps running on a smartphone applications processor. The EVS codec s not complex compared to the apps in a smartphone,
says Baumeister. Because Full-HD Voice can tolerate packet losses, it could feed compressed data directly into the Internet data stream for routing directly to other equipped devices,
like a Skype-to-Skype call between computers or smartphones. Fraunhofer Mobile World demonstration did that using apps on Google Nexus 5 phones.
With no need for network upgrades, Baumeister says, ou could conceptually roll out service this year,
but next year is more realistic. ou can hear samples at http://www. full-hd-voice. com,
but be sure to use good headphones in a quiet environment. Stern compares the difference to the shift from standard resolution to HD television. t going to be subtle, not a huge difference in intelligibility,
but it will sound better and more natural, like a high-quality speaker system, he says. This article originally appeared in print as ull-HD Voice is Nearly Here. p
#Knitted Supercapacitors to Power Smart Shirts Researchers from Drexel University in collaboration with the U s. Naval academy, have invented a way to embed activated carbon particles into different types of yarn to form a knitted textile that can store
energy to power sensors and electronics integrated into smart clothing. Smart fabrics, which incorporate different types of sensors into garments,
have been in development for decades. However, only in recent years have started we seeing the first consumer smart garments reaching the market,
including biometric smartwear that can monitor an athlete's health (like the ones made by Hexoskin,
Athos, omsignal, and other companies), as well as products designed to track health and well being (such as the Somnus Sleep Shirt developed to monitor both the quality and quantity of your sleep).
According to a Gartner study published in November 2014, the smart garment sector will grow from around 100,000 units sold worldwide in 2014 to a whooping 26 million units predicted for 2016.
So far, most (if not all of the products on the market use an external"brain, "a small computer that records data and communicates to a user's smartphone or other systems.
These modules, although relatively small, use a solid battery which is less than ideal both from an aesthetic and functional perspective.
Creating a flexible energy storage that can be integrated into the fabric has been the goal of several research groups around the world.
Last year teams from China and the United states demonstrated a fiber-like supercapacitor made from both graphene
and carbon nanotubes that could be woven into clothing. At the time these fibers were said to obtain the highest volumetric energy density reported for carbon-based microscale supercapacitors (6. 3 microwatt-hours per cubic millimeter,
which is comparable to a 4-volt-500-microampere-hour battery). However carbon nanotubes are still expensive not to mention the fact that there is still some debate about their possible toxicity.
Trying to create a textile that can store energy without the use of exotic, expensive materials,
the Drexel University team turned to activated carbon. This far less expensive material, is also nontoxic
and is used even to reduce absorption of poisonous substances. According to Drexel University materials scientist Yury Gogotsi who supervised the research,
using an area of about 3000 cm2 (about the size of the center back panel of a shirt) it is possible to store the equivalent energy of a 4 cm2,
V coin cell battery. In order to reach this energy density, the Drexel team used a technique called natural fiber welding or NFW.
This technique was invented chemistry professor Paul C. Trulove research team at the U s. Naval academy and Hugh C. Delong of the Air force Office of Scientific research.
It was patented in 2009. NFW allows embedding materials, such as activated carbon, into a cellulose-based yarn made from cotton, linen, bamboo,
or viscosell of which have been tested electrochemically by Drexel team at the A j. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute, and knitted at the Shima Seiki Haute Tech Lab. The NFW process includes several steps
which were perfected by Drexel University doctoral student Kristy Jost and Commander David P. Durkin at the U s. Naval academy.
In the lab, ionic liquid was applied to the cellulose fibers, causing the biopolymer to swell, and the individual polymer chains to start separating.
At this point instead of allowing the material to completely dissolve, the ionic liquid was mixed with carbon particles,
and when the yarn was swelled partially, pressure was applied to it in order to embed the carbon into the fiber surface.
Finally, the yarn was spooled and rinsed with water, which helped remove the ionic liquid and re-solidify the cellulose.
Despite the seemingly complex nature of the process Durkin was able to develop a small NFW machine to continuously create tens of meters of yarn at a time."
"The only thing driving the cost of NFW would be the ionic liquids, says Durkin. hey can be expensive,
but are attractive alternatives to organic solvents because they are not volatile. They can be recycled during the water reconstitution process."
"Durkin believes that if the NFW process were scaled up, ionic liquid cost would be a critical parameter.
Although we will probably not be using energy storage textiles to power our smartphones any time soon due to the low energy density of the current technology,
it can still have many other applications. Jost explains that she had started working on textile energy storage
because she noticed the growing number of e textiles on the market that incorporated knitted components,
but they all had attached solid battery packs to the shirt, rather than incorporating an energy storing fabric.
Her ultimate goal is to produce an energy storage device that can seamlessly power these kinds of technologies
including diverse types of knitted sensors and low energy communication devices o
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