#Shape-Shifting Carbon Composites Could Save Fuel Airbus and researchers at MIT are developing shape-shifting materials that could make aircraft simpler and lighter potentially saving fuel.
Made of carbon fiber composites the materials shift between two or more shapes in response to changes in heat air pressure or other environmental factors.
They can be integrated into aircraft easily replacing the need for more complex hydraulic actuators motors and hinges.
The first application might be in a jet engine s air intake valve which needs to adjust as the plane changes altitude.
Shape-changing materials are nothing new. Materials that corkscrew bend grow and shrink in response to heat
and other stimuli such as light and electricity have been around for decades. You can find them in cars airplanes robots and medical implants.
But their use has been limited in aircraft because many can t handle the conditions planes are exposed to such as extreme temperature changes says Christophe Cros a technology program leader at Airbus. The MIT approach has a number of advantages Cros says.
First most shape-shifting materials don t use carbon composites which are common in aircraft because of their light weight and high strength.
And though others have worked on carbon composites that can respond to a specific stimulus such as heat Cros says in the new approach the carbon composites can be paired with a variety of shape-shifting materials that respond to different environmental triggers.
This makes it possible to choose a specific trigger that won t be accidentally set off in the wrong conditions such as a hot day he says.
Another advantage to the new approach is that it doesn t require the electrical connections some other shape-changing composites need.
Skylar Tibbits director of MIT s Self-Assembly Laboratory begins with novel carbon fiber composites developed by the startup Carbitex based in Kennewick Washington.
Most carbon fiber composites are rigid: the glue that holds the fibers together known as matrix doesn t allow them to bend.
But Carbitex has developed a variety of matrix materials that impart a range of properties. Some result in carbon composites that are floppy like a cotton sheet.
Others are springy like a sheet of metal. Tibbits then uses a 3-D printer to apply materials that are known to shrink
or grow under certain conditions. As they change they force the carbon composite on which they re deposited to bend
or twist in various ways depending on the pattern produced by the printer. He and his colleagues are developing design software that simulates the way different patterns of these materials printed onto different kinds of composite materials will behave under different conditions.
So far Tibbits has demonstrated materials that respond to light water and heat. But he says it should be possible to make ones that respond to air pressure and other stimuli.#
#Inspired by Wikipedia, Social scientists Create a Revolution in Online Surveys Gathering data about human preferences
and activities is the bread-and-butter of much research in the social sciences. But just how best to gather this data has long been the subject of fierce debate.
Social scientists essentially have two choices. On the one hand there are public opinion surveys based on a set of multiple choice questions a so-called closed approach.
On the other there are open approaches in the form of free ranging interviews in which respondents are free to speak their mind.
There are clearly important advantages and disadvantages of each method. Today Matthew Salganik at Princeton university in New jersey and Karen Levy at New york University outline an entirely new way of gathering data inspired by a new generation of information aggregation systems such as Wikipedia.
Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents they say.
They say the new approach can yield insights that would be difficult to obtain with other methods.
But it also presents challenges for social scientists particularly when it comes to analyzing the data collected in this way.
Projects like Wikipedia are the result of user-generated content on a massive scale. The question that Salganik and Levy ask is
whether surveys could also be constructed by respondents themselves at least in part. To find out these guys have developed a new type of data collection mechanism that they call a wiki survey.
This starts with a set of seed questions but allows respondents to add their own questions as the survey involves.
This wiki survey takes a particular form in which respondents are asked to choose between two options:
Finally the pairs presented to new participants can be selected in a way that maximizes learning based on previous responses so a wiki survey can adapt as it evolves.
and Levy created a free website called www. allourideas. org on which anybody can create a pairwise wiki survey
Since 2010 this website has hosted some 5000 pairwise wiki surveys that have included 200000 items
and Sustainability run by New york city Mayor. This organization wanted to understand residents ideas about the city s sustainability plan
and integrate any new thoughts. The Mayor s Office began with a list of 25 seed items that it asked people to compare in pairwise fashion
For example people were asked to choose between Open schoolyards across the city as public playgrounds and Increase targeted tree plantings in neighborhoods with high asthma rates.
Over four months 1436 respondents contributed over 30000 responses and 464 new ideas to the survey.
These included ideas that would have been unlikely to emerge through other data gathering methods such as Keep NYCS drinking water clean by banning fracking in NYS watershed
and Plug ships into electricity grid so they dont idle in port reducing emissions equivalent to 12000 cars per ship.
That could be done by comparing the results to those gathered by other forms of data collection.
What s more analyzing the data from pairwise wiki surveys is still something of a statistical experiment.
That is an interesting new approach that allows the collection of data that would be difficult to get by other methods.
In particular it allows data to be gathered in a way that reflects the well-known long-tailed distribution of contributors.
For example on Wikipedia most of the information is intuited by a tiny proportion of editors.
If Wikipedia were to allow 10 and only 10 edits per editor akin to a survey that requires respondents to complete one and only one form it would exclude about 95%of the edits contributed say Salganik and Levy.
when it comes to data analysis. And therein lies a significant challenge. Time for the statisticians to get busy y
#Norwegian Factory Aims to Solve Cement s Carbon Problem A Norwegian cement factory has shown that it s able to capture much of its own carbon dioxide.
since cement production is responsible for more than 5 percent of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The Norcem Brevik cement works tucked into a scenic harbor south of Oslo has used waste heat to drive a process called amine scrubbing that at test scales removed between 30 and 40 percent of the total emissions
from the plant s flue gases. We think we are the first project that is testing technology in real cement-plant conditions said Liv-Margrethe Bjerge project manager for the test at Norcem which owns the Brevik plant.
It s the only cement project doing post-combustion capture. Bjerge spoke in Austin Texas at the largest international conference on carbon capture and sequestration technologies.
The plant expects to begin full-scale operation with carbon capture next summer. It could serve as a model for many plants in Europe
Ultimately the carbon dioxide would probably get shipped to an offshore well for injection which is the method available in Norway.
While these carbon-capture processes have previously been tested in power plants cement plants differ because their emissions include much higher concentrations of carbon dioxide plus more dust and other contaminants.
Some more far-out ideas for capturing carbon from cement making include using concentrated sunlight to drive the production process (see New Cement-Making Method Could Slash Carbon emissions.
Green Concrete. In the United states a startup called Skyonic is running a pilot plant at a cement mill to reuse carbon dioxide in sodium bicarbonate or baking soda a
#An Industrial-Size Generator That Runs on Waste Heat, Using No Fuel Power plants waste huge amounts of energy as heat about 40 to 80 percent of the total in the fuel they burn.
A new device could reduce that waste cutting fuel consumption and carbon emissions by as much as 3 percent and saving companies millions of dollars.
Three percent might not seem like much but for context air travel accounts for 2 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.
The generator makes use of a novel highly efficient thermoelectric material discovered recently at the University of Michigan (see Thermoelectric Material to Hit Market Later this Year.
Thermoelectric materials which convert heat into electricity have been around for decades but they have always been too expensive to use outside extreme situations in spacecraft for example.
Matt Scullin the CEO of Alphabet Energy the startup that developed the new device says connecting it to the exhaust pipe of a 1000-kilowatt generator will yield enough electricity to save 52500 liters of diesel fuel a year for a reduction
of about 2. 5 percent. For smaller engines the savings would be slightly higher Scullin says.
and mining companies that use large generators to produce power in remote areas. The generator could save those companies millions in fuel Scullin says.
Ali Shakouri a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University says the cost savings sound plausible given the material being used
Alphabet Energy s system is modular meaning it could be scaled up to make use of larger amounts of waste heat.
The company is also developing another thermoelectric material based on silicon nanowires that could convert a higher percentage of the energy in waste heat to electricity.
Other options for making use of waste heat include heating (and even cooling) nearby buildings in cities s
#Lighting Sheets Would Use Half as much Power as Lightbulbs The next big thing in lighting could be glowing sheets that use half as much energy as an equivalent fluorescent fixture
and can be laminated to walls or ceilings. The sheets will contain organic LEDS, or OLEDSHE same kind of technology used in some ultrathin TVS and smartphones.
OLEDS could be used in large sheets, because organic light-emitting molecules can be deposited over large surfaces.
They also run cooler than LEDS, so they don require elaborate heat sinks, making a lighting structure simpler.
OLED lighting is 10 to 100 times more expensive than conventional lighting but as costs come down,
it could eventually replace conventional fluorescent fixtures. In recent weeks, researchers have announced advances that could greatly improve the efficiency of OLED lighting.
For example, a startup called Pixelligent has found a way to double or triple the light output.
It does this via nanoparticles that ease the transition for light as it passes between the parts of an OLED device.
This prevents reflections and allows more light out. Various companies are also making progress toward lowering costs.
Konica-Minolta and OLED Works (a business formed from Kodak former OLED division) are both developing cheaper new manufacturing techniques.
as well as the Dutch company Philips, plan to scale up production of OLED lighting in the next year or two,
which should also lower prices. OLED lighting is expensive in part because manufacturers typically use equipment developed for making high-resolution displays,
says Michael Boroson, the chief technology officer of OLED Works. His company is reëngineering the equipment
so it uses less material and works more quickly. This fall, Konica-Minolta will start full-scale production of OLED lights on flexible plastic sheets.
The company uses oll-to-rollprocessing, which should be faster and cheaper than making OLED lights in batches,
as is done now. The factory will be able to produce a million 15-centimeter-wide panels per month.
Even with such advances, it will take years to bring costs low enough to make OLED lighting widely used.
OLED lamps cost as much as $9, 000 now. But, Philips aims to introduce OLED products by the beginning of 2017 that cost $600 to $1, 600.
Costs are expected to drop further as the scale of production increases. Fundamental research could also make OLED lighting more realistic.
OLED lighting blends red, green, and blue light, but the blue light is relatively inefficient. Last week
Stephen Forrest, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, published work on a more efficient,
longer-lasting blue material that might solve this problem. LEDS produce a beautiful sheet of light,
Forrest says. believe OLED lighting will be a very important lighting source in the future, perhaps a dominant one.
But there a big gap between what we can do now and what we need to get costs down
#Nobel for Brain s Location Code The Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine went to three researchers who made key discoveries about how the brain represents an animal s position in space orienting it
and letting it navigate. Half the $1. 1 million prize was awarded to John O Keefe who discovered cells in the hippocampus of rats that fired off in reaction to specific places the animals were in.
The work on such place cells was expanded later upon by a married couple from Norway May-Britt
and Edvard Moser who shared in the prize for their discovery of a separate type of cell grid cells
which allow animals to navigate. From the announcement by the Nobel Assembly based at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm:
An important aspect the Nobel-winning work was that it was among the first to directly observe the so-called codes by which neurons express information in this case by altering how quickly it fires.
whose lab has measured from dozens of brain cells at once producing striking videos like the one below showing place neurons firing as a rat moves through a maze.
Some engineers for instance have used the idea of grid cells as inspiration for new algorithms to control robots or autonomous submarines.
In July DARPA gave out $40 million in awards to try to develop brain implants that would help brain-injured soldiers recover lost memories
The hope is that it could also be distributed using the same global network of liquid fuel transport that moves petrol around the planet.
But there are numerous problems with this dream of a hydrogen-based economy. One is that hydrogen is difficult to store efficiently.
Hydrogen gas has a poor energy density by volume compared to petrol. In fact, there is at least 60 percent more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline then there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen.
hydrogen will always require bigger tanks. So finding ways to store more of it is a huge challenge.
But this raises issues of safety should a hydrogen-fueled car be involved in a collision.
Now Viney Dixit and buddies at the Hydrogen energy Center of Banaras Hindu University in India say they have discovered that carbonized coconut flesh is particularly good at this task.
particularly in its ability to work over many charging cycles. To help evaluate hydrogen storage materials,
%This is the mass of the entire storage system and not just the mass of the storage material.
and this takes energy. Worse, the materials tend to physically break down as the number of charging cycles increase beyond 100 or so.
The bond between hydrogen and carbon is known to be quick and reversible. What more, it is relatively straightforward to create strong, porous carbon with a high surface area.
One way of doing this is to carbonize biological material, such as fruit or coconut shell. This means heating the material to few hundred degrees centigrade in a nitrogen atmosphere
which ensures that the carbon retains its porous biological structure. Instead of coconut shell, Dixit and co carbonized coconut flesh.
Whether that is good enough to meet the Doe 5. 5 wt%criterion for an entire storage system has yet to be seen.
It may even be possible to adjust these proportions by growing coconuts in different environments.
an Ad-Free Facebook Alternative The first thing I noticed on Ello a new ad-free social network is the abundance of white space.
Unlike Facebook which rages with status updates trending topics and ads imploring me to click on things my friends like Ello is quiet and calm.
and entrepreneur Paul Budnitz Ello contends that on social networks like Facebook we the users are the product as our data is sold to advertisers who hope to entice us with ads in our feeds.
and one of several manifestos posted on the site says that those behind Ello dislike ads more than almost anyone else out there.
It doesn t sell user data to third parties either and you can decide whether or not you want to let it gather information about your own Ello activity to improve the site.
To make money it plans to take up a freemium model where it sells features to users.
This anti-ad (and in many ways anti-Facebook) ethos coupled with a stark simple design that looks
as if the German industrial designer Dieter Rams had created a more social version of Tumblr is probably not causing many people to ditch Facebook
but it is making plenty of them curious about the new social network. Ello began its invite-only beta test in August with 90 people
and while Budnitz won t divulge how many people are currently using it he says Ello is now getting up to 31000 requests for invites per hour.
In a smartphone-obsessed world that s a lot attention for a social network that doesn t even have an app yet.
But since the social network is still so small it s hard to tell whether I ll need it in the same way
I do Facebook and Twitter where I m accustomed to paying with the breadcrumbs of data
I drop along the way. Several elements of Ello s design are smart: your profile photo shows up within a circle and you can follow other users by dragging their circular icons into either a friends
or noise category and recategorize them at any time by moving the circle to and fro. You can view a feed of updates from either category with the noise one sporting a somewhat compressed Tumblr-esque layout that makes it easier to glance at many posts at once.
which is the opposite of how it s done on Facebook or Twitter. And it s embarrassingly easy to delete a friend s comment on one of your posts by clicking a tiny gray x next to the comment which
but swelling user base Ello feels kind of like a party at a hip art gallery where the guest list is kept secret.
So Ello is basically a stripped-down (commercial-free for now) Tumblr/Twitter? Is that it?
Ello simply states that it will soon offer special features that users can pay a small amount to get;
Budnitz says one example many users ask for is the ability to control multiple profiles with just one login for
and for a number of other startups like Evernote and Strava but it s not clear how well it can work on a social network especially one that wants to grow.
and its sudden popularity appears to be straining the social network. The search function seemed really slow
While some features have already been built a long list of them are still to come such as the ability to block other users from seeing your profile to post music
Apps for iphone and Android are in the offing but for now the only way to use it on a smartphone
or tablet is via a mobile browser. Despite the long to-do list Ello is off to an intriguing start.
There s room for a social network that is both pretty to look at and a pleasure to use e
#A Promising Step Toward Round-the-clock Solar power If solar power is to become a primary source of electricity around the world,
wel need cheap ways to store energy from the sun when it isn shining. A paper published in the journal Science this week reports a major step toward such a system.
Researchers have developed a device that cheaply and efficiently converts the energy in sunlight into hydrogen,
which can be used as a fuel and is stored easily. Michael Graetzel, who directs the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne
Switzerland, along with colleagues in Korea and Singapore, built a device that uses electricity and catalyst materials to make hydrogen and oxygen from water.
relatively high-voltage solar cells to generate the needed electricity, along with inexpensive new catalyst materials based on nickel and iron for two electrodesne produces hydrogen
The catalysts built on previous work showing that nickel hydroxide is a promising catalyst, and that adding iron could improve it.
The solar cells use an inexpensive and easily manufactured material known as perovskite, which has been generating excitement in the research community
because efficiencies have been improving at a breakneck pace over the last few years. The solar water splitter stores 12.3 percent of the energy in sunlight in the form of hydrogen.
That might seem like a small amount, but consider that most solar cells convert only 16 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity,
without the added step of turning that energy into easy-to-store hydrogen. More work is needed before the device can be practical.
For one thing, it only lasts a few hours before the solar cell performance quickly drops off. Researchers aren sure why perovskite materials degrade quickly
but theye been making progressuch as by adding a layer of carbon or improving the way the solar cells are sealed against the elements.
Researchers recently demonstrated a perovskite solar cell that lasted over a month
#The Coming Era Of Self-Assembly Using Microfluidic Devices When it comes to building microscopic devices,
one of the most promising ideas is to exploit the process of self-assembly. In this way, complex structures can be created by combining building blocks under natural circumstances.
This kind of self-assembly mechanism dominates at the molecular scale, where it is responsible for the construction of most biomolecules.
At the heart of this mechanism is Brownian motion which effectively mixes and jiggles molecules so that they rapidly find their place in incipient structures.
This is a powerful process that can form hugely complex machines such as the ribosome a molecular device for synthesizing proteins.
One recent idea is to use colloids rather than molecules as the building blocks for even more advanced structures.
Colloids are insoluble, nanometre scale particles mixed in water. These particles can be engineered chemically to bind together to form specific structures.
But as the building blocks become bigger, it takes longer for Brownian motion to jiggle the blocks into the appropriate locations.
So self-assembly take significantly longer. In fact, it can take thousands of seconds to synthesise a single colloidal molecule.
tetrahedrons and even a three-dimensional spiral structure using magnetic drops in a magnetic field. This kind of behaviour raises an interesting question.
Their key discovery is that the self-assembling process works when the walls of the chamber are relatively close together
but stops when the walls are moved further away. e propose here that the physical origin of the phenomenon is linked to the presence of the top and bottom walls of the self-assembly channel,
they say. In other words the walls must be close to enough to interact with the droplets, slowing them down.
This creates local changes in pressure in the fluid around the droplets that causes them to coalesce and tumble.
but the team says there is considerable room for improvement. For example, they hope to significantly increase the flow speeds through the self-assembly chambers
possibly in the presence of an electric or magnetic field to align the clusters appropriately. Shen and co say that it should be possible to change the droplet chemistry in such a way to manipulate the physical properties of the bulk material in ways that are currently difficult or impossible to do.
This includes changing the refractive index, the electrical conductivity, the magnetic susceptibility and so on. What these guys are proposing is an entirely new form of manufacturing based on clever chemistry and the powerful technique of self-assembly.
Not Programming Eugene Izhikevich thinks you shouldn t have to write code in order to teach robots new tricks.
It should be more like training a dog he says. Instead of programming you show it consistent examples of desired behavior.
Izhikevich s startup Brain Corporation based in San diego has developed an operating system for robots called Brainos to make that possible.
To teach a robot running the software to pick up trash for example you would use a remote control to repeatedly guide its gripper to perform that task.
After just minutes of repetition the robot would take the initiative and start doing the task for itself.
Brain Corporation hopes to make money by providing its software to entrepreneurs and companies that want to bring intelligent low-cost robots to market.
Later this year Brain Corporation will start offering a ready-made circuit board with a smartphone processor
The chip on that board is made by mobile processor company Qualcomm which is an investor in Brain Corporation.
At the Mobile Developers Conference in San francisco last week a wheeled robot with twin cameras powered by one of Brain Corporation s circuit boards was trained live on stage In one demo the robot called
Eyerover was steered along a specific route around a chair sofa and other obstacles a few times. It then repeated the route by itself.
But Izhikevich says more extensive training conducted over days or weeks could teach a robot to perform a more complicated task such as pulling weeds out of the ground.
and could then copy its software to new robots with the same design before they headed to store shelves.
Brain Corporation s software is based on a combination of several different artificial intelligence techniques. Much of the power comes from using artificial neural networks
Brain Corporation was previously collaborating with Qualcomm on new forms of chip that write artificial neural networks into silicon.
Those neuromorphic chips as they are known are purely research projects for the moment. But they might eventually offer a more powerful and efficient way to run software like Brainos.
Brain Corporation previously experimented with reinforcement learning where a robot starts out randomly trying different behaviors
and a trainer rewards it with a virtual treat when it does the right thing.
Training robots through demonstration is a common technique in research labs says Manuela Veloso a robotics professor at Carnegie mellon University.
Sonia Chernova an assistant professor in robotics at Worcester Polytechnic institute says that most other industrial robot companies are now working to add that type of learning to their own robots.
But she adds that training could be tricky for mobile robots which typically have to deal with more complex environments.
Izhikevich acknowledges that training a robot via demonstration while faster than programming it produces less predictable behavior.
You wouldn t want to use the technique to ensure that an autonomous car could detect jaywalkers for example he says.
But for many simple tasks it could be acceptable. Missing 2 percent of the weeds or strawberries you were supposed to pick is ok he says.
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