#Wireless Power from Across The room A startup called Energous aims to let you charge your gadgets without plugging them in. o you want us to charge your phone?
George Holmes asks. Normally, that would be an odd question. But Holmes is the vice president of sales and marketing for Energous,
a company that is developing technology called Wattup that will allow you to charge smartphones, tablets,
and other small gadgets from across a room without wires. Energous hopes other companies will license this technology and build it into all kinds of products and places,
so you can easily power your ipad while sitting on the couch browsing Instagram, or top off your phone while buying a coffee or playing Candy Crush in an airport.
It will face competition however, from a startup called Witricity that uses a different method,
and already has the backing of some major electronics companies. For now, Wattup technology is still in the demo stage,
But it works, and during a visit to my San francisco office, Holmes wants to show it off.
if they are connected to an external receiver, or slotted into a special protective case. Holmes plugs my iphone into a white device shaped like a smartphone atop a little stand.
Another iphone sits on the table wearing a bulky Energous case. Across the table, a briefcase-sized wireless energy transmitter sits on another tripod
and a plug dangling from it is plugged into the wall. Holmes picks up an ipad running a Wattup app that shows the two devices that are enabled for chargingine,
and the other iphone in the case. He taps the app to tell the transmitter to find the devices and start the power-up process.
My phone, which is 53 percent full, buzzes to indicate it is charging. Recharging works more than 10 feet from where the power is emitted
and you can move the device around while it charging. Energous is the latest in a long line of companies fixated on the idea that life would be easier
if we didn have so many wires and gadgets to plug in. Yet many of the wireless charging products that have come to market have relied on special charging mats that juice up devices at a short distance,
and theye still not that popular with consumers. here not very many people that want to take their phone
and go leave it somewhere while it charges, Energous CEO Stephen Rizzone argues. f theye going to leave it somewhere while it charges,
theye going to plug it into a wall. The most common wireless-charging technology currently available is magnetic induction,
which uses coils to transfer power over small distances via a magnetic field. This is the method used to recharge electric toothbrushes, for example.
Witricity, an MIT spinout, uses another method called magnetic resonance to transfer power several meters. Its patents are at the heart of a new standard called Rezence that is supported by companies including Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
Toyota, a Witricity investor, plans to use its technology in forthcoming electric and hybrid cars, and TDK recently licensed Witricity for use in electric car batteries.
Energous charging method uses a transmitter with lots of small antennas to send radio waves to a receiver connected to the gadget being charged.
The transmitter uses Bluetooth to scan for nearby gadgets that are authorized to receive a charge.
Once it finds one, the transmitter directs radio waves toward the receiver, which collects them and converts their energy to DC power so it can charge the phone.
The transmitter and receivers Energous brings to my office can send power to two devices that require less than 10 watts of power at a distance of up to 15 feet;
eventually, Energous says, it will be able to charge more gadgets at a time. The company expects the first products using its technologyuch as smartphone cases that can deliver wireless power to the deviceso be shown off by partner companies at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las vegas next January
and go on sale later in the year. Rizzone predicts a phone case would cost about $75 to $125,
which is within the range of what you pay today for a case that provides extended battery life,
though the transmitter for charging things probably would cost around $300. To make things sleeker
Energous wants companies to build the charging technology right into gadgets, and the company is having its first transmitter and receiver chips manufactured.
Energous faces plenty of challenges, though. Currently, the Wattup system charges a device in twice the time it takes a wall charger to do the same job,
Holmes says. And end-to-end, the company technology isn yet that efficient: about 20 percent of the power siphoned from a wall outlet is delivered to gadgets.
If the end result is wasting energy, consumers may be wary of cutting their cords
#Nerve-Stimulating Implant Could Lower Blood pressure An implantable device that reduces blood pressure by stimulating a nerve in the neck could someday be an alternative to drugs for controlling hypertension.
The device is one of the latest efforts to use a nerve-stimulating implant to treat a medical condition.
Such implants might offer new hope to those with extreme hypertension. Up to 30 percent of people with high blood pressure cannot be treated fully with medication
and some patients taking the drugs suffer from side effects including fatigue and lightheadedness. An implantable device would allow reducing the blood pressure in these patients
either alone or in combination with the already applied medication says Dennis Plachta a microsystems engineer at the University of Freiburg in Germany.
It offers a second chance not available yet and it can run in a tandem solution to a pharmaceutical treatment.
Plachta and his team developed a micromachined cuff that wraps around the vagal nerve a nerve found in the neck that exchanges critical physiological information between the brain
and other major organs including the heart. The 20-millimeter-long cuff positions a set of electrodes on a region of the nerve that the team determined would specifically stimulate the changes in blood pressure.
The researchers tested their implant in five adult rats and found that a certain stimulation pattern could reduce the rodents blood pressure by 40 percent without any major side effects.
Plachta says the procedure for implanting the device in humans would be similar to one used in an existing technique that uses vagal-nerve stimulation to treat epilepsy.
It would begin with a small incision on the left side of the neck after
which a surgeon would gently wrap the electrodes around the nerve. The device would then be connected to a capsule containing the pulse generator
which would be implanted under the chest muscle through an incision in the left armpit. The whole surgery should take an hour
and a half or less says Plachta. The president-elect of the American Society of Hypertension John Bisognano says the work is an impressive and promising application of recent advances in miniaturized electronics and microsurgery.
Bisognano a cardiologist who runs a resistant-hypertension clinic at the University of Rochester Medical center in New york knows well the need for more treatment options.
He says all his patients are on several blood pressure medications and some find that side effects make the drug regimens difficult to maintain.
The worst part is that the blood pressure is still high which means they are at high risk for stroke heart failure
and kidney failure he says. Implanted electrical devices that control bodily functions have been used for many years. Pacemakers for heart patients are known perhaps best
but electrical devices are used also to control Parkinson s disease and experimentally some psychiatric conditions (see Brain Pacemakers
and Brain Implants Can Rest Misfiring Circuits). They may be helpful even for such unlikely conditions as bladder dysfunction
and rheumatoid arthritis (see Implanted Device Controls Rheumatoid arthritis). Kristoffer Famm vice president of bioelectronics research and development at Glaxosmithkline coauthored a paper last year on the emergence of the field that he and his academic colleagues call electroceuticals.
The company has put forth $50 million to invest in companies developing such technologies. Bisognano says that nerve stimulation is a logical mechanism for controlling blood pressure.
It is well known that the nervous system can regulate the tension of the body s arteries
and control how vigorously and frequently the heart contracts he says. But only with recent technological advances could that knowledge be used to develop device-based treatments.
Bisognano has reduced successfully blood pressure with experimental implants that stimulate the carotid artery directly an entirely different design from the implant developed by the German group.
With the new design blood pressure in the rats dropped less than five seconds after the device stimulated the nerve.
Plachta says he and his colleagues are also working on developing an intelligent version of the system that can detect blood pressure
and respond to the body s needs in real time. Whereas drugs cannot adapt to patient activities an intelligent implant can he says which could offer a way to treat hypertension on demand d
#A Cheaper Tool for Virtual Sculpting A new haptic sculpting tool heralds a coming boom in 3-D modeling and manipulation.
In medical examinersoffices around the United states alone, some 25,000 unidentified human skulls, many of homicide victims, await identification.
That process can be aided greatly by generating a 3-D reconstruction of what the person face may have looked like.
Now the price of one key technology that allows this, and has many other applications besides,
is dropping fast. The technology is called a haptic stylus gadget connected to mechanical apparatus that gives force-feedback sensations to let artists eelwhat theye doing as they sculpt a 3-D image on the screen
such as from a CT SCAN of a skull. The new haptic stylus, due out next month from 3d Systems in Rock Hill, South carolina, will cost just $649, down from a range of $2, 400 to $13, 000
for existing devices. Haptic styluses and similar hardware have been used for years for niche applications and for high-end 3-D design and medical trainingor example,
to allow students to practice a complex procedure using a simulation system that feels as realistic as it looks.
More broadly, aptics? technologies that add physical sensations a common feature in products like computer mouses that vibrate and game joysticks that shake,
and even touch screens that vibrate, making you feel like there a sharp edge on a flat surface.
The new product from 3d Systems is part of a trend toward far cheaper tools to allow for 3-D imaging, modeling,
and printing for a variety of applications (see hat Yoda Taught Me About 3-D Printingand he Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers. 3d Systems,
for example, makes many 3-D printers and recently launched a sub-$1, 000 home model called Cube and a $400 handheld scanner that can, in a couple of minutes, generate a realistic 3-D drawing of a human head that as good as the ones produced by existing stationary systems
costing thousands of dollars. The cheaper haptic stylus is a descendant of a product called Phantom originally invented by an MIT startup called Sensable,
whose technology was acquired by 3d Systems. here has always been an exclusive and high cost barrier to doing this,
says Ping Fu, chief entrepreneur officer at 3d Systems. his brings that kind of ability right down into the consumer space,
so anybody can pick up the haptic device and start sculpting. Joe Mullins, a forensic artist who builds 3-D facial reconstructions for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
says cheaper versions of the technology will be crucial to making it practical for far more artists to get involved in such work,
as well as related work in archaeology, in addition to other types of 3-D renderings. or an artist, you can beat that haptic device,
or touch and feel. That is what we live for, he says. ou can tell what you are doing.
You have more finesse when it comes to adding style and details of an eyelash,
or a facial feature that you really can get just using a regular mouse. As a practical matter, it will also offer museum restoration artists
and others a way to put faces to long-dead victims . or museums, there is no other way to do itou aren going to ship a 2, 000 year old Egyptian mummy in the mail,
he says. ou do a CT SCAN and send the disk back. a
#Microsoft Readies a Virtual Assistant for the Corporate World Microsoft reputation for innovation has suffered in recent years despite the company undeniable prowess in research and engineering.
But buried within a March announcement of iphone and ipad apps for Microsoft office was word of a new app that could put the company at the forefront of productivity software again.
It called Microsoft Oslo, and it acts like a kind of virtual assistant. It draws on online content and a company internal data to offer important information, context,
and contacts when they are needed, before you even think to ask. Oslo which is currently available only in a limited-release test,
will be included in Office 365, Microsoft subscription-based productivity software for PCS and mobile devices, in the second half of 2014.
Oslo examines what youe working on to curate a selection of articles to read, Web pages to visit, videos to view,
and podcasts to hear, all presented on a Pinterest-like page of clickable tiles. For instance, if youe about to attend a meeting,
your Oslo board might present a blog post written by the meeting leader, an article on the topic of discussion,
and relevant news about your company competitors. The app also mines a few specific types of internal information, making it easy to discover,
say, colleagues who have expertise in projects youe working on. That could be an attractive prospect for organizations too large for everyone to keep track of everyone else activities. t knows everything I doinghat I reading,
general manager of the Microsoft office suite. y work is no longer about who sent me e-mail most recently;
a database developed by the former employees of Fast Search & Transfer in Oslo, Norway,
which Microsoft acquired in 2009. The Office Graph gathers information from the spectrum of Microsoft enterprise products (purportedly taking care to distinguish between public and private information)
and uses machine-learning algorithms to identify useful patterns. Oslo looks like a corporate manager answer to Google Now,
which runs in the background on Android devices, waiting for the moment to pop up with timely information about traffic patterns
or sports scores (see oogle Answer to Siri Thinks Ahead. It also has similarities to Microsoft recently unveiled mobile assistant
Cortana (see icrosoft Wants You to Educate Its Virtual Assistant. The Google parallel isn incidental.
Microsoft is struggling to compete not only with Google search, Google docs, Google Drive, and Android but with Google ability to leverage big data.
With Oslo, the company is trying to take advantage of the information that its customers have poured into various products,
in areas including search (Bing), e-mail (Outlook), social media (Yammer), document creation (Office), and content distribution (Sharepoint).
Between these products, Microsoft arguably has access to more proprietary information than any other service provider On earth.
The Office Graph has a handle on internal documents that are invisible to Google, and it potentially knows where,
when, how, and by whom theye used. Oslo is an attempt to pull together these disparate threads into a feed of information that can help individual people get work done.
Moreover, applying similar technology to Microsoft products aimed at, say, customer relationship management could give the company an advantage over competitors like Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP.
Oslo is a big test for how the company focus might change under its new CEO
Satya Nadella, who spent the last three years running Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group. Where his predecessor Steve Ballmer clutched the fading Windows operating system like a frayed security blankethe ios version of Office appeared four years after the iphone debutadella has acknowledged the company need to move on,
emphasizing a strategy he calls obile first, cloud first. And although Oslo was in the works before he took the helm,
the technology puts the mobile cloud front and centerhe kind of thing Microsoft will need to do if it going to move back into the forefront of digital life g
#Startups Experiment with Ads That Know how You Drive As businesses race to connect our homes
and cars to the Internet, unleashing new streams of data about our everyday lives, one mobile ad company scents a new opportunity.
San francisco-based Kiip plans to sell a new kind of ad targeted according to people actions at home
or on the road, offering rewards or deals in exchange for certain behavior. The company claims that format will be tempting to its existing customers,
your phone says, ere a Red Bull.?Sprague believes that kind of promotion will be received well by consumers
and will help brands ensure that people keep them in mind next time theye looking for coffee or an energy boost.
Kiip move comes at a time when more and more data on people actions in the real world is becoming available as wearable devices, Internet-connected home automation equipment,
and cars with integrated data connections head to market. Those new data streams could form the basis for many new services and products,
but they also bring new privacy concerns. Ads tailored to driving behavior will be possible thanks to a partnership with fellow startup Mojio.
It will launch a $149 device in June that plugs into a car diagnostic port
and streams vehicle data to a smartphone app to help users track their driving, their fuel economy,
and their vehicle maintenance status. Kiip will use data from that device to target promotions inside the Mojio phone app.
Sprague says that getting access to data from a car engine and safety systems could unlock some unprecedented approaches to ad targeting.
Mojio device can tell when a car airbags are deployed, or whether crash sensors on the bumpers have been triggered,
potentially allowing ads pegged to incidents on the road. t could be had you just a little fender bender,
and you need something to lift you up, he says. Similarly, Sprague says that gaining access to data from connected home gadgets,
such as thermostats or home automation systems, could also allow for creative new ads. Kiip hasn announced yet any partnerships that that might provide that data, though.
Kiip currently sells ads to brands including General mills and American Apparel. These ads target coupons on the basis of actions taken in a mobile app,
such as completing a game. The startup first experimented with selling ads against people real-world actions by offering coupons on behalf of brands such as Pepsi to people who logged workouts in fitness-tracking apps such as Mapmyrun.
The kinds of ewards-basedpromotions offered by Kiip and some other companies make it clear that a person is getting a direct benefit in return for sharing data,
says Jeremy Lockhorn, vice president for emerging media at the ad agency Razorfish. He says the approach could translate well into more real-world scenarios. here potential there for sure,
Lockhorn says of Kiip experiments in the car. The ad industry in general is interested in finding ways to use online-style ad tactics in the real world.
and interact with nearby smartphones. hen I at a physical retail store and can determine that a person who has my app
However, Kiip and other companies moving in that direction must try to find a way of offering advertisers new ways to reach people without leaving those people feeling that they no longer control their own data. he user that going to interact with your brand really needs to know what they are giving up,
CEO and cofounder of Mojio. f I being offered an insurance discount because Geico looked at my data,
I want to be the one in control. The way I drive my car is personal information. l
#Implant Lets Patients Regrow Lost Leg Muscle Five people who suffered serious leg injuries have been able to regrow muscle tissue in their legs thanks to a new regenerative medicine treatment.
The new treatment requires intensive surgery to remove scar tissue, after which a biological scaffold is sutured in.
Within two days, the patients began an intensive physical therapy regimen that helps direct the development of stem cells in the body that are drawn to the implant.
Once the stem cells reach the implant, they start making new muscle tissue. The aggressive physical therapy is demanding but critical
said study senior author Stephen Badylak, a regenerative medicine researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, at a teleconference on Tuesday.
That because mechanical forces are one of the most important cues that tell the recruited stem cells to develop into properly aligned muscle tissue,
he said. Three of the five patients involved in the U s. Department of defense-funded study were injured during military service;
two of these injuries were the result of IED blasts. The other two participants were injured in skiing accidents.
Each injury had taken between 60 and 90 percent of thigh muscle or lower leg muscles,
and the participants had undergone already multiple surgeries and physical therapy to try to repair their damaged limbs. rankly,
most of these patients have been said through hell Badylak. Although the body has a natural ability to regenerate some muscle after injury,
extreme trauma can create gaps that are too large for normal processes to fill, so the gaps are filled
Such injuries which can be caused by motorcycle accidents, bomb blasts, and more, lead to debilitating condition with limited treatment options, says Andrés García,
a bioengineer at the Georgia Institute of technology who was involved not in the study. The new treatment, described in Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday,
is imple yet with significant translational potential, says García. After the experimental treatment, three of the five patients increased their leg strength by 20 percent or more,
and were 25 percent better at physical tests such as standing on one leg and hopping.
Biopsies taken six to eight months after the procedure indicated that at least some muscle tissue grew in all five patients
The scaffold implant is a commercially available product produced by removing the cells from a pig bladder.
The material is used widely as a passive structural support for abdominal wall hernias, breast reconstruction, and chest wall defects.
As the scaffold starts to break down over several months, it releases biochemical signals that attract the body stem cells to the implant.
The researchers have started treating patients with upper body injuries, and are seeing similar results n
and storing it underground could help address climate change, but some experts worry that the gas will leak back out.
Research described in the journal Science points to a more secure way of storing its rock.
and forms minerals that could sequester the carbon dioxide for hundreds or thousands of years. Last week, a major U n. climate report called attention to the importance of carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) for dealing with climate change
and suggested that the cost of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius would greatly increase
In the new work, researchers from University college London and the University of Iceland added carbon dioxide to a stream of water being pumped underground at a large geothermal power plant in Iceland,
the carbon dioxide-laden water reacts with basalt, a type of volcanic rock. The researchers showed that, within a year,
and iron to form carbonate minerals such as limestone. Researchers have proposed storing carbon dioxide by reacting it with basalt and other types of rock before.
What surprising about this study is just how fast the reactions occurred, says Sigurdur Gislason, a professor at the University of Iceland.
The researchers report that 80 percent of the carbon dioxide they injected had formed carbonates in just one year.
says Eric Oelkers, a professor of aqueous geochemistry at University college London. The researchers estimate that this will make it twice as expensive as conventional approaches to storing carbon dioxidet least in the short run.
Mark Zoback, a professor of earth sciences at Stanford university, says there may be other challenges. While basalt is common, especially on the ocean floor,
basalt that is porous enough to accommodate the large volumes of water and carbon dioxide might be hard to come by.
If the approach were to be used at a large scale, it ould probably necessitate transport of CO2 in pipelines for thousands of miles.
whose research suggests that earthquakes could cause carbon dioxide gas to leak out of underground storage sites,
says, he advantages of storing carbon in a mineral form are absolutely clear. It would be great
#Cochlear Implant Also Uses Gene therapy to Improve Hearing More than 300,000 people worldwide have cochlear implants.
Cochlear implants use up to 22 platinum electrodes to stimulate the auditory nerve; the devices make a tremendous difference for people
but they restore only a fraction of normal hearing. ochlear implants are very effective for picking up speech,
and dynamics, says Gary Housley, a neuroscientist at the University of New south wales in Sydney, Australia, who led development of the new implant.
So there a physical gap between these atrophied neurons and the electrodes in the cochlear implant.
and electrodes should make it possible to use weaker electrical stimulation, opening up the possibility of stimulating multiple parts of the auditory nerve at once, using more electrodes,
and improving the overall quality of sound. Peptides called neurotrophins can encourage regeneration of the neurons in the auditory nerve.
distributed electrodes of the cochlear implant could be used to achieve the effect. Housley group used deafened guinea pigs
During surgery to place the cochlear implant, they injected the cochlea with a neurotrophin gene vector.
Once the implant was placed, they applied an electroporation voltage using the electrodes. The process, which took only a few seconds during surgery,
resulted in nerve regeneration in the animals. And weeks after implantation, the nerves of treated animals showed stronger responses to signals from the implant,
which suggests they are able to hear more. This research is described this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine. learly this worksn a guinea pig
says Lawrence Lustig, director of the Cochlear Implant Center at the University of California, San francisco Medical center.
Lustig group and others have been exploring gene therapy, but they use a virus to deliver the neurotrophin gene.
Robert Shepherd, director of the Bionics Institute, a nonprofit medical research center in Melbourne, Australia, says electrode-directed gene therapy could improve other kinds of neural interfaces. herever wee applying electrodes,
whether it for deep-brain stimulation in Parkinson disease, or retinal implants for the blind, there is already neural damage,
he says. Housley group is working with Cochlear a major maker of cochlear implants headquartered in Sydney,
to test the electrode and gene therapy combination in a clinical trial i
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