#Robotic Bricklayer Can Build A House in Two Days Yes, robots are taking over a worrisome number of jobs,
you can always get work as a bricklayer. Oops, check that. An Australian engineer has developed an industrial-sized bricklaying robot that can put down hundreds of bricks per hour, 24 hours a day, with superhuman precision.
The giant robot is named Hadrian, after the Roman empire who assembled a massive defensive wall in northern England to keep out formidable Scottish highlanders.
Good policy, that. Engineer Marc Pivac put more than a decade of research and development into the system,
Hadrian begins by using computer-aided design (CAD) to determine the precise placement of every brick in a given structure to within one hundredth of an inch.
Hadrian then cuts its own individual bricks and shuttles them along the articulated arm of a 28-meter-long telescopic boom.
An automated mechanism at the end of the crane arm then places the bricks individually, sealing each with mortar.
By automating the loading, cutting routing and placing and working around-the-clock Picav says Hadrian can complete a standard house structure within two days.
The Hadrian robot is all-electric, too, and designed to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. Pivac new company, Fastbrick Robotics, recently posted an animated video of Hadrian in action n
#LED Bulbs Offer a Low energy, Wireless Connection This lightbulb could work as your next wireless router.
At the University of Virginia, researchers have unveiled a new way to transmit wireless data in light waves from LED LIGHTS a much more reliable and faster alternative to radio wave Wi-fi. DNEWS:
Is The Internet Really Ruining Your Attention span? e developed a modulation algorithm that increases the throughput of data in visible light communications, Maite Brandt-Pearce,
an engineering professor at the University of Virginia, told Phys. org. e can transmit more data without using any additional energy.
As more light fixtures get replaced with LED LIGHTS, you can have different access points to the same network. randt-Pearce and with her former student Mohammad Noshad,
who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, developed this new way to connect to the Internet.
The technology would require no more energy than is used currently to emit light. The light waves can carry data at 300 megabits per second from LED fixtures to wireless devices.
The researchers have filed a patent on their technology and have created a company called VLNCOMM, which stands for Visible light Network Communications.
They are now working on a prototype for potential investors: a desk lamp that provides an Internet connection
when the light is on. Bring The nternet Of Thingsinto Your Homeesearchers have called it i-Fi?
Brandt-Pearce told Phys. org. Although the technology would only work with devices that have some sort of optical receiver,
the concept could provide a big boost to connectivity speeds with the potential to use every light in a building as an Internet transmitter. via Phys. or a
#'Edible Barcodes'Help Fight Counterfeit Drugs Who knew that the answer to fighting the trillion-dollar global counterfeit drug problem rested in a particle the size of a speck of dust?
At least that what entrepreneur Dr. Hank Wuh is counting on with Trutag Technologies, one of the companies that falls under the larger umbrella of Skai Ventures, the tech-focused venture capital accelerator that he founded.
The central idea behind the tech company are rutags-invisible, edible barcodes that can be planted right onto medicine to verify that the pills
and tablets you might consume are the real deal. Back in 2014, the company was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.
According to Wuh, a medical doctor, this kind of wider recognition is an indication that these bite-size barcodes could play a role in a tech revolution sweeping through medicine. t (Trutag) is really a game-changer
Wuh told Foxnews. com. his has huge implications for healthcare. Think about healthcare economics, think about public health it impacts all of those areas.
We think of this technology as a tremendous way to sort of improve the system. he company ags,
which have a melting temperature of 1, 600 degrees, contain illions of combinations of spectral data,
Wuh said. Within each of the tiny particles is an elaborate nanopore structure think of it as a series of microscopic holes within a thin membrane,
small enough for a single molecule to pass through at a given time. The tags are manufactured n a secret location in the middle of the Pacific
Wuh said, half-jokingly, and added that here a very heavy security feature to our business.
Manufacturing these structures is part of an elaborate process that involves breaking down the nanopore structures into niform-sized particlesthat are fabricated ompletely
and sterilized in one, continuous process. uh asserted that it is best to liken these tiny structures as specific ingerprintsor ignaturesof data. here are hundreds of millions of signatures
and each signature is tied to a database that provides you with a tremendous amount of information,
he said. Essentially, a drug that has one of these microscopic ignaturescould easily be identified as genuine and not a fake.
according to statistics from the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists. ay mom is in the hospital
and the nurse comes in with a cup that has seven pills in it. They are out of the package in the cup and there all of these morning pills together,
who also has a Masters of Public health degree from Harvard university, a big component of this company is to empower consumers to understand what they are putting into their bodies,
Imagine someone being treated for diabetes. You want to make sure they have the right medication. n an interconnected world where smartphones
and Apple Watches are becoming ubiquitous, Wuh said that a consumer could think of these edible barcodes as an extension of the wearable craze.
Wuh said the idea of tiny microscopic particles containing data about a drug is farfetched no more than someone 20 years ago saying that a person would have a upercomputer the size of his palm. ut,
with the interconnected age and concerns over personal data, are there any concerns from potential consumers over the idea of ingesting technology that contains so much information?
Wuh suggested that those queasy about the idea of literally consuming this kind of data can rest assured. here no privacy issues at all.
There is really an impenetrable firewall between your body and the information that you are getting from the product. uh said that there has been avid interest in the technology,
which is used to treat hepatitis. The law enforcement has to ship it by express mail to a lab that then has to process the drug and run a series of tests.
#'Dog Nose'Light Sniffs Out Disease Here a riddle: What kind of light can smell? Answer:
Researcher James Anstie at the University of Adelaide and his team are developing an instrument theye dubbed an optical dog nose that uses a specialized laser known as an optical frequency comb to provide a quick and noninvasive way to analyze a person
breath for disease. Gold nanoparticles Could Detect Disease: Discovery Newsprevious studies have shown that diseases such as lung and esophageal cancer,
asthma and diabetes can be all be detected in the breath. Using light to smell might be a little counterintuitive,
but stick with us for a moment. Anstie and his team shine the laser onto a sample of gas.
Since each molecule in the universe absorbs light at different optical frequencies, an odor has its own unique signature. ather than sniffing out a variety of smells as a dog would,
As for future plans, Anstie of the University of Adelaide Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing expects to have a working prototype of the device within three years and a market-ready product within five years.
Disease Detection Goes Mobilee now have a robust system to be able to detect the presence and concentrations of molecules in a sample,
Dr. Bruce Conklin, a stem cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco, along with colleagues developed these tiny hearts using stem cells derived from skin tissue.
thanks to tiny etchings made with oxygen plasma. Because of these slight differences, the stem cells developed into different types of cardiac tissue cells
#NYC Is Turning Trash cans Into Wi-fi Hotspots Consider the humble trash can. Stalwart and immobile, it populates our cities by the thousands,
Late last year, hi-tech waste management company Bigbelly upgraded two of its waste recycling stations in downtown Manhattan with Wireless internet hubs.
Bigbelly streetside trash and recycling bins are already pretty smart they use solar power to compact certain materials
and have embedded sensors that communicate with the city waste management fleet. The Wireless internet option essentially turns the trash cans into free public Wi-fi hotspots,
providing throughput of 50 to 75 MB per second. Being down at ground level and in the open,
the Wi-fi trash cans provide a strong signal that not blocked by buildings or other structures.
Wi-fi Sprinkler Saves Waterbigbelly is now working with the city to add Wi-fi to hundreds more waste stations throughout the city five boroughs, with a particular concentration in underserved neighborhoods.
The bins will pay for themselves, eventually, with display advertising. The smart trash cans will join another citywide initiative to turn all those old abandoned public pay phones into charging stations
and Wi-fi hot spots. More than 10,000 refurbished pay phone kiosks are set to go live by the end of the year.
#Car Glows Along with Driver's Heartbeat Today it is almost impossible to buy a car that is not connected in one form or another,
whether that through GPS navigation or Carplay. How more connected can we get? What about a vehicle that's connected to your heart?
The RC-F Coupe glows according to the pulse of the driver. It a new conceptual project driven by Lexus Australia and M&c Saatchi Australia creative tech division.
Despite all the tech that is already out there, they hope to increase the connectivity between car and man.
The panels of the car connect to body sensors on the driver body. As the driver pulse quickens
and slows, as it naturally does speed based on the at which the driver is going, the coupe lights up accordingly.
When hit with an electric charge, this special RF-C glows because of an electroluminescent paint. Which means that the faster you drive
the quicker the lights will glow. Although Lexus doesn't plan to add this feature to any current cars,
this concept is one step towards a larger goal: create a car that perceives the emotions of the driver,
which has the potential to prevent a lot of accidents. If falling asleep at the wheel or road rage is an issue for you,
then a future car might be smart enough to help take action. Google recently built a robot car that can drive by itself,
which has a similar objective. Naturally, trust would be a major factor if these initiatives became our reality.
Perhaps these connected cars will save lives as these companies envision it, but with hackers having the ability to take over vehicles,
we don't know if one connected to your heart is such a great ides. Ben Cooper, group innovation director of M&c Saatchi Australia recently had a conversation with Wired that relates the distressing potential."
"Mapping man with machine provides an interesting investigation of control, he said, "We think the data might show a different view of who's really driving."
"Get more from Toms Guidethis article originally appeared on Toms Guide. Copyright 2015 Toms Guides, a Purch company.
and linked with your smartphone. Other portable spectometers have been deployed by scientists in the field, but SCIO is the first to market itself as a consumer device.
and an optical sensor to identify the molecular structure of any given material. Different types of molecules vibrate in unique ways
The makers of SCIO hope that, by working with developers and pairing the device with software apps,
For instance, out-of-the-box apps planned for release will allow users to scan food for nutritional value.
the SCIO sends information to an online database. Algorithms interpret the data in the light spectrum,
and identification information is delivered back to your phone within seconds. As more people use the SCIO system,
SCIO atabase of matterwill get faster and more accurate over time. You can pre-order the SCIO pocket sensor now for $249
or if you want to design your own apps, the Developer Kit is going for $449. So there you go your own Star trek tricorder, just in time for holiday shopping.
In an experiment conducted by Professor Selma Bringsjord of New york Rensselaer Polytechnic institute, a robot proved that it was capable of responding to a logic puzzle based off the premise of the traditional ise menriddle.
In the updated version of a puzzle used by Professor Bringsjord, the robots were programmed to believe that two of them were given a umbing pillthat would cause them to lose the ability to speak.
in fact when a programmer pushed a button on the top of their heads. One robot had a placebo button
and display a level of self-awareness to distinguish itself from the other two robots. It also opened the door to the possibility that self-aware robots could make their way into the future e
#Smog Harvested from Tower Made into Jewelry A Smog Free Tower that stands 23 feet tall is being built to scrub pollution out of the air in parks and other public outdoor spaces in Rotterdam, The netherlands.
plans to transform the pollution comprised mostly of carbon into rings and cufflinks. Inspired by the idea that diamonds are made of carbon that has been subjected to high pressure,
the company believes that transforming pollution into jewelry will prove desirable to many. Each accessory will be made from scrubbing 35
000 cubic feet of air--42 percent of which is made of carbon particles. One tower alone is capable of cleaning 123 million cubic feet of clean air per day.
The company recently launched a Kickstarter campaign that allows supporters to purchase cubes, rings and cufflinks, ranging in price from $54 for a cube to $271 for a piece of jewelry.
Daan Roosegaarde, The netherlands-based innovator leading the tower project, says he woke up one day obsessed with the idea of pollution.
Holding up a bag of pollution particles in this video, he explains that it hard to believe that we accept this pollution as waste
when it can take on other forms. After its Netherlands debut, the company hopes to set up towers in other cities as well, including India, Mexico city and Beijing i
#Lab on a chip turns smart phones into mobile disease clinics Smart phones can pay our bills,
track our diets, and record our slumber. Soon they may become a leading weapon in the global fight against disease.
Researchers have designed a cheap, easy-to-use smart phone attachment (shown above) that can test patients for multiple deadly infectious diseases in 15 minutes.
All it takes is a drop of blood from a finger prick. Pressing the device big black button creates a vacuum that sucks the blood into a maze of tiny channels within its disposable credit cardized cartridge.
There several detection zones snag any antibodies in the blood that reveal the presence of a particular disease.
It only takes a tiny bit of power from the smart phone to detect and display the results:
A fourth-generation ipod Touch could screen 41 patients on a single charge, the team says.
The researchers conducted a field test of the device at three Rwandan community clinics, where health care workers rapidly screened 96 patients for HIV
and active and latent forms of syphilis. Compared with gold standard laboratory tests, the dongle was 96%as accurate in detecting infections,
missing just one case of latent syphilis, the team reports online today in Science Translational Medicine.
Despite a 14%false alarm rate, the researchers say the device high sensitivity and ease of use make it a powerful tool for diagnosing these deadly diseases in the field,
particularly among pregnant women. The researchers are now preparing a larger scale trial for the $34 device,
which they hope will let mobile clinics and health workers provide rapid and reliable disease screening in the remotest areas of the world r
#Microbe found in grassy field contains powerful antibiotic For much of the last decade, a team of researchers in Boston has exhumed eagerly
and reburied dirt. It part of a strategy to access an untapped source of new antibioticshe estimated 99%of microbes in the environment that refuse to grow in laboratories.
Now, their technique has yielded a promising lead: a previously unknown bacterium that makes a compound with infection-killing abilities.
What more, the team claims in a report out today, the compound is unlikely to fall prey to the problem of antibiotic resistance.
That suggestion has its skeptics, but if the drug makes it through clinical trials, it would be needed a much weapon against several increasingly hard-to-treat infections.
Many existing antibiotics, including penicillin, were identified by cultivating naturally occurring microorganismsacteria often try to kill each other with chemical warfare,
it turns out. But the supply of novel microbes that will grow in a lab has been tapped largely Out in 2002
microbiologist Kim Lewis, along with his colleague at Northeastern University in Boston, microbial ecologist Slava Epstein, described a new technique for coaxing bacteria to grow:
Put soil samples into tiny chambers sandwiched between permeable membranes and return these contraptions to the ground.
and grow new bacterial coloniesany scooped out of soil in the backyard of microbiologist Losee Ling,
the team let each of them duel in a lab dish with Staphylococcus aureus, a cause of serious skin and respiratory infections.
including many human pathogens. Moreover, these pathogens failed to develop resistance to the compound: There were no surviving individuals that had evolved to withstand its attack.
Resistance usually develops when a small percentage of microbes escape an antibiotic because of a mutation
and then those bacteria multiply.)Lewis initially took this total devastation as a discouraging signhe mark of nother boring detergent.
which the group named teixobactin, was not toxic to human cells in a dish. And it showed other qualities of a good antibiotic,
In mice infected with MRSA, injections of teixobactin led to a 100%survival rate at lower doses than vancomycin.
increasingly feared in hospitals for their resistance to existing drugs. But the authors suggest it could be of great value to people fighting MRSA, tuberculosis,
and infections with rare-but-nasty Enterococcus bacterial strains that aren responding to available drugs.
These results offer hope that other promising agents await discovery in the soil, says Helen Zgurskaya, a biochemist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman,
who studies how bacteria become susceptible to antibiotics. his study demonstrates that unculturable bacteria have unrecognized new,
Collaborators at the University of Bonn in Germany figured out that teixobactin works by interfering with two important lipids that bacteria use to build their cell walls.
Based on the team screens of soil, the compound seems to be relatively rare, so Lewis doubts that many bacteria have evolved to produce an enzyme that could destroy it.
a microbiologist at the University of California, San francisco. But there are many paths to developing resistance,
#'Superspreading event'triggers MERS explosion in South korea SEOULUTHORITIES in South korea are scrambling to contain an outbreak of the deadly Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS.
Scientists are wondering how a single imported case could have led to so many secondary infections. The outbreak started
He was treated at several clinics before being diagnosed with MERS on 20 may. Several countries have seen such imported cases
but the disease has never spread to more than a few other people, and the general consensus has been that MERS does not spread easily from human to human
But the Korean patient appears to have infected at least 22 family members, health care workers, and fellow patients at a hospital where he was treated from 15 may to 17 may.
The hospital's name has not been revealed. No special precautions were taken during that time, because the patient had not yet been diagnosed.
The early phase of the disease, just after hospitalization and when symptoms are getting worse,
is the time when patients tend to secrete the most virus, says Christian Drosten, a virologist at the University of Bonn in Germany. e know from Saudi arabia that the virus can be transmitted during this time
if people aren careful, he says. Yet in similar situations, hundreds of exposed contacts did not develop the disease,
says Peter Ben Embarek, the point person on MERS at the World health organization (WHO). hy does this happen in one situation and not the other?
is a lapse in infection control measures at the hospital, Ben Embarek says. The SARS virus,
which is distantly related to MERS, is known to have spread widely in 2003 when tubes were placed in patients'airways for mechanical ventilation,
or Koreans may be more susceptible to the disease than other populations, Ben Embarek says. One important piece of evidence will be the genetic sequence of the virus. Ben Embarek says Korea has agreed to share samples with several labs working on MERS,
including at Hong kong University (HKU) in China and Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, The netherlands. e hope to have sequence analysis very soon so we can see any recent changes,
Ben Embarek says. don know if the samples have left the country or not, but I know there is an agreement that it will happen.
Have not heard anything concrete yet, "Peiris e-mailed today.)So far, Korea has quarantined close to 700 people to stop the spread of the virus
which he traveled by bus to Huizhou in China's Guangdong province. Alerted by the Korean government that the man had been in close contact with a MERS patient,
and placed him in isolation in Huizhou Municipal Central Hospital on 27 may. He tested positive for MERS on 29 may.
and 27"other contacts"are under medical surveillance. None of those quarantined or under surveillance in Hong kong and China have showed any signs of illness so far.
With reporting by Dennis Normile in Tokyo o
#New test could reveal every virus that's ever infected you Can remember every viral infection youe ever had?
Don worry, your blood can. A new test surveys the antibodies present in a person bloodstream to reveal a history of the viruses theye been infected with throughout their life.
The method could be useful not only for diagnosing current and past illnesses, but for developing vaccines and studying links between viruses and chronic disease. his is really a technical tour de force,
says immunologist Hidde Ploegh of the Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge, who was involved not in the new work.
But others point out that it's unclear how many past infections the new technology misses. Now
researchers wondering whether a patient has a particular viral infectionrom herpes and flu to the AIDS virusest blood samples for one pathogen at a time.
Many tests look for antibodies, proteins the immune system produces to recognize invaders, while others hunt for the virus own genetic material.
Some assays can measure the presence or absence of longer-lasting antibodies that can linger for decades after an infection.
Researchers led by biologist Stephen Elledge of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical school wanted to develop a test that could look at every current or past infection in one fell swoop.
They first assembled a library of almost a hundred thousand synthetic protein fragments each of them representing a section of a virus that an antibody might recognize.
When the proteins are added to a drop of blood, antibodies attach to matching fragments; researchers can isolate the antibodies and,
from the fragments they paired up with, determine which viruses someone has been infected with and what antibodies their body generated in response.
The new test, dubbed Virscan, llows scientists to ask questions that just couldn be asked before,
Elledge says. ou can compare groups of peopleoung and old or those with a disease and those withoutnd see whether there a difference in their viral histories.
For instance, Virscan could help determine whether viral infections can trigger diabetes or chronic fatigue syndrome.
Elledge and colleagues used Virscan on more than 500 people from the United states Thailand, South africa, and Peru, some of them infected with HIV.
On average, they report online today in Science, most people had antibodies for about 10 previous viral infections,
although those with HIV and who lived outside the United states averaged more. Throughout all populations, common viruses including the herpes virus and rhinoviruses
(which cause the common cold) topped the list. Surprisingly, many people had generated the exact same antibodies to infections;
researchers believed people's immune responses to be more diverse, Elledge says. That observation could inform future vaccine development,
he says. Whether the test really catches everything is up for debate, however, says microbiologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University. efore we view this as a definitive definition of what people have been infected with,
we need to be sure it a comprehensive picture, he says. ight now, I don think it is.
Racaniello points out that Virscan didn identify as many people as he would expect with antibodies for noroviruses and rotaviruses,
which cause large numbers of intestinal infections. This could be because antibodies for these viruses don stick around for
as long as otherslthough researchers have shown that, in general, most antibodies last a lifetimer because of technical caveats of the test.
Elledge admits that, for now, Virscan might miss some viruses, because theye too small or contain certain modifications that the fragment library can include. e know that wee probably missing a little bit,
he says. ut wee still detecting a lot. he work stands out by its breadth and technological innovation,
or pathogens youe fought in your lifetime and what signatures of those infections remain, the results of this paper wouldn be a surprise."
"The technology's real value lies in the new questions scientists can answer, he says."
but Elledge hopes it won't cost much more than existing tests that only look at one pathogen at a time.
if you have any new infections, he says. This could help diagnose viruses like hepatitis C
which people often don know they have u
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