Txchnologist

by Txchnologist Staff

GE said today it would start moving far more complex machines to the cloud and build the first big data and analytic platform robust enough to manage the torrent of information generated by turbines, jet engines, medical scanners and other technology.

The company has partnered with Amazon Web Services, which pioneered the development of the cloud ‑ and coined its name ‑ to broaden GE’s data software and analytical offerings. GE also expanded its partnerships with Accenture and Pivotal to develop new Industrial Internet services and deploy new high-volume machine data management software based on the powerful Hadoop open-source framework.

Watch a rebroadcast of the conference:

The GE “machine cloud” technology will undergird the Industrial Internet, a robust data network designed to bring machines into the digital age, equip them with sensors and software, and use the data they generate to make customers more efficient.

by Txchnologist Staff

If you’re into thinking about the scale of the universe and other cosmographic questions that overwhelm the senses, this video might just blow your mind. 

The international team of scientists who put it together created a 3-D map of the galaxies within 300 million light-years of the Milky Way. They show scale and movement within this astronomical sphere by panning, zooming and rotating around, making it easy to forget that Earth is a tiny speck buried in the vastness of this representation of the cosmos. 

“The large-scale structure of the universe is a complex web of clusters, filaments, and voids,” said the University of Hawaii announcement released with the video. “Large voids—relatively empty spaces—are bounded by filaments that form superclusters of galaxies, the largest structures in the universe. Our Milky Way galaxy lies in a supercluster of 100,000 galaxies.”

Top Image: Map showing all galaxies in the local universe color-coded by their distance to us: blue galaxies are the closest, and red are farther, up to 300 million light-years away. Courtesy University of Hawaii.

by Charles Q. Choi

In the 2008 blockbuster film “The Dark Knight,” Batman taps into every phone in Gotham City and, like his namesake bats, uses sonar-like imaging to map the world from echoes he overhears. Now scientists have invented a real-world version of that technology, researching a way that might one day calculate the shapes of rooms by listening to the cell phones within them.

Animals like bats and dolphins—and even some blind people—navigate the world by listening to sounds reflected off their surroundings, a sensory technique called echolocation. Electrical engineer Ivan Dokmanic at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and his colleagues have developed a computer algorithm that can generate a 3-D model of a simple room using four microphones that can pick up echoes from sounds such as finger snaps, literally making it a snap to map a room.

“If someone told me some years ago that you can grab a couple of microphones, put them in a room, snap your fingers and have your computer calculate the shape of the room from the echoes, I’d be surprised,” Dokmanic says. “We turn something that’s usually considered to be annoying and what people usually try to get rid of — the echoes — into something very useful.”

Read More →

by Michael Keller

We’ve been writing quite a bit about human-computer interfaces, from projecting buttons on body parts to using WiFi signals for gesture recognition. This one, by a young Russian inventor named Maxim Kamanin, could give the others a run for their money. 

He has created Displair, an air-screen technology that projects digital 3-D images into open space and allows interactive multitouch gesture recognition. According to the website, the image is projected onto fog made of ultrafine water droplets. Infrared sensors and cameras let the user interact with the projections.

Check out the short video made by Focus Forward Films.

by Rachel Nuwer

Imagine, with the wave of a hand, adjusting the thermostat without getting out of bed, or turning up the music in the other room while in the shower. WiSee, a new gesture-recognition system, aims to harness the ever-present wireless Internet signals blanketing people’s homes to allow remote control of all their electronics. Since walls pose no obstacle for WiFi’s radio waves to traverse, such a system could work throughout the entire house, even if users are several rooms removed from the appliance they’re controlling.

“This is something people have been thinking about for some time,” says Shyamnath Gollakota, a University of Washington computer scientist. “But we asked: Can we scale it to much larger spaces, say in the whole home or building?”

Read More →

by Michael Keller

An imaging and 3-D mapping robot is being developed to help firefighters quickly understand what’s happening inside a structure when it’s ablaze.

The small Segway-like droid being built by University of California, San Diego, engineers can overcome obstacles as it moves through a burning building. It records its surroundings with one thermal and two stereo cameras, which onboard image-processing software then turns into a 3-D map that can be beamed to first responders. 

The research group, which includes universities, businesses and the local fire department, hopes that teams of the little robots will one day wheel around commercial and residential fires to quickly identify injured people, hot spots, volatile gases and areas of structural weakness.

Read More →

by GE Reports

Many people still struggle with the idea of “printing” things by adding one layer of material on top of another, but Michael Idelchik, who runs GE’s advanced technologies research, is already talking about “printing large portions of jet engines.” GE Aviation, for example, is using lasers to print fuel nozzles for next-generation jet engines. The nozzles are 25 percent lighter and as much as five times more durable than the existing model welded from 20 different parts.

“We already know that it can be done, we’ve been playing with it for a while,” Idelchik says. “Now we want to develop an ecosystem of designers, engineers, materials scientists, and other partners who can learn with us. We have a number of products that we are going to be launching and we want to challenge people to get into business with us. If the ecosystem grows, the entire industry will grow.”

Read More →

by Peter Gwynne, Inside Science

In June, as national soccer teams from around the world resume playing qualification games for the 2014 World Cup, a group of 20-somethings will kick off a soccer-related project with a global purpose that goes beyond athletic competition.

They will start full-scale manufacture of soccer-style balls that generate and store electric power when kicked around.

After playtime with these “Soccket” balls, families and communities that lack reliable access to electricity can use the balls’ power for lighting and – eventually – other electrical applications.

Read More →

by Txchnologist Staff

A new electric bus system does away with ugly overhead power lines and replaces them with next-generation “flash” boosting technology that keeps the vehicle charged along its route.

Articulated electric buses that are part of the system have laser-guided arms on their roofs that align with fast-charging receptacles at bus stops. The recharging system delivers 400 kilowatts in 15 seconds at every third or fourth stop, topping off the vehicle’s battery until it reaches the end of its route. Onboard batteries store power delivered from the electrified bus stops and through regenerative braking. At the end of the line, the bus receives a three- to four-minute full charge.

The project, called TOSA, is first being deployed on a pilot basis in Geneva, Switzerland, where its builders say it will meet the needs of high capacity, high frequency bus routes during rush hours. Geneva’s transit authorities say the power for the TOSA system will be generated through hydropower, meaning the buses will not produce carbon dioxide and the enterprise will fit into the city’s sustainability plans.

by Charles Q. Choi

By hallucinating the existence of humans, robots can learn how to better cater to people and understand our world, researchers say.

For robots that interact with and react to the world around them as best as possible, scientists want to design machines that know what’s in their surroundings. Attempts to identify an item based on its appearance can run into a gauntlet of problems — for example, an object might differ in how it looks over time depending on the lighting or the angle the robot views it from, and one item might differ enough from a similar one when it comes to color, size or shape to confound a droid’s limited knowledge.

One way researchers want to improve a robot’s ability to identify objects is to help it recognize the context an item lies within. For instance, if a machine recognizes a setting as a kitchen, that could help it figure out that objects on a countertop might be cups, bowls or utensils.

Read More →

by Michael Keller

Researchers have successfully piloted a remote-controlled helicopter using thought. After about 12 hours of training, volunteers were able to  maneuver a small quadrotor through more than 90 percent of challenges in a sophisticated obstacle course.

University of Minnesota biomedical engineers created a noninvasive computer-brain interface that interprets thoughts about movement into flight instructions the drone acts upon. The interface is comprised of a standard sensor-studded electroencephalogram (EEG) cap, which is used to detect electrical impulses in the brain, connected to a computer that interprets the signal and beams directions wirelessly to the robot.

“The experiment we conducted developed a system to decode human intention and use that signal to fly a robot in three-dimensional space,” biomedical engineering professor Bin He tells Txchnologist. “The real innovation here is picking up a signal of intention from a person’s brain and turning that into a control signal.”

Read More →

by Ryder Diaz, Inside Science

Scientists may be able to track dangerous ash-filled clouds by using information similar to the bars showing signal strength on a cell phone.

The new technique analyzes the GPS’s “signal strength” — the intensity of a GPS signal – as it attempts to cut through a volcanic plume. The research was published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The dangerous particles within these plumes can clog an airplane’s engines and send it plummeting from the sky.

Two years ago this month, Grímsvötn, a volcano in Iceland, erupted, leaving behind a thick column of ash that led to canceled flights all over Europe for days. 

Read More →

by Michael Keller

Using a supercomputer to crunch massive amounts of data, researchers say they have decoded the structure that contains and protects HIV’s genetic material. Their results potentially open a new route of attack against the structure, called the capsid, which is essential to the virus’s survival.

“The capsid is critically important for HIV replication, so knowing its structure in detail could lead us to new drugs that can treat or prevent the infection,” said senior author Peijun Zhang, associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “This approach has the potential to be a powerful alternative to our current HIV therapies, which work by targeting certain enzymes, but drug resistance is an enormous challenge due to the virus’ high mutation rate.”

Their task was no easy one. HIV’s gene-containing protein shell is comprised of nonuniform combinations of five- and six-subunit protein structures that link together to form an asymmetric shape. To get an accurate model of the capsid, they would need to piece together each of the 3 million to 4 million atoms that comprise it.

Read More →

by Michael Keller

In the estuarine waters that mix art and science swim the little musical sea creatures of Seaquence. At that site, visitors can partake in “an experiment in musical composition. Adopting a biological metaphor, Seaquence allows you to create and combine musical lifeforms into dynamic compositions.”

In other words, go there and prepare to lose at least an hour. Build your own sound-generating organisms. Alter their audio waveform, octave, scale, melody, envelope and volume to create your own composition. It’s addictive. When you’re done, check out what other Seaquence synthetic musicomarinemicrobiologists have left in the experiment’s lab-dish ecosystem.

The app was created by the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco-based digital culture nonprofit. Here’s a demo to show you how to start:

by Inside Science TV

A new optical diagnostic tool being developed at Columbia University may help healthcare providers monitor one of the most serious complications of diabetes. The noninvasive technique —called dynamic diffuse optical tomography (DDOT) imaging—fires near-infrared light at parts of the body. That which is reflected back at the machine lets it map the concentration of hemoglobin in tissue over time.

This helps providers diagnose and monitor peripheral arterial disease (PAD), a narrowing of the arteries caused by plaque accumulation that restricts blood flow to extremities and increases a person’s risk for heart attack and stroke.

Read More →

by Rebecca Ruiz

Fighting a wildfire requires a lot of data: weather forecasts, terrain maps, private and commercial property boundaries and historic fire perimeters are just some of the many variables a fire official must account for in drawing up a battle plan.

The right technology can collect essential information that gives crews a significant advantage over a blaze. Yet firefighting is a finely tuned practice based on decades of experience – to introduce the latest fad in data collection and analysis risks making potentially fatal or disastrous mistakes.

“Firefighting is a very delicate thing,” says Everett Hinkley, national remote-sensing program manager for the U.S. Forest Service. “You don’t want to introduce something that could break at a critical time.”

Read More →

by Michael Keller

As the Earth-observing Landsat satellite zooms high above our heads, it records a continuous ribbon of the planet below. It is our ever-vigilant watchdog, sending back imagery since 1972 that is used by people working in agriculture, geology, forestry, peacekeeping, regional planning and land-use change. 

The video below was taken by Landsat, a joint program run by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, on April 19 over the course of around 20 minutes. It shows the satellite’s recording of a swath of Earth 5,665 miles long from the extreme northern latitudes of Russia down to the southern tip of Africa. Landsat was actually traveling at 16,800 mph and the video’s creators sped that up to to the equivalent of nearly 22,000 mph to adjust the clip’s length.

If you don’t want to see the full overflight below, NASA has made a highlights clip that comes in at under four minutes.

Top Image: A still from an animation showing the Landsat Data Continuity Mission working in its orbit. Courtesy NASA.

by Michael Keller

It’s hard to imagine something so simple could save a child’s life. But that’s exactly what this small device built on 3-D printer did. University of Michigan doctors designed and implanted the tracheal splint inside Kaiba Gionfriddo, now 20 months old. 

The tiny collar was made to treat Kaiba’s tracheobronchomalacia, a condition in which the airways collapse when breathing or coughing. It was created directly from a CT scan of the collapsed area using a laser-based 3-D printer. The printer constructed the splint using polycaprolactone, a biodegradable polyester that is slowly absorbed by the body over a few years. It was sewn around the airway to keep it open and give support so more tissue could grow.

The doctors described their groundbreaking treatment in New England Journal of Medicine letter published on May 23.

Read More →

by Txchnologist Staff

Rice University mechanical engineering students have built a prototype shoe fitting that generates enough energy to power portable electronics and recharge batteries.

The fitting, called PediPower, diverts the energy of heel strikes while walking, which would otherwise be lost into the ground, through a small gear system and generator. In bench tests, it delivered an average 400 milliwatts, enough to charge a battery or operate a cell phone. Their creation joins another body-powered generator developed by U.S. and Canadian scientists—a knee brace that can recharge up to 10 cell phones at once.

The Rice seniors hope their innovation will be improved upon by the next group taking it up to boost power output and decrease size. The goal is for the device to reliably produce enough energy to power artificial heart valves.

HT to Laughing Squid for spotting this one.

by Michael Keller

The world is awash in antibiotics. We take them to fight off the bacteria that mean to colonize us. We feed them to animals to prevent the outbreak of disease in densely packed factory-farming operations. Even many of our cleaning and body care products, controversially, now contain them.

But many antibiotics don’t get fully metabolized within humans or animals and, through excretion, find their way into waste and surface waters. It’s a major environmental concern whose full ecological implications still aren’t clear.

And the problem creates a vicious cycle. Evolution gives our microbial adversaries the strategic advantage—the ability to adapt to our weapons and render them harmless. So we engage in a microscopic arms race, battering increasing numbers of antibiotic-resistant bugs with more and more drug compounds to keep them at bay.

So you could call it a small case of poetic justice when researchers figure out how to use the cellular machinery that renders some bacteria drug-resistant to reclaim antibiotics from contaminated water.

Read More →

by Rachel Nuwer

For those unfortunate enough to be trapped in a caved-in mine or under the rubble of a collapsed building, the chance of being rescued largely depends upon trained humans and dogs. The equipment they may be outfitted with—thermal imaging sensors, carbon dioxide detectors and flexible video cameras—may also provide some limited help.

But those buried too deeply for searchers to detect them must put all hope of rescue upon the slim possibility that first responders uncover them by chance. For this reason, researchers are trying to develop search and rescue robots that could vastly improve the odds for victims trapped underground.

“The dream and goal in this field is to turn a robot into a multifunctional device capable of moving everywhere,” says Daniel Goldman, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We’re seeking inspiration for how teams of little robots could self-organize to create structures that allow them to efficiently and effectively move around in nasty environments.”

Read More →

by Sophie Bushwick, Inside Science

Alterations to the usual glass production process, such as putting the material under stress, can introduce effects that linger even after the material hardens. While manufacturers have long exploited this phenomenon to strengthen glass, a new theory aims to get closer to understanding why it happens.

Glass is not as well understood as most materials, because it straddles the line between liquid and solid. In typical crystalline materials, molecules assemble into a set structure over the span of the entire material as the substance solidifies from a disordered liquid form. Glass, on the other hand, retains a liquid-like disorder even after it hardens.

Without a set architecture, these disordered molecules are particularly vulnerable to outside forces. If you push or pull on a substance, you create internal forces, or stress, in the material itself. Once you remove that force, you’d expect the molecules to return to equilibrium, removing the stresses. But glassy materials “remember” the long-gone force. 

Read More →

by Michael Keller

The builders of UC Berkeley’s cockroach-inspired STAR robot have strapped a camera onto the little machine to see the world from its angle.

Engineers at the university’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have designed the little transformer robot to “adapt its stiffness, height, and leg-to-surface contact angle.” At full speed, it can run at 5.2 meters or 43 body lengths per second. They say it’s the world’s fastest untethered crawling bot.

Read More →

by Inside Science TV

University of Michigan researchers have created a nanotech coating that repels liquids—even caustic acids and solvents. The material can shield textiles to create stain- and chemical-resistant garments, and can reduce drag on ships.

When applied, the coating creates a webbed surface that is up to 99 percent air. It is a mixture of rubbery plastic polydimethylsiloxane particles and liquid-resisting nanoscale cubes developed by the Air Force that contain carbon, fluorine, silicon and oxygen.

“Virtually any liquid you throw on it bounces right off without wetting it,” said Anish Tuteja, a materials science and engineering assistant professor who led the development of the product. His team’s work was published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Top Image: The new coating here repels coffee. Image courtesy Joseph Xu/University of Michigan.

by Txchnologist Staff

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey released this dizziness-inducing video of construction workers installing the final section of spire atop One World Trade Center. Some seriously brave ironworkers erected the final piece of the building on May 10.

“Using a crane located high above street level, ironworkers lifted the final two pieces off a temporary work platform on the roof of One WTC and attached them to the previously installed 16 sections of spire,” the authority wrote on its Youtube post. “During the installation, ironworkers set and tightened 60 bolts at an altitude of 1,701 feet in the air.”

They report the building now stands at 1,776 feet high, making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and the third tallest in the world. Huzzah, engineering!

by Charles Q. Choi

Researchers have developed software to predict where blackouts are most likely to happen when storms hit, which could help authorities cut the amount of time people are in the dark after disasters like Hurricane Sandy.

Sandy wreaked havoc in 2012, causing as much as nearly $50 billion in damage, making it the second-costliest hurricane to hit the United States. At its peak, it left roughly 8.5 million people without power.

“As large storms increase in frequency and intensity in the United States and worldwide due to changing climate, getting profiles of where places are vulnerable to damage and investing in infrastructure to eliminate those vulnerabilities is integral to maintaining a well-operating power grid,” says Steven Fernandez, a national security issues researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Read More →

by Michael Keller

In the video below, MakerBot Industries, the 3-D printer manufacturer based in Brooklyn, N.Y., shares the story of Richard Van As and Ivan Owen. The two create articulated prosthetic hands for those suffering from a disfiguring congenital disorder.

They are using a donated MakerBot Replicator 2 3-D printer to quickly build major parts of the device out of thermoplastics. The two have loaded the digital files to 3-D print their Robohand onto sharing site Thingiverse so that others can build the devices for people in their community. They are also soliciting crowdfunding through Indiegogo to continue their work.

Van As said that Robohand is just the beginning. “Maybe Robohand took the 3-D printing world by surprise with what we’re doing with it,” he said. “But if you have a look at the broad spectrum of it, I think that printing a mechanical device that can aid you when you’ve lost fingers is just a tiny little part of it. It’s a big, big picture, this 3-D printing.”

Top Image: Richard makes adjustments to Liam’s hand. Image courtesy MakerBot.

by Michael Keller

The harvest season seems to whiz by every year in northern latitudes. Just as the time comes to sink a fork into early spring’s peppery locally grown lettuce and asparagus, the market’s crates are already brimming with winter squash. And the juicy tomatoes that yesterday took a quick ride from a nearby farm start logging thousands of miles from farm to table.

Unfortunately, the only two options for most consumers looking to buy fresh produce during the cold months are either to get them shipped from warmer regions or from greenhouses closer by. Efficiencies in the agricultural and shipping systems being what they are, fruits and vegetables grown in warmer climes—by necessity picked before they ripen to prevent spoilage in transit—cost less than premium-priced food from the greenhouse.

Either way, each of those February cucumbers is the product of a significant energy investment—whether it’s producing the fertilizer, burning fuel in shipping, or lighting and heating commercial greenhouses.

Read More →

by Txchnologist Staff

PBS web series Off Book has produced a short, compelling video called “The Art of Data Visualization,” which showcases powerful presentations of complex data. Nuances in such information might be lost without displaying it visually.

“Humans have a powerful capacity to process visual information, skills that date far back in our evolutionary lineage,” the team behind the video write. “And since the advent of science, we have employed intricate visual strategies to communicate data, often utilizing design principles that draw on these basic cognitive skills. In a modern world where we have far more data than we can process, the practice of data visualization has gained even more importance.”

Top Image: Hurricanes and Tropical Storms Since 1851 courtesy of data visualization expert John Nelson and IDV Solutions. See the full-sized image here.

by Rebecca Ruiz

By the numbers, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy is hard to fathom. The so-called super storm swept through eight states, killing 159 people and causing $70 billion in damage.

From power outages to flooded streets, the hurricane exposed alarming weaknesses in the infrastructure of Eastern Seaboard cities. Now, Climate Central, an independent research and journalism organization based in Princeton, N.J., has added another number to that list: 11 billion gallons of sewage flowed into waterways during the storm.

The majority of overflows occurred in New York and northern New Jersey, where untreated and partially treated sewage flowed into surrounding rivers, bays, canals and, in some cases, streets, according to a recent Climate Central report.  

“This record storm revealed how vulnerable the sewage and wastewater treatment system is to major coastal flooding,” says Alyson Kenward, a scientist who is the lead author of the report.

Read More →