Lasers vaporize radioactive material and cause a fusion reaction — in effect, a small thermonuclear explosion (credit: Patent Yogi/YouTube)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a patent (US 9,068,562) to Boeing engineers and scientists for a laser- and nuclear-driven airplane engine.
“A stream of pellets containing nuclear material such as Deuterium or Tritium is fed into a hot-stop within a thruster of the aircraft,” Patent Yogi explains. “Then multiple high powered laser beams are all focused onto the hot-spot. The pellet is instantly vaporized and the high temperature causes a nuclear fusion reaction. In effect, it causes a tiny nuclear explosion that scatters atoms and high energy neutrons in all directions. This flow of material is concentrated to exit out of the thruster thus propelling the aircraft forward with great force.
“And this is where Boeing has done something extremely clever. The inner walls of the thurster are coated with a fissile material like Uranium-238 that undergoes a nuclear fission upon being struck by the high energy neutrons. This releases enormous energy in the form of heat. A coolant is circulated along the inner walls to pick up this heat and power a turbine which in turn generates huge amounts of electric power. And guess what this electric power is used for? To power the same lasers that created the electric power! In effect, this space-craft is self-powered with virtually no external energy needed.
“Soon, tiny nuclear bombs exploding inside a plane may be business as usual.”
An artist’s conception of the NASA reference design for the Project Orion spacecraft powered by nuclear propulsion (credit: NASA)
The basic concept was initially proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in his Project Orion concept in 1957 and described on George Dyson’s Project Orion — The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965 book.
Garment-based printable electrodes (credit: UC San Diego)
Instead of heating or cooling your whole house, imagine a fabric that will keep your body at a comfortable temperature — regardless of how hot or cold it actually is.
By regulating the temperature around an individual person, rather than a large room, the smart fabric could potentially cut the energy use of buildings and homes by at least 15 percent, said project leader Joseph Wang, distinguished professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego.
“In cases where there are only one or two people in a large room, it’s not cost-effective to heat or cool the entire room,” said Wang. “If you can do it locally, like you can in a car by heating just the car seat instead of the entire car, you can save a lot of energy.”
Skin temperature
The smart fabric will be designed to regulate the temperature of the wearer’s skin — keeping it at 93° F — by adapting to temperature changes in the room. When the room gets cooler, the fabric will become thicker. When the room gets hotter, the fabric will become thinner, using polymers inside the smart fabric that expand in the cold and shrink in the heat.
“93° F is the average comfortable skin temperature for most people,” added Renkun Chen, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC San Diego, and one of the collaborators on this project.
The clothing will incorporate printable “thermoelectrics” into specific spots of the smart fabric to regulate the temperature on “hot spots” — such as areas on the back and underneath the feet — that tend to get hotter than other parts of the body when a person is active.
Saving energy
“With the smart fabric, you won’t need to heat the room as much in the winter, and you won’t need to cool the room down as much in the summer. That means less energy is consumed,” said Chen.
The researchers are also designing the smart fabric to power itself, using rechargeable batteries to power the thermoelectrics and biofuel cells that can harvest electrical power from human sweat.
The 3-D printable wearable parts will be thin, stretchable, and flexible to ensure that the smart fabric is not bulky or heavy. The material will also be washable, stretchable, bendable and lightweight.
“We also hope to make it look attractive and fashionable to wear,” said Wang.
(credit: excerpt from cover of Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Tod Lipson)
3D printers could revolutionize food processing in the next 10 to 20 years, said Hod Lipson, Ph.D., a professor of engineering at Columbia University, speaking at IFT15: Where Science Feeds Innovation.
“The technology is getting faster, cheaper, and better by the minute. Food printing could be the killer app for 3D printing.”
Lipson, who is co-author of Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, said 3D printing is a good fit for the food industry because it allows manufacturers to bring complexity and variety to consumers at a low cost.
For example, Lipson said, users could choose from a large online database of recipes, put a cartridge with the ingredients into their 3D printer at home, and it would create the dish just for that person. The user could customize it to include extra nutrients or replace one ingredient with another.
Mary Scerra, food technologist at the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) said that by 2025 or 2030, the military envisions using 3D printing to customize meals for soldiers that “taste good [seriously?], are nutrient-dense, and could be tailored to a soldier’s particular needs.”
Graphene-based film on a hot electronic component (credit: Johan Liu)
A method for efficiently cooling electronics using graphene-based film — with a thermal conductivity capacity four times higher than copper — has been developed by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology. The film can be attached to computer chips and other silicon-based electronic components.
Electronic systems available today accumulate a great deal of heat, mostly due to the ever-increasing demand on functionality. Getting rid of excess heat in efficient ways is needed for chip lifespan and reduction in energy usage.
A research team led by Johan Liu, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology, originally found that graphene can have a cooling effect on silicon-based electronics, but that it’s not efficient because it’s limited to a few layers of graphene atoms. “When you try to add more layers of graphene, the graphene will no longer adhere to the surface, since the adhesion is [due to] weak van der Waals bonds,” he said.
Silane coupling between graphene and silicon. After heating and hydrolysis of (3-Aminopropyl) triethoxysilane (APTES) molecules (top right), silane coupling (bottom right) is created, providing mechanical strength and good thermal pathways (credit: Johan Liu)
The researchers solved that by creating strong covalent bonds between the graphene film and the surface. The stronger bonds result from adding (3-Aminopropyl) triethoxysilane (APTES) molecules to the film. Heating and hydrolysis then creates silane bonds between the graphene and the electronic component, doubling thermal conductivity.
“Increased thermal capacity could lead to several new [cooling] applications for graphene,” says Liu, including LEDs, lasers, and radio frequency components.
Abstract of Improved Heat Spreading Performance of Functionalized Graphene in Microelectronic Device Application
It is demonstrated that a graphene-based film (GBF) functionalized with silane molecules strongly enhances thermal performance. The resistance temperature detector results show that the inclusion of silane molecules doubles the heat spreading ability. Furthermore, molecular dynamics simulations show that the thermal conductivity (κ) of the GBF increased by 15%–56% with respect to the number density of molecules compared to that with the nonfunctionalized graphene substrate. This increase in κ is attributed to the enhanced in-plane heat conduction of the GBF, resulting from the simultaneous increase of the thermal resistance between the GBF and the functionalized substrate limiting cross-plane phonon scattering. Enhancement of the thermal performance by inserting silane-functionalized molecules is important for the development of next-generation electronic devices and proposed application of GBFs for thermal management.
The inverted V’s above are sensory hair bundles in the ear, each containing 50 to 100 microvilli tipped with TMC proteins. Gene therapy restores hearing by providing working copies of those proteins. (credit: Gwenaelle Geleoc & Artur Indzhykulian)
A proof-of-principle study published by the journal Science Translational Medicine takes a step in that direction, restoring hearing in deaf mice. Clinical trials of gene therapy for humans could be started within 5 to 10 years, Holt believes.
To deliver the functioning TMC1 gene into the ear, the team inserted it into an engineered virus called adeno-associated virus 1, or AAV1, and added a promoter, a genetic sequence that turns the gene on only in certain sensory cells in the cochlea, known as hair cells.
“I heard that!” Rasbak/Wikimedia Commons
They then injected the engineered AAV1 into the inner ears of mutant, deaf mice modeling the more common recessive form of TMC1 deafness, which causes profound hearing loss in children from a very young age, usually by around 2 years. After the injection, the animals’ sensory hair cells began responding to sound and electrical activity began showing up in the auditory portion of their brainstems.
How it works
Holt’s team showed in 2013 that TMC1 and the related protein TMC2 are critical for hearing, ending a rigorous 30-year search by scientists. Sensory hair cells contain tiny projections called microvilli, each tipped with a channel formed by TMC1 and TMC2 proteins. Arriving sound waves wiggle the microvilli, causing the channels to open. That allows calcium to enter the cell, generating an electrical signal that travels to the brain and ultimately translates to hearing.
Although the channel is made up of either TMC1 or TMC2, a mutation in the TMC1 gene is sufficient to cause deafness. However, Holt’s study also showed that gene therapy with the TMC2 gene could compensate for loss of a functional TMC1, restoring hearing in the recessive deafness model and partial hearing in a mouse model of dominant TMC1 deafness, in which patients gradually go deaf beginning around 10 to 15 years of age.
Abstract of Tmc gene therapy restores auditory function in deaf mice
Genetic hearing loss accounts for up to 50% of prelingual deafness worldwide, yet there are no biologic treatments currently available. To investigate gene therapy as a potential biologic strategy for restoration of auditory function in patients with genetic hearing loss, we tested a gene augmentation approach in mouse models of genetic deafness. We focused on DFNB7/11 and DFNA36, which are autosomal recessive and dominant deafnesses, respectively, caused by mutations in transmembrane channel–like 1 (TMC1). Mice that carry targeted deletion of Tmc1 or a dominant Tmc1 point mutation, known as Beethoven, are good models for human DFNB7/11 and DFNA36. We screened several adeno-associated viral (AAV) serotypes and promoters and identified AAV2/1 and the chicken β-actin (Cba) promoter as an efficient combination for driving the expression of exogenous Tmc1 in inner hair cells in vivo. Exogenous Tmc1 or its closely related ortholog, Tmc2, were capable of restoring sensory transduction, auditory brainstem responses, and acoustic startle reflexes in otherwise deaf mice, suggesting that gene augmentation with Tmc1 or Tmc2 is well suited for further development as a strategy for restoration of auditory function in deaf patients who carry TMC1 mutations.
IBM Research has announced the semiconductor industry’s first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips, which could allow for chips with more than 20 billion transistors, IBM believes — a big step forward from today’s most advanced chips, made using 14nm technology.
IBM achieved the 7 nm node through a combination of new materials, tools and techniques, explained Mukesh Khare, VP, IBM Semiconductor Technology Research in a blog post. “In materials, we’re using silicon germanium for the first time in the channels on the chips that conduct electricity. We have employed a new type of lithography in the chip-making process, Extreme Ultraviolet, or EUV, which delivers order-of-magnitude improvements over today’s mainstream optical lithography.”
However, as future technology starts to hit the quantum wall, “there’s no clear path to extend the life of the silicon semiconductor further into the future,” he noted. “The next major wave of progress, the 5 nm node, will be even more challenging than the 7 nm node has been.”
IBM 7nm node test chip closeup (credit: Darryl Bautista/IBM)
Meanwhile, industry experts consider 7nm technology crucial to meeting the anticipated demands of future cloud computing and Big Data systems, cognitive computing, mobile products and other emerging technologies, says IBM. Part of IBM’s $3 billion, five-year investment in chip R&D (announced in 2014), this accomplishment was the result of a public-private partnership with New York State and joint development alliance with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Samsung, and equipment suppliers.
When will it be available in products? IBM “declined to speculate on when it might begin commercial manufacturing of this technology generation,” The New York Timesreports. Intel’s public roadmap indicates that it’s also working on a 7 nanometer chip, Wirednotes.
Don’t freak out if you see a 40-foot bus resembling a coffin sometime soon. It’s the “Immortality Bus” — a “pro-science symbol of resistance against aging and death” to be driven across the U.S. by futurist and 2016 Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan, along with scientists and supporters.
“We’re trying to spread a culture that looks positively at indefinite human lifespans,” Istvan told KurzweilAI. “In addition to rallies and events, we hope to visit a number of universities, where futurist and transhumanist student groups have been popping up. We hope to have these groups on board the bus and offer advice on pursing careers in technology, artificial intelligence, and medicine. Our hope is to get youth to pursue science and engineering, instead of, let’s say, advertising or accounting.
“We also plan to visit homes with disabled war veterans, discuss new technologies that might help them live better, like exoskeleton suits, and hold events for LGBT communities that are increasingly considering virtual reality and other new tech as part of their social lives. We hope these collective efforts will help broaden the horizon of the futurist, transhumanist, and longevity communities that are all using technology to move society forward.”
(credit: Endless Eye)
Indiegogo funding campaign
To raise the $25,000 needed to fund the bus acquisition and four-month tour, Istvan has launched an Indiegogo campaign, which will also help fund a “life-sized, interactive robot on board, drones following us, a biohacking lab for experimenting on ourselves, lots of public event materials, and, of course, fuel.”
The team plans a full national tour on the Immortality Bus, putting on rallies, events, and educational conferences, starting in San Francisco. The goal: “Usher in the next great civil rights debate: Should we use science and technology to overcome death and become a stronger species?” says Istvan, who is author of the visionary book The Transhumanist Wager.
The Transhumanist Party was founded by futurist and philosopher Zoltan Istvan on October 7, 2014 as a nonprofit organization. It is dedicated to “putting science, health, and technology at the forefront of United States politics. … Many of the party’s core ideas and goals can be found in the Transhumanist Declaration and in the founding party article in the Huffington Post.”
Formerly a National Geographic Channel reporter, Istvan frequently appears on television and currently writes for Vice, Gizmodo, Huffington Post, Slate, and others. He’s also the inventor of “volcano boarding.”
Research shows how accurately a naked human eye can determine the thickness of thin-films from the observed color (credit: Sandy Peterhänsel et al./Optica)
European scientists have taught volunteers in an experiment how to determine the thickness of a titanium dioxide thin film only a few nanometers thick by simply observing the color it presents under under highly controlled, precise lighting conditions, according to Sandy Peterhänsel, University of Stuttgart, Germany and principal author of an open-access paper in the journal Optica.
The optical properties of thin films are the result of light interacting with their surfaces to produce a wide range of colors. This is the same phenomenon that produces scintillating colors in soap bubble and oil films on water.
The specific colors produced by this process depend strongly on the composition of the material, its thickness, and the properties of the incoming light. This high sensitivity to both the material and thickness has sometimes been used by skilled engineers to quickly estimate the thickness of films down to a level of approximately 10–20 nanometers. Could someone see a thinner film?
The experiment
Composed photo of all samples (bottom row) and adjusted color fields (top row). Residual defects of the samples can be seen at the edges of some samples. (credit: Sandy Peterhänsel et al./Optica)
The researchers decided to find out. The experiment setup was simple: a series of thin films of titanium dioxide were manufactured one layer at a time by atomic deposition. While time consuming, this method enabled the researchers to carefully control the thickness of the samples.
The samples were then placed on a LCD monitor that was set to display a pure white color, with the exception of a colored reference area that could be calibrated to match the apparent surface colors of the thin films with various thicknesses.
The color of the reference field was then changed by the test subject until it perfectly matched the reference sample: correctly identifying the color meant they also correctly determined its thickness. This could be done in as little as two minutes, and for some samples and test subjects their estimated thickness differed only by one-to-three nanometers from the actual value measured by conventional means. This level of precision is far beyond normal human vision.
Compared to traditional automated methods of determining the thickness of a thin film, which can take five to ten minutes per sample using some techniques, the human eye performance compared very favorably.
The researchers speculate that it may be possible to detect even finer variations if other control factors are put in place. “People often underestimate human senses and their value in engineering and science. This experiment demonstrates that our natural born vision can achieve exceptional tasks that we normally would only assign to expensive and sophisticated machinery,” concludes Peterhänsel.
Abstract of Human color vision provides nanoscale accuracy in thin-film thickness characterization
We study how accurately a naked human eye can determine the thickness of thin films from the observed color. Our approach is based on a color-matching experiment between thin-film samples and a simulated color field shown on an LCD monitor. We found that the human color observation provides an extremely accurate evaluation of the film thickness, and is comparable to sophisticated instrumental methods. The remaining color differences for the matched color pairs are close to the literature value for the smallest visually perceivable color difference.
Left: the rigid top fractures on landing, while the top made of nine layers going from rigid to flexible remains intact (credit: Jacobs School of Engineering/UC San Diego, Harvard University)
Engineers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, have created the first robot with a 3D-printed body that transitions from a rigid core to a soft exterior. The robot is capable of more than 30 untethered jumps at a time and is powered by a mix of butane and oxygen.
The researchers describe the robot’s design, manufacturing and testing in the July 10 issue of the journal Science. Michael Tolley, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC San Diego, and one of the paper’s co-lead authors, believes bringing together soft and rigid materials will help create a “new generation of fast, agile robots that are more robust and adaptable than their predecessors and can safely work side by side with humans.” And maybe help prevent (or cushion) those “that’s gotta hurt” falls experienced by some robots participating in the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge.
The idea of blending soft and hard materials into the robot’s body came from nature, Tolley said. For example, certain species of mussels have a foot that starts out soft and then becomes rigid at the point where it makes contact with rocks. “In nature, complexity has a very low cost,” Tolley said. “Using new manufacturing techniques like 3D printing, we’re trying to translate this to robotics.”
Soft robots tend to be slow, especially when accomplishing tasks without being tethered to power sources and other electronics, said Tolley, who recently co-authored a research review on soft robotics for Nature (Rus, Tolley, v. 521, pp. 467-475). Adding rigid components should help, without compromising the safety of the humans who would work with them.
In the case of the robot described in Science, rigid layers also make for a better interface with the device’s electronic brains and power sources. The soft layers make it less vulnerable to damage when it lands after jumping .
How it works
The robot is made of two nestled hemispheres. The top hemisphere is like a half shell, 3D-printed in once piece, with nine different layers of stiffness, creating a structure that goes from rubber-like flexibility on the exterior to full rigidity near to core. Researchers tried several versions of the design and concluded that a fully rigid top would make for higher jumps. But a more flexible top was more likely to survive impacts on landing, allowing the robot to be reused. They decided to go with the more flexible design.
The bottom half of the robot is flexible and includes a small chamber where oxygen and butane are injected before it jumps. After the gases are ignited, this half behaves very much like a basketball that gets inflated almost instantaneously, propelling the robot into a jump. When the chemical charge is exhausted, the bottom hemisphere goes back to its original shape.
The two hemispheres surround a rigid core module that houses a custom circuit board, high-voltage power source, battery, miniature air compressor, butane fuel cell and other components. In a series of tests, the robot jumped two and a half feet (0.75 m) in height and half a foot (0.15m) laterally. In experiments, the robot jumped more than 100 times and survived an additional 35 falls from a height of almost four feet.
Jacobs School of Engineering/UC San Diego, Harvard University | 3D-printed robot is hard at heart, soft on the outside
Wyss Institute/Harvard University | 3D Printed Soft Jumping Robot
Abstract of A 3D-printed, functionally graded soft robot powered by combustion
Roboticists have begun to design biologically inspired robots with soft or partially soft bodies, which have the potential to be more robust and adaptable, and safer for human interaction, than traditional rigid robots. However, key challenges in the design and manufacture of soft robots include the complex fabrication processes and the interfacing of soft and rigid components. We used multimaterial three-dimensional (3D) printing to manufacture a combustion-powered robot whose body transitions from a rigid core to a soft exterior. This stiffness gradient, spanning three orders of magnitude in modulus, enables reliable interfacing between rigid driving components (controller, battery, etc.) and the primarily soft body, and also enhances performance. Powered by the combustion of butane and oxygen, this robot is able to perform untethered jumping.
In Self/Less, a science-fiction thriller to be released in the U.S. today, July 10, 2015, Damian Hale, an extremely wealthy aristocrat (Ben Kingsley) dying from cancer, undergoes a $250 million radical medical procedure at a lab called Phoenix Biogenic in Manhattan to have his consciousness transferred into the body of a healthy young man (Ryan Reynolds).
But when he starts to uncover the mystery of the body’s origin — he has flashbacks in a dream of a former life as Mark — he discovers the body was not grown in a laboratory, as promised, and that the “organization” he bought the body from will kill to protect its investment. To make matters worse, he faces the threat of losing control of the body he now possesses and its original owner’s consciousness resurfacing, which will erase his mind in the process.
Curiously, at one point, Mark looks up the scientist who did the transfer on Wikipedia, and finds that he was the “godfather of transhumanism.” “What many summer movie-goers might not realize is that Self/less is loosely based on a real-life project called the 2045 Initiative, which is being spearheaded by Dmitry Itskov, a Russian multi-millionaire, Ars Technicasuggests. But the theme has also been explored in a number of movies, ranging from Metropolis to The Sixth Day, Avatar, and The Age of Ultron.
