Author: peterjang73

Ultrasound scanners, which image the inside of the human body, are a life-saving medical tool. Now researchers have shrunk the handheld ultrasound probe—which typically requires a highly trained technician to move over the skin—down to a flat chip that is the size of a postage stamp and sticks to the skin with a special bioadhesive. The new device can record high-resolution videos for two days at a stretch, capturing blood vessels and hearts laboring during exercise or stomachs expanding and shrinking as test subjects gulp juice and then digest it.

“The beauty of this is, suddenly, you can adhere this ultrasound probe, this thin ultrasound speaker, to the body over 48 hours,” says Xuanhe Zhao, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of a paper describing the new device, which was published in Science on Thursday. By recording still pictures and videos of internal organs during this time, a wearable imaging device could be used to diagnose heart attacks and malignant tumors, test the effectiveness of medications and assess general heart, lung or muscle health. “This can potentially change the paradigm of medical imaging by empowering long-term continuous imaging,” Zhao adds, “and it can change the paradigm of the field of wearable devices.”

Traditional ultrasounds are great at peering beneath the skin without causing damage to the body, but access to such scans is limited. “The conventional handheld ultrasound requires well-trained technicians to put the probe properly on the skin and apply some liquid gel between the probe and skin,” says Nanshu Lu, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the new research but co-wrote an accompanying analysis in Science. “And as you can imagine, it’s quite tedious and very short-term, very constrained.” Because they require an experienced human operator, Lu explains, these scans are expensive, and they cannot be used in tests where the subject is exercising or putting their body under stress from heat or extreme environments. “Conventional ultrasounds have a lot of limitations,” she says. “If we can make ultrasound sensors wearable and mobile and accessible, it will open a lot of new possibilities.”

Thanks to their potential versatility, other researchers have attempted to make stick-on ultrasound patches. But in order to adhere to soft, stretchy skin, earlier devices were designed to be stretchable themselves. This form factor weakened image quality because it could not accommodate as many transducers—units that, in this case, transform electrical power into sound waves with frequencies too high for human ears to detect. An ultrasound probe sends these waves through a layer of gooey gel into the human body, where they bounce off organs and other internal structures and then return to the transducer array. This converts the mechanical waves back to electrical signals and sends them to a computer for translation into images.

The more transducers, the better the image quality. “It’s very similar to a camera,” explains Philip Tan, an electrical engineer and a graduate student at Lu’s lab at U.T. Austin, who was also not involved with the new study but co-wrote the analysis piece. A stretchy stick-on ultrasound probe, which must be able to flex every time the skin moves, cannot pack as many transducers into the array—and when the wearer moves, the configuration of transducers shifts and makes it difficult to capture stable images.

Instead of making the device itself stretchy, Zhao and his team attached a rigid probe, just three millimeters thick, to a flexible layer of adhesive. This adhesive replaces the gooey liquid placed between a traditional ultrasound wand and the skin, and it is a hybrid of a water-rich polymer called a hydrogel and a rubberlike material called an elastomer. “It is a piece of solid hydrogel containing over 90 percent water, but it is in a solid state like Jell-O,” Zhao says. “We cover the surface of this Jell-O with this very thin membrane of elastomer so that the water inside the Jell-O will not evaporate out.” This bioadhesive not only stuck the probe firmly to the skin for 48 hours, but it also provided a cushioning layer that protected the rigid electronics from the flexing of skin and muscles.

To image different body systems, Zhao’s team tested versions of the probe that produce waves at different frequencies and thus penetrate the body to different depths. For instance, a high frequency such as 10 megahertz might make it to a couple of centimeters beneath the skin. The researchers used this frequency to capture the action of blood vessels and muscles as test subjects shifted from sitting to standing or exercised vigorously. A lower frequency of three megahertz goes deeper, more like six centimeters, to capture internal organs. Using this frequency, the researchers imaged the four chambers of a subject’s heart, and recorded the stomach of another emptying out as their system processed a couple of cups of juice. The researchers also compared the images gathered with their rigid ultrasound probe with those captured by a stretchable ultrasound device, Zhao says. “You can see the resolution of ours is almost one order of magnitude [10 times] higher than the stretchable ultrasound,” he adds.

An imaging device that maintains a continuous watch over specific parts of the body could be used to monitor and diagnose a variety of ailments. Doctors could keep a close eye on the growth of a tumor over time. Someone at high risk of hypertension might wear an ultrasound patch to measure their high blood pressure, alerting them when the pressure spikes or tracking whether a medication is helping. A COVID patient could stay home, knowing that an imaging device would alert them if their illness caused a lung infection severe enough to require hospitalization. Perhaps the most important application could be in the detection and diagnosis of heart attacks. “Cardiovascular disease is … the leading cause of death in the whole world, also in the U.S.,” Zhao says. Heart health is on the radar of other wearable device developers. For instance, smart watches such as the Apple Watch are capable of tracking the electrical signals that indicate heart activity with a so-called electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG). This can be used to diagnose heart attacks—at least in some cases. “There are already studies showing that EKG can only diagnose around 20 percent of heart attacks. The majority of heart attacks actually require imaging modalities, such as ultrasound imaging, to diagnose,” Zhao says. Continuous imaging of a patient’s heart could capture their symptoms and provide an early diagnosis.

“The big selling point of this new device is that it opens new types of medical diagnosis that can’t be done in a static setting,” Tan says. To assess heart health, for instance, it’s helpful to measure the organ’s activity while exercising—but it’s hard to hold an ultrasound wand against a running subject’s goo-covered chest. “With a wearable ultrasound patch, where you wouldn’t have to hold the transducer on the person, they were actually able to show that you’re able to get very high-quality images of the heart even during motion,” Tan adds.

The bioadhesive device is not ready for action yet, however. For one thing, it still has to be physically plugged into a computer that can collect and analyze the data the probe produces. “We connect this probe through a wire to a data acquisition system,” Zhao says. “But my group is working very hard to miniaturize and integrate everything into our wireless device.” He ultimately plans to upgrade the patch with a miniaturized power source and a wireless data-transmission system. This is a feasible goal, Lu and Tan agree, thanks to shrinking electronic components and fabrication methods that allow these features to be combined into an “ultrasound on a chip.” Lu suggests that if the field can attract federal and private investments, such a device could be feasible within five years, although it would still have to earn approval from federal regulators.

Ultimately, ultrasound stickers could join the ranks of wearables that monitor human health, including existing devices that gather information about heart rate, sleep quality and even stress. “Our human body is radiating a lot of a highly personal, highly continuous, distributed and multimodal data about our health, our emotion, our attention, our readiness, and so on. So we’re full of data,” Lu says. “The question is how to get them reliably and continuously.”

Discarded electronics are piling up fast, pushing researchers to explore creative ways to reduce the resulting trash, known as e-waste. Now one team has crafted a water-activated disposable battery made of paper and other sustainable materials.

The wires, screens and batteries that make up our devices—not to mention the plastic, metal and other materials that encase them—are filling up landfills with hazardous debris. Some e-waste is relatively large: old flip phones, air conditioners and radios, to name just a few common items. Other e-waste is more insidious, such as electronic single-use medical diagnostic kits, environmental sensors and smart labels that contain disposable batteries and other equipment.

“It’s these small batteries that are big problems,” says Dele Ogunseitan, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a green technology researcher and adviser for major technology companies, who was not involved in the development of the paper battery. “Nobody really pays attention to where they end up.”

Researchers at the Cellulose & Wood Materials Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) are working to address this overlooked problem. This week they published a paper in Scientific Reports describing a new water-activated paper battery they developed out of environmentally friendly materials. Such a device could eventually present a sustainable alternative to the more harmful batteries that are common in low-power devices.

The new paper battery has the same key components as standard batteries but packages them differently. Like a typical chemical battery, it has a positively charged side called a cathode, a negatively charged side called an anode and a conductive material called an electrolyte between the two. A traditional battery’s components are encased in plastic and metal; in the new battery, the anode and cathode are inks printed onto the front and back of a piece of paper. That paper is infused with salt, which dissolves when the paper is dampened with water. The resulting saltwater solution acts as the electrolyte.

Sustainable materials were a prerequisite for the researchers, who only considered nontoxic and abundant ingredients to create their device. “We were fairly confident that we would have something that would work in the end, but developing these materials and ink systems is far from trivial,” says Gustav Nyström, head of the Cellulose & Wood Materials Laboratory and senior author of the study. After trying hundreds of formulations for the different components, the scientists settled on a graphite ink to make the cathode, a zinc ink for the anode and salt-infused paper to create the electrolyte. When the paper is dry, the battery is shelf-stable. Add just a couple of drops of water, however, and the engrained salt dissolves, allowing electrons to flow. After the paper is moistened, it takes about 20 seconds for the battery to activate. At that point, it produces a stable 1.2 volts of electricity until the paper dries out. (For comparison, an AA battery provides 1.5 volts.) When the researchers rewet the paper, the battery produced 0.5 volt for more than an hour.

Although the researchers demonstrated that their battery could power an alarm clock, disposable paper batteries are unlikely to replace standard AAs on store shelves. Instead Nyström envisions a future where these batteries are embedded in diagnostic tests and environmental sensors, ideally with other sustainable components such as screens and packaging. That future may not be so far off.

It is hard to predict a time line for manufacturing such items at scale, but Nyström says he is in contact with potential industry partners and believes these batteries could make their way into products within the next two to five years. “The performance that you see on this device, I think, is sufficient for a lot of these applications already,” he says. It is mostly a matter of scaling up production and integrating the batteries into systems such as diagnostic tests and environmental sensors.

Crucially, Nyström says his team created the battery without compromising on sustainability criteria. “This is work that really starts with the development of sustainable materials,” he explains. From there, he says, “I think we were able to create something that is quite useful.”

DETROIT — General Motors Co said on Wednesday owners of certain vehicles equipped with its Super Cruise assisted driving system will now be able to use it on 400,000 miles (643,740 km) of North American roads, doubling the current operating area as Tesla and other automakers race to deploy hands-free cruising technology.

GM’s Super Cruise system, like Tesla’s Autopilot system, is a driver assistance system, and does not enable true autonomous driving. Spurred by Tesla’s aggressive deployment of Autopilot, and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk’s promises of a more advanced “Full Self Driving” system, GM, Ford, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz are racing to deploy competing partial automation technology in major markets.

At the same time, safety regulators are showing concern that drivers do not understand that Autopilot and similar systems are not designed to take over driving in every circumstance.

The GM system’s sensors and software allow a motorist to cruise with hands off the wheel on highways that have been mapped in detail. But the driver is expected to stay alert and ready to take over the car. GM uses technology to monitor the driver, and Super Cruise will sound alarms or slow the car to a stop if it detects that a driver is not responding.

Starting later this year, GM plans to enable vehicles equipped with Super Cruise and the company’s latest vehicle electronic system to operate hands-free on major, undivided highways in the United States and Canada, as well as additional miles of divided, interstate highways. Currently, Super Cruise operates only on interstate, divided highways.

The expansion, enabled by wider digital mapping, will allow owners of properly equipped GM vehicles to cruise hands-free on stretches of Route 66 and the Pacific Coast Highway in the U.S. West or the Trans-Canada highway in Western Canada, GM said.

Many of the new roads GM has mapped are in rural, heartland states where GM pickup trucks are popular. GM plans to offer Super Cruise as an option on its Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra large pickups later this year. GM has said previously it intends to offer Super Cruise as an option on 22 models by the end of 2023.

Depending on the model, Super Cruise costs $2,200 to $2,500 to add as an option.

(Reporting by Joe White in Detroit; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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Fake reviews in online marketplaces are much more nefarious thank you might think. In addition to being annoying, a new working paper has found evidence that fake reviews on online stores like Amazon might get you to buy lower quality products as well as spend more money.

Marketplaces have long been a part of human history, from bartering over bread in the town square to the hyper-consumerism of Amazon, one main feature has evolved: reviews. In theory, online marketplaces exclusively publish honest reviews by real people who have actually purchased the product, but fake reviews run rampant, and a new paper has found evidence that these fake reviews could be seriously affecting consumers. The paper, which was presented this week at the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute, found that not only do fake reviews get users to buy lower quality products but also get users to spend upwards of 12 extra cents per dollar.

The paper, which is authored by researchers at the Behavioralist, the University of Oxford, and the University of Southern California, describes an experiment in which 10,000 UK adults shopped on an Amazon-like platform for one of three products: headphones, dash-cams, or cordless vacuum cleaners. However, these shoppers were secretly broken into six groups, and shown different types of reviews for those products. For example, the control group saw informative reviews that were closely correlated with the quality of the product, while another group saw reviews with exaggerated star ratings, and another saw reviews that were suspicious and referred to a different product.

After analysis, the researchers found that the fake reviews were more likely to convince shoppers to purchase lower quality items, while also getting them to spend upwards of 12 extra cents for each dollar. On the flip side, the researchers also found that the effect that fake reviews have on shoppers is less when those shoppers are skeptical of how authentic those reviews are, and that education on how to spot fake reviews wound up making shoppers in the study more savvy.

The authors argue that this research is one of the first studies to characterize the negative effects of fake reviews on e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Facebook. Fake reviews are rampant in online stores, and Amazon is trying to get in front of them—the company announced earlier this week that it filed lawsuits against the administrators of over 10,000 Facebook groups that were a part of an effort to leave fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for financial compensation or free items.

Saudi Arabia is developing a new city, 150-stories tall and built from scratch, that will serve as a semi-enclosed environment where people can live and work without ever stepping foot outside. And while the promotional videos released Monday are likely an attempt to give the development a utopian feel that recalls so many “intentional cities” of the 20th century, the project comes across as extremely dystopian.

The city, completely walled on four sides with some kind of ventilation on top, is planned to be about 546 yards tall (500 meters), 218 yards wide (200 meters), and 105 miles long (170 km), according to the promotional videos, and will feature cutting-edge technology along with high-speed transportation from end-to-end. Cars will be completely unnecessary.

A video uploaded to Twitter proclaims this new city will house 9 million residents to provide a more healthy and “sustainable” quality of life. And while it’s being advertised as an eco-friendly project, with water and power supplies billed as “100% renewable,” the details have yet to be provided.

“For too long, humanity has existed within dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature. Now, a revolution in civilization is taking place. Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint, designing to protect and enhance nature,” the narrator of the new video explains.

The video shows what appears to be autonomous drones zipping around the new city, with plenty of greenery. And people who live there will supposedly be able to go from one end to another in just 20 minutes.

“Residents have access to all their daily needs within 5-minute walk neighborhoods,” the narrator continues.

Another promotional video, uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday and similar in content, shows the city from the perspective of a young woman literally flying through the environment. And its soundtrack definitely helps it sound dystopian—a dark and spooky cover of Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.”

Why would they use a dark and spooky version of the song—something you’d be more likely to hear in the trailer for a 2010s movie about a serial killer? Your guess is as good as ours. But it’s certainly a choice.

As we mentioned earlier, this is far from the first time that an incredibly expansive planned community has taken shape on the drawing board. Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos showed off something similar in 2019, albeit his plan is for a space colony.

Whether it was George Pullman’s hyper-capitalist town in Chicagoland, the drug-free cult of Synanon in California, or Upton Sinclair’s socialist cooperative in New Jersey, history has shown intentional communities are often ruined by the egos of the people building them. And there’s arguably no bigger ego on the planet than the developer of this city, Mr. Bone-saw himself, Mohammed bin Salman.

“We cannot ignore the livability and environmental crises facing our world’s cities, and NEOM is at the forefront of delivering new and imaginative solutions to address these issues,” MBS said in a press release about the project.

“NEOM is leading a team of the brightest minds in architecture, engineering and construction to make the idea of building upwards a reality,” the Saudi royal continued.

The question is whether MBS will be able to pull this one off. The country likely has enough money to make it happen, but as we’ve learned from countless utopian communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, you always need more than just money to make a utopian experiment work.