From Engadget: 36.7 million FPS camera revolutionized cancer screening, next comes combat sports
We’re quite familiar with the fun you can have when you’ve got a high speed camera in your possession. But, even Phantom’s pricey and impressive 2,800 FPS cameras have nothing on the latest project out of UCLA. Engineers at the school have rigged up a microscope cam that uses serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) to capture clips of individual cells at 36.7 million FPS. Let that sink in for a moment — that’s a “shutter” speed of 27 picoseconds. The school actually pioneered the method years ago, which uses ultra-fast laser pulses to generate images of cells as they speed by. The camera is capable of processing 100,000 cells a second, allowing doctors to spot cancerous anomalies that might have otherwise gone undetected. Now we just hope they can supersize the tech and sell it to HBO… boxing KOs can never be played back slow enough.
from Engadget
From Engadget: Researchers store memory bit on a lone molecule, could pave the way for petabyte SSDs
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) just deflated the size of a bit down to a solitary nanometer — the length of an organic molecule. The international research team managed it by first embedding a magnetized iron atom into a molecule made up of 51 atoms, then taking advantage of so-called memristive and spintronic properties. By applying a current, they flipped the atom’s magnetic charge, altering the resistance of the molecule as well — which they subsequently measured, storing a bit. Compared to a typical magnetic drive which needs 3 million atoms per bit, a device made this way could theoretically store 50 thousand times as much data in the same size — and would be an all-electric device, to boot. If the research ever pans out, a terabyte magnetic drive could turn into a 50 petabyte solid state unit — hopefully ready in time for all those 4K home movies you’ll need to store one day soon.
from Engadget
From Discover Magazine: Graphene, Heal Thyself: Carbon Molecule Can Rebuild Holes | 80beats
The graphene filled in the smaller hole with fresh
carbon atoms
Due to their extraordinary abilities, graphene and other one-atom-thick molecules like carbon nanotubes have enormous potential for use in fields from electronics to medicine. For example, graphene is physically strong, transparent, flexible, and a great conductor of both electricity and heat—and now the two-dimensional carbon molecule can add another power to its roster: self-healing. When researchers made holes in a graphene sheet, the molecule rebuilt its own structure using new carbon atoms. This ability might help researchers grow graphene in large quantities and specific shapes.
Physicists led by Konstantin Novoselov, who along with Andre Geim discovered graphene and won the physics Nobel Prize, trained an electron microscope at a sheet of graphene. They deposited palladium or nickel, which damage graphene by encouraging carbon bonds to break, onto a section of the sheet. When the researchers shot an electron beam at the damaged area, the beam mobilized the metal atoms to eat away at the graphene, etching nanometer-scale holes. But the holes didn’t last long: Provided with a reservoir of spare carbon atoms, the graphene incorporated the fresh carbon to patch the holes, as can be seen in the …
from Discover Magazine
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: At the Imagine Cup 2012: A Real-Life Minesweeper App That Detects Buried Landmines
Team ARMED Team ARMED from Poland post with their bomb-detecting smartphones and a model of the land mines it finds. Julie Beck
Using both the military and software sides of their education, a team of Polish military students studying computer engineering at Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna (Military University of Technology) presented at the Imagine Cup here in Sydney an app that uses the built-in magnetometer in a Windows phone to detect the magnetic signature of land mines buried in the ground.
SAPER (Sensor Amplified Perception for Explosives Recognition) is Poland’s entry in the software design category of the 2012 Imagine Cup.
It’s like a high-stakes Minesweeper with real-world results. The corresponding web application shows the locations of mines users have already detected, or whose known locations were input by military professionals. Then, if you enter a dangerous area, the app sends you a notification on your phone.
SAPER has 75 percent accuracy in detecting land mines, and works from 30 centimeters away. However, both of these stats can be improved by purchasing their external, more powerful magnetometer/metal detector, for “premium users,” which the team says makes the app comparable in accuracy to current military tools. Being from a military academy, Team ARMED had access to a field test site, where they buried mines in the ground and tested their app on them.
The team hopes to first deploy their app in the most affected areas, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam and Croatia, where, team mentor Mariusz Chmielewski tells me, there are regularly “bombs on the side of the road you are driving on. It is a big, big problem.”
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Gizmodo: Being Obese Is Better Than Being Underweight
From Gizmodo: Wireless Power Transferred Through Thick Concrete Could Mean Electric Cars That Charge While You Drive
One of the biggest issues preventing the electric car from taking over the roads is their incredibly limited battery life. But researchers at the Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan have demonstrated a new system that could let electric cars constantly recharge while they’re being driven. More »
from Gizmodo