The researchers used a type of powerful X-ray imaging in order to discover internal soft-tissue movements that were massively out of sync with the external body movements (the X-rays were used because large caterpillars are entirely opaque). Afterwards, they verified these findings by using transmission-light microscopy to see the internal soft-tissue movements of smaller, translucent caterpillars as they slowly inched their way along a glass microscope slide.

This combined imaging showed that the caterpillar’s gut slid forward in advance of the surrounding tissues. The novelty is that the caterpillar’s center of mass moves forward while the middle “legs” are anchored to the substrate. The internal gut movements are locally decoupled from visible translations of the body.

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This movement meant the abdomen typically advanced an entire step forward before the body wall caught up. The researchers described their findings as “a unique phenomenon of gut sliding”. For more information about their research read the paper that will be featured in the upcoming issue of Current Biology: “Visceral-Locomotory Pistoning in Crawling Caterpillars”.

Since the research team is also interested in engineering applications, they moved from considering the biological implications of their findings to potential uses in soft-bodied robots. The potential these robots have is large, due to their shape-shifting ability. These shape-shifting robots could be used in search-and-rescue operations, medical applications and space research applications. Let’s see if they’ll come up with something more advanced than Chem-bot – iRobot’s shape-shifting blob robot we described in one of our previous articles.

Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford, has joined forces with Brian Cantwell, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, who has spent the last five years designing rocket thrusters that run on nitrous oxide.

Conventional treatment plants pump air into wastewater sludge in a process called aeration. The idea is to convert nitrogen waste into harmless nitrogen gas by promoting oxygen-loving bacteria that thrive on sugars and other organic matter in the sludge. But aeration is a costly and energy-intensive process. As an alternative, the Stanford team wants to create a low-oxygen environment in the treatment plant, where nitrous oxide-producing bacteria are favored while aerobic species die off.

These nitrous oxide producers consume relatively small amounts of organic matter. That’s good news for other anaerobic microbes that produce methane gas by feasting on organic compounds. “When bacteria make nitrous oxide, less organic matter is oxidized, so more can be converted into methane – potentially two or three times more than is possible in a typical treatment plant,” Criddle said. “That extra methane can be used as fuel to run the plant independent of outside power sources.”

In recent experiments, the researchers demonstrated that under laboratory conditions nitrous oxide gas could be produced from wastewater using a low-oxygen technique. But there’s a downside to the process. Nitrous oxide is a significant greenhouse gas that’s more than 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. That’s where Cantwell’s rocket thruster comes in. Designed for use in spacecraft, the thruster runs on nitrous oxide – a surprisingly clean-burning propellant.

“When it decomposes, nitrous oxide breaks down into pure nitrogen and oxygen gas,” Cantwell explained. “At the same time, it releases enough energy to heat an engine to almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, making it red hot, and it shoots out of the engine at almost 5,000 feet per second, producing enough thrust to propel a rocket.”

Cantwell envisions a new generation of plants that are energy self-sufficient. “You even have the prospect of installing a wastewater facility where there is no energy source,” he said. “This could be especially important in the Third World, where millions of people live with contaminated water.”

Both researchers say that the technology could have other applications beyond wastewater treatment. For example, they also want to explore ways to recover energy from nitrate-contaminated groundwater beneath fertilized agricultural fields.

The L-shaped split-level house has 427 square meters (4,600 square feet) and it’s a collaborative design by several architects and designers. Bay Area architects David Wilson and Chris Parlette sited it, while details were completed in Philadelphia by one of McDonald’s brothers – architect Tim McDonald. Ian Reed from Medium Plenty interpreted the detailing and managed the interior and exterior designs.

Unlike previous owners who were daunted by the steepness of the site, McDonald got permission from Oakland’s building department to rearrange the lot so they could build low, meet new safety standards and codes, and keep views from being obstructed. Not including the building footprint, almost 90 percent of the lot is permeable (even most of the driveway has a “permeable paving system”). The house has comprehensive rainwater and groundwater catchment system where 15 thousand-liter (4,000-gallon) underground cistern captures rain, roof and groundwater for irrigation needs. It also has a 55 square-meter (600-square-foot) green roof and deck.

They carved the square footage they needed for the house from the hill and rearranged the excavated soil to extend the building pad. At least 25 percent fly ash was used in all the concrete poured for the slab-on-grade foundation, walkways and retaining walls. This arrangement also eliminated costly and environmentally unfriendly cement piers and achieved additional passive geothermal heating and cooling for the bunkered home.

The Margarido House has Solar PV panels and Solar Thermal (hot water) system. The cooling and cross-ventilation is achieved with operable windows, while heating is achieved with in-floor radiant heating. Passive solar design that incorporates aluminum and steel shade canopy, large upper-story “eyebrow” shading and floor-to-ceiling windows oriented south and west also helps the control of indoor temperature.

Indoor air-quality is controlled and monitored by a computer which also controls the lighting and power window shading system. In order to save energy, the house uses innovative LED lighting for all indoor, exterior and landscape lighting, push-button hot water D’mand system at each water fixture (no wasting water while waiting for it to get hot), and high-efficiency appliances. Shower heads and dual-flush toilets were applied in order to lessen the water usage.

To reduce home’s environmental impact, McDonald has used zero-VOC paints, recycled materials and a blown-in soy-based insulation in the walls. The house has unique fire-resistant siding made of recycled kiln shelves, locally produced tiles and counters for the kitchen and bathrooms. The comprehensive recycling and waste management plan during construction resulted in 80 percent of off-hauled waste recycled. Most of the materials were locally sourced.

The patented electronic lenses from PixelOptics provide dynamic and intelligent optics by using a combination of chemistry, electricity, and components that detect if the glasses are tilted in order to correct visual problems such as presbyopia, or loss of near focus which is common in people over 40 years old.

The lens has a section with an electro-active liquid crystal layer within it, and the index of refraction of this layer can be changed by a small electrical current passing through it, with the focal length varying with the current applied. The rechargeable battery is recharged over two to three hours in a charging cradle. The battery can hold its charge for up to 3 or 5 days, although the folks from PixelOptics recommend recharging every night.

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The only visible difference is a small button on the side, which is used to select one of three operating modes. In automatic mode the electro-active layer is turned on and the focus changes automatically and almost instantly as the wearer tilts his or her head (to read a book or newspaper for example) and looks through the transparent electronic layer. In manual on mode the lenses behave like normal progressive lenses with the electronic layer frozen in the on position for close distances with the eyes looking down, but objects straight ahead in the distance can still be seen clearly. In manual off mode there is no current in the electronic layer, and so the lenses act like a low power progressive lens, which has little distortion and is good for everyday activities such as playing sports, walking, and so on.

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Unlike bifocal glasses, the electronic glasses offer uninterrupted vision, just like progressive lenses but with wider distance vision, wider intermediate vision, wider reading vision and half of the peripheral “swim” that most people experience while wearing a progressive lens. They also give optimal vision for far and near distances, and in between.

CEO of PixelOptics, Ronald Blum said the emPower! will be market tested in the last quarter of this year in Washington DC, Virginia and North Carolina and will be released for general sale in the US later in 2010. It will reach European markets in the beginning of 2011. Although it is not a huge breakthrough regarding the technology, it could be helpful until some advanced ocular technology emerges.

The developer of FIT prototype claims it provides the next generation of gesture-based interaction that is more advanced than the system seen in the sci-fi movie named Minority Report. The FIT prototype tracks the user’s hand in front of a 3-D camera. The 3-D camera uses the time of flight principle, in this approach each pixel is tracked and the length of time it takes light to be filmed traveling to and from the tracked object is determined. This allows for the calculation of the distance between the camera and the tracked object.

“A special image analysis algorithm was developed which filters out the positions of the hands and fingers. This is achieved in real-time through the use of intelligent filtering of the incoming data. The raw data can be viewed as a kind of 3-D mountain landscape, with the peak regions representing the hands or fingers.” said Georg Hackenberg, who developed the system as part of his Master’s thesis. In addition plausibility criteria are used, these are based around: the size of a hand, finger length and the potential coordinates.

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A user study was conducted and found that the system both easy to use and fun. However, work remains to be done on removing elements which confuses the system, for example reflections caused by wristwatches and palms which are positioned orthogonal to the camera.

“With Microsoft announcing Project Natal, it is likely that similar techniques will very soon become standard across the gaming industry. This technology also opens up the potential for new solutions in the range of other application domains, such as the exploration of complex simulation data and for new forms of learning,” predicts Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Broll of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT.

The team isolated nanoparticles from Hedera helix (English ivy) and evaluated them for potential use in sunscreens based on their ability to absorb and scatter UV light, safety toward mammalian cells, biodegradability and potential for diffusion through skin. Their work, published in the Journal of Nanobiotechnology, responds to research claiming that metal-based nanoparticles could be linked to environmental and animal toxicity.

To test the ability of the nanoparticles to protect skin from UV radiation, a UV and visible wavelength spectrophotometer was used to measure the optical extinction spectra of the nanoparticles. The nanoparticles exhibited significant extinction in the UV region, while having little extinction at the visible and near infrared regions. This indicated that the ivy nanoparticles could effectively block UV radiation without the opacity observed in other metal-based nanoparticles.

Comparing the UV blockage with TiO2 nanoparticles at the same concentration indicated that the total extinction of the ivy nanoparticles from 280 nm to 400 nm was better than the TiO2 nanoparticles. In addition, extinction of the ivy nanoparticles decreased sharply after the UV region, which makes ivy nanoparticles more effective in the UVA/UVB region and gives them high transmittance in the visible region, making them virtually “invisible”.

To assess the toxicity of the nanoparticles, the team incubated ivy nanoparticles with HeLa cells for 24 hours. By using propidium iodide staining, researchers examined the cells upon incubation with the ivy nanoparticles by flow cytometry (a technique for counting and examining microscopic particles), noting no toxicity in comparison with the control cells.

Another research claims that metal-based nanoparticles could be linked to environmental and animal toxicity, and that TiO2, maghemite and iron nanoparticles (which have less than 15 nm in diameter) are capable of penetrating the stratum corneum, potentially leading to increased aging, pathological effects in the liver, and particle accumulation in the brain. On the other hand, ivy nanoparticles have a diameter of 65.3 ± 8.04 nm (based on measurements of 30 randomly counted nanoparticles that were not dominated by other particles). Since the particles are larger than metal-based sunscreens, they have less potential to penetrate through human skin.

In addition to demonstrating that the ivy nanoparticles can be used as a UV filter in sunscreens, the researchers also emphasized that these nanoparticles demonstrated an adhesive effect, which reportedly enhances the UV protective ability of the nanoparticles. The properties of the nanoparticles in the secretion enable the vine leaves to hold almost 2 million more times than its weight. It also has the ability to soak up and disperse light, which is integral to sunscreens.

Since question and debate remains over the safety of metallic nanoparticles in sunscreens, interesting alternatives such as these pose new opportunities for formulators in this highly debated field. Ivy nanaoparticles could be used in other applications such as military technologies, medical adhesives and drug delivery.

“Exploring the possibilities for the next generation of solar powered lighting is an exciting design challenge,” said Doreen Lorenzo, president of frog design. “Alternative energy solutions are a big part of the future of the field of innovation. We’re excited to be partnering with industry leaders like Carmanah.”

The lamps are cost-efficient, environmentally savvy, and smart enough to power down when no one’s around. They do have a nice design, although we believe the streetlights in future could look much better considering the expected miniaturization and improvements of applied technologies.

The Carmanah EverGEN 1710 light series combine advanced motion-sensing capabilities with a range of energy saving operating profiles to ensure bright, reliable illumination whenever and wherever it’s needed. The Carmanah 1710 series uses ultra-thin monocrystalline solar panels (currently most efficient on the market) which can be manually tilted when installed to take the best advantage of the sun’s angle.

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Featuring a dark-sky friendly LED fixture designed by industry-leading lighting manufacturer BetaLED, the EverGEN 1710 solar light incorporates all of the elements of a complete solar power system in a compact, pole-mounted design developed by frog design, a global innovation firm that has pioneered some of the world’s most groundbreaking designs for trendsetting companies such as Apple, Disney, HP, Louis Vuitton, Logitech, Microsoft, and Sony. The LED bulbs last much longer than traditional streetlamp bulbs, and the battery and components can be recycled.

Cost savings for cities using the LEDs are significant, since crews won’t have to spend the money trenching, cabling, and accessing the power grid, and then of course there won’t be any addition to the monthly energy bill. The lights can be placed atop existing poles or mounted on super-lightweight stands, as they don’t need to be weighted down with wires or hardware.

Most importantly, the lights are also equipped with motion sensors that can communicate wirelessly, meaning that the lights can work together as a network to switch off when the area is empty, or provide a safe, well-lit pathway when someone enters their zone. The off-grid streetlights could also be supplemented with other locally available power sources (mini hydro-plants, wind power or floors that generate power due to pressure), thus ensuring longer working hours where continuous illumination is needed.

The Macallen Building structural system is unusual for a residential building and is very efficient in the amount of steel that was required. In addition, the project team chose rapidly renewable resources such as bamboo, cork wallpaper, grasscloth wallpaper, wood-fiber ceiling tile, linoleum flooring, wheatboard, and cotton insulation. Of all the wood used in the project, 75% is certified to Forest stewardship Council standards. Several materials, such as concrete, steel, aluminum siding, rigid insulation, carpet, floor underlayment, and bicycle racks, are recycled content. Most of the materials were locally sourced.

Outdoor air is cleaned with charcoal filters and mechanically introduced into each occupied room. Carbon dioxide levels are measured at the intake and exhaust ducts, and building-operations personnel are notified if the levels exceed an adjustable set-point. Most residential units are wide, open spaces with wall-to-wall ribbon windows or, in some cases, floor-to-ceiling glazed curtain walls. Daylight is abundant, thus reducing the need for additional lightning and heating, and operable windows were cleverly inserted into the design, adding to the rhythm of the exterior facades.

The building is designed to save more than 2 million liters (600,000 gallons) of water annually through the use of dual-flush toilets and an innovative irrigation system. The dual-flush toilets reduce use of potable water for toilet flushing by about 60%, compared with a conventional building. All of the irrigation needs on site are met with collected rainwater and the water collected from air-conditioner condensate, and treated blowdown water from the cooling tower. The project earned a LEED innovation point for this last strategy, which uses a non-chemical treatment system to make the blowdown water safe for irrigation.

This LEED Gold project has a sloped green roof that controls rainwater drainage, filters pollutants and carbon dioxide out of the air, reduces heating and cooling loads, reduces the project’s contribution to the urban heat-island effect, and provides an ecosystem for wildlife. A 20,000 square feet outdoor terrace incorporated into the building provides similar benefits as the green roof. In addition, a covered garage was integrated into the building to reduce overall square footage and contribution to the urban heat-island effect and rainwater runoff.

High efficiency water source heat pumps provide HVAC for the building which add, subtract, and/or transfer heating and cooling energy through a water loop. A cooling tower is provided to reject heat in the summer and a steam heat exchanger (steam is generated of site) is provided to add heat in the winter. Variable frequency drives are utilized at the cooling tower fan, loop water pumps, hot water pumps, and garage exhaust fan to conserve motor energy.

Heating energy is recovered from steam condensate to preheat domestic water. A dedicated ventilation/exhaust air system recovers total energy from exhaust air and transfers it to the ventilation air. Motion sensors are installed to control lighting on garage levels and residential floors corridors to conserve energy. The building consumes 30% less energy compared to a similar conventional building.

The current system not only places a time burden on the individual being tested and the administrator, it generally requires travel as there are only a few test sites around the USA. The new virtual reality simulator will assess test-takers objectively against board-certified standards and criteria, possibly over the Internet. The new system is also expected to be more cost effective, with a lower price point that should lead to a wider availability across the USA.

Rensselaer’s Professor Suvranu De, Harvard Medical School Professor Daniel B. Jones and human factors engineering expert Caroline G. L. Cao, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University, are developing new hardware and software that effectively trains surgeons to perform the laparoscopic surgery fundamental tasks, as well as objectively assesses the performance of physicians who are seeking to become certified in laparoscopic surgery. This new testing and training system will employ haptic technology (touch feedback) which realistically replicates the sensation a surgeon would feel in his or her hands during an actual procedure.

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“We want to give surgeons the best tools possible, so they can better hone their skills and successfully treat their patients,” said project leader De, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer. “Just as training on virtual reality simulators has shown to be highly effective for jet pilots, we know that physicians show increased success in surgery the more times they perform it. We’re creating new tools that make it easier than ever for them to practice. These same tools will also be used in certification tests to make sure surgeons have all the required skills mastered before they start operating on patients.”

The new system features real laparoscopic tools, which are connected to equipment nearly identical to that used in actual surgical situations. Realistic computer-generated models of the simulation scene are displayed on a monitor, and the users interact with simulation both visually and using their sense of touch. The haptics technology ensures that a physician cutting or stitching tissue with the simulator will feel with their hands the lifelike toughness, sponginess, and resistance of virtual tissue. By pairing haptics with automation, the simulator will also be able to literally guide the hands of trainees, so they can see and feel the correct movements as they learn specific surgical tasks. The research team plans to make these simulations available over the Internet.

After developing the new system, the research team will work to test and validate the effectiveness and usefulness of the system as a testing and training tool at the Carl J. Shapiro Simulation and Skills Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Ordinary optical fibers are made from a “preform” (a large cylinder of a single material that is heated up, drawn out, and then cooled). The fibers developed in Fink’s lab, by contrast, derive their functionality from the elaborate geometrical arrangement of several different materials, which must survive the heating and drawing process intact.

Max Shtein, an assistant professor in the University of Michigan’s materials science department, points out that other labs have built piezoelectric fibers by first drawing out a strand of a single material and then adding other materials to it, much the way manufacturers currently wrap insulating plastic around copper wire. “Yoel has the advantage of being able to extrude kilometers of this stuff at one shot,” Shtein says. “It’s a very scalable technique.” But for applications that require relatively short strands of fiber, such as sensors inserted into capillaries, Shtein say, “scalability is not that relevant.”

The heart of the new acoustic fibers is a plastic commonly used in microphones. By playing with the plastic’s fluorine content, the researchers were able to ensure that its molecules remain lopsided (with fluorine atoms lined up on one side and hydrogen atoms on the other) even during heating and drawing. The asymmetry of the molecules is what makes the plastic “piezoelectric” meaning that it changes shape when an electric field is applied to it.

In a conventional piezoelectric microphone, the electric field is generated by metal electrodes. But in a fiber microphone, the drawing process would cause metal electrodes to lose their shape. In order to work around that problem, the researchers used a conducting plastic that contains graphite, the material found in pencil lead. When heated, the conducting plastic maintains a higher viscosity than a metal would.

Not only did this prevent the mixing of materials, but, crucially, it also made for fibers with a regular thickness. After the fiber has been drawn, the researchers needed to align all the piezoelectric molecules in the same direction. That required the application of a powerful electric field – 20 times as powerful as the fields that cause lightning during a thunderstorm. Anywhere the fiber is too narrow the field would generate a tiny lightning bolt which could destroy the material around it.

Despite the delicate balance required by the manufacturing process, the researchers were able to build functioning fibers in the lab. If you make them vibrate at audible frequencies and put them close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it. For their Nature Materials paper, the researchers measured the fiber’s acoustic properties more rigorously. Since water conducts sound better than air, they placed it in a water tank opposite a standard acoustic transducer, a device that could alternately emit sound waves detected by the fiber and detect sound waves emitted by the fiber.

In addition to wearable microphones and biological sensors, applications of the fibers could include loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions: A fabric woven from acoustic fibers would provide the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors.

Since the reversed operation of this invention could allow this device to generate electricity from movement. The researchers hope to combine the properties of their experimental fibers in a single fiber. Strong vibrations, for instance, could vary the optical properties of a reflecting fiber, enabling fabrics to communicate optically. Applications could include clothes that are sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain.