Technology

When we think about agriculture, technology and the future there is one apparent truth—we will need to produce more with less.  We are going to need to produce more food,with higher quality, closer to urban centers, with fewer agricultural inputs and impacts. While my pieces on Science 2.0 usually center around the remedies offered by biotechnology today I present work from a colleague that brings a smile to my face every time I hear it.  Drs. Natalia Peres and Clyde Fraisse of the University of Florida took on a daunting problem—how to decrease the amount of fungicide applied to…

Next generation toilets showcased at the Gates Foundation offer innovative sanitation solutions that can save and improve lives around the world. Bill Gates today has announced the winners of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, an effort to develop "next-generation" toilets that will deliver safe and sustainable sanitation for 2.5 billion people worldwide who don't have it. The awards recognize researchers (sorry, inventors, academics only) who have developed new ways to manage human waste and help improve the health and lives of people around the world. California Institute of Technology in…

Ekso Bionics has begun shipping an upgraded version of their Ekso bionic suit that powers up patients with spinal cord injuries and pathologies to get them standing and walking again. Each Ekso now comes equipped with three new walking modes for progressive rehabilitation options, and EksoPulse, a wireless networked usage monitor. Patients will have new challenges as they master each level and more control of the suit as they become more adept.   Ekso is a ready-to-wear, battery-powered bionic suit - an exoskeleton - strapped over the user's clothing. The device transfers its 45 lb…

CD-adapco has released the STAR-CCM + Battery Simulation Module, designed to simulate spirally wound lithium-ion battery cells, which could help the automotive and battery industries more quickly design and develop advanced electric drive vehicle power sources. Development was developed in  conjunction with Battery Design LLC, Johnson Controls, Inc., and A123 Systems and co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and began in August 2011. The spiral cell software was developed within the first year of a multi-year award.  This…

Being able to print electronic equipment has led to a cost-effective device that could change the way we interact with everyday objects - namely by using a phone's emitted radio waves for wireless power. The rectenna is a combination of an antenna and a rectifier; a device that converts alternating current (AC) into direct current (DC).  It costs just a penny per unit and can be placed onto objects such as price tags, logos and signage so that a user can read product information on a smartphone with a swipe. That's an incremental benefit of near-field communication (NFC) but not one…

Can't tell a $4 bottle of wine from a $40 one?  Neither can the best sommeliers in the world.  But in the future you might at least seem like an expert, thanks to the power of semantic Web technology. Deborah McGuinness, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been developing applications for tech-savvy wine connoisseurs since her days as a graduate student in the 1980s, before what we now know as the World Wide Web had even been envisioned.  We must assume she had a wine lovers BBS.Now McGuinness is an expert in Web ontology languages. These languages are…

Researchers all claim Impact Factor is meaningless - for other researchers, anyway.  The blockade put up by corporate publishing hinges on Impact Factor alone so if it were truly unimportant, convincing government funding agencies would be trivial and all studies would be freely available for taxpayers to read. Once the cultural hurdle, bolstered by lobbyists for corporate media, is overcome, true Open Publication, not subsidized by scientists like in the open access movement or subsidized by subscribers like in the legacy journal industry, could take hold.  Publication is one of…

Conventional motion capture for film, like Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and game production ("Mass Effect 3") involves multiple cameras and actors festooned with markers but the future of motion capture may look much different. A new technique not only captures the 3D poses of actors, like with traditional motion capture systems, but derives "biped controllers", which are programs that incorporate the underlying physics of the motion. Bipedal controllers generate the poses by computing the forces acting on the body and integrating them over time. Leonid Sigal, research scientist…

An experiment using single particles of light, photons, have produced and implemented them intoa quantum key distribution (QKD) link. The single photons were produced using two devices made of semiconductor nano-structures that emitted a photon each time they were excited by an electrical pulse. The two devices were made up of different semiconductor materials so they emitted photons with different colors.   QKD is a process that enables two parties, ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’, to share a secret key that can then be used to protect data they want to send to each other. The secret key is made up…

Suidobashi Heavy Industry of Japan has finally found a way to make (a) work or (b) laser tag interesting to me; put me inside a giant robot.  But to get the "Kuratas mecha" you will have to spend $1.35 million. You will want to, because they have a polite, hot Japanese girl in shorts in their video.  Its diesel engine sends it at an elegant 10 KPH clip, basically a decent walking pace.  But these are too cool to run in.  No one looks cool running so until it can fly or turn into a motorcyle, a cool pace will do. This thing is huge.  Granted, the girl in the video…