Future tech

From inventor boot camp, gadgets that could change lives

A cable-car-like ropeway that transports goods uphill. A charcoal-crushing machine made from carbonized corn cobs. A low-cost incubator that could be used to nurture premature babies in remote villages.

These are just a few of the gadgets that emerged from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology summer design workshop aimed at finding cheap, simple solutions to problems in the developing world. More than 50 innovators from some 20 countries on 5 continents gathered on MIT's campus for the monthlong International Development Design Summit, which wrapped up Friday.

Oswin Chibinga, a professor of agriculture at the University of Zambia, was part of a team designing a method for charging batteries while pumping water with a treadle pump, a simple irrigation device widely used in many developing countries.

The idea is to take advantage of the labor people are already doing to give them electric lights instead of the kerosene lamps they currently use. … Read more

The Invisible Man: A scientific breakthrough

Today, your eyes might not deceive you. But soon, they very well might.

Some extremely clever people at Cal (the one at Berkeley) have created a material that can control the direction in which visible light travels.

Apparently, this mystery material, some details of which might be revealed in Science and Nature magazines this week (People and OK weren't interested), deflects light around an object as perceived by an insouciant eye.

"In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock," the leader of the Cal researchers, Xiang Zhang, told London's Times newspaper.

In essence, you are looking at, say, the Empire State Building or a John Malkovich-piloted Boeing 747 full of nasty missiles. If these objects are coated with the material, your eyes will see light from behind them, hence creating the illusion that the object in question simply isn't there. I know that there are terrible consequences that may leap to mind in these examples.

For the more technically-minded amongst you, I can tell you that the material the scientists created had to have elements engineered to within 0.00000066 of a meter. This appears to be in a realm that might make wafers suddenly feel ridiculously overweight.… Read more

Crave: Bonnie's got a new Sidekick...and it's not Brian

It's all the goods from the Crave blog. Brian Tong and Bonnie Cha give you a peek at the newest Sidekick; copy and paste on the iPhone is here...sort of; and listen to music with Brandon, Brenda, Dylan, and Kelly!

Photos: Researchers focus on electronic eye camera

Researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have created a camera with a layout similar in size and shape to the human eye. The eye camera is based on "single-crystalline silicon detectors and electronics, configured in a stretchable, interconnected mesh," according to the University of Illinois.

The curved technology will put an entire image in focus, in contrast to today's cameras, which take images that are sharper in the center than near the edges, according to researchers. Plus, the technology could be a big step toward the development of a bionic eye similar to the … Read more

Cell phone tech for swarm robots

The tiny motors normally used to vibrate cell phones can provide researchers with a significantly more affordable option for building robots.

A team of students led by Alexis Johnson at the University of Southampton's electronics and computer science school realized the tiny motors intended for cell phone vibration are already designed and manufactured to be attached to circuit boards making them ideally suited for use in swarm robots.

Using those motors, the group designed a new type of robot platform that brought their material cost down to about $48 (24 pounds) per robot, according to a university announcement Wednesday.… Read more

Water and electronics: Enemies no more

Forever trying to protect my gadgets from the perils of even a few drops of water, it sure did feel devilishly delicious to dump an entire bottle of water onto a perfectly working laptop. Normally, that'd be curtains on your hardware, and forget about retrieving any software. But not this laptop.

Treated with Northeast Maritime Institute's special Golden Shellback clear coating, this guy emerged fine and functioning. The liquid dripped right out of the keyboard like water off a duck's back. (Watch the video to the right to see how it works.)

The folks associated with the … Read more

Nissan's ECO Pedal drives you to fuel efficiency

Nissan Motor Company on Monday announced a new system that calculates the most fuel efficient rate of acceleration and pushes the gas pedal back against the driver's lead foot, according to the Associated Press. This new system, dubbed "ECO Pedal," will be available next year and, according to Nissan, can help drivers improve fuel efficiency by 5 to 10 percent, according to AP story.

If you're thinking what we're thinking, that the ECO Pedal has potential to compromise safety in the name of fuel efficiency, you'll be glad to know that Nissan is giving … Read more

High-res mini microscope ditches the lenses

Researchers have come up with a microscopic microscope, tiny enough to fit on a fingertip, that can be cheaply mass-produced and used to scan blood and water for pathogens.

The high-resolution microscope functions without the large and expensive lenses usually associated with such imaging devices. Instead, it combines the chip technology found in digital cameras with "microfluidics," the science of channeling liquid at scales far smaller than a common droplet.

"The whole thing is truly compact--it could be put in a cell phone--and it can use just sunlight for illumination, which makes it very appealing for third-world applications," said Changhuei Yang, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology and one of the lead developers of the device.

Yang imagines a range of uses for the so-called optofluidic microscope, which measures about the size of George Washington's nose on a quarter and has the magnifying power of a top-quality optical microscope, according to the Caltech research team.

Health field workers could use it to examine blood samples for malaria and check water for giardia and other parasites. It could be employed on the battlefield. Yang said the microscope could one day even be implanted inside humans to isolate rogue cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream.

"Our research is motivated by the fact that microscopes have been around since the 16th century, and yet their basic design has undergone very little change and has proven prohibitively expensive to miniaturize," said Yang, who is currently in talks with biotech companies about mass-producing the chip, a process he says costs about $10 per microscope. … Read more

Crave: Advertising that's the pits!

It's all the good stuff from Crave. CNET MP3 editor Donald Bell drops by the studio to talk with Brian Tong about an outdoor speaker system that looks like a droid, and we look at a spy camera in a book, and sticky goo for your electronics. Plus, pitvertising? This idea sounds like it stinks!

This week in cheap spy gear

Sticky goo does your computer good

New fashions for Fall-ing

It's a problem we all face at some point: parents or grandparents start to get wobbly as they get older, followed by the inevitable falls and broken bones from which they frequently never fully recover. A team of Virginia Tech researchers has recently completed a study of the efficacy of pants with strategically placed sensors to determine the likelihood that a particular individual will take a tumble.

In a nutshell (you can read the abstract at IEEE Xplor, but the paper itself will be behind a paywall when it's published), Liu, Lockhart, Jones, and Martin from Virginia Tech's e-Textiles Lab … Read more