February 6th, 2009
How to ‘grow’ your own indoor fresh air
A presentation delivered this week at the TED 2009 conference demonstrates how you can “grow” fresh air indoors with just three varieties of plants. The discovery was the result of 15 years of testing at Paharpur Business Centre and Software Technology Incubator Park (PBC™ - STIP) in New Delhi, India, an eco- friendly oasis for businesses avoiding polluted air. The research showed that there’s a 42% probability of increasing blood oxygen by 1% if one is inside the building for 10 hours, boosting worker productivity by 20%. They were also able to reduce the fresh air supplied to the building and still meet industry standards for healthy indoor air, netting a reduction of energy costs by greater than 15%.
February 6th, 2009
Passing the Emerging Tech baton
Since Roland’s passing, I’ve been pondering what to do with this blog.
It was so well done that frankly I wasn’t sure whether to add another voice to it or start a new one entirely.
The consensus at ZDNet was to continue the Emerging Tech blog with new hosts. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to Chris Jablonski, who blogged at ZDNet way back when.
Chris will carry the Emerging Tech blog forward from here. Welcome Chris. You have some big shoes to fill, but I’m sure you can handle it.
January 9th, 2009
Rest in peace Roland Piquepaille
It is with great sadness to tell you that our Emerging Technologies blogger Roland Piquepaille has passed away suddenly. His wife Suzanne just confirmed his passing.
Roland, 62, was one of our most passionate bloggers and his ability to explain complex science well was something to behold. Roland spent most of his career in software, mainly for high performance computing and visualization companies, working for example for Cray Research and Silicon Graphics. He left the corporate world in 2001 after 33 years and jumped into blogging.
Roland passed away Monday in Paris. He was hit with enterococcal bacteria that led to a high fever and health complications beyond that. Suzanne said that the doctors are still trying to quantify how Roland got the bacteria and the exact details. We spent the last few hours confirming Roland’s passing as word began to spread. It has been a rough year for the ZDNet family.
There will be a ceremony held on Monday. Rest in peace Roland, we’ll miss you. Suzanne said that Roland had a few posts in the pipeline and wanted them published. If she is able to pull them from Roland’s PC we’ll put them on his blog to complete his record.
December 31st, 2008
A robotic Cyberknife to fight cancer
The Cyberknife is not a real knife. This is a robot radiotherapy machine which works with great accuracy during treatment, thanks to its robotic arm which moves around a patient when he breathes. According to BBC News, the first Cyberknife will be operational in February 2009 in London, UK. But other machines have been installed in more than 15 countries, and have permitted to treat 50,000 patients in the first semester of 2008. And the Cyberknife is more efficient than conventional radiotherapy devices. The current systems require twenty or more short sessions with low-dose radiation. On the contrary, and because it’s extremely precise, a Cyberknife can deliver powerful radiation in just three sessions. …
As you can see above, “the CyberKnife System uses image guidance software to track and continually adjust treatment for any patient or tumor movement. This sets it far ahead of other similar treatments. It allows patients to breathe normally and relax comfortably during treatment.” And it “uses pencil beams of radiation which can be directed at any part of the body from any direction via a robotic arm;” (Credit: various Accuray pages). Here is a link to a larger version of thie picture above.
The Cyberknife is a product of Accuray, who has deployed a corporate CyberKnife website and many other local sites in various locations. Speaking about locations, here is a link to a page where you can check if you live in a place not too far from a medical institution using such a system.
December 30th, 2008
Human hair to feed plants?
You all know that agricultural crop production relies on fertilizers, such as composted waste materials. But I bet you wouldn’t have thought to add human hair to animal manure to produce better and greener fertilizers. Yet, a study done by Mississippi State University researchers has shown that human hair, ‘combined with additional compost, is an additional nutrient source for crops.’ Apparently, barbershops and hair salons are selling human hair for a couple of years now — a fact I didn’t know. Anyway, even if human hair can be used to grow some plants, ‘further research is necessary to determine whether human hair waste is a viable option as fertilizer for edible crops.’ …
This research project has been led by Dr. Valtcho Jeliazkov (Zheljazkov), an Assistant Research Professor at Mississippi State University and a member of the North Mississippi Research and Extension Center.
How Zheljazkov and his colleagues conducted this research? “The study compared the productivity of four crops: lettuce, wormwood, yellow poppy, and feverfew, grown in commercial growth medium using untreated control, noncomposted hair cubes at differing weights, a controlled-release fertilizer and a water-soluble fertilizer. Results showed that, with the addition of hair waste cubes, yields increased relative to the untreated control but were lower than yields in the inorganic treatments, suggesting that hair waste should not be used as a single source for fast-growing plants such as lettuce.”
And here is a short quote from Zheljazkov about why human hair can be efficiently used to feed plants.
December 29th, 2008
Protecting beer from bacteria
A Canadian PhD student from the University of Saskatchewan has a mission: saving beer from bacterial contamination. She’s a member of ‘one of only two labs in the world that studies beer spoilage.’ And she jokes about what she’s doing: ‘It’s a good conversation starter. I’ve gone through so many years of school and I’ve studied medical microbiology and all this and that — and now I’m saving beer. (People) tease me about it, but they actually find it quite interesting.’ But what she does is no joke, and her research has been sponsored by breweries such as Coors or Miller. …
You can see above a photo of PhD candidate Monique Haakensen, the beer saviour. (Credit: Mark Ferguson, University of Saskatchewan) Here is a link to a larger version of this picture.
You’ll find more details about Haakensen on her personal website and on her faculty page. She’s working in the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine group led by Professor Barry Ziola at the University of Saskatchewan.
So how Haakensen is saving beer? She “has helped discover three new methods of detecting beer-spoiling bacteria, including a DNA-based technique, that has big breweries around the globe hoisting pints in celebration. Breweries usually have to keep batches of beer for two to three months to make sure they haven’t spoiled before cases are shipped out on trucks to liquor stores, says Haakensen. ‘What we’ve done here is, by using DNA methods, we can actually figure out in a matter of one to two days if that beer will spoil,’ Haakensen says.”
And how did she discover these new bacteria?
December 28th, 2008
Toward opal-based billboards?
Nature News reports that British and Canadian chemists have developed synthetic opals that can very quickly switch between various colors when a few volts of electricity are applied to them. The developers, who said they’re ready to sell the technology today, added that their ‘photonic ink’ (P-Ink) material could soon be used in electronic books or advertising displays. These modified opals could also be used to build the next generation of flexible solar cells. …
The figure above shows “the process of chemically transforming an opal (left) into a composite opal (middle) where the spheres and infiltrated material are colored white and green, respectively, and finally an inverse opal (right) where the spheres have been etched away, leaving behind the replica material.” (Credit: Geoffrey Ozin and Andre Arsenault) Here is a link to a larger version of this illustration.
This second figure describes how the P-Ink technology works. This “is an opal-based technology that provides electrically tunable color of any wavelength. By coating this material onto an array of pixels, a full-color display can be created wherein the color of each pixel can be varied at will. Switching of a P-Ink pixel in response to a voltage increasing from left to right.” (Credit: Geoffrey Ozin and Andre Arsenault) Here is a link to a larger version of this illustration.
This research project is beeing led by Geoffrey Ozin, a chemist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and his group, and by Ian Manners of the University of Bristol, UK, and his own group. The project also involved André Arsenault of Opalux, a Toronto-based start-up company which was spun off from the University of Toronto, and by Daniel Puzzo, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto.
So will we soon see applications of the P-Ink technology?
December 27th, 2008
Batteries to store wind energy
Scientific American reports that Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility company, has started to test a new technology to store wind energy in batteries. The company is currently trying it in a 1,100 megawatts facility of wind turbines in Southern Minnesota. The company started this effort because ‘the wind doesn’t always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren’t using much electricity, like late at night.’ It has received a $1 million grant from Minnesota’s Renewable Development Fund and the energy plant should be operational in the first quarter of 2009. And if this project is successful, the utility expects to deploy many more energy plants before 2020 to avoid more polluting energy sources. …
You can see two pictures on the left. The top one represents workers lifting a battery module into place. (Credit: S&C Electric Company) The picture below is a schematic of one of these sodium-sulfur batteries. “The battery is made up of twenty 50-kilowatt modules. It is roughly the size of two semi trailers and weighs approximately 80 tons. The battery is able to store about 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity, with a charge/discharge capacity of one megawatt. When the wind blows, the batteries are charged. When the wind calms down, the batteries supplement the power flow. Fully charged, the battery could power 500 homes for over 7 hours.” (Credit: Xcel Energy)
So where are these batteries coming from? “The energy storage in question — a series of sodium-sulfur batteries from NGK Insulators, Ltd. — can store roughly seven megawatt-hours of power, meaning the 20 batteries are capable of delivering roughly one megawatt of electricity almost instantaneously, enough to power 500 average American homes for seven hours.
Here is a quote from Frank Novachek, director of corporate planning for Xcel Energy: ‘Over 100 megawatts of this technology [is] deployed throughout the world. The batteries ’store wind at night and they contract with their utility to put out a straight line output from that wind farm every day.’”
These batteries are efficient, but also expensive.
December 26th, 2008
Developing hurricane-proof homes
Engineers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have developed fiber-based composite materials for low-cost residential coastal housing. Homes built with this material would be able to resist to a hurricane by bending instead of breaking. Other houses could ’simply float on the rising tide of a storm’s coastal surge.’ This ‘green’ technology will be tested during the next six months in Bangladesh, where the engineers will weave fibers from jute tree with plastics to form an ultra-strong building material. The research team has already created a similar composite material, but one that relies on glass fibers instead of natural tree fibers. This new material could also be used to build homes in the coastal regions of United States, including parts of Alabama and Louisiana. …
You can see two pictures on the left. The top one represents “Ph.D. candidate Amol Vaidya and Nasim Uddin, an associate professor of Civil Engineering at UAB, show[ing] the difference between their multifunctional composite for panelized construction and traditional structural insulated panel after a recent debris test.” (Credit: UAB, link to original version) The picture below shows the fiber-based composite material used to develop future hurricane-proof homes. (Credit: UAB). This illustration was extracted from the short video available from the link mentioned in the introduction of this post.
This research team has been led by UAB Associate Professor of Engineering Nasim Uddin, who will spend six months in Bangladesh as a visiting lecturer and researcher at the BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. While Uddin is focusing to composite materials based on natural fibers, other UAB professors, Uday Vaidya and Fouad Fouad have relied on glass fibers instead of natural tree fibers.
What will Uddin do while in Bangladesh?
December 25th, 2008
Sexy objects stimulate our brain
According to researchers at the University of California at San Diego, visual areas of our brain respond more to valuable objects than other ones. In other words, our brain has stronger reactions when we see a diamond ring than we look at junk. Similarly, our brain vision areas are more excited by a Ferrari than, say, a Tata new Nano car. In this holiday season, I’m sure you’ve received gifts that excited your brain — and others that you already want to resell on an auction site. …
You can see above hot spots showing the brain’s neural activity when a person is looking for a particular object. (Credit: John Serences, UC San Diego) Here is a link to a larger version of this illustration which was published in “Looking for something? Surprising number of neurons help find it, research shows” (University of California at Irvine news release, July 18, 2007). Please read it for additional details.
This study was conducted by John Serences, assistant professor of psychology and head of the Perception and Cognition Lab at UC San Diego.
So how did Serences find that we’re ‘rewarding’ valuable objects?
Recent Entries
- How to ‘grow’ your own indoor fresh air
- Passing the Emerging Tech baton
- Rest in peace Roland Piquepaille
- A robotic Cyberknife to fight cancer
- Human hair to feed plants?
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