Category: Sci/Tech

Speaking of rocket belts, I just put up a piece I did for Discovery Online in 1997, for their Alt.Tech column, which I contributed to for awhile.

Called “Blow Your Socks Off,” it tells the story of the development of the original Bell Rocket Belt. There are even a couple of nifty short movies, with that kind of “Gee Whiz, Jimmy” ”60s space age narrative that we all know and love.

Researchers in Singapore have developed a battery that runs on urine. A single drop o’ wee can generate 1.5 volts, the equivalent of a single A-size battery. The technology is first being developed to power medical tests that involve testing of urine (such as for diabetes), but developers say that uses could expand beyond that to such applications as powering mobile phones or other devices during emergencies. Emergencies, hell! If my pee can be used to power my digital so-called life, laptop catheter, here I come.

More details and links here.

Just because internal combustion technology is some 140 years old doesn’t mean there isn’t still room for improvement, does it? The Scuderi Group, an engine development company in Mass, claims it’s done just that. Its Scuderi Split-Cycle Engine makes use of tandem compression cylinders to “supercharge” the combustion cylinders. Sophisticated valve timing gets maximum efficiency out of every compression/combustion cycle. The company claims that the result is an engine that is almost twice as fuel efficient as today’s engines with emission reductions by as much as 80%. The company will be firing up their wares at the Engine Expo in Germany next week. The DoD has already cast their vote of interest in the form of a US$1.2 million grant.

[Via Gizmag]

Hitachi Maxell has announced development of a small 10W class hydrogen fuel cell that runs on a reaction of water and aluminum. They claim to have made improvements in fuel cell technology by developing an aluminum conversion process that requires less aluminum. The company hopes to use reclaimed aluminum in the future to make the technology even more enviro-friendly. Maxell also claims to have utilized a new membrane-electrode coating process (a key part of fuel cells) originally developed for coating their magnetic tape. The company says their test data shows that the new cell delivers five times more power density than previous cells made with methanol as the fuel source.

Right now, the cells measure 3.9″ x 6.2″ x 2.3.” They hope to make future versions that are 70% smaller. The cells were developed with laptops and other portable battery-powered devices in mind. The cells could be kept running by swapping out aluminum and water cartridges.

If only the evil AIs in The Matrix had been smart enough to create piezoelectric nanowire generators, they wouldn’t have had to go to extraordinary lengths to harvest the paltry amounts of juice we meatbots generate. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have engineered a type of nanogenerator from zinc-oxide nanowires. Like quartz crystal, the nanowires are piezoelectric, i.e. they generate power when they’re stressed. Bending them produces electricity, making them a possible candidate for a power source in future bionic implants. A generator made from bundles of these wires (each 20-40 billionths of a meter in diameter) could, researchers say, produce enough energy to power the implantable medical devices of the near future.

You can find out more about Georgia Tech’s Nanotechnology Research Center here.

Last week, we brought you a story about Josh Ellis, a Net journalist who was passing the virtual hat to do a story on Los Alamos/Trinity Test Site (which is only open to the public two times a year). Pay Josh’s way and he offered to write a piece, take a butt-load of pics, and maybe shoot some vid. He got his target amount of platinum pieces and off he went.

The result is “Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project, and the Birth of the Atomic Age.” We definitely got our money’s worth. This is a really nice piece of writing, with some fascinating factoids about the bomb and the Cold War and some lurid local color, namely in the form of Ed Grothus, a nuclear bomb engineer (retired and repentant) who now runs The Black Hole, a surplus store/nuclear junk shop (in a decomissioned Piggly-Wiggly). You’ve got to see the video of Ed giving Josh a little tour of the place. It’s a riot (in a Dr. Strangelove sorta way).

I’d say this little experiment in Net-funded journalism was a roaring success. Where to now, Josh? I’ve got some extra whuffie in my account with your name on it.

We keep hearing more and more about “nano” tech these days. Hell, the pants I just bought claim to offer “nano-care” that’ll help prevent wrinkles and reduce stains. As one blogger put it: “nano” is the new “turbo.”

It’s not all hype, obviously. Take “nanofluids,” a technology being researched at Leeds in the U.K. (among other places) where nano-particles are suspened in water or other fluid (which can then transfer heat 400% faster than a non-nano’d liquid). The resulting nanofluids offer all sorts of cooling applications, from cooling the hardware in super-PC processors to cooling the wetware in your cranium during major surgery. They could even be used to deep freeze cancer cells while leaving surrounding cells unaffected. Protein Feed offers more details.

No, there’s no joke in that title. We’re actually bringing you news of a new type of printed circuit board that uses the keratin fibers of chicken feathers and a soy-based epoxy to construct the PCBs. The resulting boards are not only more environmentally-friendly, they are also faster than traditional boards.

The chicken PCBs were delveloped by Mingjiang Zhan, a student at the University of Delaware, in association with Intel and chicken giant Tyson. While the technology looks promising, it remains to be seen how environmentally-friendly full-scale manufacturing of such “green” boards might be.

An article from the journal Environmental Health Perspectives offers more details.

[Via Treehugger]

According to a piece on Popular Science, Aethlon Medical, a small biotech company in San Diego, is developing a pen-size device that can filter viruses from your blood. Blood would flow into the “Hemopurifier” from one artery, get pumped by the user’s heart action through a series of toxin filters, “like a colander,” and then flow back into the body via another artery. The device is designed to filter out smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, and other viruses. Aethlon has already tested the Hemopurifier on animals and hopes to begin human trials by the end of this year. Sign me up.

When I wrote The Desire to Be Wired for Wired 1.04 (in 1993!), a group of biomed engineers at Stanford had recently managed to grow rat brain nerve bundles into a silicon array. It was an amazing feat, but it was a passive interface. The next step was figuring out how to get the hardware and the wetware to talk to each other, to exchange usable signals. Thanks to researchers at the University of Padua in Italy, we’re a step closer to this kind of man-machine interface, a technology that holds promise for things like the treatment of neurological disorders.

The Italian science team was able to grow rat brain cells onto a silicon chip with 16,000 transistors and hundreds of capacitors on it. And most amazingly, they were able to pass electrical signals from the neurons to the silicon array’s transistors and to use the power in the capacitors to stimulate the neurons. That’s communication, baby! Now that’s a long way off from hardware and wetware really understanding each other (we’re sort of at the level of caveman grunting), but there are some nearterm applications, such as using neuro-chips to test the effect that new drugs have on brain function.

Thanks, Alberto!