The piezoelectric effect is well known and researchers are studying ways to exploit it even better. The latest (that I know of) is an invention by a team at Georgia Tech University.

They have managed to insert a polymer – polyvinylidene difluoride -, a sort of plastic sheet for a lay person, between the two battery electrode. Deformation applied to it by pressure on the battery case generate powers that recharges the battery.

The plastic layer then acts as a nano  power generator. The challenge now is to make it produce a significant level of energy, and that can be achieved by including several layers.

By inserting this battery in the bottom of  a shoe mechanical energy of the stride is converted into chemical energy in the battery. Notice that the layer of polyvinylidene difluoride convert the mechanical energy directly into chemical energy in the Li-io battery.

In the future we are likely to see a number of these devices embedded in our cloths to leverage the power that is being produced by an activity to produce power in a different form. This is made possible by advances in understanding of materials and by the ever lower energy requirement of electronic chips whose operation can be sustained even by low power, such as the one produced by the piezoelectric effect.

It is now several years that scientists have wondered if DNA can be used as a storing medium. It has been used by Nature to store the “code of life”, the billions of instruction directing the development and up-keeping of an individual, be it a rose, a fly or a human being.

Density of data storage in different medium

Several experiments, some of them already reported in this blog, have shown the feasibility and some practical applications already exists (like the watermarking of agricultural products to identify their origin).

However, this is probably the first time that researchers have managed to store an entire book, text and images, on a DNA strand.

The feat has been accomplished by Harvard researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biomedical Engineering.

Geneticist George Church has written a book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, that will hit the shelves on October 2nd, and he and his team have coded the book also on a DNA strand. At a certain point they have also considered attaching the  DNA string to the paper book but then they decided to not do that because of still lingering concern on the proper use of DNA engineering techniques.

Interestingly, once the book has been copied in a DNA form, that DNA string has been duplicated, through usual DNA replicators in billions of copies, making this book the one having most copies ever!

It has been estimated that 4 grams of DNA would be sufficient to store the whole information produced in a year by humankind and that storage could resist thousands of years with no degradation whatsoever, making it both the cheapest and the most durable media ever used.

The drawback, with respect to other storage media, is the length of time it takes to store and read the information, a time that has to be measured in hours today, and in minutes by the end of this decade, versus the few microseconds it takes when using a flash memory or an optical/magnetic storage media.

Nevertheless, although DNA storage may never be a good solution for storing a movie or a song, it may be a good one for recording massive amount of information that need to be preserved over thousands of years.

You may want to look at the video clip telling the story in the researchers words;

[vimeo 47615970]

Have ou ever used your index finger to point at something and asked: What’s that?

Well, this is what has probably motivated a group of MIT researchers to use an (augmented) index finger to get information about the world around us.

As you can see in the photo on the left, they have developed a sort of ring to wear on your index finger. You point your finger at an object and the camera embedded in the ring transmit the image to a smartphone in you pocket where it gets identified. Through an Internet connection you can get information associated to that object, possibly contextualised to your experience.

It is really moving in the direction of the Internet WITH Things, where every object will become part of the Internet and we will be able to interact with each of them.

Clearly, this gadget looks cumbersome, although it was impossible to imagine just 20 years ago that one would be able to have a videocamera and a radio transmitter embedded in a ring, but we know that in a few years it will shrink to become almost invisible. And, besides, we will be wearing Google Goggles in two years time, probably supporting this same feature through a compass and an accelerometer embedded…

As an object gets smaller the interactions with the molecules around it change and the physics of motion becomes different. There is indeed quite a difference between a boat and a bacteria as they interact with the fluid around them. In practice, a fish can swim, a small number of molecules cannot.

This is a problem when we think of creating micro-bots to deliver drugs inside the body using the arteries and veins as highways. For a micro-robot moving in the water, or, better, in the blood stream it is like trying to swim in honey for us.

Schematics of a micro-swimmer calculated by Georgia Tech researchers

Researchers at the Georgia Tech have developed a simulation program to study motion at microscopic level, something that bacteria can do very well. They have come up with a solution that can make micro-robots feasible in the future, rendering them able to steer and move in a fluid like our blood to deliver drugs at the right location.

The idea is to leverage on properties of some (smart) materials to change its volume for moving little flaps and also change the shape so that a directed propulsion can be achieved. Clearly the problem is not just to move but to be able to direct the motion in the desired direction.
We know that at tiny scales the motion of particles, such as dust, occurs randomly, what is usually known as “Brownian motion” an this is no good if you want to deliver a drug at a specific location.

They simulated a gel based casing for the micro robot that under electromagnetic impulses changes its volume and a structure leading to the case deformation along specific lines to obtain a controlled movement. The casing, as shown in the schematics, consists of two plates that change their angle and of a moving flap. This latter operates like the flagellate bacteria, it is the propulsion device (the “flagellum”) whilst the changes in the angle between the two plates provides for direction.

It is nice to see how the convergence of studies on biology, nanotechnology, electronics and the progress of software can lead us to finer control and mimicking of Nature.

Expect a real revolution by the end of this decade.

Researchers have found various ways to simulate the sensation of touch (haptic interfaces). Now they have gone a step further by finding a way to provide a different touch sensation.

This has been demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2012 by Disney researchers who have found a way to trick our touch by circulating a weak electric current through our body as our fingers touch an object.

The physical principles is to send an oscillating current (at high frequencies currents mov on our skin, not inside our body) that interacts with the object surface (the object has to be connected to the same computer generating the current in your body) and creates the artificial sensation.

In the future, I can imagine, we can touch a teapot and feel it wet if it contains tea inside, dry if it is empty… (you can also imagine touching your car near the gasoline tank and get this kind of “touch signal”).

It is yet another way to provide a sort of augmented reality!

Graphic image used in the Technology Review article

This is what a Technology Review article is reporting! After several years of progress in both devices and software, several attempts in marketing applications we are now seeing a number of practical applications targeting the mass  market.

Augmented reality started several years ago, over 15 years ago to be exact, as a way to help professionals in tough situations, be that an airplane engine repair in some remote location with AR providing assistance to the local engineer, or as an help to a surgeon during surgery. In 2009 the first mass market apps (Yelp, Layar…) to float information on the images captured by a smartphone camera. Interesting the one that allowed you to translate road signs on the move just by pointing your phone camera to the sentence (Word Lens).

More recently, thanks to more powerful smart phones and to better wireless connectivity, apps have begun to exploit image recognition capabilities and also to share information with other phones. Crowd Optics, as an example, has shown a way to look with your cell phone at a distant part of a NASCAR racing circuit to get photos taken by people in that part of the circuit, like having a personal cameraman at your fingertips to bring in images of those parts of the circuit you cannot see from your location.

This and other examples are provided in the linked article on Technology Review.

What I like to point out, though, is that all these steps improving augmented reality through a cell phones are but the beginning of the Internet WITH Things!

We will get used to expect that any “thing” around us is loaded with information and services, and that we can get at those just by pointing our smart phones to it. And, of course, this is just the beginning. Other ways to support interaction will be wearing glasses that embeds video display capabilities (Google glasses?) and screens embedded in the Thing itself.

More down the lane we (you) might have a chip embedded in the retina… a bit scaring though.

Proteus Digital Health has announced the availability of tracking tags that can be embedded in prescription pills able to get power directly from the stomach acids. Once they are powered up they transmit a signal that is intercepted by a patch on your skin that will relay that signal to an application on your cell phone for transmission to a health monitor support centre.

The patch may also contain additional sensors to monitor your heart beat and respiratory frequency plus the kind of activity you are involved in during the day.

The tags are so cheap that it is not an issue (in terms of money) to swallow and then discard them.

For the first time the FDA has given the green light for its use in the mass market. This is a major milestone in the path toward digital medicine. So far these kind of devices were allowed only for use by doctors and in hospital environment. This has been possible thanks to the ingenuity of powering the tag with the stomach acids, getting rid of the need for a battery. This latter contains poisonous materials and that is why so far electronic devices have been reserved for usage under medical supervision.

Take a look at the video explaining how it works:

[vimeo 45229049]

We can rest assured that this is just a fist step in the way to continuous monitoring of our health with the cell phone playing the role of seamless tethering to monitoring centres.

3D printing is now a reality, at the Future Centre we dreamt about the possibility of a market of one, created by the possibility to customise each product to a specific customer, back in 2008. At that time we foresaw a revolution in the value chain, since a stronger relation between manufacturer and client would become possible, intermediation of resellers would disappear and third parties would enter into the game by providing specific software.

That vision required 3D printing capabilities and embedded software. Over these five years we have seen a good portion of this vision become reality. The smart phone world is now approaching the market of one if you think in terms of functionalities (it is very likely that each single smart phone is different from any other because of the different set of apps it has), many industries are now 3D printing their products, although we do not have 3D printers in our closet (that was forecast for the end of this decade so the jury is still out).

Printed electronics

Something we did not explicitly foresaw, but is surely part of the vision, is that 3D printing would accelerate the transformation of any object into a smart object. Indeed, with the possibility of 3D printing the object it becomes possible to print electronics as you create the object.

This is what Optomec is doing.

They have developed a technology for creating nanosized particles of silver. At that dimension they melt around 140 degrees Celsius, so it is easy to transform them into a ink that can be used to create electronic circuits as the 3D printer prints the object.

A recent article in the Economist about this technology goes as far as to say that with Optomec technology it has become possible to print your own cell phone (take a look at it, there is a nice cartoon about “printing a phone”).

What I feel is really interesting is the implication of this production technology. Basically, as industry moves towards 3D printing it becomes cost free to embed basic electronics in the object, like microchip for processing, sensors, antenna and so on. All of a sudden, that object has become a smart object, able to interact with us and with other objects, thus creating smart ambient.

Take a look at the clip showing the printing of electronics as part of the printing of a drone wing made by Optomec:

Quantum dot technology is now several years old. We appreciate its pluses, real bright colours, but we have been unable, so far, to use it in displays. Nanoparticles, tiny beads made of Gallium and Niobium, can convert light wavelengths thus transforming one colour into a different one.

This is what Nanosys does. A very thin layer of quantum dots is able to transform the blue light emitted by blue diodes into blue, green and red, that is the additive components resulting in white light.  To understand why this is useful we have to remember that current LCD screens are basically a matrix of filters (red, green and blue, one per pixel) illuminated by a white light. By making each of them more or less transparent to the back light you get to show the desired colour.

The problem is that the white light in the back panel is actually generated by diodes emitting blue light, covered by phosphor particles that transform the blu light in a (composed) white. In doing this energy gets transformed into heath and the resulting light illuminating the pixel is weaker. In addition, the phosphor do not transform the blue light in an equal amount of blue red and green (as you might expect the blue takes the lion share) and therefore this has to be counterbalanced by filters that are heavier on blue to avoid bluish images.

With the layer of quantum dot to replace the phosphor the conversion is much better and the resulting white is more balanced and brighter. The result is a much better colour rendition (and lower energy consumption). The really good thing is that there is no need to change the current LCD production process since this layer goes to replace the phosphor layer.

Nanosys is now in the process of commercialising its invention and we should be able to appreciate the effect on next years notebooks.

Here what the guys of Nansys say about their technology:

SED: the screen showcased at CEBIT in 2006

You might remember back in 2005 the SED (Surface conduction Electron-emitter Display) technology. Canon showed at CEBIT the first display based on that technology and there was a general consensus that such technology would have replaced the LCD one by the end of the decade, given the better quality of the images.

That didn’t happen because the LCD was so successful on the market that companies kept investing in its bettering that it reached the quality level promised by SED. In 2010 Canon tanked the SED.

Indeed, that was an example of the power of the market (that is all of us) in steering technology evolution. The pull of the market forced manufacturers to increase the quality of LCDs, the huge volumes led to even better manufacturing and economies of scale and made it harder for SED to carve a dent in the market.

Now it seems it is the time of Mirasol. Mirasol is a technology perfected by Qualcom (they bought it from Mirasol….) that has the promise to commission eInk. Like eInk it has very low power consumption but unlike eInk it can display colors.

Mirasol technology at work

Hence, many were considering Mirasol as the winner. A few products based on this technology have appeared on the market early this year from manufacturers in China. But they have not been met with interest by the market.

The fact is that the color eReader (that is the product being targeted by Mirasol technology) is on a collision route with the iPads and the like. It surely needs much less power and therefore its battery lasts longer but at the same time the technology is not able to display movies. This is proving to be the pitfall.

If I am looking to use it for reading books, well I can be contented with a black and white screen , like the Kindle. If on the other hand I am looking at the new wave of eBooks with multimedia content color is important, but so is the capability to run video clips.

Qualcom has announced at the end of July that they are discontinuing the production of Mirasol based screen because they have to been able to improve the production process significantly (read: it is still very difficult to run video clips on this technology).

The strong interest of the market (of us) in iPads and the likes and in using them to watch YouTube and other multimedia content is putting pressure on this kind of devices manufacturers, creates economies of scale that lead to improving performances and lowering the production cost. And this is making it harder for technologies like Mirasol to grab a share of the market.