The 5 technologies you need to know in March
Nowadays, phones or smart watches integrated with health monitoring features are very popular. But how do you think about smart clothing that can help provide lots of data and predict your own movements? This month’s coolest things are far out, and maybe not so far off.
World’s most powerful offshore wind turbine
Image credit: LM Wind Power/GE Renewable Energy.
You can go big or go home, and GE Renewable Energy designed a machine that can generate 13 megawatts and whose rotor stretches nearly 220 meters. That added its own logistical challenges relating to the manufacture, transportation and even the testing of the enormous blades.
At 107 meters from end to end, the blade for the Haliade-X wind turbine — the world’s most powerful offshore wind turbine in operation — is longer than a football field, and possibly one of the single biggest machine components ever built.
The blade has just received its component certification, a critical step before the Haliade-X can be installed in oceans around the world.
Garments made from smart fibers, or "tactile electronics," can sense the wearer's movements, positioning and pressure points. Image credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
What is it? MIT researchers have designed clothing with intelligent, touch-sensitive fibers that can detect the wearer’s pose or activity and even predict what movements they’ll make.
Why does it matter? While many wearables like smartwatches process relatively simple data — say, breathing and heart rate — these intelligent fibers can capture much more. Plus they’re soft, stretchable and breathable. “Traditionally it's been hard to develop a mass-production wearable that provides high-accuracy data across a large number of sensors,” says Yiyue Luo, MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on the project, published in Nature Electronics. MIT says researchers see potential uses for the fabric in “athletic training and rehabilitation” and can “imagine a coach using the sensor to analyze people’s postures and give suggestions on improvement,” or a caregiver monitoring patients’ positions for potential falls or emergencies.
How does it work? In a range of prototypes, from socks to larger garments, like a vest, the fibers can sense if a person is sitting or moving in a specific pose. MIT says “the team’s ‘tactile electronics’ use a mix of more typical textile fibers alongside a small amount of custom-made functional fibers that sense pressure from the person wearing the garment.” Luo adds that the team “developed a self-correcting mechanism that uses a self-supervised machine learning algorithm to recognize and adjust when certain sensors in the design are off base.”
Researchers affixed a tiny electrode to this Venus flytrap, which opens and closes in response to electrical signals. Image credit: NTU Singapore.
What is it? Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have developed a device that “communicates” with plants through a tiny electrode.
Why does it matter? The team at NTU believes measuring electrical signals sent to and from plants could have a number of useful applications, including plant-based robotics and early disease detection in food crops. But plants’ electrical signals are weak and can only be detected when an electrode makes good contact — no easy feat when plant surfaces are often bumpy, hairy or waxy.
How does it work? Researchers took a cue from electrocardiograms, which doctors use to measure the heart’s electrical activity. The team used a hydrogel — a soft, pliable adhesive — to attach a 3-millimeter electrode to the surface of a Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant that can close its jaw-like lobes over unsuspecting insects that land there. When the team used a smartphone to transmit electric pulses to the device at a specific frequency, the Venus flytrap closed in response in just over a second. The findings, published in Nature Electronics, “demonstrate the prospects for the future design of plant-based technological systems,” NTU says. And that’s something we can sink our teeth into.
Holograms could jump from credit cards to fields like virtual reality, 3D printing, and medical imaging. Images credit: Getty Images.
What is it? MIT researchers are using deep learning to produce holographic images on consumer laptops and smartphones in real-time
Why does it matter? The technology, called “tensor holography,” could help holograms jump from credit cards to fields like virtual reality, 3D printing, and medical imaging.
How does it work? The team first produced typical holograms with existing, computer-based methods modeled after the human eye. Then, MIT says, researchers “built a custom database of 4,000 pairs of computer-generated images” and used the resulting data to train a deep-learning model that adjusted its algorithms accordingly. The result? More realistic holograms in milliseconds. Study co-author Wojciech Matusik says: “It’s a considerable leap that could completely change people’s attitudes toward holography. We feel like neural networks were born for this task.”
A dead locust's ear in a specialized chip gives allows a robot to "hear" researchers' signals. Image credit: Tel Aviv University.
What is it? Scientists at Tel Aviv University used a dead locust’s ear to give a robot a sense of hearing.
Why does it matter? Scientists believe that the inherent advantages of biological systems — finely tuned senses such as smell, sight, hearing and touch — could one day be used to build smarter electronic systems, according to the university. “Nature is much more advanced than we are, so we should use it,” says Dr. Ben M. Maoz, who co-supervised a new study that applied this approach.
How does it work? First, researchers built a robot that responds to environmental stimuli. Next, Maoz and his colleagues created what they call an “Ear-on-a-Chip,” a device that supplied oxygen and food to the locust ear and took electronic signals out. They amplified these signals and sent them to the robot. “The result is extraordinary: When the researchers clap once, the locust's ear hears the sound and the robot moves forward; when the researchers clap twice, the robot moves backward,” the university reports.