Eideard

X-ray technology, which first appeared in the late 1800s, hasn’t changed that much, aside from shrinking the size of X-ray machines down to the size of large handheld drills that cost some $40,000. Now, a Los Angeles-area start-up is steaming ahead with a more affordable, ultraportable X-ray machine that utilizes a brand new technology built off focused static electricity.

Tribogenics, which spun out of DARPA-backed project at UCLA, announced today it has raised $2.5 million from Flywheel Ventures and other angels to build its portable X-ray machines, which should be available in the next year or two. The company said it’s hoping to disrupt the existing $12 billion X-ray machine industry, improving the way other existing industries such as mining, medical devices and security screening lean on the technology and enabling much broader use of X-rays by consumers.

The technology is built off a discovery made by UCLA researchers Carlos Camara, Juan Escobar, Jonathan Hird, and Seth Putterman who found they could create X-Rays bright enough to produce images from peeling adhesive tape. They were able to recreate this tribolelectrification by using an actuator that brings an epoxy surface in and out of contact with a silicone membrane. This ionizes the air and when captured in a vacuum, can create X-ray radiation. This approaches eliminates the need for high voltage, which has previously limited how portable and small other X-ray machines can get.

What Tribogenics has done is turn this whole process into a handheld product called Pocket XRF about the size of thick iPhone. It doesn’t create an image like medical X-ray machines. Instead, it’s designed to send a burst of X-rays into an object and stir up the atoms inside. Then it reads the various fingerprints of the materials inside and presents the results on a graph. That means a jeweler can tell what metals went into a ring or a safety inspector can see the lead content in a product. Miners can see if there are precious metals in a sample. And security screens can inspect objects quickly.

Reflect upon how a technology like this might be used, how many complex expensive procedures might be simplified and costs reduced. These really aren’t X-Ray machines as we understand them; but, machines that excite atoms in similar fashion and allow recording and analysis – without the dangers attendant upon using X-Rays.

At the end of October, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched its Shredder Challenge contest. The objective: create a system for reconstructing shredded papers, then demonstrate it by piecing together five documents, the shredded remains of which were posted on the contest’s website.

Although the contest had a December 4th deadline, the “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” team correctly reassembled all five documents with two days to spare.

The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used “custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification.” Members of the team spent approximately 600 man-hours developing algorithms and otherwise working on the challenge, completing everything within 33 days. Because it was able to reconstruct all five documents posted in the contest, the team was able to claim the complete prize of $50,000.

DARPA hosted the contest both to develop methods of reading shredded documents left behind by enemies in war zones, and to identify ways in which U.S. shredded documents could be read by other parties, so that countermeasures could be developed.

They still run the risk of Congress reducing funding for an agency that makes it possible to reassemble bits and pieces of evidence like this.

Harvard scientists have built a new type of flexible robot that is limber enough to wiggle and worm through tight spaces.

It’s the latest prototype in the growing field of soft-bodied robots. Researchers are increasingly drawing inspiration from nature to create machines that are more bendable and versatile than those made of metal.

The Harvard team, led by chemist George M. Whitesides, borrowed from squids, starfish and other animals without hard skeletons to fashion a small, four-legged rubber robot that calls to mind the clay animation character Gumby…

The Harvard project, funded by the Pentagon’s research arm…took two months to construct, is 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) long. Its four legs can be separately controlled by pumping air into the limbs, either manually or via computer. This gives the robot a range of motions including crawling and slithering.

The researchers tested the robot’s flexibility by having it squirm underneath a pane of glass just three-quarters of an inch from the surface.

Scientists maneuvered the robot through the tiny gap 15 times using a combination of movements. In most cases, it took less than a minute to get from side to side.

Researchers eventually want to improve the robot’s speed, but were pleased that it did not break from constant inflation and deflation.

“It was tough enough to survive,” said Harvard postdoctoral fellow Robert Shepherd, adding that the robot can traverse on a variety of surfaces including felt cloth, gravel, mud and even Jell-O.

There were drawbacks. The robot is tethered to an external power source and scientists need to find a way to integrate the source before it can be deployed in the real world…

I love this stuff. Of course, I can see the first battlefield simulation being defeated by a Jack Russell terrier.

Or the first real-life use searching for earthquake survivors in a collapsed building? I can hear some poor bugger trapped in the rubble screaming in panic when he sees a version of this wriggling towards him in the dust and darkness.

Insects have served as the inspiration for a number of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) that could be deployed to monitor hazardous situations without putting humans in harm’s way. Now researchers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering are proposing using actual live insects enhanced with electronic sensors to achieve the same result. The insect cyborgs would use biological energy harvested from their body heat or movements to potentially power small sensors implanted on their bodies in order to gather vital information from hazardous environments.

To harvest energy from insects, the researchers have designed a spiral piezoelectric generator that converts the kinetic energy from the insect’s wing movements into electricity. This power would be used to prolong the battery life of devices implanted on the insect, such as a small camera, a microphone or a gas sensor. The prototype piezoelectric generator was fabricated from bulk piezoelectric substrates and was designed to maximize the power output in a limited area.

“Through energy scavenging, we could potentially power cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment that an insect could carry aboard a tiny backpack,” said Professor Khalil Najafi, the chair of electrical and computer engineering at the U-M College of Engineering. “We could then send these ‘bugged’ bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go…”

Getting the insects to go where their handlers want them to is another part of the puzzle that needs to be solved before insect cyborgs can be deployed. But DARPA has been working on this, having put out a call some years back for research proposals for Hybrid-Insect-Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) interfaces to control the movement of living insects. Combining the two technologies could be just the thing to take insect cyborgs to the next level and see them used to monitor hazardous situations in the not to distant future.

Two thoughts immediately come to mind:

Can we trust the insect cyborgs to be loyal to their new human masters – or will they become double agents on behalf of the Dark Side.

This surely ain’t the Ivy League

A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.

The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world, the university is announced.

The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a “statement of accomplishment.”

For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries.

The instructors are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, two of the world’s best-known artificial intelligence experts. In 2005 Dr. Thrun led a team of Stanford students and professors in building a robotic car that won a Pentagon-sponsored challenge by driving 132 miles over unpaved roads in a California desert. More recently he has led a secret Google project to develop autonomous vehicles that have driven more than 100,000 miles on California public roads.

Dr. Norvig is a former NASA scientist who is now Google’s director of research and the author of a leading textbook on artificial intelligence…

The two scientists said they had been inspired by the recent work of Salman Khan, an M.I.T.-educated electrical engineer who in 2006 established a nonprofit organization to provide video tutorials to students around the world on a variety of subjects via YouTube.

“The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today,” said Dr. Thrun…

Hal Abelson, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who helped develop an earlier generation of educational offerings that began in 2002, said the Stanford course showed how rapidly the online world was evolving.

“The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”

Bravo! I set this article aside a few days ago to post at the blog. I got an email from one of our regulars – Ursarodinia – who just signed up for the course and they’re now up over 83,000.

UPDATE: Over 129,000 signed up, now – and more info at their website.

At the Fifth International Meeting on Synthetic Biology at Stanford University, a representative from the DARPA announced a new program called Living Foundries that will invest in and develop synthetic biology projects.

The goal, according to the agency’s program manager Alicia Jackson, is to revolutionize materials science, and to foster projects that will enable the creation and manufacture of materials that are not possible to make today, such as more efficient solar and electronic materials. To do so, she said, DARPA will get into synthetic biology “in a big way.” The goal is to establish new manufacturing capabilities in the United States.

Synthetic biologists try to systematically reengineer cells to do something useful, such as make biofuels. People in the field have great dreams of designing probiotic microbes to kill cancer cells, or remediate the effects of climate change, or make transportation fuels from abundant biomass. And synthetic biologists have made great strides; last year, for example, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they had made a living “synthetic cell” by editing a genome on the computer, building it in a lab, and transplanting it into a cell of another species. But still, the amount of time it takes just to get experiments going is a major brake on creativity, and practical results of this research have come slowly…

Synthetic biology today is “expensive and time consuming, and this limits innovation,” said Jackson. “We [at DARPA] are that genie in a bottle that will make the impossible inevitable.”

When asked for further comment after her talk to clarify the funding levels and timelines for this blue-sky project, Jackson said she cannot disclose further details. The program’s first meeting with industry will be on June 28.

I’ll try to keep an ear cocked to listen for the results of this meeting in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile – please, please – no one tell Congress about this.

AeroVironment, the California-based company behind the largest, highest and longest flying unmanned aircraft system, the Global Observer, has now achieved a remarkable technical milestone with a much smaller aircraft. With its “Nano Hummingbird” the company has for the first time achieved controlled precision hovering and fast-forward flight of a two-wing, flapping wing aircraft that carries its own energy source and relies only on its flapping wings for propulsion and control.

The hand-made final concept demonstrator Nano Hummingbird has a wingspan of 16 cm (6.5 in) and weighs just 19 g (2/3 oz), which is less than the weight of a AA battery. Into this tiny and lightweight package the AeroVironment UAS team has managed to cram all the systems required for flight, including batteries, motors, communications systems and even a video camera.

The aircraft can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways left and right, fly forward and backward, as well as rotating clockwise and counter-clockwise – all under remote control and while carrying a video camera payload. It is even capable of doing a 360-degree loop.

The Nano Hummingbird can be fitted with a removable body fairing, which is shaped to have the appearance of a real hummingbird and, although it is larger and heavier than an average hummingbird, the aircraft is actually smaller and lighter than the largest hummingbird found in nature.

Development bucks came from taxpayers via DARPA. Maybe the rest of us will get to play with it after the spooks are through using it as a mini-spyplane.

The next hydrangea you grow could literally save your life. With the help of the Department of Defense, a biologist at Colorado State University has taught plant proteins how to detect explosives. Never let it be said that horticulture can’t fight terrorism…

It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. “Plants can’t run and hide,” says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. “If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.”

That would be the “receptor” proteins in its DNA, which respond naturally to threatening stimuli. If a bug chews on a leaf, for instance, the plant releases a series of chemical signals called terpenoids — “a cavalry call,” Medford says, that thickens the leaf cuticle in defense…

It all started in 2003 with a DARPA program to grow circuitry. Back then, Medford heard about a program from the far-out Pentagon research arm called Biological Input/Output Systems, geared to produce “rational design and engineering of genetic regulatory circuits, signal-transduction pathways and metabolism.”

The program was essentially a call for computer-designed receptors. “I was a plant biologist,” Medford recalls, “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we put it all together, like Reese’s peanut butter and chocolate.’”

That led to a $2 million grant from Darpa, with the Office of Naval Research kicking in another million. But by far the biggest benefactor to Medford’s research is the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which last year gave her a $7.9 million grant to get the bomb-sniffing ferns from the lab to the real world…

Eventually, Medford expects to bring the bomb-detecting plants to market through genetically modified seedlings. Whatever it costs, it’s got to be less than the $100,000 to $200,000 that a backscatter “junk scanner” can run.

Since it appears any green plant can be modified to suit the purpose, eventually – consider the potential for mutual support between anti-terror aspidistra and medical marijuana! The possibilities are endless. If not vegan.

NASA officials have confirmed that studies are being conducted to assess whether astronauts can be sent on a one-way mission to the Red Planet. So far, the mission amounts to US$1.1 million in seed capital that NASA’s Ames Research Centre and the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency hope to turn into the $11 billion the mission could cost.

Ames Director Simon Worden confirmed the studies at the Long Now Foundation’s “Long Conversation” conference in San Francisco last weekend…

Worden’s admission offered few details beyond a possible 2030 launch date, but its coincidence with a new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology suggests how such a mission might look.

In their paper “To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars,” Washington State University geobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Arizona State University cosmologist Paul Davies suggest a one-way trip sidesteps the potentially prohibitive costs involved.

“Eliminating the need for returning early colonists would cut the costs several fold and at the same time ensure a continuous commitment to the exploration of Mars and space in general,” they write…

Davies and Schulze-Makuch argue that a series of successful missions to Mars could eventually lead to long-term colonization of Earth’s second-closest planetary neighbour…

In the meantime, those with a spirit for adventure can start dreaming of what to pack.

Attwood says ideal candidates would be “willing to take a chance to see what’s on the other side.”

I needn’t comment on those who can’t conceive of such an idea. Those willing to risk all on exploration have always been uncommon – though not lacking in the history of our species.

I imagine that many of those who set forth on each of the journeys that brought our species from Africa northwards were equally capable of climbing aboard a rocket without a return ticket guarantee.

More troops than ever are surviving their battlefield injuries, often overloading the military’s health care system. Massive blood shortages continue to plague military trauma care, and the problem is complicated by the remote, inaccessible locations of today’s war zones.

In 2008, Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, launched the Blood Pharming program, with the goal of manufacturing mega doses of universal-donor red blood units (O-negative) using a compact, self-contained system. “Pharming” is the process of genetically engineering animals or plants to generate mass quantities of medically useful substances, like hormones or antibodies. In this case, Darpa wants a synthetic platform that’s engineered to cultivate blood cells.

Now Arteriocyte, the Cleveland, OH biotech firm that got $1.95 million for the project, has sent off an initial shipment of their pharmed blood product to the Food and Drug Administration for an independent evaluation of the company’s blood-growing process. It hopes to pass muster with agency’s safety regulators.

The blood was produced using hematopoietic cells, derived from umbilical cord-blood units. It’s a trick that scientists have pulled off for years. The hard part is making quantities of red stuff that are large enough for military or medical utility. Currently, it takes Arteriocyte scientists three days to turn a single umbilical cord unit into 20 units of RBC-packed blood. The average soldier needs six units during trauma treatment.

But while Arteriocyte think they’ve mastered the formula for pharmed blood, the company’s got a ways to go to make it financially viable. A single unit of pharmed blood currently runs them $5,000.

Still, given the price tag of transporting and storing donated blood, Darpa’s betting that a unit of pharmed blood will make financial sense once it costs less than $1,000.

On paper, human trials are 3 years away. We still have a couple years of wars to wind down – I hope – and the pressures of battefield medicine will speed up the priority, I’m certain.