Ever since University of Manchester scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov first isolated flakes of graphene in 2004 using that most high-tech pieces of equipment – adhesive tape – the one-atom sheet of carbon has continued to astound researchers with its remarkable properties. Now Professor Sir Andre Geim, (he’s now not only a Nobel Prize winner but also a Knight Bachelor), has led a team that has added superpermeability with respect to water to graphene’s ever lengthening list of extraordinary characteristics.

Graphene has already proven to be the thinnest known material in the universe, strongest material ever measured, the best-known conductor of heat and electricity, and the stiffest known material, while also the most ductile. But it seems the two-dimensional lattice of carbon atoms just can’t stop showing off.

Stacking membranes of a chemical derivative of graphene called graphene oxide, which is a graphene sheet randomly covered with other molecules such as hydroxyl groups OH-, scientists at the University of Manchester created laminates that were hundreds of times thinner than a human hair but remained strong, flexible and were easy to handle.

When the team sealed a metal container using this film, they say that even the most sensitive equipment was unable to detect air or any other gas, including helium, leaking through. The team then tried the same thing with water and, to their surprise, found that it evaporated and diffused through the graphene-oxide membranes as if they weren’t even there. The evaporation rate was the same whether the container was sealed or completely open.

“Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one molecule thick sheets of ice which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction, explains Dr Rahul Nair, who was leading the experimental work. “If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules.”

Professor Geim added, “Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimetre -thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger. You cannot help wondering what else graphene has in store for us.”

Although graphene’s superpermeability to water makes it suitable for situations where water needs to be removed from a mixture without removing the other ingredients, the researchers don’t offer ideas for any immediate applications that could take advantage of this property. However, they did seal a bottle of vodka with the membranes and found that the distilled solution did indeed become stronger over time. But they don’t foresee graphene being used in distilleries.

However, Professor Geim adds, “the properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

The folks at MakerBot Industries have not exactly been resting on their laurels since causing a stir at CES last year with the Thing-o-Matic 3D printer. Even though the original small object creation device would still see the jaws of most people dropping in wonder, the company has now unveiled a new model at CES 2012 called the Replicator that is not only capable of fabricating much bigger objects than its predecessor, but can also do so in two colors at the same time.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

DIAMONDS IN THE SKY

Australian astronomers have discovered a planet they think is made of diamond.

The galactic gem could be as large as 60,000 kilometres across – five times the diameter of Earth.

The “diamond planet” orbiting a pulsar, centre, of this image. The orbit is represented by the dashed line. The blue lines represent the radio signal from the pulsar. Illustration: Swinburne University 

It is orbiting a tiny, dead, spinning star, called a pulsar, about 4000 light years away in the Milky Way.

CSIRO astronomer Michael Keith said the diamond planet was likely to be very hot and glowing white.

“It would probably look very pretty,” he said.

An international team, led by Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found the exotic object using telescopes including the radio telescope at Parkes. They were searching for pulsars – the lighthouses of the universe – which emit beams of radio waves as they spin rapidly.

They discovered a pulsar which is only about 20 kilometres across and rotating extremely fast – 175 times every second.

Slight variations in its pulse alerted the astronomers to the presence of the companion planet, which orbits the pulsar every two hours and 10 minutes. Dr Keith said the planet appeared to have been a massive star that lost more than 99 per cent of its mass.

Its density made it likely it comprise mostly of carbon atoms, crushed together in a crystalline structure “very similar to diamond.”

He joked that it would be priceless: “I recently got engaged so I know how much diamonds cost.”

Team member Willem van Straten said they hoped the planet was glowing white, because that would make it easier to see light from it using a telescope. The team was searching for millisecond pulsars because they were like accurate “clocks” whose regularity could be used to detect the presence of gravitational waves – theoretical ripples in space time thought to be generated by cosmic events such as two black holes colliding.

The “holy grail” would be to find a pulsar orbiting a black hole, to see if Einstein’s general theory of relativity still holds in an extremely strong gravity field, he said. “You could study space and time in the vicinity of the black hole with a lot of precision.”

Somewhat unromantically the pulsar, with its diamond companion, is named PSR J1719-1438

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Researchers have created a new aerogel that boasts amazing strength and an incredibly large surface area. Nicknamed ‘frozen smoke’ due to its translucent appearance, aerogels are manufactured materials derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas, resulting in a material renowned as the world’s lightest solid material. The new so-called “multiwalled carbon nanotube (MCNT) aerogel” could be used in sensors to detect pollutants and toxic substances, chemical reactors, and electronics components.

Although aerogels have been fabricated from silica, metal oxides, polymers, and carbon-based materials and are already used in thermal insulation in windows and buildings, tennis racquets, sponges to clean up oil spills, and other products, few scientists have succeeded in making aerogels from carbon nanotubes.

The researchers were able to succeed where so many before them had failed using a wet gel of well-dispersed pristine MWCNTs. After removing the liquid component from the MWCNT wet gel, they were able to create the lightest ever free-standing MWCNT aerogel monolith with a density of 4 mg/cm3.

MWCNT aerogels infused with a plastic material are flexible, like a spring that can be stretched thousands of times, and if the nanotubes in a one-ounce cube were unraveled and placed side-to-side and end-to-end, they would carpet three football fields. The MWCNT aerogels are also excellent conductors of electricity, which is what makes them ideal for sensing applications and offers great potential for their use in electronics components.

A report describing the process for making MWCNT aerogels and tests to determine their properties appears in ACS Nano.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

world’s smallest video camera

Medigus has developed the world’s smallest video camera at just 0.039-inches (0.99 mm) in diameter. The Israeli company’s second-gen model (a 1.2 mm / 0.047-inch diameter camera was unveiled in 2009) has a dedicated 0.66×0.66 mm CMOS sensor from TowerJazz that captures images at 45K resolution (approximately 220 x 220 pixels) and no, it’s not destined for use in tiny mobile phones or covert surveillance devices, instead the camera is designed for medical endoscopic procedures in hard to reach regions of the human anatomy.

The miniature cameras are made with bio-compatible compnents and are suitable for diagnostic and surgical procedures. Potential applications include cardiology, bronchoscopy, gastroenterology, gynecology, and orthopedic and robotic surgery.

“Medical procedures that have not been possible until now become possible with the world’s smallest camera,” said Dr. Elazar Sonnenschein, CEO for Medigus Ltd.

The camera will be integrated into Medigus’ own disposable endoscopic devices as well as sold to third-party manufacturers.

Medigus says it will begin supplying camera samples to US and Japanese manufacturers in coming weeks.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Experimental nuclear fusion reactor is seen at a laboratory in the Southwest Institute of Physics in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Photo: Reuters

The congenial Professor Duan Xuru doesn’t look like a stereotypical mad scientist as he shows guests into a cluttered laboratory filled with canisters, vacuum pumps and patched-up pipes tied together with spirals of blue wire and rubber tubing.

But Professor Duan, based in the south-west Chinese city of Chengdu, is working on an audacious project described as a “man-made sun”. He hopes it will eventually create almost unlimited supplies of cheap and clean energy.

Professor Duan is no maverick either, but a pioneer in one of the many expeditions that China has launched to map out its nuclear energy options in the future.

Old-fashioned atom splitting has been in the spotlight after Japan’s biggest earthquake and tsunami left an ageing nuclear reactor complex on the north-east coast on the verge of catastrophic meltdown.

While Germany and Italy have turned their backs on nuclear power, China is pressing ahead with an ambitious plan to raise capacity from 10.8 gigawatts at the end of 2010 to as much as 70 or 80 GW in 2020.

Many of the nuclear research institutes across the country are working on advanced solutions to some of the problems facing traditional reactors, from the recycling and storage of spent fuel to terrorist attacks.

But Professor Duan and his state-funded team of scientists are on a quest for the Holy Grail of nuclear physics: a fusion reactor that can generate power by forcing nuclei together instead of smashing them apart – mimicking the stellar activity that brought heavy elements into existence and made the universe fit for life.

Professor Duan said fusion could be the ultimate way forward: it is far safer than traditional fission, requires barely 600 grams of hydrogen fuel a year for each 10-gigawatt plant, and creates virtually no radioactive waste.

“Due to the problems in Japan, the government hopes nuclear fusion can be realised in the near future,” said Professor Duan, the director of fusion science at the South-western Institute of Physics, founded in 1965 and funded by the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC).

While fusion has moved some way beyond the purely hypothetical after more than half a century of painstaking research, it still remains some distance away from being feasible. Critically, the energy required to induce a fusion reaction far exceeds the amount of energy produced.

Fusion might be the ultimate goal, but in the near future, all China’s practical efforts will continue to focus on a new model of conventional fission reactors.

While China’s nuclear industry awaits the results of a government review in the wake of the Fukushima crisis, all signs point to China pushing ahead with its long-term strategy.

The National Development and Reform Commission said last week China would continue to support the construction and development of advanced nuclear reactors and related nuclear technologies.

“Suddenly, China has become even more important to the world – as other people ask whether they still want to go ahead, China still seems intent on going ahead at full speed,” said Steve Kidd, deputy secretary general with the World Nuclear Association, a London-based lobby group.

If traditional nuclear power represents the civil application of the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, fusion is an extension of the hydrogen bomb, first tested by the United States in 1952.

Showing Reuters around a sweltering, hermetically-sealed lab designed to bring hydrogen isotopes to an unthinkable 55-million degree boil in a 1.65 metre vacuum chamber, Professor Duan said progress had been slower than first expected at the dawn of the nuclear age.

“It took about nine years to go from the atomic bomb to nuclear power, and we hoped it would take a maximum of 20 years to get from the first H-bomb to a fusion reactor,” he said. “But in reality it was very difficult because there were so many technical and scientific challenges.”

Described by one observer as an attempt to put the sun in a box, nuclear fusion has been derided as the province of cranks and charlatans – the modern equivalent of the perpetual motion machines that plagued US patent offices in the 19th century. Sceptics scoff that the world is now 50 years away from fusion power – and always will be.

Professor Duan shrugged off the criticism. He has spent more than 20 years in the field, including eight years in Germany, and found reasons to be optimistic.

“Actually, the concept of nuclear fusion is very simple,” he said with a wry smile. “The first thing is to generate the plasma. The second thing is to heat the plasma to a few hundred million degrees. And then you need to confine it.”

The devil, of course, is in the details.

Exotic options

As Japan’s stricken Fukushima plant lurched from crisis to crisis in March and April, the safety of nuclear power was called into question – including in China. Five days after the quake and tsunami knocked out the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi complex, China said it was suspending approvals for nuclear power plants pending safety checks of plants in operation or under construction.

China by most calculations is already the world’s biggest energy consumer, and demand for power is set to soar in the next decade. But its dependence on fossil fuels have also turned it into the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gas.

Professor Duan’s fusion reactor could be the answer to China’s energy conundrum. It does not require hectares of space or tonnes of scarce fuel or water resources. It produces no carbon dioxide emissions or waste, and is completely safe, even if struck by an earthquake.

A large part of China’s fusion research is now focused on the tokamak, a Russian acronym meaning “toroidal magnetic chamber”.

It is a doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel wrapped in superconducting magnetic coils that confine and control the ultra-high temperature soup of ions and electrons known as plasma.

But tokamaks can only run a few seconds in experiments conducted every five months or so, creating a brief 500-megawatt burst of energy before fizzling out.

Unlike the tokamak, new conventional technologies are on the cusp of being commercialised, including “third-generation” designs imported from US-based Westinghouse, owned by Toshiba, and France’s Areva.

Also on the horizon are fourth and fifth-generation technologies that go by names such as fast-breeder, travelling wave, or high-temperature gas-cooled, as well as small and versatile “modular” reactors with shorter construction times.

“[China] has investments in the more exotic reactor designs and they also have got co-operation on fast reactors with the Russians,” said Mr Kidd of the World Nuclear Association. “They are keeping their options open, and Fukushima will encourage that tendency toward next-generation reactors.”

The allure of the next generation reactors is they can eliminate, or at least defer, the problem of fuel shortages by reprocessing spent uranium into plutonium and other actinides and boost the amount of usable fuel by a factor of 50.

Like fusion, some of these advanced reactors remain a long way from the market, said Adrian Heymer, executive director at the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, DC.

High-temperature gas-cooled reactors are unlikely to be ready until 2030, and fast breeders could have to wait until the 2040s.

“When we say future, we are really looking at the distant future – they not only need a step forward in technology but certainly also a step-up in operator acumen,” Mr Heymer said.

The nuclear debate, Mr Kidd says, needs to focus more on the commercial application of current technologies.

“The nuclear industry’s reaction, whenever there is a problem, is to try to find technical solutions rather than business solutions, which is the way any other industry would deal with it.”

Non-mainstream technology is a diversion, he said, and China needs to focus on the task in hand: getting a new generation of reactors into commercial operation for the first time.

“What the industry has to do now is build a large number of third-generation units around the world, bring costs down and establish a global supply chain that will allow costs to be cut.”

Fission mission

All the discussions about Professor Duan’s “artificial sun” seemed ironic in the April gloom of Chengdu in China’s rainswept Sichuan basin, where industry representatives met to talk about the long-term prospects for nuclear power.

They were originally lined up to celebrate the country’s rapid capacity build-up and the extraordinary leaps expected over the next decade. Now they had to come to terms with the worst crisis to hit the industry in a quarter-century.

For the first time in years, China’s bullish nuclear firms were on the back foot. Tang Hongju, the head of the nuclear division of the Chengdu-based Dongfang Electric, one of China’s biggest nuclear equipment manufacturers, tried gamely to put it in the best light.

“The fact that we could have this conference and invite so many experts after the Fukushima accident shows how much confidence there still is in the Chinese nuclear sector.”

Some worried about profits in the coming year.

“We are actually quite worried about a slowdown in orders,” said a representative with another supplier. “There is still a lot of uncertainty because in the end it all depends on what the government decides. Right now we have no idea what it will be.”

Before March 11, the world was awaiting a bold 2020 capacity target of 85 GW, more than doubling the previous 40 GW figure. The two big plant builders, CNNC and the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC), said 100 GW would be possible.

Even before Fukushima, some urged caution. The State Council Research Office published a paper in January saying China needed to rein in the overexuberant nuclear sector and keep the target at around 70 GW.

“There was a lot of hot air about a ‘nuclear renaissance’ in the last few years and the credibility of it was getting lower – Fukushima actually provides an excuse to slow down a bit.”

Beijing has not yet published new targets, but Xue Xinmin, a researcher with the NDRC’s Energy Research Institute, said it was now likely to be scaled back to around 70-80 GW.

He said a slowdown would give China time to improve its regulatory system, train personnel and build manufacturing capacity, thus ensuring the industry’s long-term strength.

Official corruption is another concern. Last November, the CNNC chief was jailed for life for taking bribes and abuse of power, raising questions about the integrity of policy-making at the top of the industry.

Optimism

Despite the uncertainties, optimism continues to prevail – and some insiders suggested Fukushima could actually cement China’s future dominance of the sector.

“The Japan accident could be good for China,” said one industry official who didn’t want to be identified in order to speak more candidly.

“It will force China to move forward technologically and pay even more attention to safety. But it will also lead to a bigger slowdown in nuclear development in other countries. China can really gain the upper hand.”

China has already committed itself to investing $1.5 trillion in seven strategic industries, including nuclear and high-speed rail.

Its plans to push into high-tech sectors prompted US President Barack Obama to call for a “Sputnik moment” aimed at ensuring that the United States doesn’t fall behind.

Even the lower target of 70 GW is still a huge leap from 10.8 today, and China could very quickly return to “business as usual Kidd said.

While many predicted the safety review after Fukushima would cause project approvals to be suspended for at least a year, now the expectation is for the pipeline to start moving again in August.

Dozens of plants are waiting to be built.

“Obviously, there will be some delays, but I don’t think there are any implications for those projects already under construction – and there are 27 of those, which is enough to be going along with,” said Kidd.

Fukushima nightmare

Parts of China are prone to earthquakes, such as the 8.0-magnitude quake that flattened several towns in Sichuan in 2008, killing 80,000 people.

The quake did no harm to nuclear power plants, sparing China a Fukushima-style nightmare.

But it damaged beyond repair a turbine manufacturing unit belonging to one of China’s biggest nuclear equipment makers, Dongfang Electric, at a loss of 1.6 billion yuan.

Since then, the company has recovered, building and expanding facilities in quake-damaged Deyang and elsewhere.

Despite misgivings among the public, the quake didn’t stop nearby cities – including the megapolis of Chongqing – from pushing ahead with their own reactor plans.

Chinese netizens have expressed concerns about the projects, and after Fukushima some accused local officials of putting prestige and profit ahead of public safety.

“The people of Sichuan should unite and together resist the shameful act of building a nuclear power station in Sichuan,” said one comment on an internet site (www.mala.cn) used to discuss local issues in the province.

Existing nuclear projects are clustered on China’s eastern coast, but the government has identified nuclear power as a crucial part of efforts to reduce coal dependence and boost energy supplies in poor and polluted interior regions.

Beijing said shortly before the Japan crisis that China’s first inland plant would begin construction within two years, and Sichuan was among a number of provinces hoping to be in the first pick.

A lot is at stake. Sichuan officials said apart from Dongfang Electric, more than 30 companies in the province were preparing for the projects, which have not been given the final go-ahead by the central government.

Critics of nuclear power suggest all the “inland” nuclear plans should be torn up in light of the Japan crisis, and not just because of the potential earthquake risks.

“China has a huge variety of natural disasters – this is a country vulnerable to extreme weather and the government needs to take into consideration all the worst-case scenarios,” said Li Yan, China campaign manager with Greenpeace.

Nuclear supporters see a massive overreaction to Fukushima.

“The safety requirements for inland nuclear power plants are no different from those on the coast – the key consideration is water supply and environmental capacity,” said Li Xiaoxue, an official in charge of new reactor projects at CGNPC.

Kidd of the World Nuclear Association said plants in earthquake-prone regions could be scaled back, but that was no reason to ban all inland projects.

“Some of the regions have seismic problems and as a consequence of Fukushima there may be less of a rush to go to some of these areas, including Sichuan, but otherwise there’s no particular good reason not to build them,” he said.

Generation gap

Li of CGNPC caused a stir at the Chengdu conference when he said China could halt approvals for new second-generation plants – similar to the Fukushima Daiichi plant – after Japan’s disaster. He also wondered whether China was ready to make the big leap into third-generation technology.

The company later denied Li had made those statements. But even if China does go ahead with some second-generation plants among the many projects pending approval, the Japan crisis is likely to strengthen its prior commitment to third-generation reactors such as the AP1000 and Areva’s EPR.

“China was heading that way anyway,” said Kidd. “They see the AP1000, or derivations of the AP1000, as the way forward. I think they have looked at it and said if they can build it properly, it will be cheaper.”

At Sanmen on the east coast, China is building the world’s first AP1000, a model designed by Westinghouse to withstand the sort of catastrophic strains that struck the Fukushima complex.

China isn’t just building Westinghouse’s new third-generation model, it is also absorbing the technology in a strategy aimed at seizing the global initiative in the industry and building an entire industrial chain with a global reach.

Technology transfers from Westinghouse and others will allow China to create its own reactor brands. CNNC is talking to foreign partners about selling them abroad.

“Many of the technologies have already been basically localised,” said Xue, the NDRC researcher. Reactors now under construction could rely on domestic manufacturers for around 80-85 per cent of their components and equipment, he said.

“We are localising advanced technologies in order to enter the global market – China must become a nuclear exporting country and exporting reactors must be a part of our national strategy.”

China is emulating South Korea, which signed a similar technology transfer agreement in 1987 and is building its own reactors in the United Arab Emirates.

“With the transfer of technology, the Chinese will have the wherewithal to move ahead with similar designs, and by the time they get to unit 10 they are going to be pretty much self-sufficient,” said Heymer of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

“It could mean that by 2020-2025 they will be up and running themselves and could be a competitor,” he said.

Breaking even

Back at his lab in Chengdu, Professor Duan remains optimistic about the long-term prospects for fusion, particularly when the pressures of climate change begin to intensify.

Professor Duan heads a team of 200 people, up from just a few dozen in the 1980s when fusion researchers were struggling to convince their paymasters the technology was feasible.

In recent years, Beijing has offer more funds, partly to meet its commitments to a fusion project known as the international thermonuclear experimental reactor, or ITER.

“Now it is much better than before,” Professor Duan said. “One reason is energy security. Another is political: we joined the ITER project.”

China joined the European Union, Russia, Japan and the United States in ITER in 2003. With India and South Korea also on board, the project aims to produce a working fusion reactor by 2019. The countries will share the project’s costs, expected to run to €10 billion.

Fusion is far behind fission in terms of development and far more reliant on international cooperation, at least while the technology is in its infancy. China, which has shown it can leverage its nuclear might to get know-how from Westinghouse and Areva, could be equally hard-headed if fusion looks like is paying off.

While the fusion research community has no secrets now, Professor Duan said, labs like his could start to go their own way if big breakthroughs are made.

A number of labs – including the Joint European Torus (JET) in Abingdon near Oxford in the United Kingdom – have come close to a crucial breakthrough: getting more power out of the reactor than they put in, a ratio known as Q or “breakeven”. ITER is likely to lift Q from less than 1 to more than 10 within 20 years.

The Q ratio is a starker, more scientific version of the sort of cost-benefit analysis that is brought to all forms of energy, including conventional nuclear power.

For the industry’s inveterate opponents, benefits will always be outweighed by costs. But as China scours the planet for the scarce resources needed to meet the energy demand of more than 1.3 billion people, nuclear is seen as fundamental.

During his travels around the nuclear conference circuit, Kidd said he had identified as many as 20 separate excuses why nuclear power shouldn’t be developed, but in the end, the fundamental problem facing the sector is cost.

It is a problem China is in the best position to solve.

“They have a wonderful opportunity to show what they can do and the key thing they can bring to the world is lower costs.”

Whether China can eventually do the same for fusion remains to be seen, and until it is finally commercialized, China and the rest of the world have little choice but to endure all the costs and risks that arise from splitting the atom.

Professor Duan has dedicated his adult life to fusion research, and he still isn’t sure if he will see a commercially viable reactor in his lifetime.

“It is difficult to say,” he said ruefully.

“I believe we will have a fusion power plant within 50 years, but I don’t know if I will still be here to see it.”

Reuters

$75,000 a piece … The Martin Jetpack.

George Jetson fans take note: the wait for your very own jet ski in the sky is nearly over, according to the New Zealand company behind an ambitious aeronautical project.

The Martin Jetpack, literally a strap-on personal flying machine, is now in the final stages of development, with the first machines to be dispatched for solo flights by the end of the year.

Military agencies, border control and rescue organisations in the United States will be the first to use the pricey $NZ100,000 (about $75,000) aircraft. 

Inventor Glenn Martin predicts it will be just 18 months before other wealthy enthusiasts get their delivery.

“We’ve had 2500 people sign up for one so far, and plenty of them from Australia,” Mr Martin told AAP.

Their plans for the expensive toy range from practical – “some just want to dodge the rush-hour traffic and do it in style” – to the purely frivolous.

“We know of someone that would love to do stunts flying across Sydney Harbour. How amazing would that be?” Mr Martin said.

The jetpack resembles two leaf blowers welded together but its capabilities are much more complex. The two-litre, jet-powered engine can soar across the skies at 100km/h at heights of up to 50 metres.

Carrying enough fuel to fly for 30 minutes, the contraption could be used in hard-to-access areas and war zones to patrol borders and, if unmanned, to make difficult deliveries by remote control.

“Some of that might sound boring but where there’s huge cost savings and an increase in efficiencies for agencies it’s actually hugely exciting,” Mr Martin said.

Recreationally, it could be used to go fishing and, one day, get to work.

For now, however, it is categorised as a microlight so it cannot be taken into the city centre, however this may change under US law.

Martin’s machine, lauded as Time magazine’s most anticipated invention last year, has been more than three decades in the making.

The Christchurch man began tinkering with the concept in the 1970s, inspired by the limited success of the US Bell Rocket Belt, which stayed airborne for just 26 seconds before crashing.

A gas-guzzler in the extreme, the belt burned through $US2000 worth of fuel in 30 seconds.

Martin’s latest and most celebrated version, unveiled at an air show in 2008, is more fuel efficient, costing just 15 US cents for 20 seconds in the air.

It was designed to be the “simplest aircraft in the world,” said Mr Martin, who has described how “you strap it on, rev the nuts out of it and it lifts you up off the ground”.

“It’s basic physics. As Newton said, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So when you shoot lots of air down very fast you go up and you’re flying.”

He said the interest had been overwhelming, with inquiries coming from Middle Eastern royalty, US business tycoons and European daredevils.

The Australian government hadn’t officially registered its interest but, judging by website traffic, the Australian Defence Force was a fan.

“It’s the fourth biggest visitor to our site after Boeing, NASA and the SAS, so something’s going on there,” he said with a laugh.

“Maybe they’ve just got an employee who thinks it’s so cool they spend all day checking it out.”

AAP

Received & published by Henry Sapiecha

and Higgs singlet:

how messages might be sent

to the past or future

Stephanie Gardiner

March 22, 2011 – 5:01PM

Workers walk past a giant photograph of a part of the Large Hadron Collider. Photo: Getty Images/ Sean Gallup

Scientists believe they are one step closer to creating time travel.

American physicists from Vanderbilt University believe they may be able to use the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest atom smasher buried underground near Geneva, to send a type of matter called the Higgs singlet into the past.

But they’re unsure if the Higgs singlet actually exists and whether the machine can produce it, according to a report by Live Science.

The Higgs singlet is related to another hypothesised particle called the Higgs boson, dubbed “God’s particle” because it is associated with giving other particles mass, which the 27-kilometre long atom smasher may produce.

If the Higgs boson is created, the Higgs singlet may also appear, scientists say.

The Higgs singlet may be able to jump through space and time, travel through a hidden dimension, and then re-enter our dimension forwards or backwards in time, physicists Professor Thomas Weiler and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho believe.

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Professor Weiler said in a statement on research website arxiv.org.

“Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example.

“However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

The singlet, a highly technical term to describe the particle that doesn’t interact with matter in the usual way, and boson are both named after theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.

The researcher’s study is based on M theory, or “the theory of everything”, which attempts to unite the cause of all matter.

But it’s much too early to start thinking like Back to the Future’sMarty McFly.

University of Sydney Associate Professor of Physics Kevin Varvell said the study was highly speculative, something the researchers themselves admit.

“From my reading of the paper, these guys themselves aren’t going crazy over the idea of time travel,” Professor Varvell said.

“They explicitly say we’re not talking about time travel for humans, they’re talking about potentially one might be able to send information through the production of these particles.

“But they’re also saying that’s very, very highly speculative as well.

He said it’s one of many ideas that proposes using the collider and it is serious scientific work.

“But, again, I think we need to find the Higgs boson or something like it, before we can entertain other new particles being produced in association with it.”

The Large Hadron Collider, which cost more than $4 billion to build, has attracted plenty of controversy.

Before it started working, some feared it would create black holes and its operation was delayed several times due to a string of technical problems, including a liquid helium leak in 2008.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

DARPA asks the public to design

a new combat support vehicle

The XC2V must be designed around the tubular chassis found in the Local Motors Rally Fighter

In an effort to streamline the design and build process for manufacturing military vehicles, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is enlisting the “power of the crowd”. Through the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge, which asks entrants to conceptualize a vehicle body design for combat reconnaissance and combat delivery & evacuation, the agency is looking to pick the brains of not only armed service members and engineers, but also members of the public and others that usually have no way to contribute to military design.

The challenge is being conducted with Local Motors, a Phoenix-based company that lets a community of car designers and engineers collaborate on designing cars, which can then be bought and built in regional micro-factories. Local Motors’ first “open source” production vehicle is the Rally Fighter, which was developed in 2008 using a crowd-sourced process. The XC2V design submissions must be based on the lightweight, tubular steel chassis and the General Motors LS3 V8 powertrain found in that vehicle.

Budding designers must also devise a vehicle that meets two mission sets – combat delivery and evacuation and combat reconnaissance. To meet the requirements of combat delivery and evacuation missions, the judges will be looking for flexible vehicle body designs that allow supplies, people and equipment to be transported around a potentially hostile battlefield in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

Meanwhile, in terms of combat reconnaissance, the vehicle must also be light and fast with the capability to mount sighting systems on the exterior and space inside to stow items such as camouflage and ammunition so it is easily accessible.

To help make the mission requirements easier to understand for those without a military background, DARPA has provided four different fictitious scenarios that illustrate how the vehicle might be used in different missions. DARPA and Local Motors will also provide feedback to competitors as submissions are received

Local Motors is accepting design submissions until March 3, 2010, which can be as simple as a sketch on a piece of paper or as detailed as a 3D CAD file. However, the submission must include a profile view, front/rear/Combo view and top (half or full) view.

Once the submissions are assessed, those that meet the competition requirements will be put to a vote on March 3 to 10, with anybody able to cast their vote on the designs, meaning that not only the designs, but the winner that is being crowd-derived.

Third place will be awarded US$1,000, second place $1,500, while first place will take home $7,500 and will get to see their vision become a reality as soon as June when a fully functional concept vehicle based on the winning design is due to be ready.

Entrants must be over 18 with full competition details and entry guidelines available at Local Motors’ website.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

promises bionic capabilities

for everyone

January 22, 2008 It’s not often in this era of rampant technological innovation that a fundamentally new concept surfaces – with almost no limitations to what can be achieved with the myriad new technologies coming to market over the last few years, fundamentally new ideas of this magnitude are becoming increasingly rare, much less technologies with groundbreaking societal implications. Such a technology emerged this week when it was announced that engineers at the University of Washington have used microscopic scale manufacturing techniques to combine a flexible contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Though in its infancy, the combination of a wearable contact lens with embedded optoelectronic and electronic devices promises many things, most notably this could well be the beginning of the Computer Human Interface of the future.

The trend towards miniaturization of computers has now reached a roadblock due to our inability to adequately display the information they provide on smaller screens – the main limiting factor in relation to the ever-shrinking size of computers and telephones has become the size of the display – if it gets any smaller, we can’t read it.

Currently, the most obvious solutions for further reduction in size of wearable computer-based devices are miniature projectors and externally worn heads up displays.

The amount of investment in miniaturized projector technologies bears testimony to the prospects for this market and we have seen numerous prototypes showcased recently by the likes of Microvision, 3M, Texas Instruments, Explay, Neochroma,Digislide, Light Blue Optics and from research labs such as the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems . Though the microprojection area promises the ability to project a large screen on any flat surface, we have yet to see commercially available products and the technology won’t suit everyone, partially because they’re still not quite small enough, and partially because of privacy issues – projecting delicate company information onto an airport terminal wall, for example, might not be a good idea.

Similarly, those heads up displays that have come to market are either prohibitively expensive or do not yet offer high resolution screens of sufficient clarity and stability to avoid the attendant migraine headaches. The promise is there for the near future, but one of the major drawbacks to mass adoption of these products is that not everybody wishes to look like a cyborg.

Accordingly, the University of Washington’s contact lens offers the promise of a viable large screen display alternative for connecting users with their mobile devices. Project head and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Babak Parviz envisages that his team’s electronic contact lens will offer the ability to superimpose a transparent high resolution display over the field of vision of one, maybe both eyes of the wearer .

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” says Parviz.

Apart from the expectation of eventually offering a large screen display for our wearable and micro computers, PDAs and phones, the heads-up aspect of the contact lens leaves the way open for a democratization of Augmented Reality.

Unlike Virtual Reality, where the user’s field of view is completely replaced with an artificial visual environment, Augmented Reality uses head tracking in conjunction with augmented vision to overlay complimentary information on the user’s view.

The system can tell which direction the user is looking and adjusts the displayed image accordingly, displaying new and appropriate information for the scene being viewed. For example, when viewing a map, it may be beneficial to orient the map to the user’s field of view so that the user can identify landmarks in the real world by their proximity to landmarks on the map.

Augmented Reality is already in use in a wide range of industrial applications due to the work of companies such as Arkiva which is used by technicians doing extremely complex work, enabling them to overlay instructions, circuit diagrams, mechanical drawings and the like over real-world tangles to ensure they get it right.

If the tools were readily available and in mass usage, a plethora of new applications for augmented reality would almost certainly come to light.

In tourism, for example, Augmented Reality would offer the ability to see the ancient ruins in Rome, overlayed with what the buildings originally looked like and for buildings to be labeled in a real/virtual mixed tour.

At a sporting event, players might be labeled, the ball/puck tracked, distances marked, and for certain professions, such as a surgeon, vital organs, veins and arteries could be delineated. Obviously, such capabilities would require additional technologies to come into play, but with wireless networking becoming ubiquitous, it’s a possibility for the mid-term future.

Another aspect of AR is displaying vital information to someone who is actively involved in doing something where the need to refocus on a dashboard or set of instruments would impair that person’s ability to perform their task. The heads up display was pioneered and significantly evolved in jet fighters, and has been trailed in Formula One and there are now commercially available systems on the market for racing drivers, motorcyclists and bicycle riders.

The Parviz team’s contact lens would enable pervasive heads up displays in automobiles, which would significantly reduce accidents, even if it only helped people tune their radio or find the album they wanted on their iPod whilst driving.

Taking wireless technologies and the evolution of the UW Contact Lens even further, there’s significant promise of using the contact lens displays in coordinating groups of people to work more effectively in teams, the most likely first up usage for this being for military personnel on the battlefield and for disaster response teams in a crisis where saving time and doing things efficiently means saving lives.

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

“People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it’s safe,” said Parviz, who heads a multi-disciplinary UW group that is developing electronics for contact lenses.

Bionic Zoom Vision

One of the aspects of the UW Contact Lens most likely to capture the imagination of the public is its promise of bionic vision, popularized in mass market science fiction such as the Terminator movie series where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg character and his cyborg combatants demonstrated the ability to zoom in on distant objects, as did Lee Majors’ character Steve Austin in the Six Million Dollar Man television series.

“Using nanotechnology you can extend the sophistication of the contact lens as far as you like,” says Parviz. “There is interest in including cameras on the contact lens and incorporating other lenses so that, for example, if you were looking at something very small, you would be able to zoom in to get a closer look. Similarly, if something is far away, you would be able to zoom in.”

With an array of lenses wirelessly connected to a wearable computer, there’s obviously the capability of “recording images” says Parviz. We prompt him on the possibility of recording in real time what we see, and he adds that there are many uses for the technology they are developing that have not yet been explored, and indeed, that there are uses they almost certainly haven’t even thought of.

Once again, the military and law enforcement domains are the most likely to pony up the dollars for real-time recording of critical encounters, but the possibilities are almost endless once someone is wearing such a contact lens – could it be that at some point in the future, those “this conversation could be recorded for training purposes” on-hold telephone announcements (warnings) might be applicable to every conversation with a customer service representative?

With the ability to record everything we see, which the UW Contact lens will ultimately enable, the concept of privacy, instant recall and a whole host of new capabilities come into play – remember that reliable, solid state data storage is becoming more cost effective by the day. A decade from now, recording everything we say and do is now a distinct possibility.

Bio-sensing and a wearable health monitoring system

Perhaps the most left-field aspect to the UW study is the promise of a wearable health monitoring system. “The second big area that we are looking at is bio-sensing, because on the surface of the contact lens there are a lot of biomarkers already present that are important for monitoring health care,” explains Parviz.

“We recognized that if we could have a contact lens that incorporated biosensors that could sample the biology of the eye we could constantly report it outside, and hence have a non-invasive way of putting people on continuous health monitoring.”

Whatsmore, the system also has the capability of displaying the key indicators in real time to the wearer or a relevant third party as a personal dashboard via their heads up display.

How the project began

“The way this whole thing started,” says Assistant Professor Babak Parviz, “was that we were looking at conventional contact lenses and we noticed that they were straightforward polymer structures. They do something useful in vision correction, but the structure of the system is simple – it’s just one material.”

“The expertise we have in our group surrounds nanotechnology and microfabrication which enables us to make a lot of very small, very useful devices, so we thought that if we could migrate all these devices onto a contact lens, we could get a lot more functionality out of this simple object that’s used by millions of people. The contact lens is safe to use and people are quite comfortable with using them.”

“We had a few things in mind. The first was that we could display some information – the level of the sophistication of the display would obviously be dependent on the sophistication of the technology we used. At its simplest, it might just be a single pixel that switched on and off and indicated something that’s important to the user. Going several levels beyond that, it might be a high resolution display.”

“There are a variety of applications in that domain once you have a reasonable degree of resolution in a display, such as augmented reality and computer generated images that you could superimpose over the outside world.”

“Going beyond that, we could incorporate all sorts of optical devices on a contact lens. Obviously it needs to be remotely powered and it would communicate with outside devices via a wireless link.”

“A fully functional high resolution display is still some way off,” he says, explaining that the existing prototype lens contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, and have been tested on rabbits with no adverse effects.

“Our immediate goal is to have a display that has only a few pixels to demonstrate the viability of the concept and after that we will work upwards towards increasing the resolution of the display but it will be some time yet before we have a fully functional hires display.”

“This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”

“So those are all doable things that are on our agenda”, says Parviz, referring to the array of technological possibilities mentioned elsewhere in this article, “but they’re not easy to implement so they’re all in the future still.”

“What’s interesting and encouraging is that a lot of these things have already been demonstrated independently so there are lots of different micro-lens designs already.”

“These are lens that are exactly the right size, but they have never been incorporated into a contact lens so what’s really encouraging is that a lot of these things exists and one of our hopes is that we have opened the venue of the contact lens to microelectronics – people thinking about contact lenses as a place where we can put elecronics and optoelectronics.”

Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across. They then sprinkled the grayish powder of electrical components onto a sheet of flexible plastic. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a microfabrication technique known as self-assembly. Capillary forces – the same type of forces that make water move up a plant’s roots, and that cause the edge of a glass of water to curve upward – pull the pieces into position.

The prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer’s vision, but the technique could be used on a corrective lens, Parviz said. And all the gadgetry won’t obstruct a person’s view. Ideally, installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out, and once installed the wearer would barely know the gadget was there, Parviz said.

“There is a large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that we can use for placing instrumentation,” Parviz said. Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens, Parviz said.

The results of the project to date were presented last week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors were Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha