Emerging tech

What do you get when you combine an Android smartphone, cell phone image sensor, Lego building blocks, and a handful of Caltech engineers and biologists? The ePetri, which isn't Petri Dish 2.0, but a full reworking of a technology that dates back to the late 1800s.

Traditionally, the Petri dish (named after German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri) has been used in the medical field to identify bacterial infections by studying samples via microscope as the cultured cells grow in an incubator.

The Caltech researchers have a few choice words for such an approach in 2011, including "expensive," "labor-intensive," and "suboptimal." So they set out to improve not just the dish, but the entire process.… Read more

The airflow of a typical human breath travels at less than 2 meters per second. Instead of lamenting its weakness, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to try to make a material that could react to this airflow in such a way as to convert it to electrical energy.

So they turned to polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a material in which an electrical charge can build up in response to applied mechanical stress. (There's even a name for this: the piezoelectric effect.) The trick, then, was to get this material thin enough to be sufficiently stressed by human breath.

"We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face," says Xudong Wang, a materials science and engineering assistant professor who reports on these findings in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Wang's team had go about thinning this material very carefully, so as to preserve its piezoelectric properties. They used an ion-etching process that, with some improvements, might eventually enable them to control thickness to the submicron level.

The obvious benefits of using respiration to power biomedical devices (think blood glucose monitors or pacemakers) are that the source is local and it is consistent.… Read more

After dipping its toes in the water with some limited-scope mobile apps, Adobe Systems is taking the plunge today with six programs for Android Honeycomb tablets, including the company's flagship brand, Photoshop.

The programs, each to debut in November with a $10 introductory price, fall under the new Adobe Touch Apps brand. And they tie in with the new Adobe Creative Cloud, a service for sharing files, finding services, and transferring works from the tablet apps to Adobe's Creative Suite apps running on traditional computers.

Along with Photoshop Touch, the other apps are Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, and … Read more

Tossing clothes into the wash when dirty is so last year, thanks to a discovery by chemists out of the University of California at Davis. Near-ordinary cotton may simply need be exposed to light to get busy killing bacteria and breaking down toxic chemicals such as pesticide residues.

Ning Liu, a doctoral student at UC Davis, worked with textile chemists Gang Sun and Jing Zhu to develop a method that incorporates a compound (2-AQC) into cotton fabrics. When exposed to light, it produces reactive oxygen species such as hydrogen peroxide that kill bacteria and break down toxins.

While Liu says 2-AQC is more expensive than other compounds, it is difficult to remove from cotton due to strong bonding, and cheaper equivalents should work, too.

"The new fabric has potential applications in biological and chemical protective clothing for health care, food processing, and farm workers, as well as military personnel," she says.

The team reported on its findings in the Journal of Materials Chemistry last month, shortly before another study out of the University of Iowa chronicled the vast presence of even drug-resistant disease-causing bacteria on hospital curtains.… Read more

It looks like Kindle e-book customers have found a digital-era hole in customer service that Amazon needs to fix.

Those readers are giving Amazon an earful after purchasing the newest novel from popular author Neal Stephenson--only to be notified cryptically that their e-book needed to be replaced because of "missing content."

The problem afflicted Stephenson's new "Reamde: A Novel," a thriller that's apparently something of a departure from his sci-fi books such as "Snow Crash" and the more nerdy intellectual fiction such as "Cryptonomicon." The problem isn't the kind of thing that would happen with a paper book.

That's of course because e-books are essentially as mutable as any other collection of digital bits. Just like a quick update can patch a new app's shortcomings, an e-book update can fix last-minute typos.

The problem here was not so much that the book changed, but rather that people didn't know what about it had changed.

"After reading over 500 pages of this great book, Amazon tells me there was 'missing content.' After a live chat and talking to 2 support people, they won't tell me what was missing, how much, what type of content, or why," seethed reader cdale77. … Read more

SANTA ROSA, Calif.--On-demand aviation, the idea that mobility one day can be just as personal and convenient in the air as it is on the ground, is a lofty goal. And it's what competitors at NASA's Green Flight Challenge going on here this week are trying to attain.

Aerospace Engineer Mark Moore said the challenge, which is one of NASA's Centennial Challenges and sponsored by Google, is about finding ways to use the layers of uncluttered 3D space above us to get around--and how to do it in an energy-efficient manner.

Commercial planes currently average about … Read more

Optical tweezers have been used by biophysicists since their invention at Bell Labs in the 1980s, and are typically used to study cellular components. But they have a few drawbacks, not least of which are overheating and inefficiency.

So engineers at Harvard have been working on a next-gen model they call plasmonic nanotweezers to solve those and other issues with traditional optical tweezers so that tiny particles such as viruses can be isolated, observed, and manipulated.

Back at Bell Labs, scientists had shined a laser through a microscope lens to focus it tightly. They found that light, made of electromagnetic waves, creates a gradient force at the point of focus that is capable of attracting a tiny particle and holding it in that beam of light until random motion or some other force knocks it out.

The basic limitation of this approach is that a lens cannot focus that beam beyond half the wavelength of light, so if the particle the researchers hope to trap is smaller than the focal spot, they might have trouble trapping it.

Meanwhile, that focal size limit also places an upper limit on the gradient force generated, and yet a stronger force is required to trap nanoscale particles. So for a conventional optical tweezer to capture nanoscale particles, a high-powered laser is required.… Read more

I really wanted to like the new generation of compact, high-end cameras. Honest.

The hybrid designs promised the best of both worlds: the high image quality and interchangeable lenses of SLRs but the portability of a compact point-and-shoot. Their interchangeable lenses mean versatility, their larger sensors mean higher image quality, and their lack of an SLR's reflex mirror means they're much smaller.

My enthusiasm waned, though, as I saw models from Olympus, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, and Pentax arrive. And I'm sorry to report that Nikon's new J1 and V1 compact, mirrorless, interchangeable-lens camera (ILC) models left … Read more

Engineers at the University of Utah predict that, in about five years, a network of wireless transceivers around a bed will be able to measure breathing rates without a single tube or wire being connected to the patient.

The uses of the system, which the team has dubbed BreathTaking, are obvious: patients in post-op, infants at risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or even people with sleep apnea.

And because the technology uses off-the-shelf transceivers similar to ones used in home computer networks, the system could cost less than current breathing monitors, said electrical engineer Neal Patwari, senior author of … Read more