Circa 2008
Industrial motors can spin at a head-spinning 250,000 revolutions per minute. But a new matchbook-sized motor runs circles around the competition.
Researchers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Power Electronics created a drive system in cooperation with its industrial partners that exceeded 1,000,000 rpm in tests.
👽 New beetle
Fyodor R.
Researchers have developed a tiny wireless camera that is light enough to be carried by live beetles.
The team at the University of Washington in the US drew inspiration from the insects to create its low-powered camera system.
Its beetle-cam can stream up to five frames per second of low-resolution, black and white footage to a nearby smartphone.
The consumer-electronics research arm has been quiet for years—but it’s also been busy. Its new mission: Make Google hardware as smart as Google software.
Adidas GMR, a smart insole for soccer players, is powered by Google ATAP’s Jacquard technology. [Photo: courtesy of Google].
For half a millennium, people have tried to enhance human vision by technical means. While the human eye is capable of recognizing features over a wide range of size, it reaches its limits when peering at objects over giant distances or in the micro- and nanoworld. Researchers of the EU funded project ChipScope are now developing a completely new strategy towards optical microscopy.
The conventional light microscope, still standard equipment in laboratories, underlies the fundamental laws of optics. Thus, resolution is limited by diffraction to the so called Abbe limit’ – structural features smaller than a minimum of 200 nm cannot be resolved by this kind of microscope.
So far, all technologies for going beyond the Abbe limit rely on complex setups, with bulky components and advanced laboratory infrastructure. Even a conventional light microscope, in most configurations, is not suitable as a mobile gadget to do research out in the field or in remote areas. In the ChipScope project funded by the EU, a completely new strategy towards optical microscopy is explored. In classical optical microscopy the analyzed sample area is illuminated simultaneously, collecting the light which is scattered from each point with an area-selective detector, e.g. the human eye or the sensor of a camera.
When neurons fire an electrical impulse, they also experience a surge of calcium ions. By measuring those surges, researchers can indirectly monitor neuron activity, helping them to study the role of individual neurons in many different brain functions.
One drawback to this technique is the crosstalk generated by the axons and dendrites that extend from neighboring neurons, which makes it harder to get a distinctive signal from the neuron being studied. MIT engineers have now developed a way to overcome that issue, by creating calcium indicators, or sensors, that accumulate only in the body of a neuron.
“People are using calcium indicators for monitoring neural activity in many parts of the brain,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and a professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “Now they can get better results, obtaining more accurate neural recordings that are less contaminated by crosstalk.”
Chemistry Nobel
Olof Ramström, from the Nobel Committee, said lithium-ion batteries had “enabled the mobile world”.
Three scientists have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of lithium-ion batteries.
John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the prize for their work on these rechargeable devices, which are used for portable electronics.
At the age of 97, Prof Goodenough is the oldest ever Nobel laureate.