Project Loon
18-Feb-2017: Project Loon can now predict weather systems
Researchers at Google have moved a step closer to rolling out a network of huge balloons to provide Internet connectivity to billions of people around the world, particularly those in difficult-to-reach rural areas.
The Project Loon team, part of the company’s X research lab, said it can now use machine learning to predict weather systems. The advance means Google has much more control over where its balloons reach and try to give service in a particular place in the world with ten, twenty or thirty balloons rather than the hundreds needed previously.
The company has experimented with beaming down connectivity from a network of huge, tennis-court sized balloons rather than undertaking huge construction projects to replicate connectivity networks in the developed world.
The balloons float in the stratosphere around 18 kilometres high. By raising or lowering altitude, the balloons can be caught in different weather streams, changing direction.
By using machine-learning algorithms, Google thinks it has found a way to predict weather with enough accuracy to make it possible to hover balloons over a relatively small area for a long period of time.
The firm was last year able to keep a cluster of balloons over Peru for three months.
Thubber
15-2-2017: Thubber, a new rubber material with high thermal conductivity.
Scientists have developed a novel rubber material with high thermal conductivity and elasticity. The material is an electrically insulating composite that exhibits an unprecedented combination of metal-like thermal conductivity, elasticity similar to soft, biological tissue, and can stretch over six times its initial length.
Applications could extend to industries like athletic wear and sports medicine — think of lighted clothing for runners and heated garments for injury therapy. Advanced manufacturing, energy, and transportation are other areas where stretchable electronic material could have an impact, researchers said.
The key ingredient in “Thubber” is a suspension of non-toxic, liquid metal micro-droplets. The liquid state allows the metal to deform with the surrounding rubber at room temperature. When the rubber is pre-stretched, the droplets form elongated pathways that are efficient for heat travel.
E-Pills
7-Feb-2017: E-pills that can monitor patient health under development
MIT scientists have developed a small battery that runs on stomach acids and could power next-generation ingestible electronic pills which may monitor patient health or treat diseases by residing in the gastrointestinal tract for extended periods of time. The device may offer a safer and lower-cost alternative to the traditional batteries now used to power such devices.
Researchers have previously built and tested many ingestible devices that can be used to sense physiological conditions such as temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate, or to deliver drugs to treat diseases such as malaria.
This work could lead to a new generation of electronic ingestible pills that could someday enable novel ways of monitoring patient health and/or treating disease. Such devices are usually powered by small batteries, but conventional batteries self-discharge over time and pose a possible safety risk.
Researchers took inspiration from a very simple type of voltaic cell known as a lemon battery, which consists of two electrodes - often a galvanized nail and a copper penny - stuck in a lemon. The citric acid in the lemon carries a small electric current between the two electrodes. To replicate that strategy, the researchers attached zinc and copper electrodes to the surface of their ingestible sensor. The zinc emits ions into the acid in the stomach to power the voltaic circuit, generating enough energy to power a commercial temperature sensor and a 900-megahertz transmitter.
In tests in pigs, the devices took an average of six days to travel through the digestive tract. While in the stomach, the voltaic cell produced enough energy to power a temperature sensor and to wirelessly transmit the data to a base station located two metres away, with a signal sent every 12 seconds. Once the device moved into the small intestine, which is less acidic than the stomach, the cell generated only about a hundredth of what it produced in the stomach. But there's still power there, which you could harvest over a longer period of time and use to transmit less frequent packets of information.
The current prototype of the device is a cylinder about 40 millimetres long and 12 millimetres in diameter, but the researchers anticipate that they could make the capsule about one-third that size.