Breakthroughs and trends in the world of technology.
Industrial Process Engineering
Hidden Wealth?
The United Nations estimates that the world wastes 1.4 billion tons of food annually. The average American chucks out 250 pounds’ worth. Schemes for shrinking the global garbage heap include better harvesting techniques, storage, transportation, and farmer-buyer agreements. Solveiga Pakstaite, a recent industrial design graduate of Brunel University in Britain, is developing new packaging that gives a more precise signal of spoilage than the conventional sell-by date, thus preventing food from being thrown out prematurely. As for putting the waste to use, Seattle has mandated composting, as is practiced at Manhattan’s Union Square (photo above). But a London-based accelerator, the Center for Process Innovation, sees gold in garbage. It plans to produce biogas through anaerobic digestion of the waste, split it into methane and carbon dioxide, and then separate out graphitic carbon and hydrogen – both marketable commodities. – Mark Matthews
©Newscom
Human-Technology Interface
Separation Anxiety
The iPhone has been in existence for less than eight years, yet it’s become not only a must-have device but also an extension of its users’ sense of self. Or so says a study authored by a University of Missouri journalism Ph.D. candidate. The research, led by Russell Clayton, measured the blood pressure and heart rates of participants while they completed two word-search puzzles. During the first test, they had their iPhones with them. During the second, their phones were moved to another area of the room. As they worked on the puzzle, investigators rang their phones, which they couldn’t answer. The upshot: Not only did their blood pressure and heart rates spike during the second test, they reported that they felt more anxious and ill at ease. Moreover, they performed significantly worse on the second puzzle. Clayton’s prescription isn’t to wean yourself from your iPhone, but instead to keep it with you during situations that require top mental performance, such as taking tests, attending meetings, or completing important work. Or to paraphrase Don Corleone: Keep your friends close, but your iPhone closer. – Thomas K. Grose
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Marine Engineering
Floating Behemoth
Call it the battle of the super containerships. Late last month, the world’s largest container ship – Mediterranean Shipping Company’s MSC Oscar, built by South Korea’s Daewoo – was scheduled to set off on its maiden voyage from Asia to Europe. How big is this engineering triumph? Around 1,297 feet long, 99 feet deep, and nearly 194 feet in breadth; it can carry 19,224 standard size shipping containers. That’s enough cargo space to hold 39,000 cars or 117 million pairs of sneakers, according to Vox. Only 53 days before the Oscar’s scheduled launch, another megasize containership, the Globe – owned by China Shipping Container Lines and built by Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries – launched and briefly held the title as world’s biggest. Actually, the Globe is a bit longer than the Oscar, but it can “only” carry 19,100 containers. The previous record-holder was the Triple-E class. The Globe’s Chinese owner plans to launch four other ships this year the same size as the Globe, spending $700 million for all five of them. The world’s first container ship, the 1956 Ideal X, carried 58 containers. By 1996, the Regina Maersk became the first ship with 6,000-container capacity. MSC Oscar’s title will probably be short-lived. Experts say ships that can carry more than 20,000 containers are already on drawing boards. But the ultimate limit may be around 22,500 containers. Not because of engineering constraints, but because no port can accommodate ships capable of carrying anything more than that. – TG
©Mediterranean Shipping Company
Submersibles
Undersea Worthy
Ocean researchers are getting help from engineers. The “exosuit” designed by Vancouver inventor Phil Nuytten – essentially a wearable submarine that allows divers to descend to 1,000 feet for up to 50 hours – has been getting headlines for several years. But in late 2014, the suit – which looks like a mashup of Buzz Lightyear and Ironman costumes – got its first real test when divers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution used it to explore the famous Antikythera shipwreck, which lies 200 feet below the surface off the coast of Greece. The $700,000 metal suit maintains surface pressure despite the great depths, and it gives divers maneuverability thanks to 18 arm and leg joints. Propelled by four 1.6-horsepower thrusters, it can also be controlled remotely without a diver inside. Meanwhile, mechanical engineering students at leading Swiss tech school ETH Zurich recently showed off a video of a cuttlefish-inspired robot they designed. A cuttlefish is a cephalopod that uses two undulating fins to move back and forth, hover, and spin. The robotic version, dubbed Sepios, uses four orthogonal fins and is also omnidirectional. It weighs 50 pounds, can reach depths of slightly more than 30 feet, and will operate for 90 minutes on one battery charge. Because it drives itself with fluttering fins and not a spinning propeller, it can move through sea grass without getting tangled, and it produces very little turbulence. Outfitted with a video camera, it will be a perfect undersea spy, unobtrusively observing marine life. – TG
©Nuytco Research Ltd
Automotive Engineering
Moving Right Along
Efforts in the U.K. to build a car capable of hitting more than 1,000 mph and ripping a hole through the world land speed record are, well, racing along. The hybrid rocket that will help propel the Bloodhound SSC to supersonic speeds was successfully fired for the first time in December by manufacturer Nammo at its testing grounds in Norway. Engineers late last year overcame a major design hurdle when they figured out how to adhere the upper chassis’s titanium panels to its aluminum ribs without warping the shell. When it’s ready to roll, the Bloodhound will be powered by the rocket strapped to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine, giving it 135,000-thrust horsepower, or more than 180 F1 race cars. The plan is for a test run later this year that will hit a speed of 800 mph, then go for the 1,000-mph mark in 2016. The project was announced in 2008 by a former science minister as a way to get students excited about STEM subjects. Science curricula can be downloaded from the project website. The project director is Richard Noble, who broke the speed record in Thrust2 in 1983 with a speed of 663 mph. Also involved is former RAF pilot Andy Green, 51, the current record-holder, who hit a speed of 763 mph in 1997 in Thrust SSC. Green will also drive Bloodhound. But in a recent blog post, Noble admits money is tight, and he does not yet have the $15.2 million needed to finish the project. Nevertheless, he added, he is confident that Bloodhound will get its first big test later this year on a desert track in South Africa. – TG
©Flock and Siemens
Software Engineering
Raising the Stakes
Computers are good at playing games. The most obvious example is IBM’s Watson, which four years ago bested two human Jeopardy! champs. But poker has been a tough game for computers to master. That’s because it’s a game where players have imperfect information. Past information doesn’t matter because each hand is different, and you have no idea what is in your opponent’s hand. But computer scientists at Canada’s University of Alberta have programmed a computer called Cepheus that can pretty much win all the time in poker, at least in a limited version called heads-up limit Texas Hold ‘Em, a two-player game with betting limits. Cepheus got its poker skills by playing billions of games against itself, and it was programmed to learn from its “regrets,” those times when it realized it might have done better had it folded, bluffed, or bet higher. The real-life application of the Cepheus algorithm isn’t to beat the casinos, but to help strategize against terrorists or criminals. Even when very limited information is available, it can strategize the best times to set up checkpoints, conduct searches, or place air marshals on planes. To the algorithm, terrorists and criminals become rival players who, it is hoped, are easy to beat. – TG
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Medicine Delivery
Break and Entry
Human cells are designed to fight off foreign substances. That’s a good thing if the intruding matter is a disease-causing virus or bacteria but not so good if it’s medication to combat HIV or cancer. Now a start-up co-founded by legendary MIT biochemical engineer Robert Langer has come up with a chip-size device to make it easier to get treatments into cells by squeezing them. SQZ Biotech’s device takes white blood cells extracted from a blood sample, mixes them with the drugs doctors want to inject into the cells, and then pumps them through 75 microscopic channels that at one point squeeze the cells, temporarily breaking open their membranes, thus allowing the drugs to leak in before the membrane snaps back and closes the gaps. Last year, SQZ won a $100,000 prize from MassChallenge, the world’s largest accelerator, and it also won the $200,000 CASIS-Boeing Prize for Technology in Space. Additionally, it’s collected more than $1 million in seed and academic grants. – TG
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Chemical Engineering
Carbon Sponge
Asphalt, that abundant, petroleum-based mixture used to pave roads, could soon have a second useful purpose: soaking up carbon dioxide from natural gas wellheads. Chemistry researchers at Texas’s Rice University have found that asphalt mixed with potassium hydroxide at a high temperature and then pulverized into a powder proves excellent at absorbing escaping CO₂ at room temperature and can hold 114 percent of its weight in carbon while letting the methane natural gas flow through. The Rice team was looking for better ways to capture escaping CO₂ from wellheads at sea without having to use bulky equipment. The asphalt powder absorbs the pressurized gas as it exits a wellhead. Once the pressure subsides, it releases the CO₂, which can then be sequestered or perhaps piped back into the well. Amine-based materials currently used to capture carbon are nowhere near as efficient, and are also corrosive and much more expensive, the researchers claim. When it comes to cost, asphalt is indeed hard to beat: it can sell for as little as 30 cents a pound. – TG
©Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
Neuroscience
Next-Generation Implants
In 2012, Grégoire Courtine, a professor of life sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, gained media attention – including in Prism – when he demonstrated paraplegic rats could learn to walk again using a cocktail of tissue growth-enhancing drugs, electrical stimuli to neurons, and rigorous training. Building on that research, he recently was part of a team that has developed flexible, stretchable electrodes that move in sync with brain pulses and spinal cord movements, and could result in longer lasting implants that control prosthetic limbs. Dubbed e-dura, the system mimics the protective membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal column, reducing the “substantial biomechanical mismatch between implants and neural tissues,” the team wrote. The stretchy electrodes are based on a silicone substrate with gold interconnects and micro-cracks that make it more malleable. The material is then printed on soft electrodes coated with a platinum-silicone composite. In tests, rats outfitted with e-dura implants had no problems moving or tissue damage after six weeks. Those with conventional hard implants eventually suffered inflammation and deformation of their spinal cords, and impaired mobility. Courtine’s paralyzed rats needed drugs as part of the therapy that helped them walk again. The soft implants are impregnated with a tiny “chemotrode” that can inject drugs into neurons. Such implants could reduce dosages by five- to ten-fold for sufferers of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological afflictions, greatly easing the unpleasant side effects of the drugs. – TG
©2015 EPFL/Alain Herzog
Alternative Energy
Leaf Blower
This spring, French entrepreneur Jérôme Michaud-Larivière hopes to plant his first tree at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. But this is no ordinary evergreen. It’s a steel wind turbine that stands 36 feet tall, with 72 artificial leaf-like micro-turbines that spin vertically on an axis. Unlike industrial-size turbines, it’s silent – all of its cables and generators are buried deep within its leaves and branches. Michaud-Larivière, who created the start-up New Wind to market Wind Trees, says the device can create power even from light breezes, allowing it to provide electricity for more than 280 days a year. Power could be either directed to a nearby building or sent to the grid. Each unit generates 3.1 kilowatts, but rows could be networked. Michaud-Larivière got the idea for Wind Trees while sitting in a park watching tree leaves flutter. If his prototype works as well as he hopes, it could bloom into a forest of turbines sprouting across Paris and beyond. – TG
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Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
Cut-Rate HIV Meds
The AIDS epidemic has yet to abate, with infections growing by a rate of 14 percent a year. Now a multiuniversity team led by B. Frank Gupton, a chemical engineering research professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, has devised a better way to produce a key drug used to fight the disease and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes it. Nevirapine is used in combination with other antiretroviral drugs to treat AIDS and HIV, and to stop the transmission of HIV from mother to child. The Medicine for All initiative was funded with a $4.4 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant. “We’ve gotten the chemistry to where it’s probably the lowest cost process you could imagine, using really cheap, inexpensive raw materials and streamlining the chemistry for the process,” Gupton says. By lowering costs, it’s hoped that the drug will become much more widely available in developing countries. – TG
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Medical Technology
Ebola-Fighting Armor
Of the 8,000 deaths caused by the Ebola virus last year, 360 of them were health care workers. Part of the problem for doctors and nurses is that the protective suits they wear are difficult to remove, which can cause them to touch the outside of the suit, exposing them to the contagious body fluids of patients. To come up with better ways to fight Ebola, the U.S. Agency for International Development launched a grand challenge last October that garnered more than 1,500 submissions. In December, USAID announced five winning ideas. One of them was a better protective suit that was designed by a wide-ranging team of engineers, medical professionals, and students during a weekend-long crash effort led by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Bioengineering and Design. The suit features a pull-away, behind-the-neck zipper for opening the suit, and two shoulder straps that, when stood on, pull the suit safely away while turning it inside out. It also pulls off the outer gloves while keeping an inner set intact. Another cool feature: a battery-powered cooling system – a very helpful addition for health care workers using the suit in steamy West Africa, the Ebola epidemic hot spot. The center says it may be ready to mass produce the suit as soon as this April. That really is rapid prototyping. – TG
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School Safety
Glass Act
In December 2012, Adam Lanza shot his way through a window by the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 students and six staff members in the three minutes before police arrived. In the tragedy’s aftermath, Christopher Kapiloff, a young father who co-owns a family glass-installation business in Massachusetts, decided there had to be a better way to deter or at least delay gun-toting intruders. His business, Kapiloff’s Glass, has long partnered with a materials lamination company, LTI Group, to make and install bulletproof glass on government buildings and embassies. But that type of protective glass is too thick, heavy, and expensive for schools. One door can cost $50,000. So Kapiloff and LTI’s co-owner, Jeff Besse, developed a lightweight security glass that cracks but won’t break for at least six minutes when bludgeoned or repeatedly shot. Police response time to a public-school emergency is typically five minutes. The bullets initially leave only small bullet holes. School Guard Glass, the firm Kapiloff and Besse started, began selling the new glass last year. The cost to replace a full-glass door is $1,000 to $1,200, a price that shouldn’t shatter school districts’ budgets. – TG
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