Breakthroughs and trends in the world of technology
Solar Power
Van Extraordinaire
The Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in Australia is a biennial solar-vehicle competition that has been attracting collegiate and corporate teams since 1987. The Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology is a perennial winner, taking top honors for its four- and five-seat vans. When the pandemic pushed this year’s event to 2023, Eindhoven’s team opted to challenge itself, the Guardian newspaper reports. The resulting two-person solar camper can travel up to 450 miles on sunny days, hit speeds of 75 mph, and power all its electronic amenities. It also has a kitchen, sitting area, bed, shower, and toilet. The team’s 22 students put the RV through its paces during an 1,800-mile road trip this past fall from Eindhoven to Tarifa in southwest Spain. The rollout wasn’t entirely smooth: drivetrain woes forced the students to use a trailer to convey their van from Eindhoven to Brussels and then to Paris, according to the Associated Press. All went well after that initial setback, however, and the solar RV was a hit with other drivers on Spanish roads. Even on cloudy days the vehicle can produce 60 to 70 percent of its power needs, and like conventional electric vehicles, its battery pack can be recharged at a charging port. – Thomas K. Grose
© Rien Boonstoppel and Bart van Overbeeke
Artificial Intelligence
Twin Peeks
Apple recently postponed plans to put a scanning algorithm on its iPhones that can detect illegal images, particularly depictions of child sexual abuse, because of privacy issues. However, some governments are eyeing the technology to help police bypass the end-to-end encryption that criminals hide behind. The scanners are called perceptual hashing-based client-side scanning algorithms (PH-CSS). They use artificial intelligence to sift through images stored on a device and compare them to known images of illegal material. If a match is made, the PH-CSS notifies the company that installed the algorithm and law-enforcement authorities. In a recent study, however, computer scientists at London’s Imperial College determined that the algorithms could be easily defeated. The researchers first tagged several mundane images—of fruit or muffins—as “illegal” to see if the algorithm could spot the same pictures stored in a phone. Next, they applied image-specific filters they designed that imperceptibly altered the stored images. The filtered images looked different to the algorithm 99.9 percent of the time, even though they appeared entirely the same to humans. “We misled the algorithm into thinking that two near-identical images were different,” says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, an associate professor and the study’s lead author. Given how easily criminals could dupe PH-CSS surveillance, the researchers are not making their filter-generation software public. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Electronics
Cool Crowd
As the microchips that power everything from smartphones to computers grow smaller, the heat they generate becomes an increasing problem. But new research from physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder has found that, counterintuitively, some ultrasmall heat sources cool down quickly if packed closer together. The finding could help engineers devise a new way to dissipate heat from processors. In 2015, a team of physicists placed two nano-size bars of metal, each many times thinner than a human hair, on a silicon base and heated them with a laser. Usually nanoscale metals remain hot for a long time once heated, but these bars cooled down quickly. In a new study, the researchers repeated their experiments computationally. With help from aerospace engineers who specialize in modeling the motion of photons, they modeled their 2015 experiments using the university’s Summit supercomputer. The simulations were so detailed that the researchers were able to watch the behavior of each of the millions of atoms in the model. They observed that when the metal bars were far enough apart, the heat leaked in a predictable way and the metal stayed hot. But when the bars were pushed closer together, their heat dissipated because the vibrations of energy they produced bounced off each other. The phenomenon, which they dubbed “directional thermal channeling,” moves heat away from its source and into the substrate. – T. G.
© Steven Burrows
Biomimicry
Choppers Off the Old Block
The maple tree’s propeller-shaped seed casings, which resemble tiny helicopters when shed, have inspired a fleet of tiny flying microchips, each no larger than a grain of sand. Designed by engineers at Northwestern University, the microfliers can fall slowly and in a controlled manner when dropped from a high elevation—making them useful for monitoring airborne pollution and diseases. The team looked at many plants but was most impressed by one in the Tristellateia genus, a flowering vine whose star-shaped seeds slowly rotate as they fall. Microfliers of different shapes were built and computationally modeled to come up with an optimal structure. The final version falls more slowly and at more stable trajectories than any seed, and the microchips are much smaller than their plant-borne counterparts. The chips are composed of wings that interact with the air to give them slow, stable rotational motion, while the weight of their millimeter-sized electronic components is distributed low in the center so the device doesn’t tumble chaotically to the ground. Each chip contains sensors, a power source that harvests ambient energy, memory storage, and an antenna for wireless data transfer. To reduce litter, the team is developing materials that will allow the microfliers to dissolve harmlessly over time in groundwater. – T. G.
© Northwestern University
Automotive Technology
Power Aid
Electric vehicles may be speeding toward dominance in auto markets worldwide, but several roadblocks remain before consumers fully embrace them. A big one: how to serve all those urban dwellers who lack off-street parking and thus must rely on costly public charging stations. British start-up ZipCharge recently unveiled a potential solution. Its suitcase-size portable Go charger can provide up to 20 miles of range within 30 minutes, according to Autocar magazine. The device then can be recharged by plugging it into any standard electrical socket. While not a huge range, 20 miles is sufficient for the average UK commute, the company contends. Moreover, most users would likely top up well before their EV’s battery is spent. The Go charger, which weighs about 50 pounds, has wheels and a retractable handle, Engadget reports. An app enables users to monitor and control the device, or to schedule recharges during off-peak hours to further cut costs. ZipCharge, which expects to charge a monthly fee of £49 (roughly $69) when its device hits the market later this year, also is readying a higher-capacity model that can add up to 40 miles of range. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Robotics
Artful Dodger
When Egyptian customs officials detained UK artist Ai-Da back in October on suspicion of being a spy, the incident sparked a diplomatic stir. Working around the clock, the British embassy secured the painter’s release ten days later. Ai-Da is no ordinary visiting dignitary, however. She is an ultrarealistic humanoid robot, created in 2019 by a team of programmers, roboticists, art experts, and psychologists to critique “the rise of artificial intelligence, and more broadly all future technologies,” explains Aidan Meller, an Oxford art gallery owner who led the multimillion-dollar project. Named for computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da and her latest work—a sculpture inspired by the Sphinx—were commissioned to appear at a contemporary art show at the Great Pyramid of Giza and had been airfreighted to Cairo, according to the Guardian newspaper. But border guards interpreted the robot’s modem and camera eyes as instruments of espionage. The artist was finally cleared mere hours before the exhibition started. “The whole situation is ironic,” says Meller, “because the goal of Ai-Da was to highlight and warn of the abuse of technological development, and she’s being held because she is technology. Ai-Da would appreciate that irony.” – T. G.
© Aiden Mellar
Cancer Treatments
Heal Thyself
Immunotherapy, which uses drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors, is an emerging treatment for some cancers. The process leverages the body’s own immune system to attack and destroy tumor cells. Ideally, it could work better than chemotherapy drugs, which can have toxic side effects and eventually lose their ability to kill cancer cells. The inhibitors mainly work by reenergizing T-cells that have become too exhausted to attack tumor cells, but they’re only effective against a small number of cancers. It’s estimated that less than 13 percent of cancer patients respond to the treatment. Researchers at MIT, however, have discovered that live tumor cells that have been damaged by chemotherapy may help boost the effectiveness of inhibitors and expand the types of cancers they can treat, reports GEN, a biotechnology news outlet. The novel therapy requires culling tumor cells from a patient, treating them with chemotherapy drugs, and then returning the cells to the tumor. When the inhibitor drugs are delivered simultaneously, the injured cancer cells apparently send out signals that rally the previously dozy T-cells into action. In vivo tests on mice showed the approach completely eliminated tumors in 40 percent of the treated mice. Moreover, when researchers injected cancer cells into the mice some months later, they were quickly recognized and destroyed by the T-cells. The team hopes to conduct clinical trials in human patients whose tumors have not responded to regular immunotherapy. But first the researchers must determine which inhibitors, at which doses, will likely work best against different types of tumors. – T. G.
© Sudha Kumari and Yiran Zheng
Mathematics
Bedeviling Eggs
Researchers have finally cracked the universal formula that describes one of nature’s most exquisite—and exquisitely vexing—forms: birds’ eggs. Often called the “perfect shape,” eggs in fact represent four geometric varieties: sphere, ellipsoid, oval, and conical. All are large enough to hold an embryo yet sufficiently small to efficiently exit the body. Once laid, eggs can’t easily roll away, and they’re structurally robust enough to bear a hen’s weight. These beneficial attributes have long fascinated mathematicians, engineers, and biologists, and the shape is widely applied in disciplines from architecture to aeronautics to the biosciences. But efforts to devise a formula that describes any type of bird’s egg have failed. Until now. An international team led by biologists at England’s University of Kent recently came up with a calculation that uses four parameters: length, maximum breadth, the shift in the egg’s vertical axis, and diameter of one-quarter of its length. The formula should help broaden applications, for instance, to engineer thin-walled, egg-shaped vessels that are superstrong. The universal formula also could help researchers develop better technologies for incubating, processing, storing, and sorting eggs—and perhaps even answer how and why eggs first evolved. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Artificial Intelligence
Roll Over, Beethoven
After nearly 195 years, Ludwig van Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony—one of the great “what ifs” of classical music—is complete. The composer’s health was failing when he began work on it, and all he left behind were sketches when he died in 1827. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the maestro’s birth last year, a group of music historians, musicologists, composers, and computer scientists released a version of the Tenth Symphony that was cobbled together using artificial intelligence. In a piece for news website The Conversation, Ahmed Elgammal, the Rutgers University computer science professor who led the AI portion of the effort, explained how difficult it was to complete the task. “We would need to push the boundaries of what creative AI could do by teaching the machine Beethoven’s creative process,” he writes. To achieve that, the algorithm was fed Beethoven’s completed compositions, his notes for those works, and his sketches for the Tenth—all of which first had to be transcribed by a computational music expert so they could be fed into the computer. Then a human composer had to figure out how to blend the bits Beethoven left behind with the AI-generated composition. The two-year effort culminated on October 9 with a performance and recording of the completed score in Bonn, Germany. While the project needed AI to work, Elgammal says that algorithms will never replace the human creative process, because they are merely tools artists can use to help express themselves. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Mass Learning
Machine Learning
A national research collaboration is underway to establish a new field of study that probes the mysteries of life by analyzing images of all creatures great and small. The multidisciplinary effort, which, like the Human Genome Project, leverages high-powered computing tools to discern patterns, includes a $15 million National Science Foundation grant to fund the new Imageomics Institute at Ohio State University’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. Researchers have a lot of material to work with, including digital collections of museums, labs, and other institutions; photos and films taken by scientists in the field using camera traps and drones; and images that citizen-scientists have uploaded to online platforms like iNaturalist and Wildbook. Machine-learning algorithms will scour big data sets of images for clues of biological traits ranging from behavior and physical appearance to skeletal structure. NSF says that imageomics has the potential to rewrite the fields of biomedicine, agriculture, and the basic biological sciences. “This will change how we are able to see and understand the natural world. Computers help humans ‘see’ images differently and expose what we may otherwise miss,” explains Tanya Berger-Wolf, an OSU professor of computer science and engineering and the initiative’s principal investigator. Imageomics, it seems, is about to have its Kodak moment. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Imaging Technology
Terms of Endearment
In recent years, researchers from archaeologists to art historians have used various new tools to uncover secrets of the past. Now, a high-tech imaging technology has revealed redacted sweet talk and other text from letters written more than 200 years ago by Marie Antoinette, the New York Times reports. Under house arrest for two years before being guillotined in 1793, the French queen spent the time writing to her close friend, the Swedish count Axel von Fersen. At some point, von Fersen copied the letters, which his family eventually donated to the French national archives. Most of the letters were intact and dwelled on political intrigue, but several contained scribbled-over words and sentences. Historians have long believed that the censor was a family member, perhaps keen to hide evidence that the queen and the count were lovers. CT scans, which are often used to decipher redacted text, proved fruitless because the censor and the count used the same metal-gall ink. Because the iron sulfate in such inks isn’t pure, however, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy ultimately was able to differentiate between new and older inks, allowing eight of 15 missives to be deciphered and establishing the count himself as the censor. Though the letters are liberally sprinkled with such affectionate terms as “beloved,” “adore,” and “madly,” historians say that doesn’t prove the pair were paramours. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Textile Engineering
High-Tech Dungarees
Denim is one of the world’s most popular fabrics, but its manufacture—the dyeing, finishing, and washing—consumes a lot of water and energy and can cause water pollution. Researchers at North Carolina State University recently experimented with making “digital denim” using a specialized inkjet printer to spread droplets of a textile colorant onto the surface of pretreated fabric samples that have the same weight and texture as traditional jeans. Using printers to color jeans would not only require less water and energy but could also dramatically broaden the array of hues. Experts were asked to compare the digital jeans with the real thing. When it came to color, the look was very close. But the printed jeans were not quite up to snuff in terms of texture or style. That’s likely because traditional dyeing has high ink penetration, while printing merely colors the surface. If they can solve the saturation problem, the researchers reckon that denim could be mass produced using high-speed printers. In the meantime, they say digital denim may still hold appeal in niche markets, such as home textiles, jeggings, or clothes for fast-growing kids. For now, your 501s will still be made the old-fashioned way. – T. G.
© Ming Wang/NC State University
Structural Engineering
Cushioned Blows
Tatheer Zahra, a lecturer in materials science and civil and environmental engineering at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology, was searching for a cheaper, more effective way to protect buildings from gas explosions, car collisions, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other major shocks. Auxetic materials, which expand or contract in all directions simultaneously when stretched or compressed, are highly energy absorbent and load resistant. But they’re also costly and not always readily available. So Zahra 3D-printed auxetic geometries using as her ink such off-the-shelf bioplastics as those used to cushion running shoes or construct memory-foam pillows. These geometries, she says, could replace the polymer mesh embedded with steel as well as the fibers now used to reinforce composites. Masonry is a sturdy, cheap construction material but its mortar joints weaken overall structural strength. Zahra says that embedding her auxetic geometries in the mortar could better protect it from microorganisms and high temperatures, and thus help it last for the design life of the structure. The materials also could be used to make protective coatings for walls. Lab tests indicated that a mere 20-millimeter-thick application over a full-scale building wall would likely withstand the impact of a car traveling at around 35 mph. Zahra plans to test her invention on full-size masonry and concrete structures. – T. G.
© Queensland University of Technology (QUT)