Breakthroughs and trends in the world of technology
Marine Engineering
Skip the Skipper
The world’s first fully electric autonomous cargo ship is ready to embark. The 263-foot, 3,527 deadweight-ton vessel will soon begin two years of trials navigating the seas from Porsgrunn in southwest Norway to the port of Brevik, eight miles to the south, TechXplore reports. The Yara Birkeland was commissioned by Yara, a large fertilizer company, to transport containers to Brevik, eliminating 40,000 truck journeys a year and thus cutting diesel fuel emissions. The ship is powered by eight battery packs, giving it a capacity of 6.8 megawatt hours, or about the same as 100 Teslas. Humans will be aboard during the trial, but the wheelhouse could be removed once the vessel proves it can handle the journey guided solely by sensors. The company notes that most maritime accidents result from human error, so it’s hoped that an autonomous ship will prove to be safer as well as cleaner. The developers say the coming months will be a learning period as the Yara Birkeland figures out how to navigate a narrow fjord, sail under two bridges, manage currents, and cope with heavy traffic, including merchant ships and even kayaks. Experts tell TechXplore that electric ships won’t factor much in helping the maritime industry meet its goal of reducing emissions 40 percent by 2030 because they’re a long way from being able to handle ocean crossings. Ferries and cargo ships on short, stable routes is their more likely nautical niche. – Thomas K. Grose
© Yara International ASA
Television
Hot Licks
TV and movies engage our eyes and ears. Taste and smell? Not so much. Over the decades, efforts to incorporate aromas into films—from 1960s Smell-O-Vision technology to the Odorama scratch-and-sniff cards deployed by director John Waters for his 1981 film Polyester—have flopped. Now comes Homei Miyashita, an associate professor of human-computer interactions at Japan’s Meiji University, with Taste the TV, a technology that lets users taste the image of whatever food they’re viewing by licking the screen. The device uses 10 canisters filled with a range of flavors from salty to sweet and savory to bitter that can be blended to mimic the taste of a food or drink. According to Reuters news service, the flavor sample is then rolled onto a hygienic film covering a TV flat screen, so the viewer can safely lick it. Miyashita hopes his invention will let people experience the taste of restaurant foods from around the world from the comfort of their couch. Another possible application, he says, is distance learning for budding sommeliers and cooks. He’s also in talks with companies about using the spray technology to give slices of toast the taste of pizza or chocolate. Miyashita built his machine in the lab but speculates that a commercial version would cost around $875 to produce. That price may be too much for consumers to swallow. – T. G.
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Robotics
Clean Machines
Train carriages in Britain accumulate a fair amount of trash, including discarded cups, newspapers, food, and even hazardous or biological wastes. Much of the detritus ends up in hard-to-reach spaces under and between seats. And cleaning crews often are under pressure to work quickly. Researchers at Scotland’s National Robotarium, based at Heriot-Watt University in Glasgow, have developed a robotic trash picker-upper that can more readily reach those tight spots and free up humans to focus on disinfecting surfaces and ridding aisles and seats of dirt, spilled drinks, and other junk. To train the robot to accurately identify trash, the robotics team, which included researchers from Heriot-Watt and the University of Edinburgh, used more than 58,300 images of waste taken from many different angles and in a variety of states, such as crumpled versus folded sheets of newspaper. The research was funded by the Rail Safety and Standards Board, and the cleaning ’bots are expected to soon apply pails to rails. – T. G.
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Remote Learning
Mood Meter
Teaching large online classes poses many challenges, including how to simultaneously deliver material and gauge its reception. Five University of Toronto fourth-year electrical and computer engineering students tackled the problem in their capstone course—and emerged with an award-winning app and paper presented at ASEE’s 2021 Virtual Conference. Engage AI, the real-time feedback system the students developed with ECE professor Hamid Timorabadi, analyzes facial features and sends the results to a dashboard that gives instructors an immediate measure of class engagement. “The app takes a 3D picture of your face and extracts the features around your eyes, nose, and lips,” team member Manik Chandhok explained to UofT’s Engineering News. “Then our machine learning model analyzes the expression and classifies it as an emotion.” To simplify and accelerate the process, the students focused on two essential moods: happy or drowsy. By tweaking the app with results from various trial images, their model was able to recognize emotions with 98 percent accuracy. Students need not have their cameras on in class, and because all image processing is done on the student’s computer, “we don’t record any personally identifiable information,” added co-designer Raman Mangla. Timorabadi, who appreciated the way Engage AI mimics an instructor’s in-person ability to “read the room” and adjust accordingly, pronounced it “a timely and well-executed project.” – Pierre Home-Douglas
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Space Exploration
Cosmic Condiment
If humans are ever to colonize Mars, they will need to figure out how to farm in extreme environments, where temperatures average more than 100ºF colder than on Earth, sunlight and gravity are weaker, and the atmosphere consists mainly of carbon dioxide. Toward this goal, a team of scientists has successfully wrapped up a two-year experiment to grow tomatoes under conditions that mimic those on Mars, Smithsonian magazine reports. The team included researchers from Heinz, who pronounced the resulting crop high enough quality to make a “Marz Edition” of the company’s popular ketchup. The scientists chemically altered Earth soil to make it more Mars-like, then grew the tomatoes under similar temperature and water conditions to those future astronaut-farmers would find. They mitigated the hostile climate using artificial light and fertilizers and by leaching toxins from the soil. The resulting tomatoes were then combined with the same ingredients that go into Heinz’s regular ketchup. The company hosted a live-stream taste test of Marz Edition on social-media channels but has no plans to commercialize the novel condiment. Nor has the simulated space sauce been approved for public consumption. Still, the publicity was out of this world. – T. G.
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Artificial Intelligence
Wired for Learning
Nearly all artificial intelligence research is software-based. But if the goal is to one day have computers that mimic animal brains, some knowledge must be encoded into semiconductors so that the hardware can learn from experience and adapt to changing environments—just like neurons. In an article on the news website The Conversation, Shriram Ramanathan, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue University, describes his team’s recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found nickel oxide can emulate the most basic learning abilities of animals. When the metal is exposed to hydrogen, it produces an abundance of electrons that can be used to generate an electrical current. Ramanathan’s team kept switching the nickel oxide between hydrogen and normal air environments. The more they kept up that stimulation, the more the metal got habituated to the hydrogen, eventually reducing its conductivity. But when they exposed the metal to bright light or ozone, giving it a sharp shock, conductivity ramped up—demonstrating sensitization. Now, Ramanathan writes, researchers need to fill in some knowledge gaps. For instance, they’ll have to determine how much time a material like nickel oxide needs to learn—and whether it’s quick enough to be useful in electrical systems. – T. G.
© Wikimedia
Archaeology
Restoration Hardware
Among Pompeii’s buried treasures was a fresco depicting trophies and weapons that adorned one wall of a large hall used by the Roman army. The wall survived the eruption of nearby Mt. Vesuvius, which destroyed the city nearly 2,000 years ago, and was unearthed in 1915. It later remained intact after taking a direct hit from an Allied bomb during World War II, only to collapse in 2010 during heavy rains. Now researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology are designing and building a robot they hope can reassemble the fresco’s fragments, Scientific American reports. The robot will use computer vision to scan the pieces and machine learning to figure out where each belongs. It will also receive guidance from human archaeologists and art historians. The final design is still a work in progress, but the robot will have a torso and arms and likely will be mounted to a slider on a workbench. The ’bot also will be fitted with soft robotic hands covered with smart gloves embedded with tactile, kinesthetic, and position sensors so that it can gently handle the fragile fragments. Since researchers know what the fresco once looked like, the restoration—set to start this spring or summer—will be a good test of the robot’s puzzle-solving capabilities. If successful, the robot will be tasked with reconstructing two mystery frescos from their rubble. But according to Arianna Traviglia, the principal investigator, recreating art with no clue about what it looked like may prove beyond the capacity of artificial intelligence. – T. G.
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Neuroscience
Verbal Dexterity
Research has suggested that some linguistic abilities, including understanding word meanings, are controlled by the same areas of the brain that control fine motor skills. A 2019 study conducted by researchers at several French and Swedish universities, for instance, showed that people who were proficient in the use of tools were better at understanding the nuances of Swedish syntax. The team’s latest study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show for the first time that people involved in tool-handling and syntax exercises rely on the same region of the brain, the basal ganglia, Science Daily reports. Researchers made the discovery by scanning participants’ brains while they underwent training to perform a task using small pliers, and then practiced syntax exercises in French. Participants performed a syntactic comprehension exercise before and after 30 minutes of motor training with the pliers. The motor training correlated with better syntactic comprehension of the exercises, while training to improve their linguistic abilities helped participants do better in the tool exercises. The findings, the researchers say, may give therapists new ways to help patients recover lost language skills. – T. G.
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Computational Modeling
Movie Mythbusters
In the Marvel Studios hit Avengers: Infinity War, the archvillain Thanos wears a metal gauntlet powered by six Infinity Stones, which allows him to twist the fabric of the universe—a power he uses to kill half of all creatures with a snap of his fingers. After Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Georgia Tech, watched the film with his students, they debated whether metal-covered fingers could, in fact, snap. To settle the question, students used high-speed cameras and force sensors to measure the speed and acceleration of snapping fingers. A snap, they discovered, is a human superpower, occurring in a mere seven milliseconds—or more than 20 times faster than the blink of an eye. They then analyzed the snaps of bare fingers and fingers covered in several different materials, including a rubber glove. To approximate Thanos’s metal glove, they used thimbles to cover the tips of the middle finger and thumb. Snaps, they determined, require a “Goldilocks zone” of friction—too little friction won’t load enough energy into arm and finger tendons to produce a snap, while too much friction causes most of the stored energy to dissipate as heat rather than sound. Spoiler alert: the rubber glove caused too much friction, the thimbles not enough. In short, Thanos’s metal-covered digits could clank and make noise… but not snap and cause the Blip. – T. G.
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Sustainable Buildings
Pots and Spans
Construction materials account for some 11 percent of global carbon emissions, which is why the industry has sought such greener alternatives as biomaterials made from algae, mycelium fungus, and coffee husks. But one cheap, light, sturdy, and sustainable substance is generating a lot of buzz lately, according to Fast Company: hemp. Yep, Cannabis sativa, the same species known as pot, weed, and reefer if the plant contains more than 0.3 percent concentrations of THC, the chemical that gets marijuana users high. Hemp can grow to 13 feet in just a few months and be cultivated within 90 to 120 days—100 times faster than oak. Lighter and cheaper than wood, it also bests trees at capturing carbon. France recently cut the ribbon on its first public building made from hemp. The 4,000-square-foot sports center outside Paris has walls made from blocks of hempcrete, a mixture of hemp, lime, and water. The blocks are clad with cement-fiber panels. Hempcrete has excellent thermal and acoustic properties and is resistant to fire but weighs about an eighth as much as regular concrete. Though more expensive than concrete, hempcrete’s insulating properties should cut energy bills and mitigate the extra construction costs. The United States, which legalized the growing of industrial hemp in 2018, boasts many hemp start-ups. HempWood in Kentucky, for instance, makes lumber, flooring, and furniture; its products resemble traditional hardwood but are 20 percent stronger than hickory. Even so, experts say over-regulation still prevents the market for hemp-based building materials from reaching its full potential highs. – T. G.
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Synthetic Biology
Hang Tight
Mussels can stick to a variety of surfaces underwater because of a particularly adhesive chemical they secrete called mussel foot protein (Mfp). Engineers have tried for years to devise glues with similar properties, but some weren’t as sticky while others didn’t work well in water or couldn’t be used for medical applications. Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis recently engineered bacteria to produce a biocompatible adhesive hydrogel that’s strong, as sticky as Mfp, and functional underwater, according to ScienceDaily. The work, which builds on an earlier synthetic biology breakthrough that yielded a strain of non-underwater Mfp-producing bacteria, is being led by Fuzhong Zhang, a professor of energy, environmental, and chemical engineering. The new hydrogel uses synthetic spider-silk proteins that researchers have been producing in the lab from synthetic bioengineered microbes. The silk-amyloid hybrid protein is stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar. To prepare the hydrogel, the researchers integrated the synthetic silk protein with the synthetic Mfp, then synthesized a tri-hybrid protein that combines Mfp’s adhesiveness with silk’s strength. Because the gel is denser than water, it works well underwater. It’s also safe to use in vivo and is biodegradable, so it could be useful for repairing tissue. – T. G.
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Invasive Species
Piscine Predator
Mosquitofish, native in much of North America, were introduced by scientists 100 years ago to control malaria-spreading mosquitoes. But absent their natural predator, the largemouth bass, the import thrived and soon proved deadly to native fish and tadpoles on whose tails they chomped. In 2000, the New York Times reports, conservationists classified the mosquitofish as one of the world’s most invasive species. Efforts to control them have so far proven ineffective or too costly. But a new study in Australia may have found a solution: a robot largemouth bass. The researchers put six mosquitofish and six tadpoles into a tank with the bass ’bot, then repeated the experiment a dozen times over several weeks. Each time a mosquitofish came close to a tadpole, the robot would lunge toward it. The mosquitofish were so stressed by the robot that the males’ sperm counts dropped while the females produced lighter eggs. As one researcher told the Times: “It was not only that they were scared. But they also got unhealthy.” The researchers say that robotic bass won’t be released into the wild anytime soon, but the proof of concept should lead to more research. As the Terminator bass might vow: “I’ll be back.” – T. G.
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Air Pollution
Bubbly Insights
Water surfaces can harbor contaminants, from microlayers of oil in the ocean to microbes that coat reaction tanks of wastewater treatment plants. Bubbles can pick up and spread those pollutants into the atmosphere upon bursting. In a new study, engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) released single bubbles into columns of water layered with various oils. They used high-speed cameras to film the interplay between bubble surfaces and contaminated water as well as what happens when bursting bubbles release aerosolized organic compounds into the air. The UIUC team found that the thinner the layer of surface oil, the more likely that a popping bubble will release a jet of contaminants—and that up to 80 percent of each minuscule drop of burst may consist of pollutants. The research will be used to improve models that predict how contaminants spread through the air after disasters such as oil spills and to help climate scientists refine contaminant data used in climate modeling. Meanwhile, researchers at Australia’s University of Melbourne studied the properties of soap bubbles to devise an algorithm for software used to design open-pit mines. These mines consist of a series of nested pits, called pushbacks, but the industry is constantly looking for ways to improve their design to better meet operational needs and make them more cost-effective. The Bubble Pit software’s mathematical model could revolutionize the design of pushbacks and make them more efficient by mimicking the geometric properties of masses of soap bubbles. – T. G.
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