Breakthroughs and trends in the world of technology
Nautical Engineering
Racers’ Edge
The towering AC-72 catamarans vying for the America’s Cup last month were as much a marvel of technology as of tactics. Essentially flying wings, these “world’s fastest boats” streaked across San Francisco Bay at speeds topping 40 m.p.h. – twice wind speed – with a boost from aeronautical, materials, and computer engineering. The 131-foot-tall, carbon-fiber-and-composite hinged sail operates like a vertical aircraft wing, with adjustable flaps on the trailing edge to increase forward lift and nimbleness. L-shaped, retractable hydrofoils below each hull lift the boat off the water; they are controlled by computerized systems, as are the wing-like rudder elevators that control pitch. Oracle Team USA, the defending champion, is outfitted with more than 300 sensors that transmit a gigabyte a day of performance data to a server in the hull, allowing the 11-person crew to monitor everything from strain on the mast to how much to trim the wingsail – which is captured on video and streaming still images. A chase boat crunches the numbers while the boat is sailing. New safety equipment – required after the Swedish team’s AC-72 capsized during a practice in May, drowning its seasoned Olympic champion strategist – also reflects engineering’s nautical influence. Tweaking the technology – and a new strategist – helped the U.S. crew rally from an 8-1 deficit to clinch yachting’s venerable Cup in a historic winner-take-all final against New Zealand. – Mary Lord
Image Courtesy of © ACEA/¨Photo Gilles Martin-Raget © ACEA/¨Photo Abner Kingman
Transportation Technology
Might Rail
California recently made a $7.7 billion down payment on a planned $66 billion high-speed train network linking Los Angeles and San Francisco that will whisk passengers along at 220 mph. But Elon Musk, the South Africa-born physicist and businessman behind electric sports carmaker Tesla Motors and Space X, the commercial spacecraft venture, says he’s got a better, cheaper idea. Hyperloop is a train that would ride inside an elevated vacuum tube at speeds of up to 760 mph, cutting the L.A.-S.F. commute to 35 minutes. Musk, who says the system could be built for just $6 billion, claims he’ll build a working prototype once he finds the time. Vac-trains were first suggested by rocket pioneer Robert Goddard more than a century ago. Florida-based ET3 has been promoting a similar technology for several years, claiming a 4,000 mph evacuated tube train could transport passengers between New York and Beijing in two hours. Meanwhile, SkyTran, which has been working with NASA since 2009 to develop an elevated magnetic levitation train for cities, is trying to raise $50 million to build a proof-of-concept four-mile link in Tel Aviv. All aboard! – Thomas K. Grose
Image Courtesy of © Tesla
Propulsion Systems
Flights of Fancy
Jetpacks have been floating around since the 1950s. They crop up in Jetsons cartoons and the James Bond movie Thunderball. Prototypes have even emerged from Thiokol, Bell Aerosystems, and other company labs. All, however, were expensive, impractical gizmos that barely could stay aloft for 30 seconds. New Zealand’s Martin Aircraft Co. says it has developed a practical jetpack that could go on sale next year. The latest working prototype, its 12th, features a 200-horsepower, two-stroke V-4 gasoline engine that produces enough thrust from two fans to lift the pilot in a vertical takeoff and fly for up to 30 minutes. It has a top speed of 30 knots and a range of 19 miles, and it can reach a height of nearly 3,300 feet. First responders, the military, industry, and thrill-seekers have all expressed an interest. Martin claims its jetpack is easy to fly in “reasonable weather conditions” and has an automated hover function. It also has a built-in parachute — just in case. – TG
Image Courtesy of © Martin Aircraft
Remote Detection
Liquid Assets
Radar Technologies International (RTI), a French-American company that uses radar and optical satellite imagery to scout for natural resources, is unaccustomed to making global news. Yet that’s what happened last month when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced that its WATEX technology had uncovered five aquifers in Kenya’s parched northern Turkana County that hold, at a minimum, 250 billion cubic meters of water. As British broadcaster ITV noted, you’d have to empty Loch Ness, Scotland’s deepest and most famous lake, 25 times over to fill those aquifers. WATEX blends technologies ranging from space-based remote sensing to those used in oil exploration, including seismic information and remote sensing, to detect and model aquifers both shallow and deep. RTI says its system can spot water deposits from 40 to 4,000 meters underground, and ensure drilling accuracy rates of 75 to 95 percent. Turkana County, home mainly to impoverished nomadic herders, was seared by a drought last year. Overall, Kenya is home to 41 million people, 17 million of whom lack steady access to potable water. One UNESCO scientist told ITV that finding so much underground water could be a “game changer” for that thirsty country. – TG
Image Courtesy of © NASA and Radar Technologies International
Biomimicry
Digital Vision
Despite vast improvements, digital cameras remain far less efficient than the human retina at capturing images. The eye’s neurons only react when something changes — for example, when a light dims or brightens. Moreover, they have different degrees of sensitivity, so none responds the same way to incoming data. Engineers at Swiss company IniLabs, a spinoff of the University of Zurich’s Neuroinformatics Institute, have devised a camera that mimics the human retina and needs much less memory, energy, and computational power than conventional vision sensors. Typically, digital cameras record images in a series of frames, which means storing and processing lots of redundant data. The company’s Dynamic Vision Sensor transmits local pixel-level changes caused by movement, but only as they occur. This allows for microsecond resolution that requires dramatically less power and computational muscle. Moreover, each pixel adjusts at its own exposure, so the camera can better handle uneven lighting. IniLabs expects the DVS has a variety of potential uses, including ambient sensing, automated manufacturing, microscopy, and motion analysis. – TG
Image Courtesy of © IniLabs & Thinkstock
Manufacturing
Treasure in Trash
AUSTRALIA: “Green steelmaking” is a nickname given to an innovative polymer-injection technology that replaces coking coal with discarded rubber tires in furnaces at superhigh temperatures. With an estimated 1.2 billion tires dumped worldwide each year, the environmental benefits could be enormous. Along with reducing carbon emissions and waste, the technique – which already is being used commercially in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as in Bangkok, Thailand – could cost 10 percent less than conventional methods. “It’s all about green materials,” explains its inventor, Veena Sahajwalla, an acclaimed engineering professor and head of the Center for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The university, which handled commercialization of her invention, foresees much wider use in coming years. Meanwhile, the U.S.-educated Sahajwalla, one of a handful of prominent women engineering educators, is perfecting her latest invention: fueling furnaces with glass and plastic from junked cars to produce useful alloys. – Chris Pritchard
Image Courtesy of © University of New South Wales
Environmental Design
What a Dump!
A new building at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal’s 30th Street Pier looks like a modern museum – not surprising since architect Annabelle Selldorf is acclaimed for designing museums and galleries. But this gleaming edifice is a $94 million, state-of-the-art recycling facility scheduled to start this month. The operator, Sims Metal Management, invested $46 million into the project, with New York City paying the balance. All refuse will be shipped to the site via barges, replacing 150,000 annual truck trips, or 260,000 vehicle miles, thus easing road congestion. The enormous “tipping building,” where sanitation workers separate tons of plastic, glass, and metals for recycling, can accommodate more materials than the two types of plastic the old plant could handle. The Sims facility, which also has a green roof and can generate renewable energy, is vital to New York’s Recycle Everything campaign. The goal: double the amount of municipal waste that gets recycled to 30 percent by 2017. The city’s schools also have developed a curriculum to teach kids the theories behind recycling that includes a field trip to the plant. – TG
Image Courtesy of © Selldorf Architects
Neuroscience
Mind Reader
On August 12, University of Washington computer science professor Rajesh Rao watched a basic video game on his office computer. On his head was a cap linked to an electroencephalography machine, which records brain signals. Without moving his hand, Rao imagined his right index finger hitting the keyboard’s space bar to “fire” a cannon. Across campus, Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor of psychology, sat in his office wearing a swimming cap outfitted with a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil, a device that can stimulate part of the brain. Next to his right hand was a keyboard. Immediately after Rao thought about tapping the space bar, Stocco’s right index finger moved involuntarily to his keyboard. The pair, positing that the EEG relayed Rao’s thought to Stucco’s coil via the Internet, believe this to be the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface. They say a paper is forthcoming. Miguel Nicolelis, a Duke University neuroscientist who has demonstrated brain-to-brain signals in rats, is not impressed. He told CNN that any electrical stimulation would have triggered Stocco’s trigger finger. An actual brain-to-brain interface would have involved Stocco choosing to accept the command and sending a message back to Rao. Mind over matter? The jury’s still out. – TG
Image Courtesy of © University of Washington
Laser Optics
Bomb Squad
Buried roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices as the military calls them, have killed more American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other kind of weapon. The Pentagon has spent billions trying to defend troops from IEDs with some success. Still, IEDs cause 61 percent of American deaths and injuries. A new, vehicle-mounted device developed by defense contractor Raytheon and based on technology originally conceived at Britain’s Loughborough University may further reduce IED casualties. It uses a laser optical processing system that Raytheon says can detect, confirm, and diagnose an IED’s capability from a safe distance, and even sniff out makeshift bombs with little, or even no, metal components. Moreover, the device has a very low false-alarm rate. Raytheon aptly calls the technology Soteria, after the Greek goddess of safety. – TG
Image Courtesy of © Raytheon
Atomic Clocks
Precise Moment
Traditional mechanical clocks used a swinging pendulum to tick off seconds. Today’s most accurate timekeepers – atomic clocks – keep track of highly constant oscillations within atoms. Today’s models, which use microwaves to agitate cesium atoms, lose a second once every 100 million years. Such precision is necessary for GPS tracking and to keep the Internet synchronized, among other things. Atomic clocks soon may become three times more precise. Scientists at the Paris Observatory have developed an optical lattice atomic clock that uses lasers to cause strontium atoms to oscillate, a faster process that would lose a second just once every 300 million years. Atomic clocks also are getting smaller. Researchers at DARPA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed the first chip scale atomic Clock (CSAC) in 2004. Building upon that work, Massachusetts-based Symmetricom began selling commercial versions in 2011. The company’s latest CSAC weighs a mere 35 grams and needs only 120 microwatts of power. Applications range from securing military radio frequencies to keeping drones aloft. NIST now is developing an even tinier CSAC, no bigger than a grain of rice. – TG
Image Courtesy of © Hoptroff & Symmetricom
Electric Vehicles
New Vroom
Will racing fans throng to watch electric cars streak soundlessly around city streets from Berlin to Bangkok? The world will find out when the Formula E championship debuts next September. Embraced by the motor sport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, as a way to make electric vehicles (EVs) more exciting, 10 inaugural teams will race for 20 to 25 minutes and stop to change cars just before the batteries die. The first sleek high-performance contender was unveiled last month at the Frankfurt Motor Show. Designed and built by Spark Racing Technology and Renault, the SRT_01E resembles its cool Formula 1 cousins. Under the hood, however, lies an all-electric, 200-kilowatt/270-horsepower motor and gearbox engineered by McLaren Electronics Systems that can achieve 140 mph. The racer, which rests on a monocoque, carbon-fiber, and aluminum chassis, weighs the mandatory 1,793 pounds, including 441 pounds of lithium-ion batteries. One required feature still under development: an artificial tone to keep mechanics safe when EV racers enter the pits. Gentlemen, unplug your engines. – TG
Image Courtesy of © Formula E Holdings