Breakthroughs and trends in the world of technology
Geoscience
Deep Secrets
According to a recent climate report, warming air temperatures will continue to shrink Greenland’s surface ice. The meltwater eventually will seep through the ice and drain into the sea, lubricating the flow of the ice sheet above. This is no new phenomenon. There have been several eras over the past 800,000 years when Northern Europe was covered in thick ice. Rising temperatures caused the ice sheets to retreat, carving deep “tunnel valleys” on land that now lies below the muddy bottom of the North Sea, the BBC reports. Scientists have long wanted to see these buried channels, which could hold clues as to how Greenland’s ice sheets will decay. Now they can—in superfine, 3D detail—thanks to new seismic survey technology that the oil and gas industry uses to image and assess whether seabed sediments are strong enough to support drilling infrastructure. The technology reveals a complex network of incisions and deposits that were made by rivers of meltwater as well as the movement of the surface ice. The images also provide a snapshot of what Greenland might look like several hundred years hence. – Thomas K. Grose
© James Kirkham/British Antarctic Survey
Emissions Control
Pastoral Privy
To methane-laden burps and flatulence add another environmental hazard generated by cows: urine. With a billion bovines worldwide, each producing tens of liters per day, that’s a lot of wastewater. In barns, the urine mixes with feces, forming a slurry that releases ammonia, an air pollutant. In fields, cow urine is not only a source of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, but also can leach into groundwater. Estimates suggest that capturing 80 percent of cow urine could cut ammonia emissions in half. But how? Researchers led by Lindsay Matthews, an animal behaviorist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, devised an unusual solution. They built an outdoor cow potty, dubbed a MooLoo, and trained nearly a dozen animals to use it, according to Science News. The small, fenced-in latrine has artificial turf flooring that allows urine to drain into a tank. Initially, individual cows were penned in and given a treat when they peed. Next, the cattle were placed in a hallway leading to the toilet. Those that skipped to the loo received a sweet reward; hall defilers got spritzed with water. After ten days, 11 of 16 cows were fully potty trained. Matthews thinks that the others are “probably trainable, too,” but the pilot project ran out of time. Next, he is developing an automated MooLoo system—milking the invention for all it’s worth. – T. G.
© FBN (CC BY-SA)
Sustainable Design
Power Walk
The goal of harvesting energy from footsteps just took an elegant turn. Swiss researchers seeking to turn wooden floors into electrical generators initially were stymied because the material is poor at attracting or losing electrons. So they devised a way to fabricate a nanogenerator by layering wood and electrodes, United Press International reports. The top layer of wood is coated with a silicone that gains electrons when contacted; the other layer contains nanocrystals that easily shed electrons. After many tests, the team found that spruce—an inexpensive wood commonly used in European construction—best served as a scaffold for the coatings, generating eighty times more electricity than natural wood. A prototype about the size of a sheet of paper was able to power a light bulb. The researchers, who hail from ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, say the technology is easily scalable to an industrial level. The team now is improving the method so that wood nanogenerators might one day provide green energy in smart buildings. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Chemical Engineering
Picture Perfect
Many of the world’s renowned paintings risk degradation due to factors such as sunlight, moisture, and volatile organic compounds. Even works by Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Vincent van Gogh are prey to discoloration, flaking, and fading. Current preservation techniques involve coating artwork with commercial polymers. The downside: once applied, the coatings cannot be removed. Chemical engineers at Greece’s University of Patras have developed a promising alternative: shielding paintings with a veil of graphene, reports the Ars Technica website. Clear, strong, and hydrophobic, graphene’s single-layer lattice of carbon atoms also absorbs UV light. Moreover, though graphene easily adheres to surfaces, it can be removed without damaging the art. The Patras team tested their coating on three paintings. Two were partly covered in graphene and then exposed to hours of light for sixteen weeks. After enduring this simulated aging process, the graphene-protected portions of the works showed no signs of cracks or wrinkles. The third piece demonstrated that the graphene could be removed without damage using a soft rubber eraser. Since the treatment may be inappropriate for paintings with very rough surfaces or embossed patterns, the researchers also are developing a way to deposit graphene on framing glass. – T. G.
© University of Patras
3D Printing
Fold Your Breath
Many seriously ill COVID-19 patients must be put on ventilators if their oxygen levels fall critically low. During the height of the pandemic, hospitals ran short of these breathing machines, prompting researchers to quickly come up with novel substitutions. While ventilator supplies are less of a problem now, there’s still a need for compact, portable versions that can be used in developing countries, rural areas, and long-term care facilities. Woo Soo Kim, an associate professor of mechatronic systems engineering at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, and his team have patented just such a device. Their largely 3D-printed system is made from inexpensive, lightweight parts and could be produced for $200, Kim reckons—far less than the $2,000 that portable ventilators currently cost. A key part of the technology derives from origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. Instead of a simple bag-valve mask, Kim’s ventilator uses several interlocking folding plates to create a 3D-printed tube that is smaller than the equivalent component in a conventional ventilator but has more mechanical strength. Kim’s team has partnered with Pantheon Design, a Vancouver ventilator manufacturer, and Tinkerine, a 3D printing company, to commercialize the invention. – Pierre Home Douglas
© Hans Goksoyr/Simon Fraser University
Data Mining
Winning Strategy
The term “hot streak” is usually associated with athletes, sports teams, and gamblers. But research by Dashun Wang, a management professor at Northwestern University, suggests that 90 percent of us experience at least one hot streak in our careers, according to the Guardian. Wang’s latest investigation used artificial intelligence to figure out what typically precedes runs of critical success. Her team first looked at the auction prices of 2,128 artists’ works, film reviews for 4,337 directors, and total citations for the research papers of 20,040 scientists. Next, the researchers applied an AI system to analyze the diversity of their subjects’ work at various points in their careers. The algorithm was trained, for instance, to look at such elements as brushstrokes, shapes, and objects to recognize different styles of art. Movie directors’ works were analyzed for plots and casts, while scientists’ were examined for diverse research topics. Wang and her team discovered that hot streaks are usually preceded by experimental phases, where the subjects’ works were quite diverse. Once they began achieving success, however, most individuals kept to a narrower approach, hoping to exploit the works that ignited their streak. The upshot seems to be that when you’re hot, you’re hot; when you’re not, keep experimenting. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Assistive Technology
Soft Touch
Prosthetics have advanced rapidly in recent years. As a result, people with upper-limb amputations often can be fitted with an artificial arm that provides a fair amount of dexterity. Lacking a sense of touch, however, users must watch what their prosthetic hand is doing and can struggle to make corrections if they apply too much or too little force. A first-of-its-kind bionic arm developed by an international team of biomedical engineers could enable wearers to function like someone without an amputation, according to findings published in Science Robotics. The arm, made from off-the-shelf components, was tested on two patients who had undergone a procedure to establish a neural-machine interface by reconnecting amputated nerves to remaining skin and muscles. Both were able to send nerve impulses from their brains to the device when they wanted to move it, and the nerves likewise could send tactile signals back to the brain. “With the new bionic limb, people behaved like they had a natural hand,” explains Paul Marasco, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Cleveland Clinic, which is leading the effort. The researchers determined that the trial participants’ brains and behavioral strategies matched those of nonamputees, enabling quick adjustments in grasp. If the results hold up in larger studies, the bionic arm could be a game changer for amputees. – T. G.
© Cleveland Clinic
Food Safety
Spoiler Alert
Infrared (IR) spectrometers can be tuned like a radio to pick up the signatures of materials that are otherwise invisible. But the devices have historically been large and expensive, making them impractical for use outside laboratories. Until now. An international team of researchers led by electrical engineers at the University of Melbourne has invented an infrared light-emitting diode (LED) that can be tuned to detect the IR signatures of many materials. The LED is so small and inexpensive that it could be fitted into a smart device and placed inside a refrigerator, where it could quickly sniff out gases released by bacteria as meat turns bad. To make the LED, the team affixed a thin layer of black phosphorus crystals to a flexible, plastic-like substrate. When the substrate is bent in different ways it causes the crystals to emit light of different wavelengths, essentially becoming a tunable infrared LED detector. The LED could also be attached to small drones and flown over buildings, disaster areas, and war zones, or into mines, alerting first responders, soldiers, and miners to toxic gases that may await them. – T. G.
© Getty Images
Biomimicry
Tail Gait
Geckos can glide between rain forest trees gracefully; their landings often are anything but. Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ardian Jusufi, an associate professor at Germany’s Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems, have studied the lizards for fifteen years and seen lots of headfirst crashes. Video analyses show how the creatures use their tails to stick the landing and emerge unscathed. While their padded hind feet and clawed toes dig into the tree’s bark, the tail presses against the tree to prevent a backwards tumble. The researchers first used a math model to confirm what they were seeing was physically possible. They then built a gecko-inspired soft robot with Velcro on its feet and a tail designed to press downward when its head and front feet crashed into a wall. They also constructed a tailless robot. The tailed robot successfully landed on a vertical surface 55 percent of the time, versus just 15 percent for the tailless version. The researchers say their finding could help engineers design gecko-like tails to stabilize drones or other flying robots alighting on vertical surfaces. – T. G.
© Peter Braem
Community Modeling
All That Flitters…
For the past three decades, school groups and other citizen scientists have been tracking butterflies across the Midwest. The result: more information about butterflies than almost any other type of insect—and a window on biodiversity trends. Elise Zipkin, a quantitative ecologist at Michigan State University, and her team of academic and government researchers are developing novel methods to tap those wellsprings and determine why many bug populations are declining. Reasons for this so-called insect apocalypse include pesticides and urbanization, but Zipkin says the effect of climate change remains a mystery. Drawing on data-integration techniques and community modeling, a way of linking models of individual species to better understand populations for which there are scant data, her team analyzed monarch butterfly populations and found strong correlations with springtime temperatures and rainfall as well as summer breeding ranges. The researchers now are extending their modeling to hundreds of butterfly species. “If we can understand factors affecting butterflies generally,” Zipkin says, “we can get insight into what may be happening to other insect taxonomic groups.” – T. G.
© Getty Images
Audio Engineering
Celestial Music
Rock stars are sometimes inspired by real stars—or at least their remnants. Back in the ’90s, the British group Oasis sang about a champagne supernova (whatever that is). Some years later, Muse, another UK band, tuned in to a supermassive black hole. Now, CNET reports, we can hear the heavens ring for real. The score begins with a recent image that NASA researchers created of the Tycho supernova remnant—named for 16th-century Dutch astronomer Tycho Brahe, who thought he’d found a new star in the constellation Cassiopeia. It actually was the spectacularly bright light of a dying star. Along with imaging, the NASA team used a technology called sonification to convert the dead star’s image into sound. It’s part of an ongoing project to make sound models from various cosmic entities, including nebulae and galaxies. Using data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the sonification process starts at the middle of the image and moves outward. Notes from highs to lows are assigned to different colors on the spectrum: reds emit the bass notes; blues and violets the trebles. To give a lusher sound, stars that are visible in the background of the image are plucked like strings of a harp. The Tycho supernova is more like a synthesizer-heavy opening section for a ’70s progressive rock anthem, just before the guitars and drum kick in, than Brit pop. In other words, it sounds quite spacey. – T. G.
© Nasa/Chandra x-ray
Space Exploration
Lunar Digs
One of NASA’s goals in establishing a permanently manned moon base is to mine valuable metals and minerals. If, as hypothesized, the moon and Earth were once part of a common planet, then they should be composed of similar elements, such as rare earth metals used in smartphones and medical devices as well as titanium, gold, and platinum. The prospects recently prompted a $500,000 NASA award to University of Arizona engineers working on autonomous robots that could be programmed to team up on mining, excavation, and building tasks. The researchers are adapting a neuromorphic learning-architecture technique they’ve developed that will enable the robots to improve their ability to collaborate over time. The plan is to build and train the robots here on Earth in preparation for future deployment on the moon, where they eventually will work, with no need of direction from humans, to mine materials and build simple structures. Swarms of worker-bee bots could tackle the dirty, boring, and dangerous chores, freeing astronauts to focus on mission-critical work. – T. G.
© Chris Richards/University of Arizona
Computer Engineering
Thought Processor
All computers are hampered by an unwanted byproduct of their architecture called the von Neumann bottleneck. Because the memory that holds data and programs is physically separated from the processor, slowdowns occur as information is shunted between them. A large international team of electrical and computer engineers led by Texas A&M University has invented a device to break the bottleneck. It uses organic molecules that somewhat mimic how the human brain can instantly reconfigure itself by rewiring connections between nerve cells. The molecular device doesn’t change its physical connections. It can, however, reprogram its logic by simply changing applied voltages and, like nerve cells, the device can store information for future retrieval and processing. The compound the researchers used has a central iron atom bound to three organic molecules called ligands. When a negative voltage is applied, the molecular device can switch back and forth from insulator to conductor. To describe the complex current-voltage profile of the device mathematically, the team eschewed basic physics-based equations in favor of a decision-tree algorithm that uses “if-then-else” statements, as is common in digital games. As a result, the device can be reprogrammed or reconfigured in an instant merely by changing the voltage pulse. The eventual result could be a more powerful, speedier, next-generation processor that needs much less energy to run. – T. G.
© TAMU