2009-10-30

Xerox Printable Electronics

clipped from hackaday.com

Xerox ink will print circuits

xerox-silver-bullet-ink

Xerox has announced a breakthrough in printable circuits. They’ve developed a conductive ink called “silver bullet” that can be printed on many different types of substrate to create circuits. The key part of the new ink is its lower melting point. Plastic film substrate melts at 150 degrees Celsius but the ink is liquid when ten degrees cooler to avoid damaging the film. This begs the question: how do you then solder components to the circuit?

clipped from www.xerox.com
Xerox
Xerox Scientists Develop "Silver Bullet" Needed to Replace Silicon Circuits with Low-Cost, Durable Plastic


Integrated circuits are made up of three components - a semiconductor, a conductor and a dielectric element - and currently are manufactured in costly silicon chip fabricating factories. By creating a breakthrough silver ink to print the conductor, Xerox has developed all three of the materials necessary for printing plastic circuits.

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Sources:
  1. Xerox ink will print circuits - Hack a Day
  2. Xerox Scientists Develop "Silver Bullet" Needed to Replace Silicon Circuits with Low-Cost, Durable Plastic
Related:
  1. Xerox's Fabric-Printable Circuitry Coming to Production, Heralds Electronic Clothing | Popular Science
  2. Xerox hopes to print computing smarts on fabric, plastic | Deep Tech - CNET News
  3. Xerox make flexible electronic circuits a reality with new silver ink – Computer Chips & Hardware Technology | Geek.com
  4. Xerox Develops Ink To Print Circuits On Nearly Anything - Xerox printable circuits - Gizmodo
  5. Xerox develops silver ink for wearable or throwaway electronics | VentureBeat
  6. Xerox Claims Printable Electronics Breakthrough - Reviews by PC Magazine
  7. Xerox Develops Silver Ink for Cheap Printable Electronics
  8. Xerox Scientists Develop Silver Bullet Needed to Replace Silicon Circuits with Low-Cost, Durable Plastic | Reuters
  9. Xerox Document Management, Color Printers, Copiers, Business Consulting Services

2009-10-29

Muscle-Computer Interface

clipped from www.livescience.com

The Future of Video Game Input: Muscle Sensors


Electromyography (EMG) sensors can decode muscle signals from the skin's surface as a person performs certain gestures. Researchers attached such sensors to their forearms, and built a gesture recognition library by monitoring muscle signals related to each gesture. The project emerged as a collaborative effort between Microsoft, University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Toronto in Canada.

clipped from www.livescience.com
A muscle computer interface allows interaction with a computer without touching an keyboard, mouse or other input device. In tests, a \
clipped from www.youtube.com

UIST'09: Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces

Presented at UIST (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology) http://www.acm.org/uist/

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Technology Review - Published By MIT
Muscle-Bound Computer Interface

Forearm electrodes could enable new forms of hands-free computer interaction.

The new muscle-sensing project is "going after healthy consumers who want richer input modalities," says Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft. As a result, he and his colleagues had to come up with a system that was inexpensive and unobtrusive and that reliably sensed a range of gestures.

Muscle-Computer Interfaces

Muscle-computer interfaces directly sense and decode human muscular activity rather than relying
on physical actuation or perceptible user actions. Using a wireless EMG armband, we have shown
relatively high accuracies decoding simple finger gestures both when the arm is rested on a surface,
but also when the gestures are performed in free space.
More info...

Geeks play Guitar Hero without guitars

guitar_hero_muscle_01

The muscle computer interface does away with all that unnecessary button bashing


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Sources:
  1. The Future of Video Game Input: Muscle Sensors | LiveScience
  2. YouTube - UIST'09: Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces
  3. Technology Review: Muscle-Bound Computer Interface
  4. Desney Tan - Projects
  5. Geeks play Guitar Hero without guitars • Register Hardware
Related:
  1. Desney Tan - Professional Homepage

2009-10-28

Bridgestone Color E-Paper

Tech-On!


Bridgestone Corp announced an electronic paper (e-paper) device based on its "Quick-response Liquid Powder" Oct 26, 2009.


The company expects that the device will be used for browsing electronic books and electronic data. It will be tested with the assistance system for liaison officers at Kansai Urban Banking Corp from the spring of 2010.

Bridgestone's new e-paper device

Bridgestone's new e-paper device

Full-colour, flexible e-Paper is finally here

According to ePaperCentral, “unlike other e-paper devices like the Kindle and Sony’s 505/700, the Bridgestone model does not use E Ink based technologies. Instead, it uses a powerful technology built in house that could completely revolutionize e-paper called QR-LPD.”

Bridgestone QR-LPD Color E-Paper Demonstration

Bridgestone Color E-Paper Featured on a Japanese Show


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EinkCentral
Bridgestone Color E-paper

The Technology

The technology behind the screen itself is based on Bridgestone’s own QR-LPD electronic powder, which provides the quick rendering of black and white images that are as clear and paper-like as E Ink’s technology, and uses about the same battery life. Color is provided by a series of filters that go over each individual pixel that create the impression of a high definition, true color display.

The touch screen surface is provided by a WACOM tablet, much like the touch screen surface used in Sony’s PRS 700 and the IRex Iliad. As you can see in the example videos, the touch screen updates really quickly, but the actual full display refresh can be very slow. Depending on the model and the image displayed, the full screen refresh can be anywhere from .8 seconds to a full 15 seconds.


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Sources:
  1. [FPDI] Bridgestone Unveils 'World's 1st' Flexible E-paper Device -- Tech-On!
  2. Full-colour, flexible e-Paper is finally here | Eyeblaster Creative Zone - Blog
  3. Bridgestone Debuts Color E-Paper Display - Epaper Central
Related:
  1. Tire maker Bridgestone shows world’s first flexible e-book reader
  2. Bridgestone announces flexible touchscreen color e-reader
  3. Bridgestone Announces Flexible Touchscreen E-Paper Display - Gadget.Com – Gadget.com

2009-10-27

A Bacterial Ratchet Motor

clipped from medgadget.com

Scientists Enslave Bacteria to Power Tiny Microsized Motor


Italian scientists from the University of Rome managed to harness free floating E. coli bacteria to turn a tiny crankshaft. Although potential uses for such a tiny and unusual motor drive are not yet clear, no doubt interesting applications in medicine and life sciences should present themselves over time.

Luca Angelani
Micromotors pushed by biological entities constitute a fascinating way to
convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. We show
that a properly designed asymmetric object can be spontaneously set into the
desired motion when immersed in a chaotic bacterial bath.


Self-starting micromotors in a bacterial bath

Micromotors pushed by biological entities, constitute a fascinating way to convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. We show that a properly designed asymmetric object can be spontaneously set into the desired motion when immersed in a chaotic bacterial bath. [more]

A Bacterial Ratchet Motor

A nano-fabricated asymmetric gear (48 μm external diameter, 10 μm thickness)
rotates clockwise at 1 rpm when immersed in an active bath of motile
E.coli
cells, visible in the background.

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Sources:
  1. Scientists Enslave Bacteria to Power Tiny Microsized Motor
  2. Luca Angelani - Home
  3. Roberto Di Leonardo - Home
  4. RDL - Tube
Related:
  1. Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Self-Propelling Bacteria Harnessed to Turn Gears
  2. Bacteria Harnessed To Power Micro-Motor | Singularity Hub
  3. [0812.2375] Self-Starting Micromotors in a Bacterial Bath
  4. [0910.2899] A bacterial ratchet motor
  5. Miss Atomic Bomb: Letting bacteria work for you
  6. Random motion of bacteria could drive micromotors - physicsworld.com
  7. Column: The crucible

2009-10-26

Digital Rosetta Stone

clipped from www.forbes.com

Storage for the Millennium

image

If people can read this story a millennium from now, they may have Tadahiro Kuroda to thank. Kuroda, an electrical engineering professor at Keio University in Japan, has invented what he calls a "Digital Rosetta Stone," a wireless memory chip sealed in silicon that he says can store data for 1,000 years.

Kuroda’s Rosetta stone will be a stack of four thin wafers, each one 15 inches in diameter and roughly 12-thousandths of an inch thick, embedded with 1,100 tiny chips. Together, says Kuroda, the four wafers will have 312 gigabytes of memory, the equivalent of 480 standard cds. The wafer stack is sealed in silicon dioxide, which keeps the humidity below 2%, preventing corrosion.

clipped from nextbigfuture.com

Kuroda's method: Instead of moving data as electrons through wires, as occurs in standard semiconductors, Kuroda’s sealed stack of wafers allows information to be beamed wirelessly on radio waves. This is a variation on radio-frequency identification technology, used in everything from scannable passports to inventory tracking.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk
British Broadcasting Corporation


'Rosetta stone' offers digital lifeline

Intel chip
The Rosetta Stone is built on silicon wafers used in the chip industry
Hard drive
Hard drives are susceptible to magnetic fields

Tadahiro Kuroda


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Sources:
  1. Storage for the Millennium - Forbes.com
  2. Digital Rosetta Stone for Digital Storage for 1000 years
  3. BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Rosetta stone' offers digital lifeline
Related:
  1. Global COE program of Keio University » Tadahiro Kuroda
  2. Global COE program of Keio University » Outline of Research
  3. Technical analysis for shorts & longs Message Board - Msg: 26023585
  4. IEEE Spectrum: Digital Data Written in Stone
  5. IEEE Spectrum: Solid-State Circuits, in 3-D!
  6. The 12th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference Technical Program

2009-10-25

Why extremists tend to dominate debates

clipped from news.yahoo.com
Yahoo! News

Why Extremist Views Dominate


A new study suggests a possible reason: People with extreme views seem more willing to share their opinions than others, but only if they believe, even falsely, that their views are popular.

clipped from ts-si.org

Extremists Assume Majority Status When Sharing Opinions

Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions

Those that take the extreme version of their group’s viewpoint may believe that they actually represent the true views of their group. “When people with extreme views have this false sense that they are in the majority, they are more willing to express themselves,” said Kimberly Rios Morrison, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University (OSU).

ScienceDirect® Home

EXTREMISTS MORE WILLING TO SHARE THEIR OPINIONS, STUDY FINDS

The key is that the extremists have to believe that more people share their views than actually do, the research found.

Kimberly Rios Morrison

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Sources:
  1. Why Extremist Views Dominate - Yahoo! News
  2. Extremists Assume Majority Status When Sharing Opinions
  3. ScienceDirect - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology : Expressing deviant opinions: Believing you are in the majority helps
  4. Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions, Study Finds
Related:
  1. Extremists more willing to share their opinions, study finds
  2. Prof: Extremists tend to dominate debates • The Register
  3. Global Debate: Study Shows "Extreme" Views Dominate Public Debates
  4. Distinguishing Between Silent and Vocal Minorities: Not All Deviants Feel Marginal : Center for Social Innovation (CSI)
  5. OSU School of Communication: Dr. Kimberly Rios