2011-02-28

Corning Glass Display Technologies

A Day Made of Glass: Corning’s Vision of the Future of Display Technology

Corning Incorporated, best known for their Gorilla glass technology, is the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. Drawing on more than 150 years of materials science and process engineering knowledge, Corning creates and makes keystone components that enable high-technology systems for consumer electronics, mobile emissions control, telecommunications and life sciences.



EAGLE XG® Glass Substrates
This award-winning composition offers low density, high chemical durability, advanced thermal properties, and a pristine surface ideal for large, high-resolution displays.
  More

Jade® Glass for Advanced Display
Recognizing that there was no glass substrate fully optimized for LTPS applications, Corning filled the void by developing Jade® glass for advanced display.
  More

Corning® Gorilla® Glass
By supporting the sleek, ultra-thin edge-to-edge designs that are a popular trend in today’s LCD TV industry, Gorilla® TV cover glass is literally changing the face of LCD TV.
  More

EAGLE XG® Slim Glass Substrates
As the end-market demands for thinner, sleeker products are increasing, Corning is delivering thinner and lighter substrates (glass of 0.4 mm thickness or less).
  More


CORNING® GORILLA® GLASS | INNOVATING WITH GORILLA

CHARACTERISTICS

Gorilla Glass provides exceptional performance and protection, with distinct advantages over other materials. More »

CUSTOMIZATION

Gorilla Glass offers customization options to suit your applications. More »

APPLICATIONS

Gorilla Glass is an ideal cover glass for the most innovative electronic devices, from smartphones to slates to TVs. Many companies have not only integrated the glass, but designed for it. More »



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2011-02-26

Samsung's Full-Color Display with Quantum Dots

Connect the quantum dots for a full-colour image : Nature News




low-energy televisions.

Ink stamps have been used to print text and pictures for centuries. Now, engineers have adapted the technique to build pixels into the first full-colour 'quantum dot' display — a feat that could eventually lead to televisions that are more energy-efficient and have sharper screen images than anything available today.

Engineers have been hoping to make improved television displays with the help of quantum dots — semiconducting crystals billionths of a metre across — for more than a decade. The dots could produce much crisper images than those in liquid-crystal displays, because quantum dots emit light at an extremely narrow, and finely tunable, range of wavelengths.

Dots deliver full-colour display - physicsworld.com



Researchers in South Korea and the UK say that they have produced the first large-area, full-colour display based on red, green and blue quantum dots. The technology could spur the launch of colour TV screens combining a vast colour range with an incredibly small pixel size.

Both attributes stem from the intrinsic properties of the quantum dots, which despite being just a few nanometres in diameter comprise several thousand atoms that form tiny compound-semiconductor crystals. [...]

The First Full-Color Display with Quantum Dots - Technology Review



Samsung's four-inch diagonal display is controlled using an active matrix, which means each of its color quantum-dot pixels is turned on and off with a thin-film transistor. The researchers have made the prototype on glass as well as on flexible plastic, as reported in Nature Photonics this week. "We have converted a scientific challenge into a real technological achievement," says Jong Min Kim, a fellow at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.
[...]
Quantum-dot displays would consume less than a fifth of the power of LCDs, says Samsung researcher Tae-Ho Kim. They promise to be brighter and longer-lasting than OLEDs. What's more, they could be manufactured for less than half of what it costs to make LCD or OLED screens.

This potential has caught the attention of big display manufacturers other than Samsung. LG Display is partnering with MIT spinoff QD Vision to develop quantum-dot displays.


QD Vision Inc. - Quantum Dot Technology for Lighting and Displays

Displays

QD Vision's Quantum Light™ products offer a unique solution for display systems, providing both superior light and color performance, while simultaneously reducing manufacturing and operating costs and significantly improving energy efficiency.  Quantum Light™ inks and optics are available for all types of displays, from mobile handsets to large, flat screen, high-definition televisions.  More »


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2011-02-23

3D Bioprinting of Human Skin and Body Parts

Collected from: YouTube - Bioprinting

Like an inkjet printer, biological materials can be printed at home - SmartPlanet

[...]
Vladimir Mironov envisions a day when doctors might be able to print out new skin for a burn victim or print out a new organ for patients awaiting a kidney transplant. Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina said he made the printer run on an open-source platform called Fab@Home. It could potentially print biological materials for surgical implants or print out robotic parts for cosmetic testing so animals don’t need to be used.

The printed material can’t really be implanted in humans yet, Mironov said, adding that more animal tests are needed. But imagine if you could take cells from a donor, culture them and put them into an ink and basically grow a new organ. This would avoid rejection issues associated with transplants and eliminate the need for a synthetic implant.

At the press conference, the device printed a silicon model of a human ear cartilage. It took about 20 minutes to print out an object shaped like an ear.
The object can be printed layer-by-layer. Once it is incubated, it can be implanted.
[...]


2011 AAAS Annual Meeting (17-21 February 2011)


Bioprinting: A Future of Regenerative Medicine

Speakers: 
Vladimir Mironov, Medical University of South Carolina
Introduction in Bioprinting

Hod Lipson, Cornell University
Digital Bioprinting

James Yoo, Wake Forest University
Bioprinting of Human Skin In Vivo




BBC News - 'Printing out' new ears and skin


Hod Lipson: 'People have been trying to expand the range of materials that can be fabricated using a 3D printer'
 
The next step in the 3D printing revolution may be body parts including cartilage, bone and even skin.

Three-dimensional printing is a technique for making solid objects with devices not unlike a computer printer, building up line by line, and then vertically layer by layer.

While the approach works with polymers and plastics, the raw ingredients of 3D printing have been recently branching out significantly.

The printers have been co-opted even to make foods, and do-it-yourself biology experiments dubbed "garage biotech" - and has most recently been employed to repair a casting of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker that was damaged in a botched robbery.

Update 31 Januari 2012:

3D printer and living "ink" create cartilage - YouTube

Lawrence Bonassar, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, describes a cutting-edge process he has developed in which he uses a 3D Printer and "ink" composed of living cells to create body parts such as ears.



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2011-02-21

Cella Energy -- Synthetic Hydrogen Fuel


 
Energy from hydrogen can be harnessed by burning the gas or combining it with oxygen in a fuel cell to produce electricity.

But current methods of storing hydrogen are expensive and not very safe.

To get round this, scientists from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford, University College London and Oxford University have found a way of densely packing hydrogen into tiny beads that can be poured or pumped like a liquid.

Stephen Volker, of Cellar Energy, which is developing the technology, told Gizmag: ‘We have developed micro-beads that can be used in an existing gasoline or petrol vehicle to replace oil-based fuels.

How it works: Cella Energy is optimistic that drivers will not need to modify their cars in order to use the fuel



Safe, low-cost hydrogen storage

[...]

Vehicles
Vehicles – Hydrogen fuels for vehicles you can pump like regular gasoline at room temperature and pressure, safer to use than gasoline or diesel but with zero carbon emissions.
  • Fuel additives that could allow a regular vehicle to meet the Euro 6 emission standards with minimal modifications
[...]

 Features:

  • low-pressure
  • safe
  • ambient temperatures
  • rapid desorption of hydrogen
  • pure hydrogen
  • can be handled safely in the open air
[...]

Benefits:

  • increases revenue for customer
  • fast introduction into market
  • saves money and time on packaging
  • end customer can travel further without refuelling
Collected from: Cella Energy - Home

Pure hydrogen solution, how it would work in a vehicle

Cella can manufacture the materials in the form of micron-sized beads. This makes it possible to move the beads like a fluid.

[...]

 The beads are stored in a fuel tank, which does not need to contain high pressures or be heated and cooled, therefore it can be a simple lightweight plastic tank of complex shape similar to that used in current vehicles. The hydride beads are then pumped to a hot cell where waste heat from the engine exhaust is used to drive the hydrogen into a small buffer volume. The hydrogen buffer is maintained at a pressure suitable for the internal combustion engine ICE or fuel cell and which is sufficient in volume to be able to restart the vehicle. Once the hydride has been heated and the hydrogen driven off, the waste beads are stored in another lightweight plastic tank.




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2011-02-19

AeroVironment Hummingbird Flapping-Wing Nano-UAV

Nano Hummingbird, drone, spy plane, Pentagon: Pentagon, AeroVironment to unveil Nano Hummingbird, an experimental mini-spy plane - latimes.com

latimes.com
A pocket-size drone dubbed the Nano Hummingbird for the way it flaps its tiny robotic wings has been developed for the Pentagon by a Monrovia company as a mini-spy plane capable of maneuvering on the battlefield and in urban areas.

The battery-powered drone was built by AeroVironment Inc. for the Pentagon's research arm as part of a series of experiments in nanotechnology. The little flying machine is built to look like a bird for potential use in spy missions.


AeroVironment, Inc.: News & Events: AeroVironment Develops World’s First Fully Operational Life-Size Hummingbird-Like Unmanned Aircraft for DARPA

AeroVironment, Inc. is a leader in Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Electric Vehicle Charging Systems, and Power Cycling & Test Systems.

• Two-wing, Flapping Aircraft Hovers and Flies in Any Direction
• Total Weight of Two-thirds of an Ounce Includes Batteries and Video Camera

WASHINGTON, at AAAS Conference, Feb. 17, 2011 – AeroVironment, Inc. (AV)(NASDAQ: AVAV) today announced it has accomplished a technical milestone never before achieved -- controlled precision hovering and fast-forward flight of a two-wing, flapping wing aircraft that carries its own energy source, and uses only the flapping wings for propulsion and control.




AV is developing the Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) under a DARPA sponsored research contract to develop a new class of air vehicle systems capable of indoor and outdoor operation. Employing biological mimicry at an extremely small scale, this unconventional aircraft could someday provide new reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities in urban environments.



The hand-made final concept demonstrator Nano Hummingbird has a wingspan of 16 cm (6.5 in) and weighs just 19 g (2/3 oz), which is less than the weight of a AA battery. Into this tiny and lightweight package the AeroVironment UAS team has managed to cram all the systems required for flight, including batteries, motors, communications systems and even a video camera.

The aircraft can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways left and right, fly forward and backward, as well as rotating clockwise and counter-clockwise – all under remote control and while carrying a video camera payload. It is even capable of doing a 360-degree loop.




The Nano Hummingbird met all, and exceeded many, of the Phase II technical milestones set out by DARPA:

  • Demonstrate precision hover flight.
  • Demonstrate hover stability in a wind gust flight which required the aircraft to hover and tolerate a two-meter per second (five miles per hour) wind gust from the side, without drifting downwind more than one meter.
  • Demonstrate a continuous hover endurance of eight minutes with no external power source.
  • Fly and demonstrate controlled, transition flight from hover to 11 miles per hour fast forward flight and back to hover flight.
  • Demonstrate flying from outdoors to indoors, and back outdoors through a normal-size doorway.
  • Demonstrate flying indoors 'heads-down' where the pilot operates the aircraft only looking at the live video image stream from the aircraft, without looking at or hearing the aircraft directly.
  • Fly the aircraft in hover and fast forward flight with bird-shaped body and bird-shaped wings.

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2011-02-17

Bladderworts Ultrafast Suction Trap Killer Plant

Utricularia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Utricularia, commonly and collectively called the bladderworts, is a genus of carnivorous plants consisting of approximately 227 species (precise counts differ based on classification opinions; one recent publication lists 215 species).[1] They occur in fresh water and wet soil as terrestrial or aquatic species across every continent except Antarctica. Utricularia are cultivated for their flowers, which are often compared with those of snapdragons and orchids, and among carnivorous plant enthusiasts.


Utricularia, Carnivorous Plants Online - Botanical Society of America


Utricularia - The Bladderwort

TRAP TYPE: Suction Trap
Currently 220 listed species occupying temperate and tropical habitats throughout the world--the most diverse and widespread genus of carnivorous plants.
Utricularia (bladderwort, Figure 2), a plant named for its tiny bladders, or utricles. Unlike the other carnivorous plants discussed here, Utricularia often lives in open water, but again where the nutrient concentration is relatively low. One common habitat is in the nutrient-poor bog lakes. In the open water, it supplements its nutrients by trapping insects in a bladder that is like a suction bulb (Figure 1, Figure 4, and Figure 5). Tiny hairlike projections at the opening of the bladder are sensitive to the motion of passing organisms like Daphnia (water fleas). When they are stimulated, these hairs cause the flattened bladder to suddenly inflate, sucking in water and the passing animal and closing a trap door after it.





Discovery News

Killer Plant Sucks in Prey at Record Speed


THE GIST
  • Bladderworts have just been named the world's fastest trapping carnivorous plants.
  • These aquatic meat-eaters suck and trap prey in less than a millisecond.
  • The sucking and trapping mechanism is among the fastest movements in the entire plant kingdom.


Carnivorous Bladderworts Suck Up Prey - Science News

Carnivorous bladderworts trap prey with speed that would make a Bond villain shudder in gleeful envy.

Using high-speed cameras, researchers have gotten the first good look at how these underwater plants spring their ambushes. Bladderworts sport trap doors that buckle in with a tiny nudge, creating a whirlpool that sucks in wee critters — all in about half a millisecond. That’s some of the fastest plant action on Earth, a French and German team reports online February 15 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
[...]
Small or not, the traps are masterpieces of suction. Pumped nearly dry, the chambers set up a pressure difference between the plant’s innards and the water outside. When swimmers brush up against a series of hairs along the trap door, the door bursts open and sucks water and crustaceans alike in.

Despite decades of interest in these nefarious plants, botanists couldn’t say for sure how the traps worked. Bladderworts were just too quick for old-school cameras. But with fancy new high-speed cameras, biologists can get their close-ups, says Adamec.
[...]

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2011-02-16

Mars500 -- A Simulated Mars Mission

«Mars-500» project

[...]
“Mars-500” project is being conducted by the State scientific center of the Russian Federation – Institute for Bio-Medical Problems of RAS under the aegis of Roscosmos and Russian Academy of Sciences. It includes a series of experiments simulating these or those aspects of an interplanetary manned flight. The main part is a series of experiments on long-term isolation of the crew in conditions of the specially built ground-based experiment facility. This part includes:

14-day isolation (it was completed in November 2007)
105-day isolation (it was completed in July 2009)
520-day isolation (June 2010 – November 2011)
[...]
Collected from: «Mars-500» project

ESA - Mars500 - The isolation facility



The Mars500 isolation facility in which the crew will be based is located in a special building on the IBMP site in Moscow. This building comprises the isolation facility itself, as well as the operations room, technical facilities and offices. The current layout of the isolation facility comprises four hermetically sealed interconnected habitat modules, in addition to one external module, which will be used to simulate the 'Martian surface'. The total volume of the habitat modules is 550 m3.



Diego Urbina (@diegou) takes us on tour inside the Mars500 facilities - see how the crew are living and working for the next 17 months in isolation.




YouTube - First Mars500 'Marswalk' raw video

The first 'Marswalk' by Diego Urbina and Alexandr Smoleevskiy on 14 February started at 13:00 Moscow time and lasted one hour and 12 minutes,



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2011-02-08

A Universal Flu Vaccine

Universal flu vaccine breakthrough

A universal flu vaccine that could protect people from all strains of flu has been successfully tested on humans for the first time by Britain scientists.


The breakthrough vaccine targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common to all types of flu instead of being tailored to match individual strains, according to researchers at Oxford University.
[...]

Dr Sarah Gilbert, who led the study, tested the vaccine on 11 healthy volunteers, all aged over 50, who were infected with H3N2 flu virus and compared them to 11 people who were also infected but did not receive the vaccine. 

guardian.co.uk home

Flu breakthrough promises a vaccine to kill all strains

[...]
While traditional vaccines prompt the body to create antibodies, Gilbert's vaccine boosts the number of the body's T-cells, another key part of the immune system. These can identify and destroy body cells that have been infected by a virus.

In her trial, Gilbert vaccinated 11 healthy volunteers and then infected them, along with 11 non-vaccinated volunteers, with the Wisconsin strain of the H3N2 influenza A virus, which was first isolated in 2005. She monitored the volunteers' symptoms twice a day, including runny noses, coughs and sore throats, and she calculated how much mucus everyone produced by weighing tissues they used. Though a small study, it was significant in that it was the first vaccine of its type to be tested on people.

Gilbert said: "This is the first time anyone's tested if you can boost somebody's T-cell response to flu and, having done that, if it helps protect against getting flu. It's the first time anybody's done that in people."
[...]






HOW FLU VACCINE WORKS

New universal flu vaccine is injected into the arm and is taken up by healthy cells.

 Cells containing vaccine attract immune cells which multiply and move around the body.

 Immune cells now trained to recognise proteins inside virus, which enters body via airways.

 
Killer immune cells recognise flu-infected cells and destroy them along with flu virus.


The one-off once in a lifetime super-jab for all types of flu | Mail Online

[...]
Because it targets a different part of the flu virus to traditional vaccines, the new jab does not need to be expensively ­reformulated every year to match the most prevalent strain.

It could be stockpiled in advance and prevent pandemics such as the swine flu outbreaks of recent years.
[...]
Dr Gilbert added: ‘If we were using the same vaccine year in, year out, it would be more like vaccinating against other diseases like tetanus. It would become a ­routine ­vaccination that would be manufactured and used all the time at a steady level. We wouldn’t have these sudden demands or shortages, all that would stop.’

A T-cell vaccine could be on the market in five years if a field trial, of several ­thousand people, is a success.

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2011-02-06

Hard-tip, Soft-spring Lithography (HSL)

New way of printing nanostructures makes desktop fabrication disposable - SmartPlanet



Researchers have figured out how to make designer nanostructures using arrays of silicon pens to create tiny patterns in biological and electronic materials. This is good news for researchers at least, as the method could make it cheaper to produce computer chips and gene chips for testing purposes, reports Technology Review.

[...]

The technique is called hard-tip, soft-spring lithography (HSL). The technique basically uses hard pen tips that float on soft polymer springs. It’s different than the commonly used method called dip-pen lithography because HSL uses a hard tip instead of a soft pen tip.

The hard tip helps researchers make patterns with greater resolution. The print heads can be thrown away, giving this nanoprinting a disposable dimension to it.


Nanolithography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nanolithography is the branch of nanotechnology concerned with the study and application of fabricating nanometer-scale structures, meaning patterns with at least one lateral dimension between the size of an individual atom and approximately 100 nm. Nanolithography is used during the fabrication of leading-edge semiconductor integrated circuits (nanocircuitry) or nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS).


Scanning probe lithography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scanning probe lithography describe a set of lithographic methods, in which a microscopic or nanoscopic stylus is moved mechanically across a surface to form a pattern.



Polymer Pen Lithography uses arrays of tiny pens made of polymers to print over large areas with nanoscopic through macroscopic resolution. By simply changing contact pressure (and the amount the pens deform), as well as the time of delivery, dots of various diameters can be produced. (The pen tips snap back to their original shape when the pressure is removed.)


McCormick News Article

Method Prints Nanostructures Using Hard “Pen” Tips Floating on Soft Polymer Springs

Jan 26, 2011 12:00 PM

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new technique for rapidly prototyping nanoscale devices and structures that is so inexpensive the “print head” can be thrown away when done.

Hard-tip, soft-spring lithography (HSL) rolls into one method the best of scanning-probe lithography -- high resolution -- and the best of polymer pen lithography -- low cost and easy implementation.

HSL could be used in the areas of electronics (electronic circuits), medical diagnostics (gene chips and arrays of biomolecules) and pharmaceuticals (arrays for screening drug candidates), among others.

To demonstrate the method’s capabilities, the researchers duplicated the pyramid on the U.S. one-dollar bill and the surrounding words approximately 19,000 times at 855 million dots per square inch. Each image consists of 6,982 dots. (They reproduced a bitmap representation of the pyramid, including the “Eye of Providence.”) This exercise highlights the sub-50-nanometer resolution and the scalability of the method.

The results will be published Jan. 27 by the journal Nature.
[...]

Nature | Letter

Hard-tip, soft-spring lithography


Wooyoung Shim, Adam B. Braunschweig, Xing Liao, Jinan Chai, Jong Kuk Lim, Gengfeng Zheng & Chad A. Mirkin

Nature 469,516–520 (27 January 2011) DOI: doi:10.1038/nature09697

[...] Here we describe a low-cost and scalable cantilever-free tip-based nanopatterning method that uses an array of hard silicon tips mounted onto an elastomeric backing. This method—which we term hard-tip, soft-spring lithography—overcomes the throughput problems of cantilever-based scanning probe systems and the resolution limits imposed by the use of elastomeric stamps and tips: it is capable of delivering materials or energy to a surface to create arbitrary patterns of features with sub-50-nm resolution over centimetre-scale areas. We argue that hard-tip, soft-spring lithography is a versatile nanolithography strategy that should be widely adopted by academic and industrial researchers for rapid prototyping applications.



Labels:

2011-02-05

RoboEarth an Internet for Robots



What is RoboEarth?

At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment.
[...]

RoboEarth will include everything needed to close the loop from robot to RoboEarth to robot. The RoboEarth World-Wide-Web style database will be implemented on a Server with Internet and Intranet functionality. It stores information required for object recognition (e.g., images, object models), navigation (e.g., maps, world models), tasks (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies) and hosts intelligent services (e.g., image annotation, offline learning).





The aim of RoboEarth is to use the internet to create a giant open source network database that can be accessed and continually updated by robots around the world. With knowledge shared on such a vast scale, and with businesses and academics contributing independently on a common language platform, RoboEarth has the potential to provide a powerful feed forward to any robot’s 3D sensing, acting and learning capabilities.
Collected from: RoboEarth | Motivation

RoboEarth: robots sharing a knowledge base for world modeling and learning of actions (ROBOEARTH)

Project description

The RoboEarth-project exploits a new approach towards endowing robots with advanced perception and action capabilities, thus enabling robots to carrying out useful tasks autonomously. The core of the innovation involves a world-wide web-style database: RoboEarth. RoboEarth will allow robots to share any reusable knowledge independent from their hardware and configuration. When a robot starts performing a task, it is able to download available high-level knowledge on both task and environment; next, it can use and translate this knowledge to its hardware specifications and its configuration and will improve it by learning during the task. Finally, it will upload its knowledge to RoboEarth again.


YouTube - AMIGO robot downloads its instructions from the RoboEarth internet !



During the RoboEarth workshop at the University of Technology in Eindhoven a group of engineers was able to make robot AMIGO download its own instructions from the internet! check www.roboearth.org or www.techunited.nl



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