2013-05-26

The Narwhal's Mysterious Tusk

Narwhal Tusk Discoveries

The narwhal, Monodon monoceros, has long fascinated sea explorers, scientists and aristocracy. This arctic whale is characterized by a single spiraled tusk extending six to nine feet, emerging from the upper jaw and through the lips of adult males. Some females may exhibit a tusk and, in rare instances, a male with two tusks has been observed. Often associated with the horn of the unicorn, the narwhal tooth has found its way into the books of scientific rarities and mythical tales.


The Narwhal's Mysterious Tusk - YouTube

This species of whale has an unusual and mysterious tusk, once harvested and sold as a unicorn horn for 10 times its weight in gold.




HowStuffWorks "The Narwhal Tusk"


The narwhal's tusk isn't unique at first glance. Elephants, rhinos and walruses all have these long, protruding teeth. But this one is different from any other tooth you've ever seen.

[...]

... The soft, sensitive part is on the outside, while the dense, hard part makes up the middle. Ten million tiny holes lie right on the surface on the tusk. Human teeth have these little tubules too, which is why sometimes the cold bothers your teeth, but they're covered with enamel. Imagine having all your nerves exposed in the icy waters of the Arctic. Why would the most sensitive part of a tooth be on the outside?

Harvard Gazette: Marine biology mystery solved

Function of 'unicorn' whale's 8-foot tooth discovered by Harvard School of Dental Medicine researcher


Nweeia has discovered that the narwhal's tooth has hydrodynamic sensor capabilities. Ten million tiny nerve connections tunnel their way from the central nerve of the narwhal tusk to its outer surface. Though seemingly rigid and hard, the tusk is like a membrane with an extremely sensitive surface, capable of detecting changes in water temperature, pressure, and particle gradients. Because these whales can detect particle gradients in water, they are capable of discerning the salinity of the water, which could help them survive in their Arctic ice environment. It also allows the whales to detect water particles characteristic of the fish that constitute their diet. There is no comparison in nature in tooth form, expression, and functional adaptation.


2013-05-07

In Vivo Flexible Large Scale Integrated Circuits

Team develops in vivo flexible large scale integrated circuits (w/ Video)


A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-team-vivo-flexible-large-scale.html#jCp
A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-team-vivo-flexible-large-scale.html#jCp
A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-team-vivo-flexible-large-scale.html#jCp
A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-team-vivo-flexible-large-scale.html#jCp
A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication.

A KAIST Research Team Developed in Vivo Flexible Large Scale Integrated Circuits - Technobahn

Professor Keon Jae Lee's team fabricated radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) interconnected with thousand nano-transistors on silicon wafer by state-of-the-art CMOS process, and then they removed the entire bottom substrate except top 100 nm active circuit layer by wet chemical etching. The flexible RF switches for wireless communication were monolithically encapsulated with biocompatible liquid crystal polymers (LCPs) for in vivo bio-medical applications. Finally, they implanted the LCP encapsulated RFICs into live rats to demonstrate the stable operation of flexible devices under in vivo circumstances.

Professor Lee said, "This work could provide an approach to flexible LSI for an ideal artificial retina system and other bio-medical devices. Moreover, the result represents an exciting technology with the strong potential to realize fully flexible consumer electronics such as application processor (AP) for mobile operating system, high-capacity memory, and wireless communication in the near future."



2013-05-04

Boeing X-51A WaveRider test flight

Experimental aircraft speeds to more than 3,000 mph in test flight - latimes.com



A lightning-quick experimental aircraft made history when it sped more than 3,000 mph above the Pacific Ocean in a test flight, reigniting decades-long efforts to develop a vehicle that could travel faster than a speeding bullet.

Boeing X-51 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Boeing X-51 (also known as X-51 WaveRider) is an unmanned scramjet demonstration aircraft for hypersonic (Mach 6, approximately 4,000 miles per hour (6,400 km/h) at altitude) flight testing. It successfully completed its first powered flight on 26 May 2010 and also achieved the longest duration flight at speeds over Mach 5.[1]

The X-51 is named "WaveRider" because it uses its shockwaves to add lift. The program is run as a cooperative effort of the United States Air Force, DARPA, NASA, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. The program is managed by the Aerospace Systems Directorate within the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).[3][4] The X-51 had its first captive flight attached to a B-52 in December 2009.



Boeing: Boeing X-51A WaveRider Sets Record with Successful 4th Flight

A U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress from Edwards Air Force Base released the X-51A from 50,000 feet above the Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center Sea Range at 10:55 a.m. Pacific time. After the B-52 released the X-51A, a solid rocket booster accelerated the vehicle to about Mach 4.8 before the booster and a connecting interstage were jettisoned. The vehicle reached Mach 5.1 powered by its supersonic combustion scramjet engine, which burned all its JP-7 jet fuel. The X-51A made a controlled dive into the Pacific Ocean at the conclusion of its mission. The test fulfilled all mission objectives.

The flight was the fourth X-51A test flight completed for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. It exceeded the previous record set by the program in 2010.


2013-05-03

OpenWorm an Open-Source Virtual Worm

BBC News - Virtual worm project wriggles into life

The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the most widely studied creatures on Earth
Soon you could have an artificial creature living in your web browser.
Programmers and scientists have joined together to try to create a comprehensive computer model of the Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm.

OpenWorm Is An Open-Source Virtual Worm, Accurate In Every Way | Popular Science

Elegant Elegans The OpenWorm 3D Browser iPhone app lets you peek into C. elegans at the cellular level. MetaCell, LLC
Predictive models are essential in engineering fields, but less common in biology, though accurate simulations of living organisms could help us understand disease, drug efficacy and neuroscience.

OpenWorm, a new open-source project devoted to creating a complete virtual model of a worm, aims to bring simulation into the living world by creating a digital organism--C. elegans, a nematode commonly used as a model organism in biology research.




Controlled Flight of Insect-Scale Robot

BBC News - Robotic insect: World's smallest flying robot takes off

Scientists in the US have created a robot the size of a fly that is able to perform the agile manoeuvres of the ubiquitous insects.
This "robo-fly", built from carbon fibre, weighs a fraction of a gram and has super-fast electronic "muscles" to power its wings.






Robotic insects make first controlled flight — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences


Cambridge, Mass. - May 2, 2013 - In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory last summer, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.

Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m.—subject line, "Flight of the RoboBee."

"I was so excited, I couldn't sleep," recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science.

Robotic insects make first controlled flight

The RoboBees project "provides a common motivation for scientists and engineers across the university to build smaller batteries, to design more efficient control systems, and to create stronger, more lightweight materials," says Harvard engineering professor Robert J. Wood. "You might not expect all of these people to work together: vision experts, biologists, materials scientists, electrical engineers. What do they have in common? Well, they all enjoy solving really hard problems." (Credit: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon, Harvard University.)

The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade's work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

"This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years," says Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, Wyss Core Faculty Member, and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project. "It's really only because of this lab's recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well."

Controlled Flight of a Biologically Inspired, Insect-Scale Robot

Science
Vol. 340 no. 6132 pp. 603-607
DOI: 10.1126/science.1231806

2013-05-01

Printable Robots

MIT Project Aims to Deliver Printable, Mass-Market Robots | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Insect printable robot. Photo: Jason Dorfman, CSAIL/MIT
[...] MIT announced a new project, “An Expedition in Computing Printable Programmable Machines,” that aims to give everyone a chance to have his or her own robot.

MIT CSAIL Project Could Transform Robotic Design and Production | CSAIL

It currently takes years to produce, program and design a functioning robot, and is an extremely expensive process, involving hardware and software design, machine learning and vision, and advanced programming techniques. The new project would automate the process of producing functional 3-D devices and allow individuals to design and build functional robots from materials as easily accessible as a sheet of paper.

“Our vision is to develop an end-to-end process; specifically, a compiler for building physical machines that starts with a high level of specification of function, and delivers a programmable machine for that function using simple printing processes,” said Rus.




Science Nation - Printable Robots Designed to be Consumer-friendly, Inexpensive - YouTube

"This research revolutionizes the design and manufacturing of robots, with a profound potential impact on society," says Ralph Wachter, a program director in the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. "It would remove barriers to manufacturing robots, making it possible for average citizens to customize and manufacture their own robots to meet their needs. This opens the door to great possibilities."