Japanese Already Controlling Robots With Their Thoughts
This video shows a man controlling a robot using only his thoughts. It’s “mind” blowing. <- rly?!
[via pink tentacle]
sensors Category
Only You and Fire Sensing Trees Can Prevent Forest Fires
Elizabeth A. Thomson at the MIT News Office writes:
MIT researchers and colleagues are working to find out whether energy from trees can power a network of sensors to prevent spreading forest fires.
What they learn also could raise the possibility of using trees as silent sentinels along the nation’s borders to detect potential threats such as smuggled radioactive materials.
The U.S. Forest Service currently predicts and tracks fires with a variety of tools, including remote automated weather stations. But these stations are expensive and sparsely distributed. Additional sensors could save trees by providing better local climate data to be used in fire prediction models and earlier alerts. However, manually recharging or replacing batteries at often very hard-to-reach locations makes this impractical and costly.
The new sensor system seeks to avoid this problem by tapping into trees as a self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with an off-the-shelf battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree. A single tree doesn’t generate a lot of power, but over time the “trickle charge” adds up, “just like a dripping faucet can fill a bucket over time,” said Shuguang Zhang, one of the researchers on the project and the associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBE).
The system produces enough electricity to allow the temperature and humidity sensors to wirelessly transmit signals four times a day, or immediately if there’s a fire. Each signal hops from one sensor to another, until it reaches an existing weather station that beams the data by satellite to a forestry command center in Boise, Idaho.
Scientists have long known that trees can produce extremely small amounts of electricity. But no one knew exactly how the energy was produced or how to take advantage of the power.
In a recent issue of the Public Library of Science ONE, Zhang and MIT colleagues report the answer. “It’s really a fairly simple phenomenon: An imbalance in pH between a tree and the soil it grows in,” said Andreas Mershin, a postdoctoral associate at the CBE. The first author of the paper is Christopher J. Love, an MIT senior in chemistry who has been working on the project since his freshman year.
To solve the puzzle of where the voltage comes from, the team had to test a number of theories — many of them exotic. That meant a slew of experiments that showed, among other things, that the electricity was not due to a simple electrochemical redox reaction (the type that powers the ‘potato batteries’ common in high school science labs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery). The team also ruled out the source as due to coupling to underground power lines, radio waves or other electromagnetic interference.
Testing of the wireless sensor network, which is being developed by Voltree Power (http://voltreepower.com), is slated to begin in the spring on a 10-acre plot of land provided by the Forest Service.
According to Love, who with Mershin has a financial interest in Voltree, the bioenergy harvester battery charger module and sensors are ready. “We expect that we’ll need to instrument four trees per acre,” he said, noting that the system is designed for easy installation by unskilled workers.
“Right now we’re finalizing exactly how the wireless sensor network will be configured to use the minimum amount of power,” he concluded.
The original experiments were funded by MagCap Engineering, LLC, through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
[MIT via Boing Boing]
Nokia’s Eco Sensor
The following is from Nokia PR:
URL: http://www.nokia.com/A4707477
At the cutting edge of innovation
We envision developing mobile technologies in new ways to help us all reduce our environmental footprint. To meet our future vision, the Nokia Research Center supported by Nokia designers conceived the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept. Our visionary design concept is a mobile phone and compatible sensing device that will help you stay connected to your friends and loved ones, as well as to your health and local environment. You can also share the environmental data your sensing device collects and view other users’ shared data, thereby increasing your global environmental awareness.
The concept
The concept consists of two parts – a wearable sensor unit which can sense and analyze your environment, health, and local weather conditions, and a dedicated mobile phone.
The sensor unit will be worn on a wrist or neck strap made from solar cells that provide power to the sensors. NFC (near field communication) and RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies will relay information from the sensors to the phone or to other devices that support RFID technology.
Both the phone and the sensor unit will be as compact as possible to minimize material use, and those materials used in the design will be renewable and/or reclaimed. Technologies used inside the phone and sensor unit will also help save energy.
Stay in touch with your health and local environment
To help make you more aware of your health and local environmental conditions, the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept will include a separate, wearable sensing device with detectors that collect environment, health, and/or weather data.
You will be able to choose which sensors you would like to have inside the sensing device, thereby customizing the device to your needs and desires. For example, you could use the device as a “personal trainee” if you were to choose a heart-rate monitor and motion detector (for measuring your walking pace).
Environmental monitoring
* Atmospheric gas-level monitor (including carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and ground-level ozone detectors, for example)
* Ultraviolet radiation sensor
* Subscription to environmental catastrophe warning and guidance system
Personal health
* Motion detector
* Heart rate monitor
* Noise level monitor
Weather monitoring
* Air pressure sensor
* Humidity sensor
* Temperature sensor
* Subscription to environmental catastrophe warning and guidance system
A mobile device that builds on the “three Rs”
Reduce, reuse and recycle – the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept is built upon all three of these underlying principles of waste reduction. Emphasis will be placed on materials use and reuse in the phone’s construction:
Printed electronics
* Printed electronics is an innovative technology in which simple components are created by printing electrically conductive inks (nanoinks) onto surfaces such as plastic using standard printing processes. The technology allows us to create smaller electronic components – and smaller components mean more compact phones!
Bio-materials
* Bio-materials, such as polylactic acid (PLA) plastics with plant or other biomass-based modifiers, can help to reduce the use of non-renewable materials. An additional bonus is that the energy required to produce PLA – from raw material to plastic pellet – is minimal.
* Elastomers based on biomaterials can be used as rubber-like materials to seal off battery case.
Reclaimed materials
* The phone’s casing will be made from 100% reclaimed steel. Imagine – your scrapped car could become part of your next mobile phone!
A phone for the energy-conscious consumer
To complete the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept, the phone and detector units will be optimized for lower energy consumption than phones in 2007 in both the manufacturing process and use. Alternative energy sources, such as solar power, will fuel the sensor unit’s power usage. Thus, we aim to create a self-powered sensing device to reduce dependence on external, non-renewable energy sources.
Electronics
* Printed electronics consume less energy during manufacturing than traditional circuit board production and will be used in the phone, detection units, and their chargers.
Display screens
* Display technologies widely in use in 2007, such as liquid crystal display (LCD) or organic light-emitting diode (OLED), are continuously evolving – resulting in increasingly energy-efficient screens. But other technologies, such as electrowetting, also exist that produce screens that consume less energy than LED or OLED displays. Electrowetting is the process of applying electrical voltage to tiny drops of oil, causing the droplets to expand and contract. When compressed under the display glass, expanding droplets produce an effect similar to a pixel “lighting up,” whereas contracting droplets can be compared to a pixel “turning off.”
Alternative energy sources
The wearable sensor unit will be powered by alternative energy sources, and may incorporate multiple energy technologies:
* Solar energy will be harvested from the device strap, which would be made from solar cells.
* Kinetic (energy derived from motion) and heat energy might also be harvested from the user, in the way some wristwatches already get their power.
Innovative Services
The possibilities to introduce creative and useful mobile applications and web services that build upon the environmental data collected from such a design concept are numerous. These services can range from personal health monitoring and improvement, to large-scale collective efforts to promote sustainable lifestyle choices. Even very simple environmental variables can bring about novel solutions when shared and integrated into a global network of mobile explorers.
Where next?
By creating the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept, we hope to stimulate an ongoing discussion and idea sharing – both within the mobile industry and with consumers. Through these discussions, we hope to gain a better understanding of what we can do with mobile technology in the near future and how we can lead the mobile industry towards a sustainable future.
[Nokia]