Tata Airpod - Car that runs on Air

Indian car maker Tata hopes to bring a car powered by compressed air. An idea that's been contemplated for years but has proved difficult to build commercially to market. Built on technology licensed from Luxembourg's MDI, the AirPod is a light, apparently one-seated car that's supposed to be able to run at between 45 and 70 kilometers an hour (28 to 43 miles per hour). Instead of running on gas or electricity, however, the engine is powered by a tank of compressed air, which can either be pumped in through a charging station or taken in while driving with the help of an electric engine. The car can also recapture some energy during braking, similar to current hybrid vehicles.

Living Tomorrow: house of the future

Toshiba flexes its paper-thin LCD muscle

First Microchip Pills of World

World's first microchip pill has been introduced and approved by FDA.

The microchip is a normal digital chip made up of silicon with traces of magnesium and copper and is no bigger than the size of a normal medicine. Once the microchip is ingested, it gets activated by the digestive fluids of stomach and starts generating electric signals. These signals are received by a battery operated patch on the patient’s skin which forwards the medical information to a mobile app on patient’s consent. The battery operated patch has a life of seven days and in the mean duration; it is responsible for receiving all the inner-body conditions from the microchip.

The conditions such as heart rate, temperature, body position are tracked and then forwarded to the clinicians (via mobile app) so that the patient can be medicated accordingly. Currently the device has been approved to be used with placebo pills so as to test it’s safety and working. If the procedure turns out to be successful and safe, microchips will be soon integrated with medication. This chip will help to analyze Heart Diseases also.

Bosco Verticale will be the World's First Vertical Forest (Milan, Italy)

A forest in the form of a skyscraper  (Milan, Italy). Each apartment has a balcony with its own little mini-forest. These provide the pollution-filtering benefits of plant life and the energy-saving benefits of shade, but in a small area.

The Bosco Verticale is a system that optimizes, recuperates, and produces energy. Covered in plant life, the building aids in balancing the microclimate and in filtering the dust particles contained in the urban environment (Milan is one of the most polluted cities in Europe). The diversity of the plants and their characteristics produce humidity, absorb CO₂ and dust particles, producing oxygen and protect the building from radiation and acoustic pollution. This not only improves the quality of living spaces, but gives way to dramatic energy savings year round.

Each apartment in the building will have a balcony planted with trees that are able to respond to the city’s weather — shade will be provided within the summer, while also filtering city pollution; and in the winter the bare trees will allow sunlight to permeate through the spaces. Plant irrigation will be supported through the filtering and reuse of the grey water produced by the building. Additionally, Aeolian and photovoltaic energy systems will further promote the tower’s self-sufficiency.

The design of the Bosco Verticale is a response to both urban sprawl and the disappearance of nature from our lives and on the landscape. The architect notes that if the units were to be constructed unshackled as stand-alone units across a single surface, the project would require 50,000 square meters of land, and 10,000 square meters of woodland. Bosco Verticale is the first offer in his proposed BioMilano, which envisions a green belt created around the city to incorporate 60 abandoned farms on the outskirts of the city to be revitalized for community use.

Samsung planning to build 300 GHz Chips using Graphene

Samsung researchers have developed microprocessor using the Graphene-Silicon Schottky barrier as they can easily control electron flow by increasing or decreasing the height of the barrier.

Samsung also manufactured a basic logic gate device and verified that this logic gate can effectively perform one function. The basic procedure the device can manage is adding. 

The transistor-like gate called a Barristor.

Samsung researcher’s institute has owned other 9 major Graphene-related patents and it is only current company who has built a working microprocessor using Graphene. 

Graphene is a material that permits electrons to move through it 200 times easier than currently used semiconductor silicon.

If we can create a microprocessor using Graphene than we can build CPU which can run at 300 GHz speeds. So, researchers have achieved half of the normal Graphene electron mobility in making microprocessor. 

IBM has predicted theoretical that we can create 1000 GHz microprocessor using Graphene.

Making microprocessor using Graphene is little tough as it is a semi-metal and we can not control electron flow in a semi-metal. 

We can use cooling solutions to control electron flow in Graphene because electron can not pass through it. But the higher electron mobility might help dissipate the heat energy faster in a cooling base.

We can produce microprocessor using combination of Silicon and Graphene but it does not produce desirable results. 

We can transform Graphene in a semiconductor as it can effectively reduce free electron mobility in this semimetal and this technology has successfully used for Silicene transformation.

Project Glass: One day...

Google demonstrates Image to Text Translation at Mobile Tech Fair

Internet giant Google has successfully demonstrated the prototype version of a new image recognition technology that can capture an image file into a cell phone and translate a non-English text into English text.

This is what Andrew Gomez, an associate product-marketing manager at Google, posted on Google blog this week.

"Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can not understand, a waiter impatiently tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no idea whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, eventually you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language.

Of course, that's not possible today - but yesterday at the Mobile World Congress we demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in an extremely early stage, but we thought we'd share this demo with you because it shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to our translation technologies."

This week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the chairman and CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt and the company's scientist Hartmut Neven demonstrated a prototype version of Google Goggles recognition software merging with Google's machine translation technologies.

Schmidt took a picture of a German menu on a cell phone, which instantly translated the written German text into English.

Neven said in the company blogpost that this prototype connects the phone's camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.

He said that currently this technology only works for German-to-English translations and is not yet ready for prime time.

Google plans to eventually bring out Googles Googles that can translate all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate.

Humvee airless tire test

Now, get your ECG reports on iPhone

Controlling an ATV through Nokia smartphone

'True 3D' Display Using Laser Plasma Technology #DigInfo

Terrafugia - Flying Car

Researchers "Grow" New Blood Vessels

Synthetic blood vessels that can be made in advance and stored until surgery could help patients undergoing heart surgery, hemodialysis—cleansing of the blood in cases of kidney failure—and other procedures. Laura Niklason, an anesthesiologist and biomedical engineer at Yale University, and her collaborators have grown blood vessels using human cells and tested them in baboons, showing that they provoke no immune rejection and avoid common complications of synthetic vessels, such as clotting, bursting, or contracting over time. Researchers hope these studies will show that the vessels are safe enough to win permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials.

During bypass surgery, doctors looking to circumvent blocked arteries usually harvest vessels from a patient's leg or arm. But people who suffer from vascular disease or who have had previous procedures may have no suitable vessels left. The other options have complications: grafts from donors are often rejected by the recipient's immune system, artificial plastic vessels have high rates of blood clots and other problems, and vessels grown from a patient's own tissue take more than six months to mature. "Artificial grafts suffer from clotting and obstruction because they are not tissue," says Niklason, especially when plastic is used.

Niklason says she has solved this problem by creating vessels that are derived from living tissue but can be used off-the-shelf and are not rejected by the immune system. Using a technique she developed at MIT in the 1990s, researchers seed tubular scaffolds with smooth muscle cells. The cells secrete collagen and other connective tissue molecules around the scaffolds, forming blood vessels. After the scaffolds break down, the vessels are washed with a detergent that strips away the cells, leaving behind the fibrous tubes of collagen.

Because the tubes contain no living cells, they do not trigger an immune response and have a shelf life of more than a year. The group has previously grown vessels using cells from several different animal species, including canine versions for heart bypass surgeries in dogs.

Now, in a report published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers have grown vessels using human cells for the first time. They used the vessels to link an artery and a vein in baboons, creating a structure called a fistula to mimic the setup required by hemodialysis patients, who have a needle injected into such a link two or three times a week to get their blood filtered. Also, while previous versions of the vessels required a wait of several weeks while the insides of the vessels were "personalized" with some of the patient's own cells, a process that makes them less likely to clog, these hemodialysis vessels did not need that treatment.

"That means they could potentially be immediately available to the patient," says Shannon Dahl, a biomedical engineer who cofounded a biotechnology company called Humacyte with Niklason and another colleague to help bring the technology to market. Humacyte initially plans to test its technology in hemodialysis patients, though Dahl declined to give a timeline for clinical trials.

Researchers ultimately hope to test the vessels for heart surgeries, but they first want to show that the technology is safe and effective. "I would love to get to coronary bypass at some point, but we have to prove that this is a good, safe therapy in other anatomical locations first," says Niklason. A hemodialysis graft is much more easily replaced than a bypass graft if there are infections or other problems.

The researchers' use of baboons also provides important additional support before they move into human trials, says David Putnam, a chemical engineer at Cornell University who studies biomaterials. The reason is that the dynamics of blood flow in baboons are a good model for what happens in humans, he says. "They are going about this very well, very carefully. They're building a house with very strong bricks," he says. "And the next step is humans."

Insulin Pill Against Diabetes Undergoes Testing

One of the most cumbersome and inconvenient aspects of diabetes is the fact that patients suffering from advanced forms need to inject insulin into their bloodstream each day. Their own body is unable to produce the hormone, and they cannot survive without it. Delivering insulin has become big business, and many research groups have been looking for a method of making the entire process simpler and more efficient. Now, the Denmark-based Novo Nordisk has been found to engage in phase 1 clinical testings of a new pill, which may deliver insulin without the need for painful shots.

The pharmaceutical corporation has been a leader in the field of diabetes care for most of its 87-year history, delivering numerous products and therapies to sufferers. The new effort, if successful, would additionally consolidate its position, while at the same time providing diabetes patients with the Holy Grail of all cures, the insulin pill. Encapsulating the hormone in an easy-to-swallow dose is not exactly a walk in the park, but the fact that Novo is so advanced in its research can only mean excellent news for the company and patients alike, Technology Review reports. 

In addition to the added comfort associated with receiving insulin in this manner, the pill would also entail other, more important benefits. If ingested, it reaches the stomach directly, from where it can easily go to the liver, mimicking the action of its naturally-produced counterpart. Generally, diabetes sufferers who have daily injections tend to insert the hormone in muscles or fat, which means that the substance is fairly far away from where it needs to go. This is why even patients who take their insulin shots at the correct time of day can develop hypoglycemia at any given point. 

There are several hurdles associated with delivering insulin orally. They include the highly-acidic nature of gastric liquids, the complex nature of the insulin molecules, the rate at which epithelial cells absorb the compound and so on. In order to circumvent most of these problems, the Novo team turned to protein engineering, so as to modify insulin according to needs. “You can't use human insulin [for developing orally-delivered pills]. ]It doesn't work,” explains Novo's chief scientific officer, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen. The team is currently still tweaking its final product, details of which are currently kept under wraps.

Learning and Filing Information in Your Sleep

During sleep, your brain can learn a new piece of information and even store it for later, so that it pops up when you need it, found a new study carried out by researchers at theUniversity of York and Harvard Medical School.

The team also discovered that sleep helps people remember new words easier and allows them to enrich their 'mental lexicon' with new vocabulary.

For the experiments, the study volunteers learned new words in the evening and were tested right afterward.

They slept over night at the lab while their brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram, and the next morning underwent another test.

The results proved that the subjects could remember more words than they did just after they had learned them, and they could also recognize them faster, which supports the theory that sleep has strengthened the new memories. 

For the control group however, things went a little differently: they were trained in the morning and were re-tested in the evening, without getting any sleep in between, and their results were much weaker.

The researchers examined the brainwaves of sleep volunteers and saw that deep sleep or slow-wave sleep, helped more in strengthening new memories, than REM sleep (light sleep) did.

Another thing that the researchers tested was whether the new words had been integrated with already existing knowledge in the mental lexicon, and doing so, they discovered the importance of sleep spindles in the brain.

Sleep spindles are short but very intense bursts of brain activity which occur during the information transfer between the hippocampus and the neocortex (hippocampus memories are stored away from other memories, and the neocortex memories are connected to existing knowledge).

Participants who had more sleep spindles during the night made better connections between the new words and the others in their mental lexicon.

“We suspected from previous work that sleep had a role to play in the reorganization of new memories, but this is the first time we've really been able to observe it in action, and understand the importance of spindle activity in the process,” said co-author of the paper, Professor Gareth Gaskell, of the University of York's Department of Psychology.

These results are another confirmation of the importance of sleep in learning new things.

The study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.