Electrode recreates all four tastes on your tongue

     An electrode that can produce the taste of salty, sweet, bitter and sour food could make gaming tastier and help in healthcare too.

       LIFE in virtual reality could soon get a whole lot tastier – now a digital simulator can transmit the taste of virtual food and drink to the tongue. This might mean that gamers and VR explorers will be able to sample something of the food appearing on their VR headset or computer screen.

       The synthesiser was developed by a team led by Nimesha Ranasinghe at the National University of Singapore, who thinks that one day TV viewers will be able to taste the food in cookery shows, too.

       Signals that reproduce the four well-known major taste components – salt, sweet, sour, bitter – are transmitted through a silver electrode touching the tip of the tongue. The taste receptors are fooled by a varying alternating current and slight changes in temperature controlled by semiconductor elements that heat and cool very rapidly.

    "We have found noninvasive electrical and thermal stimulation of the tip of the tongue successfully generates the primary taste sensations," says Ranasinghe. The device is a little clunky at the moment, but redesigning it will mean it can be in contact with the tongue when the user's mouth is almost closed. It was presented at the ACM Multimedia conference in Barcelona, Spain, last month.

          Ranasinghe also foresees healthcare applications for his device. "People with diabetes might be able to use the taste synthesiser to simulate sweet sensations without harming their actual blood sugar levels. Cancer patients could use it to improve or regenerate a diminished sense of taste during chemotherapy."

        The team is also working on a spin-off called a digital lollipop that will give the effect of a continuous sugar hit – but without sugar. For taste messaging they have developed TOIP – taste over internet protocol. This is a data format that makes it easy to transmit information on how to recreate the different tastes via the electrode.

It is early days. The four major taste components, plus the fifth, the savoury "umami" tang, are only a part of what we call flavour. Smell and texture are important, too – and the team now wants to work on adding those effects.

         "In a gaming environment we could come up with a new reward system based on taste sensations," Ranasinghe says. "For example, if you complete a game task successfully, or complete a level, we can give a sweet, minty or sour reward. If you fail we can deliver a bitter message."

         It could also be used to wean people off sugary drinks, says Jennifer Cornishof Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Last week her group warned that overconsumption of such drinks could cause changes in the brain that might lead to Alzheimer's and cancer. "A taste simulator might help extinguish or reduce the physiological effect of drinking sugar, however, the psychological factors of sugar enjoyment would remain.

Superconducting Video Camera Sees the Universe in Living Color

   Your camera sees the world in black and white; but a new astronomical camera sees the stars in color.

Almost every imaging device on the planet (or in orbit, for that matter) sees the world in black and white: incoming photons hit the sensor, knock electrons loose, and generate a current. If the incoming photon’s energy is anywhere in the detector’s sensitivity range, the result is the same: the pixel is white. To see color, imagers (including the human eye) integrate multiple black-and-white images made with defined parts of the spectrum. They either split the sensor field, using overlapping arrays of sensors with different filters to simultaneously make separate images—from red, green, and blue, for example—or they split the spectrum to project successive single-wavelength images on a single sensor field. The Array Camera for Optical to Near IR Spectrophotometry (ARCONS) approaches the problem from a different angle, simultaneously capturing time and energy (and so wavelength) information from a single photon.

"What we have made is essentially a hyperspectral video camera with no intrinsic noise," says Ben Mazin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Mazin—with UCSB colleagues and collaborators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Oxford University, and Fermilab—is developing the ARCONS device for astronomical observation. "On a pixel-per-pixel basis, it's a quantum leap from semiconductor detectors; it's as big a leap going from film to semiconductors as it is going from semiconductors to these superconductors. This allows all kinds of really interesting instruments based on this technology."

             The heart of ARCONS is a 60-nanometer-thick layer of titanium nitride (TiN) carried on a silicon base. Depending on the ratio of nitrogen to titanium, the layer becomes superconducting at about 1 Kelvin. (As the proportion of nitrogen decreases, the superconducting transition temperature and band-gap energies get lower; consequently, the imager's sensitivity to incoming photons increases. At its tiniest, the band gap of the superconducting TiN is about three orders of magnitude smaller than in a typical semiconductor.)

           The TiN layer is etched into a 44 x 46 pixel array, and each pixel gets its own individually tuned microwave resonator and a microlens. The ensemble is enclosed in a lens-topped Dewar jar cooled to 0.1 K. When a photon strikes the sensor surface, is sends a ripple through the superconductor, breaking up the paired electrons—the Cooper pairs—that carry superconducting currents. The more energetic the photon, the more Cooper pairs are divided. Disrupting these pairs alters the impedance of the pixel. This electrical change, in turn, shifts the amplitude and phase of the pixel’s resonance in proportion to the number of Cooper-pair disruptions.

              The researchers use a microwave frequency comb to interrogate and read out all 2024 pixels over a single microwave channel. Each pixel can be read about 2500 times per second, accurately seeing colors that range from the ultraviolet (100 nm) through the visible spectrum and into the infrared (longer than 5000 nm). CCD sensors, by contrast, typically detect light from 300 to 1000 nm—and only in a black and white. The result is a video spectroscopic sensor that requires no beam-splitting, no filters, and no duplication of array fields for different wavelengths. Or, as the group’s paper for Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (also available on ArXiv) describes it, “A superconducting detector can count single photon events with no false counts, while determining the energy (to several percent or better) and arrival time (to a microsecond)”

         The ARCONS has been field-tested at the 200-inch Palomar and 120-inch Lick telescopes, observing the link between surges in optical and radio pulses in the Crab Nebula pulsar and a 3.07 x 10-13 (three parts in 10 trillion) change in the 28.3-minute orbital period of a compact binary star.  This shot of the double ring galaxy Arp 147 shows the ARCONS image with the Hubble Space Telescope’s version as an inset (here’s the full HST image). The ARCONS test image resolution is not quite up to the Hubble's standard—but then again, they were shot using a prototype sensor on a 5-meter-diameter, 17-meter focal length, Earth-based telescope, not the 2.4-meter-diameter, 57.6-meter focal length, orbiting HST. 

           ARCONS are not the only superconducting detectors under development; there are also designs based on Superconducting Tunnel Junctions and Transition Edge Sensors. Overall, though, the developers think ARCONS is a contender, offering (to quote from their paper):  

• Time resolution up to six orders of magnitude better than a CCD
• Extremely broad intrinsic bandwidth (100 to 5000 nm) with good quantum efficiency
• No read noise or dark current, and nearly perfect cosmic ray rejection
• No observing time lost to read-out of the array.
• Simple scaling
• Time domain information allows after-the-fact use of calibration stars for monitoring atmospheric transparency, setting dynamic apertures, and applying tip/tilt corrections.
• Photon arrival time, spectral resolution, and the large number of pixels allow for monitoring and removing sky emissions.

Kyocera launches 70-megawatt solar plant, largest in Japan

        Kagoshima in southern Japan is known for its puffing volcano Sakurajima, green tea, and rocket launchpads. Now it has a new superlative -- the country's largest solar plant. Smartphone maker Kyocera recently launched the Kagoshima Nanatsujima Mega Solar Power Plant, a 70-megawatt facility that can generate enough electricity to power about 22,000 homes. The move comes as Japan struggles with energy sources as nuclear power plants were shut down after meltdowns hit Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima plant in 2011. Set on Kagoshima Bay, the sprawling Nanatsujima plant commands sweeping views of Sakurajima, an active stratovolcano that soars to 3,665 feet.

          It has 290,000 solar panels and takes up about 314 acres, roughly three times the total area of Vatican City. Kyocera established the facility with six other firms as well as a company to run the plant. It will sell electricity generated to the local utility, Kyushu Electric Power Co. A Japanese government program that began in 2012 compels utilities to buy 100 percent of electricity from certain renewable energy power plants. To spread its solar philosophy, the Kagoshima plant hopes to attract tourists, students, and other visitors to an observation room overlooking the installation, which joins other photovoltaic attractions in Japan such as the Sanyo Solar Ark.

Cheap Ink-Jet Printed Circuitry

  Researchers at Georgia Tech have created a new technique that’ll allow nearly anyone to create circuitry using a desktop printer. The project, which was initially a in the hands of the University of Tokyo and with Microsoft Research, uses a desktop printer to laydown conductive circuit wiring on resin coated paper, PET films and photo papers. According to Georgia Tech the new printing technique can use silver nanoparticle ink to create circuits in as little as 60 seconds.

              “We believe there is an opportunity to introduce a new approach to the rapid prototyping of fully custom-printed circuits,” said Gregory Abowd, Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech and an investigator in the study. “Unlike existing methods for printing conductive patterns, conductivity in our technique emerges within a few seconds and without the need for special equipment.”

             What’s more everything used in the development of the project is available to consumers. For about $300 you can build your own circuit printing machine. That development alone has excited researchers, “Using this technology in the classroom, it would be possible to introduce students to basic electronics principles very cheaply, and they could use a range of electronic components to augment the experience,” said Steve Hodges, a team member from Microsoft Research.”

Yoshihiro Kawahara, Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo echoed Steve’s excitement, “[This]method can be used to print circuit boards, sensors and antennas with little cost, and it opens up many new opportunities.”

In a demonstration of the versatility and responsiveness of their new circuit printing technique Georgia Tech researchers attached a capacitive ribbon to an inkjet printed circuit and placed it into a glass of water. The circuit immediately adhered to the glass’s wall and, when connected to a smartphone, was able to measure the amount of water in the glass.

As this technology continues to mature I imagine it’ll find its way into corporate R&D departments and DIYers’ garages everywhere. With cheap, quickly prototyped circuits right at their fingertip I would n’t be surprised if circuit designers make major advances in electronic technology in the coming decades.

Flexible Mobile Devices Get a Flexible Battery Made From Nanotubes

After years of promises that mobile phones were going to become flexible, Samsung announced plans last month to release its flexible phone.

While the Samsung Galaxy Round is not flexible to the extent you can bend it to your heart’s content, it does offer a display that is flexible enough for the manufacturer to curve it. The move has also spurred other mobile device manufacturers to announce their intentions to market similar devices.

With the age of flexible devices seemingly upon us, one of the primary challenges for their development has been the power source. Samsung’s new phone is more or less powered by a standard rigid battery. But both LG and Samsung acknowledged that they are on a quest to develop a flexible battery that will enable a truly flexible phone.

Researchers, who anticipated that the launch of flexible mobile devices would require a flexible power source, have steadily pursued the flexible battery. There have been a few commercial efforts using printed electronics, and some thin-film technologies that have made a splash.

Now researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have developed a flexible battery made from carbon nanotubes that is aimed at powering flexible devices. 

Over four years ago, researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles reported details of their efforts to use carbon nanotubes to produce flexible batteries through printed electronic techniques. The NJIT researchers avoided printed electronics and simply created a flexible material through standard electrochemical architectures, consisting of an electrode and an electrolyte. The carbon nanotubes and other microparticles used in the flexible material serve as active components of the battery such as the positive and negative material as well as the electrolyte.

“This battery can be made as small as a pinhead or as large as a carpet in your living room,” says Somenath Mitra, a professor of chemistry and environmental science at NJIT whose research group invented the battery. “So its applications are endless. You can place a rolled-up battery in the trunk of your electric car and have it power the vehicle.”

One of the distinguishing features of this technology, according to Mitra, is that consumers can fabricate it at home. Presumably one would buy a kit consisting of electrode paste and a laminating machine. To make the battery, you would coat two pieces of plastic with the electrode paste and then place a third plastic sheet between the two coated sheets. Then the assembly would be laminated together.

That feature is not likely to win the favor of companies like LG and Samsung as they seek out their solutions to the flexible battery issue. But it could make DIYers pretty pleased.

Simplest construction of DC motor

How is it ?   :)

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Android 4.4 KitKat Features Detailed by Google

With Android 4.4 KitKat officially unveiled, fans of Google's mobile platform and developers are now waiting for the operating system to actually make its debut on the market. Although LG Nexus 5, the first handset to ship with Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box has been recently put on sale on Google Play Store, it will take a couple of days before the device reaches customers. Until then, Google published some of the most important features of the Android 4.4 KitKat operating system. Keep in mind that some of these features will only be available on Nexus 5, while others will be included on other devices powered by Android 4.4 KitKat as well. The first thing worth mentioning is the fact that Android 4.4 has been especially optimized to work smoothly on entry-level smartphones that come with only 512MB of RAM.

Another interesting new feature has already been successfully implemented in Motorola Moto X and allows users to control the smartphone only by voice. Simply say “Okay Google” to start a voice search, get directions, or play a song. Other apps, such as the Caller ID app, have been improved to search for local business that match a number that you call, which is not included in Contacts. As expected, the Hangouts application has been enhanced and now allows users to send and receive SMS and MMS, but for the time being it is not integrated within the Google Voice text and voice messages. There's also faster multitasking: “Android 4.4 takes system performance to an all-time high by optimizing memory and improving your touchscreen so that it responds faster and more accurately than ever before. This means that you can listen to music while browsing the web, or race down the highway with the latest hit game, all without a hitch.” With Android 4.4 KitKat users will be able to print photos, documents, and web pages from their phone or tablet while on the go. According to Google, you will be able to print to any printer connected to Google Cloud Print, to HP ePrint printers, and to other printers that have apps in the Google Play Store. Other new features added in Android 4.4 KitKat include: Bluetooth MAP and Chromecast support, Chrome web view, Device management built-in, Infrared blasting, Low-power audio playback, and touchscreen improvements.