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Welcome to the May 2008 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
STORIES
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Just how do these test drives take place? The company preps for potential customers test drives hauling the car up the hill in a trailer. Between customer test drives a generator is used to charge the car's batteries.
Owners of these Tesla Roadsters will plug in their cars and recharge them from wall sockets and special chargers. Generating electricity for this will spew some carbon emissions, but not nearly as many carbon emissions as running gas-powered cars. The company also plans to set up charging stations along highways and at likely destinations.
But for now, until you can drive home with one of these things, the generator is likely the refueling station of choice.
Before they could grind up the egg shell, the engineers needed to remove the collagen-containing membrane that clings to the inside; they developed an organic acid that does the job. About 10 percent of the membrane consists of collagen, which sells for about $ 1000/gram. This collagen, once extracted, can be used in food or pharmaceuticals, or for medical treatments. Doctors use collagen to help burn victims regenerate skin; it's also used in cosmetic surgery.
The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays that are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly.
Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech. Independent researchers said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be more challenging. The most significant limitation that the Hewlett-Packard researchers said the new technology faces is that the memristors function at about one-tenth the speed of today's DRAM memory cells.
The company is mounting a major effort to improve the parallel computing capabilities in its software. Engineers and computer scientists acknowledge that despite advances in recent decades, the computer industry is still lagging in its ability to write parallel programs. To accelerate its parallel computing efforts, Microsoft has hired some of the best minds in the field and has set up teams to explore approaches to rewriting the company's software. If it succeeds, the effort could begin to change consumer computing in roughly three years. The most aggressive of the Microsoft planners believe that the new software, designed to take advantage of microprocessors now being refined by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, could bring as much as a hundredfold computing speed-up in solving some problems.
Microsoft executives argue that such an advance would herald the advent of a class of consumer and office-oriented programs that could end the keyboard-and-mouse computing era by allowing even hand-held devices to see, listen, speak and make complex real-world decisions - in the process, transforming computers from tools into companions.
The devices that use established, open wireless standards such as 802.11 Wi-Fi have already begun to trickle in. A perfect example of a technology still trying to make its way into our homes is ultra wideband. A few domestic appliance companies are also tackling the use of standard wireless technology for the home, such as the Intelligent Oven from TMIO, which can be programmed via the Web or cell phone to give cooking, warming, or refrigeration directions. Another fledgling application of established technology in the home is the plan to use radio frequency identification tags to track food consumption. Samsung announced at the Consumer Electronics Show last year that it was developing a refrigerator that would use RFID tags on food containers to let you know when you're out of milk or beer, and even compile a shopping list sent directly to your cell phone.
Until recently, three-wheelers have occupied a unique niche. Some European companies made them back in the 1950s and '60s. And an evil villain drove one in Goldmember, the third movie in the Austin Powers trilogy. However, some three-wheelers are going upscale. Venture Vehicles plans to bring three-wheeled hybrids and electric cars that would sell in the $20,000 range to the States starting next year.
There are a few advantages to the three-wheeled vehicles. First, three-wheelers don't weigh as much as their four-wheeled counterparts, so they can go farther on a charge than regular electric cars. Second, they are smaller making them easier to park in cities. Third, three-wheelers can also get to the market faster because they are classified as motorcycles, which means there is less safety testing. And finally, they are just fun to drive.
The most amazing thing is that the device needs no power and hence no wires. It also has no moving parts. By taking on a tube shape and with the help of a bubble of air in the device, the researchers are able to move the device by simply bombarding it with sound waves. The waves cause the bubble to expand and contract, creating a sucking and blowing motion that generates thrusts, similar to the movement of how sea scallop move.
According to Dr. Ohl, "Our acoustic technology could be a big improvement. You could drive one inside the human body by placing the skin in contact with a loudspeaker. The sound needed to drive the device is loud but bearable".
As the current speed of the robo-scallop is only a couple of millimeters per second, it is not sufficient to overcome the flow of blood inside the body. But just an increase of about three to four times the current speed is all it takes to accomplish that, which Dr. Ohl thinks is possible to achieve.
There's even the possibility of reducing the current size of the robo-scallop to as small as one-quarter. Reducing the size will allow more parts of the human body to be accessible by this device. With such wonder devices available, would you ever allow these robots to swim through your body?
While the operation was done in Milan, Italy, the creator of the robot surgeon, Dr. Carlo Pappone, was monitoring the process from his computer in Boston, USA. Dozens more heart specialists attending an international congress in America were also watching this major medical event. Prior to this first break through unassisted operation, the robot has already done at least 40 assisted operations, and has also gathered operation details from more than 10,000 past human operated surgeries.
According to Dr. Carlo Pappone, "This operation has enabled us to cross a new frontier. The robot can now recognize the type of patient and the required method of operating". For any doctors or doctors-to-be who are reading this, consider this a warning. Because this operation has been considered a major success and Pappone already has a plan to begin putting this prototype robot on sale this month.
Will this technology ever be widely accepted? Would you allow your loved ones to be operated by an unassisted robot? Time will tell.
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