Terahertz Chip Identifies Short Strands of DNA | MIT Technology Review

Terahertz Chip Identifies Short Strands of DNA | MIT Technology Review: They say that the sequence of bases in an oligonucleotide determines the way in which the strand resonates at frequencies in the terahertz range...

...they have tested it using a device they call a silicon nanosandwich, a quantum well of p-type silicon surrounded by barriers doped with boron. This produces terahertz radiation inside the well where the oligonucleotide is deposited at a concentration that allows a single molecule to enter.

Muscle-powered bio-bots walk on command | News Bureau | University of Illinois

Muscle-powered bio-bots walk on command | News Bureau | University of Illinois: The new bio-bots are powered by a strip of skeletal muscle cells that can be triggered by an electric pulse...

“Skeletal muscles cells are very attractive because you can pace them using external signals,” Bashir said. “For example, you would use skeletal muscle when designing a device that you wanted to start functioning when it senses a chemical or when it received a certain signal. To us, it’s part of a design toolbox. We want to have different options that could be used by engineers to design these things.”

The design is inspired by the muscle-tendon-bone complex found in nature. There is a backbone of 3-D printed hydrogel, strong enough to give the bio-bot structure but flexible enough to bend like a joint. Two posts serve to anchor a strip of muscle to the backbone, like tendons attach muscle to bone, but the posts also act as feet for the bio-bot.

Could wireless replace wearables? | MIT News Office

Could wireless replace wearables? | MIT News Office: As described in an earlier MIT News story, the system works by transmitting a low-power wireless signal and using its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall.

As the signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of the signal penetrates through, reflecting off a person on the other side. However, due to all the signal interference from other objects, the team had to create technology to cancel out irrelevant reflections.

In order to monitor breathing, the technology needed to be precise: The researchers created a complex metric that approximates the subject’s volume, and then observed and amplified its changes to distinguish the breathing.

How An Ordinary Camera Phone Can Photograph Objects Hidden Behind Other Things — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium

How An Ordinary Camera Phone Can Photograph Objects Hidden Behind Other Things — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium: The trick here is to treat the data from each pixel as a separate image. The task then is to look for the correlation between each of these images, just as in the single-pixel imaging techniques...

And they even produce images using reflected light (as opposed to transmitting light). To prove this, these guys recorded the light from an object that was scattered off a wall covered in white paint.

Sure enough, the resulting image revealed the object, even though it was essentially around a corner from the camera.

Nanoscale neuronal activity measured for the first time | KurzweilAI

Nanoscale neuronal activity measured for the first time | KurzweilAI: “The nanopipette hovers above the surface of the sample and scans the structure to reveal its three-dimensional topography. The same nanopipette then attaches to the surface at selected locations on the structure to record electrical activity.

Air bubbles could be the secret to artificial skin

Air bubbles could be the secret to artificial skin: On a uniform elastomeric substrate, traction tests revealed the creation of micro-fissures in the metallic layer, which would eventually result in the rupture of the conducting network. But with foam substrates, these cracks only occurred above the air bubbles. "Between the bubbles, the metal remained intact. The conducting network is thus maintained and can function," she explains. "Our measurements showed that we could achieve a level of elasticity over 100% without disrupting the network. These metallic pathways built upon foam could thus be used as electrodes, sensors or interconnections for the electronic skin that we're developing."

Zinc Oxide Nanowires Transistors Can Be Sophisticated Pressure Sensors | MIT Technology Review

Zinc Oxide Nanowires Transistors Can Be Sophisticated Pressure Sensors | MIT Technology Review: In the new research, Wang’s group demonstrates nanoelectronics that offer at least a 15-fold enhancement in sensor density and spatial resolution compared to the previous approaches... The density, resolution, and sensitivity of the sensors, says Wang, is comparable to that of the skin of a human finger...

In Wang’s nanowire transistors, the gate traditionally used in electronics is eliminated. Instead, the current flowing through the nanowires is controlled by the electrical charge generated when strain or force applied is to the transistors.

The first controllable atom SQUID

The first controllable atom SQUID: Campbell and colleagues in the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group have long been investigating analogous behavior in toroidal Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) – ultracold, donut-shaped ensembles of atoms that are all in the same quantum state and form a superfluid.

To create rotation, which is the superfluid counterpart to external magnetic fields in a SQUID, the team introduces a green laser beam perpendicular to and penetrating the plane of the superfluid ring, and slowly rotates the beam around the ring. (See animation.) The beam acts as a sort of optical paddle, causing the superfluid BEC atoms to rotate.

Just as a superconducting ring admits flux when the current exceeds a critical value, the ring of superfluid admits a vortex, resulting in a change in the circulation of atoms around the ring. Like everything else in the quantum world, the properties of those vortices are quantized – that is, they occur only at discrete values, and lead to quantized circulation states in the BEC. Campbell's team was able to observe and measure those quantum increments and for the first time was able to control the onset of discrete circulation states by tuning the power and rotational speed of the green laser.

The most complex synthetic biology circuit yet

The most complex synthetic biology circuit yet: Using genes as interchangeable parts, synthetic biologists design cellular circuits that can perform new functions, such as sensing environmental conditions. However, the complexity that can be achieved in such circuits has been limited by a critical bottleneck: the difficulty in assembling genetic components that don’t interfere with each other...


The pathway consists of three components: an activator, a promoter and a chaperone. A promoter is a region of DNA where proteins bind to initiate transcription of a gene. An activator is one such protein. Some activators also require a chaperone protein before they can bind to DNA to initiate transcription.

The researchers found 60 different versions of this pathway in other species of bacteria, and found that most of the proteins involved in each were different enough that they did not interfere with one another. However, there was a small amount of crosstalk between a few of the circuit components, so the researchers used an approach called directed evolution to reduce it. Directed evolution is a trial-and-error process that involves mutating a gene to create thousands of similar variants, then testing them for the desired trait. The best candidates are mutated and screened again, until the optimal gene is created.

One Per Cent: Hairy sensors to give robots sensitive skin

One Per Cent: Hairy sensors to give robots sensitive skin: Similar to their organic counterparts, the 50-nanometre-wide hairs of Suh's device twist and bend against each other when an external force like a beating heart or a soft touch is applied.

The contact between the hairs generates an electrical current which the sensor identifies as specific changes in pressure, shear or torsion...

... It could detect the dynamic motion of a tiny water droplet bouncing on a hydrophobic plate and the physical force of a heartbeat....

Liquid-Filled Robot Finger More Sensitive to Touch Than a Human's

Liquid-Filled Robot Finger More Sensitive to Touch Than a Human's: A flexible, spongy skin complete with ridges (like a fingerprint) is stretched over a liquid filling. As it slides over a surface, the skin vibrates in ways that are distinctly tied to the texture of the material it is touching. A hydrophone inside the core of the finger picks up these vibrations and uses them to distinguish between materials...

The researchers recreated this way of discerning between exploratory movements via an algorithm that allows the robot to zero in on the best exploratory movements for appraising any material set in front of it at random. The result: when presented with 117 materials gathered from fabric, stationary, and hardware stores, the robot correctly identified them 95 percent of the time using no sensory input but touch.

T-rays technology could help develop Star Trek-style hand-held medical scanners

T-rays technology could help develop Star Trek-style hand-held medical scanners: This new design creates a T-ray beam at low temperatures, essentially by mixing and amplifying beams of light at different wavelengths. It uses a pair of electrodes situated just 100 nanometers apart on a semiconductor substrate. Light in two different wavelengths shines on the electrodes and is funneled through the 100-nm gap. A strong current between the electrodes acts as an antenna and amplifies the light to the THz range. The T-rays can even be tuned to create a constant beam, which would be required for a T-ray scanner. The setup is two orders of magnitude stronger than existing THz systems, the researchers say in their paper, which was published this month in Nature Photonics.
Along with their efficacy at low temperatures, the best thing about this T-ray beam is its small size — it’s tiny enough to be integrated into existing silicon chips.

Nano Paint Could Make Airplanes Invisible to Radar

Nano Paint Could Make Airplanes Invisible to Radar: This effect works, Guo says, because the nanotubes are perfectly absorbing, and because when they are grown with some space between them, as in his experiments, their index of refraction is nearly identical to that of the surrounding air. This means that light won't scatter out of the nanotubes without being absorbed.

Artificial Skin Feels With Nerves Made of Clear Nanotube Springs | Popular Science

Artificial Skin Feels With Nerves Made of Clear Nanotube Springs | Popular Science: Lipomi and colleagues in Zhenan Bao’s skin lab used nanotubes suspended in liquid, spraying them onto a silicone surface and then stretching the silicone...
The sensors are made from two nanotube-coated silicone pieces, sandwiching a third layer of deformable silicone that stores an electrical charge. When pressure is applied, the device’s capacitance increases, and this can be used to calculate the amount of pressure. It’s not quite as sensitive as another super-sensitive skin developed in the same lab last year, because the researchers were focused on making this one transparent.

Seeing through walls - MIT News Office

Seeing through walls - MIT News Office: Even when the signal-strength problem is addressed with amplifiers, the wall — whether it’s concrete, adobe or any other solid substance — will always show up as the brightest spot by far. To get around this problem, the researchers use an analog crystal filter, which exploits frequency differences between the modulated waves bouncing off the wall and those coming from the target. “So if the wall is 20 feet away, let’s say, it shows up as a 20-kilohertz sine wave. If you, behind the wall, are 30 feet away, maybe you’ll show up as a 30-kilohertz sine wave,” Charvat says. The filter can be set to allow only waves in the range of 30 kilohertz to pass through to the receivers, effectively deleting the wall from the image so that it doesn’t overpower the receiver.

Artificial Fingerprints Help Robots Distinguish Shapes - Technology Review

Artificial Fingerprints Help Robots Distinguish Shapes - Technology Review: The optimization of hardness is a successful proof-of-principle example, which opens the way for a novel computational technique. “A new era in material design and discovery is about to begin,” said Prof. Oganov. “New materials with desired properties will be routinely discovered using supercomputers, instead of the expensive trial-and-error method that is used today.”

The Future of Skin | Popular Science

The Future of Skin | Popular Science: Click through to the gallery for a look at some recent breakthroughs in skin technology.

Scientists develop sensitive skin for robots

Scientists develop sensitive skin for robots: The centerpiece of the new robotic shell is a 5 square centimeter hexagonal plate or circuit board. Each small circuit board contains four infrared sensors that detect anything closer than 1 centimeter. "We thus simulate light touch," explains Mittendorfer. "This corresponds to our sense of the fine hairs on our skin being gently stroked." There are also six temperature sensors and an accelerometer. This allows the machine to accurately register the movement of individual limbs, for example, of its arms, and thus to learn what body parts it has just moved. "We try to pack many different sensory modalities into the smallest of spaces," explains the engineer. "In addition, it is easy to expand the circuit boards to later include other sensors, for example, pressure."
Plate for plate, the boards are placed together forming a honeycomb-like, planar structure to be worn by the robot.

High-Speed Robot Hand - Boing Boing

High-Speed Robot Hand - Boing Boing

Moved By Light - Science News

Moved By Light - Science News: While other scientists built stuff that shook thousands or millions of times a second, he created a ceramic wafer 30 micro-meters long that expanded and contracted 6 billion times per second. The faster an object’s natural quiver, the easier it is to remove energy, meaning less cooling needed to reach the ground state. Using a state-of-the-art liquid-helium refrigerator capable of achieving millikelvin temperatures, Cleland’s team put the wafer in its ground state 93 percent of the time.

By measuring the electric fields produced by this object, Cleland and his colleagues showed that they could nudge the wafer into a state of superposition — both moving and still at the same time.