Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2008

Industrial motors can spin at a head-spinning 250,000 revolutions per minute. But a new matchbook-sized motor runs circles around the competition.

Researchers from ETH Zurich’s Department of Power Electronics created a drive system in cooperation with its industrial partners that exceeded 1,000,000 rpm in tests.

A giant underground gyroscope array has taken its first measurements of how the world goes ’round.

👽 New beetle

Fyodor R.

Researchers have developed a tiny wireless camera that is light enough to be carried by live beetles.

Continue reading “Beetle-mounted camera streams insect adventures” »

The consumer-electronics research arm has been quiet for years—but it’s also been busy. Its new mission: Make Google hardware as smart as Google software.

Adidas GMR, a smart insole for soccer players, is powered by Google ATAP’s Jacquard technology. [Photo: courtesy of Google].

Seagate has confirmed it is working on optical data storage.

Dark matter must exist, but has evaded all attempts to find it. Now comes our boldest plan yet – sensing its minuscule gravitational force as it brushes past us.

Samsung has announced its latest lineup of high-capacity consumer solid-state drives: the 870 QVO. It starts at $129.99 for the 1TB SSD, working all the way up to Samsung’s first 8TB model made for consumers.

For half a millennium, people have tried to enhance human vision by technical means. While the human eye is capable of recognizing features over a wide range of size, it reaches its limits when peering at objects over giant distances or in the micro- and nanoworld. Researchers of the EU funded project ChipScope are now developing a completely new strategy towards optical microscopy.

The conventional light microscope, still standard equipment in laboratories, underlies the fundamental laws of optics. Thus, resolution is limited by diffraction to the so called Abbe limit’ – structural features smaller than a minimum of 200 nm cannot be resolved by this kind of microscope.

So far, all technologies for going beyond the Abbe limit rely on complex setups, with bulky components and advanced laboratory infrastructure. Even a conventional light microscope, in most configurations, is not suitable as a mobile gadget to do research out in the field or in remote areas. In the ChipScope project funded by the EU, a completely new strategy towards optical microscopy is explored. In classical optical microscopy the analyzed sample area is illuminated simultaneously, collecting the light which is scattered from each point with an area-selective detector, e.g. the human eye or the sensor of a camera.

When neurons fire an electrical impulse, they also experience a surge of calcium ions. By measuring those surges, researchers can indirectly monitor neuron activity, helping them to study the role of individual neurons in many different brain functions.

One drawback to this technique is the crosstalk generated by the axons and dendrites that extend from neighboring neurons, which makes it harder to get a distinctive signal from the neuron being studied. MIT engineers have now developed a way to overcome that issue, by creating calcium indicators, or sensors, that accumulate only in the body of a neuron.

“People are using calcium indicators for monitoring neural activity in many parts of the brain,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and a professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “Now they can get better results, obtaining more accurate neural recordings that are less contaminated by crosstalk.”