Lifeboat Foundation

At MIT, researchers have developed a stretchable bandage-like device capable of sensing skin temperature, delivering drugs transdermally, and containing electronics that include LED lights for displaying information. The various components of the system are designed to work together, for example the drug dispenser activating only when skin temperature is within a certain range and the LEDs lighting up when the drug reservoirs are running low. While this is only a prototype device, it certainly points toward future flexible devices that stay attached to a person’s skin, or even internally, for extended periods of time while providing health data and taking therapeutic actions in an intelligent way.

The device is based on a stretchable hydrogel matrix that reliably holds onto embedded metallic components linked by pliable wires. The hydrogel was made to have a stiffness similar to human soft tissues so that it blends well with the body when attached to it. When wires, drug reservoirs, delivery channels, and electronic components were built-in, the team tested the stretchiness of the final result showing that it maintains functionality even after repeated stress.

Continue reading “Flexible Electronics Used to Make Smart, Temperature Responsive Drug Eluting Patch” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7iCUSXctY

How can a person see around a blind corner? One answer is to develop X-ray vision. A more mundane approach is to use a mirror. But if neither are an option, a group of scientists led by Genevieve Gariepy have developed a state-of-the-art detector which, with some clever data processing techniques, can turn walls and floors into a “virtual mirror”, giving the power to locate and track moving objects out of direct line of sight.

The shiny surface of a mirror works by reflecting scattered light from an object at a well-defined angle towards your eye. Because light scattered from different points on the object is reflected at the same angle, your eye sees a clear image of the object. In contrast, a non-reflective surface scatters light randomly in all directions, and creates no clear image.

Continue reading “The amazing camera that can see around corners (w/ video)” »

Just How Much Did ‘Back to the Future’ Get Right about October 2015? 2:19.

In “Back to the Future Part II,” Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel from 1985 to October 21, 2015, to find a world filled with flying cars, hoverboards and self-drying jackets.

Those predictions didn’t exactly pan out, although people are working on each of those concepts. (Screenwriter Bob Gale did get a lot of things — from drones to fingerprint scanners — right, as he told TODAY earlier this year.)

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Researchers at Linköping University’s Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Sweden, have developed power paper — a new material with an outstanding ability to store energy. The material consists of nanocellulose and a conductive polymer. The results have been published in Advanced Science.

One sheet, 15 centimetres in diameter and a few tenths of a millimetre thick can store as much as 1 F, which is similar to the supercapacitors currently on the market. The material can be recharged hundreds of times and each charge only takes a few seconds.

It’s a dream product in a world where the increased use of renewable energy requires new methods for energy storage — from summer to winter, from a windy day to a calm one, from a sunny day to one with heavy cloud cover.

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LG really, really wants your next TV, smartwatch, and car to use an OLED panel and, preferably, one that’s come off its new $8.71bn production line. The company’s panel arm, LG Display, has announced a whopping 1.84 trillion South Korean Won investment into a brand new facility dubbed P10, which will cater for what LG predicts will be blockbuster demand for OLED in a range of sizes.

That $8.71bn is only the tip of the iceberg, mind, and the plant — to be constructed in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, Korea — is expected to eventually cost more than five times that amount.

Continue reading “LG pumps $8.7bn into OLED for your car, TV and wrist” »

“I believe the children are our future,” philosopher Whitney Houston once opined. Well, if she was talking about car design, she wasn’t wrong.

OK, not ‘children’ exactly. But certainly students. Audi has today unveiled the results of its ‘Design Universe’ think-tank, in which young designers at four top universities have explored how the Audi of tomorrow might look.

Take the car above, as an example. It’s called the Audi Quantum, and was designed by a pair of students at the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan. Looks suitably futuristic, no? There are retina scanners that, um, scan the driver’s retina and configure the interior settings before he or she climbs in.

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Scientists in the UK have invented a new type of touchscreen material that requires very little power to illuminate, offering up a cheap alternative to today’s smartphone and tablet screens, with vivid colours and high visibility in direct sunlight.

The team is already in talks with some of the world’s largest consumer electronics corporations to see if their new material can replace current LCD touchscreens in the next couple of years, which could spell the end for daily smartphone charging. “We can create an entire new market,” one of the researchers, Peiman Hosseini, told The Telegraph. “You have to charge smartwatches every night, which is slowing adoption. But if you had a smartwatch or smart glass that didn’t need much power, you could recharge it just once a week.”

Developed by Bodie Technologies, a University of Oxford spin-off company, the new display is reportedly made from a type of phase-change material called germanium-antimony-tellurium, or GST. The researchers are being understandably cagey about exactly how it’s made as they shop the technology around, but it’s based on a paper they published last year describing how a rigid or flexible display can be formed from microscopic ‘stacks’ of GST and electrode layers.

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Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind self-healing gel that repairs and connects electronic circuits, creating opportunities to advance the development of flexible electronics, biosensors and batteries as energy storage devices.

Although technology is moving toward lighter, flexible, foldable and rollable electronics, the existing circuits that power them are not built to flex freely and repeatedly self-repair cracks or breaks that can happen from normal wear and tear.

Until now, self-healing materials have relied on application of external stimuli such as light or heat to activate repair. The UT Austin “supergel” material has high conductivity (the degree to which a material conducts electricity) and strong mechanical and electrical self-healing properties.

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How thin can a camera be? Very, say Rice University researchers who have developed patented prototypes of their technological breakthrough.

FlatCam, invented by the Rice labs of electrical and computer engineers Richard Baraniuk and Ashok Veeraraghavan, is little more than a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in a traditional camera.

Making it practical are the sophisticated computer algorithms that process what the sensor detects and converts the sensor measurements into images and videos.

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