Electromagnetic Shock So smooth, it’s like riding on an electromagnetic field. via Gizmag

Automobile suspensions have come a long way from their humble spring and tension beginnings to the common hydraulic systems in place today, but researchers at Eindhoven University think they can do even better: electromagnetic suspension. Building on an idea that’s been incubating in the auto tech world for a while now, a team there now has a test car ready to demonstrate the technology, which they claim improves ride quality by 60 percent.

Quantifying ride quality into a percentage seems difficult/nebulous, but the technology does seem to have quite a theoretical edge over even the best active hydraulic suspensions. That’s simply because electromagnetic systems can react more quickly to bumps in the road than hydraulic systems can. As sensors and accelerometers placed around the car feed data into an onboard computer, it should be able to make nearly instantaneous adjustments to the ride at all four wheels.

This, according to the Eindhoven team, is the core technological principle that makes its electromagnetic suspension superior to the usual active hydraulic systems. But the benefits don’t end there. Each shock absorber unit packs both an electromagnetic actuator and a passive spring, so if the batteries for some reason fail in the electromagnetic system, the suspension still functions as a mechanical system (via the spring) until the car can be serviced.

Moreover the batteries have a peak consumption of 500 watts, the Eindhoven team says, which is roughly a quarter of the power needed to keep active hydraulic systems running. The new system also incorporates tiny generators that turn road vibrations into battery power, helping to keep batteries replenished without tapping the car’s main power source.

As for that 60 percent ride improvement number, it was obtained in the lab and we’re not exactly sure what 60 percent overall ride improvement feels like. But seeing the benefits on paper definitely makes us feel like an electromagnetic suspension could go a long ways toward smoothing out an otherwise bumpy ride.

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Microsoft’s Surface Touchscreen Display A new patent filing by Microsoft could lend a tactile quality to the company’s touchscreen tech. Ergonomidesign via Wikimedia

The slick touchscreens of our iPhones and Droids are visually magnificent and the epitome of tech chic, but their slick, untextured glass screens don’t resonate with humans’ tactile nature (that’s why some people just can’t kick the hardware button keyboard). Good tactile touchscreens – screens that impart a feeling of touch or texture in sync with a displayed image – have thus far eluded device makers. A new Microsoft project could change all that.

Previous attempts at tactile screens have focused largely on so-called vibrotactile displays that use small voltages at different frequencies to create the illusion of texture, but Microsoft wants to offer the real deal. The tech giant’s patent calls for pixel-sized plastic cells that can be physically manipulated to create the ridges and bumps that create a realistic touch sensation.

According to the patent filing, the technology is aimed at large displays like Microsoft’s table-sized Surface display rather than portable touchscreens – for the time being, anyhow. Surface works via a projector that beams images onto the tabletop screen from below. Users’ fingers touching the other side of the screen generate infrared reflections that are picked up by sensors below, creating touchscreen capability.

Microsoft’s patent envisions augmenting this with a shape-memory polymer that responds to light commands; when certain wavelengths of UV light hit pixels they respond accordingly, becoming harder, or softer, or protruding or retracting. Syncing this up with visual information could create the kinds of ridges and bumps that could five an image texture, or simulate the feeling of pressing real buttons rather than relying on the flat touchscreen tap iPhone users are familiar with.

Don’t put it on your Christmas list – this technology is nascent to say the very least, and Microsoft is mum on its development plans or if/when a tactile product might come to market. But the fact that a big player like Microsoft is pushing beyond vibrotactile displays is promising for the field in general. If researchers there can make it work, texting on touchscreens might never be the same.

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Someday, This Tree Could Be Producing Its Own Light nauright on Flickr

Taiwanese researchers have come up with the elegant idea of replacing streetlights with trees, by implanting their leaves with gold nanoparticles. This causes the leaves to give off a red glow, lighting the road for passersby without the need for electric power. This ingenious triple threat of an idea could simultaneously reduce carbon emissions, cut electricity costs and reduce light pollution, without sacrificing the safety that streetlights bring.

As many good things do, this discovery came about by accident when the researchers were trying to create lighting as efficient as LEDs without using the toxic, expensive phosphor powder that LEDs rely on. The gold nanoparticles, shaped like sea urchins, put into the leaves of Bacopa caroliniana plants cause chlorophyll to produce the reddish luminescence.

In an added bonus, the luminescence will cause the leaves’ chloroplasts to photosynthesize, which will result in more carbon being captured from the air while the streets are lit. The next steps are to improve the efficiency of the bioluminescence and apply the technology to other biomolecules.

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Hello From Kinect’s sensor bar. John mahoney

There is a certain we try to capture here every day on PopSci.com, that effervescent sensation when the future becomes suddenly tangible, thrilling, real. That sharp, at times bewildering moment: “Wow.”

After playing for four days, I can comfortably say Microsoft’s Kinect, the Xbox 360′s new sound and motion sensor for Xbox, delivers that feeling more than anything I’ve experienced recently. I feel safe calling it a bounding leap forward in potential for the future of gaming, your living room, and the way we interact with machines. But we’re not living in that future fully just yet.

What’s New

It may seem like Microsoft is crossing the finish line last in the motion-controller race, the one the Nintendo Wii started in 2006 and Sony joined earlier this year with the PlayStation 3′s Move controller. But really, Kinect is a different thing altogether. The three main hardware components are off-the-shelf: a visible-light camera, a multi-array microphone and an infrared depth sensor that sprays your room with hundreds of IR dots. Microsoft poured its massive R&D resources into the software that processes all the data Kinect’s humdrum hardware brings in. (We took a behind-the-scenes look at that software earlier this year).

It’s the software brain that knows whether you’re doing the Soulja Boy dance correctly, that filters out a room’s ambient audio profile to process voice commands with incredible accuracy and speed, that spots the difference between your face and your brother’s, instantly. What Kinect does is see and hear you, less like a machine and more like a form of intelligence. Which is pretty amazing.

What’s Good

It’s watching and listening: That very act of being seen and heard by a machine is what’s good. Controlling your Xbox’s menus with voice commands that work, at a normal volume and tone of voice, almost all the time. The very low level of frustration with the controls. This is what Kinect was created to do, and so far, it feels really, really right.

Dance Central: The game Dance Central, by the creators of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, is very good. As is having goofy dance-offs with as many friends as possible, and seeing yourself in the high-speed animated GIFs Kinect’s camera spits out at the end of every dance.

This: Flapping your arms to fly in zero gravity and holding them out to hover in Kinect Adventures. More please!

What’s Bad

Most of the launch titles: With the single, shining exception of Dace Central, the launch titles feel more like tech demos than complete games. Which for a system like this is in many ways a necessity, but you can tell even now that most Kinect owners won’t be playing many of these launch titles for more than a few months.

That said, the tech being demo’d is still pretty thrilling, so they’re not without charms. My friends and I certainly enjoyed steering a car with our hands held Frankenstein-style in front of our faces clutching an invisible wheel in Kinect Joy Rides. Ping Pong in Kinect Sports is a blast. There is fun to be had, just probably not much staying power.

This is in some ways a good thing. When I really start to drool is while thinking about the seemingly limitless applications of some or all of Kinect’s features into future games. The launch titles have set the foundation, now it’s time to grow from there.

The space required: My apartment’s living room is 12 feet deep, with a couch flush against the back wall and the TV console flush against the far wall. This is just barely enough space to operate Kinect. In the calibration routine, I can’t really step into the back third of the viewing area. This causes the biggest problems in two-player simultaneous games. It had a hard time recognizing the faces of both drivers in a two-player Kinect Joy Ride race, and Kinect Adventures even advises against playing two-player modes in my setup.

You mean I have to stand up? Clearing your living room, standing up and really getting into it is a huge part of what makes playing a Kinect game fun. That said, I really wish it worked consistently while I was sitting down on the couch. I had a hard time paging through menus in the dashboard, or selecting and controlling videos in the Zune app without standing up. I’m fine with getting off my ass to bust a move, but not to use the default interface.

The Price

You can get Kinect bundled with the new, slimmer Xbox 360 console for $400 (with a 250GB hard drive), $300 (with 4GB of flash storage), or for $150 on its own, bundled with the game Kinect Adventures. Launch games are all priced around $50.

The Verdict

Like any new platform, Kinect is a set of tools waiting to be put to new and interesting uses. But what tools! Even with a fairly lackluster lineup of launch titles, it’s clear that Kinect’s abilities open up the Xbox 360 to so many new things. The big, as-yet unanswered question is how easy it wil be for developers to integrate Kinect features into their games. I really hope the answer isn’t “hard.” Think of what Call of Duty could be if you could give radio orders in natural speech (and without a geeky headset) to the AI-controlled members of your squad, who then responded to the level of urgency in your voice. Or, browsing Neflix with your hands while slumped on the couch.

In the launch titles, you can already see little hints of where some developers may take this. In Kinect Joy Ride, you can paint your car by holding up any object for Kinect’s camera, aligning it with what amounts to a real-world Photoshop eyedropper tool. It’s not a significant gameplay feature, but it’s an interesting taste of what just a little creativity can get you on Kinect.

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No Service:  David Becher

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast are studying a new kind of wireless network that might someday help alleviate the crush of mobile internet traffic in dense cities. How does it work? By making you–and me, and all of us–into cellphone towers.

The research concerns what’s called body-to-body networks, or BBNs. A BBN requires each user to have some kind of wearable sensor, which, it turns out, can be embedded inside a phone (so don’t worry about having any shiny circuitry adorn your clothing). All of these sensors communicate with each other to provide a sort of ad hoc network, sending data between lots of little sensors rather than to one giant tower–different from other innovative antenna designs.

What’s great about this concept is that it specifically works best where we need it the most: in cities. In major cities, especially the ultra-connected ones like New York and San Francisco, there’s a crush of users sending lots and lots of data through only a few cell towers. Those towers are exceedingly expensive to build and maintain, and need constant improvement to keep up with new technologies like 4G. Thanks to the expense, they’re sometimes sparsely placed, which creates bottlenecks, which in turn results in diminished performance. (San Francisco iPhone users know about this all too well.)

BBNs could potentially help that situation out, because they would work best in densely populated areas–just the places where traditional cell towers fail.

The press release is damnably vague, so it’s hard to tell exactly how these sensors work–surely there has to be some central repository for redirection of data, right?–but it’s still early in the testing stages, after all. Plus, it’s doubtful that those scared of cellphone radiation are in any particular hurry to attach more sensors to their own gadgets. But they would definitely require less power than building more base stations, and there’s kind of a fun team-based mentality to the whole thing. Let’s build our signal together, right, folks?

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Deuteronomy Scroll Containing The Ten Commandments This portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the oldest known copy of the Ten Commandments. Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

In a matter of months, it will be possible to peruse the Dead Sea Scrolls from the comfort of your computer chair. Because now that Google’s digitized one priceless national treasure, this is the next logical step.

The keepers of the scrolls, the Israel Antiquities Authority, announced Tuesday that as part of their 20th anniversary, they are launching this project to digitize all of the 30,000 fragments that make up the earliest known copy of the Hebrew Bible. Taking a page out of the PopSci handbook, the IAA is entrusting Google with the task of preserving their sacred, prophetic treasures. This is the first time since the 1950s that the entire collection will be photographed.

U.S. company MegaVision developed the high-resolution imaging technology that is to be used on the project. According to the IAA, the resulting images will be just as good as looking at the scrolls themselves. This will allow not only widespread access to the collection, but also minimize the need to expose the delicate 2,000-year-old parchment and papyrus to the harsh effects of light and air.

Once the project is complete, researching the scrolls will be easier than ever. Google Israel and the IAA plan to include transcriptions, translations and a bibliography with the images so you won’t have to be an expert, or even able to read Aramaic in order to decipher the scrolls.

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Motorola Droid John Mahoney

There are all kinds of ways to check your phone for updates like new email, ranging from audible alarms to vibrations to little blinking lights. But how about something more…tactile? A new casing for cellphones encourages you to squeeze your phone–the level of turgidity or flaccidity indicates what’s happening inside. It’s not as erotic as it sounds.

Shwetak Patel and his fellow researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed SqueezeBlock, a pressure-based casing that expands and contracts to mimic the tactile feel of a spring. (You can read their report here–warning, it’s a PDF.) The casing has tiny motors built inside it which both detect pressure and provide feedback in different levels.
Lab tests showed that users can typically distinguish four levels of firmness, which gives at least as many options as an indicator light (which often, as on Android phones, have several different possible colors). Plus, a squeezable phone is silent and doesn’t need to be removed from the pocket, making it perfect for surreptitious phone-checking. With four levels, the phone’s firmness could indicate battery life, missed messages or phone calls, or even volume–a quick squeeze could reassure you that yes, your phone is in silent mode.

There are also UI possibilities, although the provided examples seem a little unnecessarily complex. (A phone could expand to the right to indicate that there’s more content on the right side of the screen–I mean, sure, but that could be accomplished with an on-screen icon much more easily.) But some apps could use it, whether to provide a new form of force feedback in games or to, say, expand right or left to indicate level or balance.

I can foresee some practical obstacles that might outweigh the benefits. Hardware manufacturers like Apple and HTC and already struggling to cram a processor, memory, storage, screen, inputs, connections, sensors, and all kinds of other detritus into ever-shrinking smartphone cases. The SqueezeBlock tech would involve a larger case, to make room for the new plates and motors, and I’m not sure the advantages over, say, haptic feedback and a blinking light are worth the extra few millimeters. (Or at least, I would bet that’s how Apple and HTC see it.)

Still, the idea of a phone that changes its physicality is an enticing one, especially as smartphones move further towards designs that are little more than a screen.

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Graphene Nanobubble Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics today to University of Manchester professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work isolating graphene from graphite and identifying its behavior. Graphene, a one-atom thick sheet of carbon, is the thinnest, strongest material ever discovered. It conducts heat and electricity, and despite being one atom thick, is so dense even helium cannot pass through it. As the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in the Nobel Prize announcement: “Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.”

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Navigating by Touch Nate Medeiros-Ward/William Provancher, University of Utah

The most complicated task one used to undertake while driving was changing the eight-track, but now there are more technological bells and whistles in the cabs of our autos than we can possibly pay attention to as. So University of Utah engineers are testing a new tactile system to remove at least one audio-visual distraction from the driving experience, allowing navigation systems to direct drivers by sense of touch.

The system, researchers insist, isn’t aimed at urging drivers to talk on their cell phones or engage in other distracting activities while driving, but it does allow the driver to receive tactile cues from his or her GPS system if noise in the car prevents him or her from hearing the systems audio cues. It also keeps the driver from having to look at the GPS device’s screen, especially at the times he or she is most likely to do so, like when approaching an intersection where traffic is prone to be moving in different directions.

he system could also be used to help hearing-impaired drivers receive instructions from navigation devices, and such a tactile scheme could even be adopted to walking sticks for the visually impaired to help them negotiate landscapes.

The system works by installing two IBM TrackPoint caps – those little pencil eraser-looking mouse devices integrated into the keyboards of ThinkPad computers – at ten and two on a steering wheel. When the system wants to prompt the driver to turn or change lanes to the left, it nudges the driver’s fingers left. It does the same in the opposite direction to prompt a driver to the right.

It sounds simple enough, but in tests that involved placing drivers in a simulator and distracting them with a cell phone call, drivers using the system still made the proper turn 98 percent of the time. Those that were trying to maintain a phone conversation while listening to or watching the dashboard GPS device only managed to follow directions properly 74 percent of the time.

It’s not an excuse to talk on the phone while driving, the researchers say, but in a car filled with screaming kids, constant cell phone distractions, and more entertainment options for passengers than ever before it could help drivers stay on the right course if not completely focused.

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The Leatherback Sea Turtle The spot atop the leatherback’s head can be used as a biomarker, making it easier and safer for marine biologists to identify individual specimens without resorting to radio tagging or other electronic marking methods. rustinpc via Wikimedia

Imagine if every time you needed to officially identify yourself you had to be sedated and knocked out cold. This might sound only slightly less stressful than checking through security at the airport, but for animals being tracked by wildlife authorities and researchers it’s a regularity that is not only stressful, but potentially harmful. But new “visual fingerprinting” technology that recognizes individual animals based on physical characteristics – similar to face recognition technology – is allowing researchers to track animals from afar, sans the tranquilizer darts and physical ID tags.

One beneficiary of this emerging technology is the leatherback sea turtle, which marine biologists usually identify by conventional plastic tags. These tags often fall off, leaving behind scars but no way to identify specific specimens. So conservation group Widecast approached a Dutch computing firm about developing an algorithm that can identify turtles by unique, pigment-free spots on top of their heads, encoding those distinct patches into a biomarker.

Using a biomarker database, the Widecast team is able to identify turtles not just in person, but from digital photographs taken of the turtles’ heads. This opens up a whole new kind of crowdsourced science, in which anyone who happens across a sea turtle can snap a photo of its head with a smartphone or camera and upload it to a database along with geo-location data and other relevant info. The system can identify the turtle, building a profile for each specimen and its activities for researchers and wildlife authorities to draw upon.

Non-invasive, digital biomarking schemes are being developed for other animal species. African penguins can be digitally identified by the unique markings on their chests, while black rhinos (for whom sedatives can cause fertility problems in females) can be identified in absentia from their footprints alone. Similar footprint-recognition software has been used to create biometric signatures for white rhinos, polar bears, and cheetahs as well.

Such biomarker databases, made ubiquitous, could change the way biologists conduct their research as everyone from farmers to photographers to hikers and outdoors enthusiasts could contribute – easily and in real time – to both specific studies and to the larger cannon of wildlife study. As for the animals themselves, a quick vanity shot from a digi-cam sure beats a shot of heavy sedatives.

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