3–D Printers Are Mainstream


3–D printers are now mainstream after they have been around for two or three decades. The big ones at about $20k are out of reach for most of us, but people like J. Leno, car collector and comedian or perhaps I should say comedian and car collector, who is printing out car parts that aren’t manufactured any more (1, 2) can afford to have one tucked away. Or Disney, who are printing toys with light guides and led lights embedded which can respond to stimuli from outside (3), are becoming innovators.

Smaller ones that cost $2k or less are available for the dedicated technophilic geek (3, 4, 5, 6, 7) who may want an absorbing hobby or may be trying to start a business. For example, the entrepreneurs who came up with the idea of printing guns (8) but got shut down, as it seems to require a license to do that. Would that also be true of replica guns or some wild new design reminiscent of a Sci-Fi weapon?

Reprap (4) had a great idea in that their first printer was designed in such a way that it could print out parts to make another one. The prototype couldn’t do it all, but they are getting to that stage and they hope to be able to include their printed circuits in the print run. So we are seeing machines that can clone themselves ad lib and the growth could be exponential.

The vision of the brave new world of all robots coming along with their personal 3–D printers so that they can not only repair themselves, but get busy and assemble their clones is very definitely not just the figment of one’s imagination after too many hours in the bar.

So now that we are able to say “Have printer, will travel” as a promise to arrive on someone’s doorstep and spend an afternoon printing the Christmas presents for the kids is fine, but there is a snag. It’s all in the software. Not necessarily in the difficulty of any coding – easy for a technophilic geek – but in the scanned in details of the objects for the delight on Christmas morning around the tree.

Those files are where the income streams will come from. Sites could be set up where we could pay a fee and use them for a specified number of runs, or time, or for a higher fee purchase them. The BBC report (3) indicates that files are already showing up on Pirate Bay.

  1. http://www.webpronews.com/the-3d-printed-car-may-not-be-too-far-off-2012-08
  2. http://www.stratasys.com/Products/Overview.aspx 
  3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19818815
  4. http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
  5. http://deezmaker.com/bukobot/
  6. http://store.makerbot.com/replicator2.html
  7. http://www.webpronews.com/another-cheap-3d-printer-looks-to-kickstarter-for-funding-2012-10
  8. http://www.webpronews.com/diy-gun-project-put-on-hold-as-creators-have-their-3d-printer-seized-2012-10

When Concierge Parking Is No Longer A Luxury


Concierge parking is a luxury that few of us indulge in. It can be expensive, and there's always the thought that the young guys driving your car will have a lead foot when you're out of sight. However, if your car could go and find a parking space on its own, we would all be over the moon.

It seems that the luxury of concierge parking for free is on its way. In this year's Combined Exhibition for Advanced Technologies in Japan, Nissan have shown a vehicle, the NSC-2015, which will do precisely that (1,2). The robotic system installed in the car enables it to rush off to find a parking spot after you have got out and told it to go park itself.

The cameras and sensors in the car enable it to find a vacant parking slot and it will reverse itself into the spot. With 4G technology it has keeps track of where you are every minute that you’re away from it, so when you are ready, a button on your smart phone will bring it rushing to your side like a whistle to an obedient dog.

Your faithful robotic car doesn't sleep. It keeps a watchful eye open for bad guys getting too close. If they try and interfere with it, it will tell your smartphone which will warn you of impending doom. You could call the police, rush to its aid, or best, tell it to come and find you. Unfortunately, at present this is only a demo version and we will have to wait for a while before our parking problems have vanished.

The engineers seem to think that robotic control of our cars is a long way off. The auto-drive Google car has quite a few miles under his drive train and the laws are being changed to make it legal for general use. The BBC report suggests suggest that auto-drive vehicles may be popular in urban settings but less so on the interstate. It seems to me that long journeys on the interstate would be a good place to set the auto-drive function, just as we use cruise control today.

I hope we get our auto-drive and concierge parking electric cars very, very soon. I'm feeding my piggy bank so I'm ready.

  1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2012/10/03/nissans-robot-car-finds-its-own-parking-spots/
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906

Biodegradable Electronics


Biodegradable electronics are not a usual feature of our high tech society in which our devices are obsolete in two to three years. Also biodegradable electronics implies disposable units and this limits the materials that can be used.

Currently the ‘clever bit’ of our electronics is silicon based and silicon is biofriendly. It oxidizes and dissolves in water, so this is a starting point from which a large team led by Rodgers and Omenetto took up the challenge for developing biodegradable electronics, which they call transient electronics (1,2).

At normal body and most environmental situations, the solubility of silicon is very low and their solution is to use it in very thin nanomembranes, thus there is very little of it to go into solution. So nanomembranes of silicon, with some metal oxides to make semiconductors, form the basis of electronic devices that could be implanted into a person, an animal or perhaps a sensitive environmental situation which would make it difficult to retrieve.

The proof of principle gadget was a circuit embedded in a wound which could be heated to act as a bacteriocide. It worked like a charm, the wound healed and the device was absorbed into a now happy rat. No antibiotics were required.

The next problem is that we might want some circuits to last longer than others and making them thicker isn’t a very good option for a uniform production process. The answer the team used was to sign up some silk worms into the work force. The fibroin in silk forms sheets which then stick together via weak hydrogen bonds. The nanomembranes can be coated with dissolved silk, which is then allowed to re-crystalize. This controls the subsequent dissolution of the coating and then the device.

A number of devices are under lab test and one can imagine that in addition to the bacteriocide concept mentioned above, the biodegradable electronics could be used for sensors (chemicals released by sepsis or temperature changes for example after surgery) or for a controlled release of a drug. With modern wireless technology, perhaps the release and data acquisition could be controlled and read by our smartphones.

  1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1640
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19737125

Listening For Change In Complex Soundscapes


Listening for change is something we do for both pleasure and survival. Unless we are in a very rarefied atmosphere, the soundscape is usually complicated. Even when we are sitting in the sun out in the country, we have multiple components to the sound scene we are listening to at any given moment. We hear the rustling of leaves in the trees and birds singing or quarreling in their branches, but the moving around of little rodents in the nearby bushes adds to the complexity.

With music on the menu, we listen to the rise and fall of volume and changes in complexity as instruments and voices move in and out of the composition of the soundscape. Sometimes it’s pleasing and sometimes it’s not.

Picking up rapidly on soundscape changes is a survival instinct that we are still fairly good with. Not so good as our dog perhaps, or that deer out in the woods.

Sudden changes in volume are important, of course, but something with large teeth creeping up on you won’t be adding much to volume. Rather it will be bringing in new sounds as it tries to approach stealthily. You turn your head, it stops moving and that sound is gone. You wait a little, shrug and continue and then you hear the sound appear again. The cat and mouse game continues until – well, that depends.

In this week’s PLoS ONE, Constantino et al have their paper in which they describe a series of experiments to see how easily people can spot changes to a sound scene as a new sound come is or an old one disappears. The scenes are non-musical and consist of groups of frequencies played together in groups of 4, 8 or 14. Experiments were carried out to eliminate problems such as changes in loudness as one sound appeared or disappeared from the mix.

The results were quite clear that sounds disappearing weren’t noticed as successfully as sounds appearing in the mix. The bigger the mix, the less the loss of one component was noticed, but even in the largest mix, the appearance of an additional sound was spotted rapidly and successfully.

Clearly our survival mechanism is dominant and our auditory senses work similarly to our visual ones where we pick up on a change as a head pops up. Just like the other animals out there, our first reaction is to get ready to run or take the safety off our gun.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0046167

Driving Tired Or Just Tired Of Driving


Driving tired is something that we all do from time to time. Driving around in most urban areas has become rather a pain in the rear, especially when going to and from our place of work. Commuting is always slowest when we have an early morning meeting and our nervous tension rises.

But that is not the only problem with those early meetings. We have in all probability put our alarm clock on earlier than usual, which wakes our grumpy partner, maybe the kids and certainly the dog and cat. ­ The latter demands food and the former demands walks.

The result is that you end up driving tired. Mistakes are, of course, due to those other dorks on the road, but when you’re driving tired, there are always many more of them travelling in the space that you have bought and paid for with you damn taxes!

 In a recent study published in PLoS ONE, Di Milia et al set about quantifying the effect of driver sleepiness during commuting (1). I should state at the outset that they did not look at the way a tired driver attracts dorks so that is an area crying out for grant applications. The study looked at sleepiness and the outcomes for night shift workers and those of us who purport to work during the day, but must commute.

 The study took place in Queensland, OZ, where they inveigled the local police to stop people for random breath tests and invited them after their blow job to go down the road and sign up for an “are you dozy?” survey. Not a great idea when you’re hurrying, bleary eyed, with your mouth tasting worse than the bottom of your parrot’ s cage, to that strategy meeting critical to your career prospects.

About 60% of the invited participants participated. This amounted to almost 650 drivers. A significant number worked the night shift. They indicated their tiredness level, how much sleep they’d had and how many driving booboos that they had made. No one totaled, killed or otherwise blotted their driver’s license, but there was far too much wandering across lanes accidentally for it to be a good thing.

Workers on the night shift were making more errors and were sleepier than non-night workers, but sleepiness was clearly bad. The authors suggest roadside tiredness tests rather like the random breath tests as a solution. Sounds like a very bad idea to me. Much better to rush forward conversion kits to make all our cars Google cars which will drive about with only the occasional word of advice and ecouragement from a hardworking Joe or Jill.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0045856