Last week Dennis O’Brien the Chief Electronics Engineer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) gave a very interesting talk in the CEPS Frontiers lecture series. LLNL is one of the premier applied physics laboratories in the world. Together with Los Alamos, it is in charge of managing the US nuclear stockpile. It also runs a host of projects in the fields of national security and energy research.

Mr. O’Brien is a distinguished alumnus of UNH CEPS. He earned his BSc and MSc at our university in ‘75 and ‘77 respectively. Since then he was working at LLNL on various projects and at many positions. Currently he is the Chief Electronics Engineer of LLNL in charge of workforce planning and development for over 1300 engineers and other personnel.

At the beginning of the talk, Mr. O’Brien gave a quick overview of LLNL and its stunning achievements. He then spent the rest of the lecture introducing the National Ignition Facility, one of their most interesting and most expensive projects. It is essentially a huge laser (500 terawatt!) covering the area of three football fields. Its purpose is to generate enough energy to start nuclear fusion, with hydrogen as fuel, in a confined place. The idea is to generate more energy with fusion than it took to produce the laser beams. If this process of ‘ignition’ succeeds it could be the basic principle of future fusion powered power plants.

It was great to have such an accomplished alumnus give a talk at UNH. I think current students and faculty were very much inspired by the example of Mr. O’Brien’s great career and accomplishments.

Oszkar

This article from CNN describes how researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a way to produce a new type of battery. Angela Belcher, professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, has developed a way to create batteries from an M13 bacteriophage virus. This virus is common and does not pose a health risk to humans. In the process of creating the battery, the virus becomes covered in iron phosphate and then connects to carbon nanotubes. A carbon nanotube is an extremely strong network of interconnected carbon atoms. When these virus-nanotube structures are added up in large numbers, they produce a battery.  Professor Belcher has said that about ten grams of the virus-nanotube material has enough energy to power a small device for around 40 hours. One of the greater benefits of this type of battery is that no waste is created during production. Also, toxic materials that are used in normal batteries (such as lead and acid in a car battery) are not used in this type of battery. 

Devin Mullen

Cell phones are one of the most widely used technology on this planet today. Most people in the world access the internet right on their cell phone, rather than on a computer. But the question still echos, are cell phones safe, even today? The answer is not clear. Research has been going on for more than a decade, but the results are still being interpreted. Many experts in the fields of cancer research, epidemiology, electrical and computer engineering and electromagnetic radiation see cause for concern, but many others don’t. Supposedly, the radiation emitted from cell phones is at a low enough frequency that it would not damage cells, but this is still being disputed.

We still don’t know to what extent it affects humans. The trend may be scary in the future though, take cigarettes for example, it took 30 to 40 years after they were mass produced for a noticeable change in lung cancer to be noticed. More explaining is done in this article from CNET.

Mike Litchfield

Both Rohm and NEC are focused on unveiling new chip designs for integrated circuits that would consume no standby power. Integrated circuits are briefly inactive in between cycles on chips, and the new chip designs take into account that not all parts of the circuit require constantly receiving full power. In an attempt to curtail this leakage power that is consumed by an IC,  the companies have implemented “power gating” in the new designs. “Power gating” is a method of turning off individual circuits on a chip that do not need power. NEC plans to release a prototype by the end of 2009, but Rohm, Inc. hopes its chip will be in consumer products within the same time frame. Popular Science Magazine writes, “The new chip designs differ [from current IC chips] in that they don’t require the inactive portions of the circuit to receive full power at all times, allowing for more efficiency both during use and in a traditional ’standby mode’.” It is predicted that the new designs’ efficient energy usage will help decrease overall power consumption and could improve efficiency  within a device.

From Tech On!:

Erika Swanson

Can one say today that they purchase a cellular phone mainly to use it to talk, without all the little features that comes with them? For the technologically savvy, the answer is “no”. Its inventor, Dr. Martin Cooper made the first US analogue mobile phone call in 1973.  The Motorola DynaTac has broken the barrier of calls being made from a stationary location when he made a call while walking to his rival, Dr. Joel Engel, from AT&T’s Bell Labs.  Three and half decades later, cellular phones have evolved into mini computers while still having the capability of making local (US) and international calls. They give us the ability to surf the net, read and write emails, use Microsoft office applications, sync with our PC, listen to any media, real-time GPS, games, bar-code scanner, take pictures and videos, and much more. The next step for cellular phone usage is in the medical field.

At the University of California Berkeley, “researchers have developed an add-on to a mobile phone that can take detailed images and then analyze them to diagnose diseases such as tuberculosis”.  David Breslauer and his colleagues hope that this device will be useful in the developing world; and where diagnostic medical issues are difficult, but the ownership and coverage of a cellular phone are commonplace.  Knowing these facts, they hope to make medical diagnoses and/or medical care portable at one’s own convenience without the inconvenience of going to the doctor’s office.

kamal

While looking online, I found some articles about AI that talked about how certain kind of technology could be helpful in the next years for us in order to create better artificial intelligence. Some days later, I was on facebook and my friend posted this link about how computers and machines would “take over” our world. It’s not like it hasn’t already. I mean, we use technology in our everyday lives, but scientists and researchers worry about it being more than just a tool used for our benefit. The link for this article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html

This got me interested in discovering more about AI, so I found this article about a technology called “Imagination Machine”. It’s composed of two artificial neural networks, one of them is in charge of dreaming about an idea and the other one checks if the idea is valid for it to be able to resolve a given task. The link is http://www.wfs.org/May-June09/Thalerpage.htm. Supposedly, this technology would be able to replicate a human brain. And if you think about it, the complications and ethical issues are huge. But I think if we manage to use technology for the greater good, then we should not be worried to much about it.

For example, in this other article that I found, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm,some scientists say that they would be able to re-engineer a artificial human brain in the near future. This is also alarming, but if we think about the outcome of what we could accomplish with this, like learning more about the most obscure part of our bodies and how would we help our future generations or use it for medical reasons.

Erick Janampa

So this last week in technology was all about the moon landing that happened on July 20th, 40 years ago. And I found this youtube video that makes you think of the possibilities for our future:

Erick Janampa

This week UNH’s Tech Camp visited Project 54 to take a look at the simulator.

The tech camp is a program based out of Kingsbury Hall, where kids from seventh through tenth grade are able to get a sense of STEM professions (These include Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). The camp is designed to give students interested in STEM professions a closer look into what these jobs are all about.

Tech Camp students visited the Project 54 simulator, as well as a model of a New Hampshire State Police cruiser. Students were given a short briefing about Project 54, and were then allowed to ask questions about what the system does.

Above: Oskar Palinko demonstrates the use of the Project 54 simulator to UNH Tech Camp Students

Many students enjoyed testing the simulator, which allows the user to get a first hand look at Project 54. Students learned about how the Project makes operating a police officer’s cruiser safer, using speech controls and an integrated computer system, rather than a multitude of buttons and switches.

Above: Mark Taipan demonstrates Project 54 to UNH Tech Camp students with a state police cruiser model.

Devin Mullen

            For the past one hundred or so years, the most common way to transmit electricity to homes and businesses has been through the use of electrical cables, and the extensive power grid that runs throughout the United States and the rest of the world.  As a result of recent research done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that may change fairly soon.

             In the late 1800’s Nikola Tesla performed experiments to send large amounts of electricity through the air. Some of his experiments proved successful, although the efficiency rating for sending the electricity was very low.

Above: A Tesla Coil

             In 2006, MIT researchers developed a way to send electrical power with a much higher efficiency than Tesla was able to achieve. The theory behind this idea is resonance. Most FM and AM radios use resonance to tune in on a specific station; FM uses frequency modulation, tuning in on radio waves with different frequencies, and AM uses amplitude modulation, tuning in on radio waves with different amplitudes.  All radio waves carry some amount of power, which can be observed using a crystal AM radio, a radio that has no power source and uses only the power contained in the waves to power its circuit. When an inductor is used to transmit power (for example, in a transformer), the magnetic field that it produces is very weak, mainly because it sends a magnetic field in all directions, so it does not concentrate the field. This means that any device that is receiving the power must be within a very short distance of the inductor. An electric toothbrush uses this basic idea. Most rechargeable electric toothbrushes have an inductor in the charging base, and an inductor in the bottom of the toothbrush. The inductor in the charging base induces current in the inductor in the bottom of the toothbrush, and in turn charges the battery. This is called inductive coupling. For this method, the toothbrush must be very close to the charging base because inductive coupling is fairly inneficient, and only carries electricity over short distances.

Above: Inductive Coupling with a Rechargeable Toothbrush

             The idea behind this new form of wireless power transfer is based upon the theory of resonance and the circuitry of the common AM or FM radio. Every radio uses a basic tuning circuit, composed of a capacitor and an inductor. This circuitry allows the radio to tune in on certain frequencies by increasing or decreasing the inductance or capacitance in the circuit. Using this basic principle of the common radio, wireless power transfer can be made much more efficient. If you send power in frequencies, along radio waves, you can greatly improve the efficiency over inductive coupling. If you send power in the form of a radio wave, you are only sending it to certain receivers that are tuned to the specific frequency that the power transmitter is tuned to. This means that instead of sending these radio waves everywhere, (and wasting a lot of electricity) you can send power to a select few devices within a certain range, usually about two meters. This is beneficial more for in-home use, rather than widespread power transfer.

Above: Wireless Power transfer through Resonance      

              For long distance power transfer, microwaves (the form of electromagnetic radiation, not the kitchen appliance) are more sensible. Microwaves have a much longer range than normal radio waves and are therefore much more efficient in terms of wireless power transfer. The only major drawback with microwaves is that they aren’t entirely safe; microwaves contain high amounts of radiation, which could be a problem with radiation poisoning and cancer. Overall, you can expect the power grids to stay , but the ability to eliminate wires for common household devices is already here.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/wireless-power.htm

 Devin Mullen

I found this article about people from Cornell University creating a powerful computer program that was able, due to some major calculations, to figure some scientific laws of physics such as the Newtonian Laws. It’s pretty cool to know that a program could do that and that in the future it might be able to help us discover new things about science.

Even though it was more like a program full of trial and error, with a supercomputer and a lot of memory, we could try a huge amount of formulas and get results faster than humans can.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai/

Erick Janampa