The Red Ferret Journal

The good folk at Peratech have just signed a $1.4 million deal with Nissha, ‘one of the world’s largest manufacturers of touch screen technology’, to license Peratech QTC force sensitive technology in small touchscreens.

If the tech takes off we could see a raft of new phones with pressure sensitive touchscreens, offering new features such as pressure sensitive artistic capabilities on a cell phone, faster scrolling with increased finger pressure or audio loudness control based on the pressure exerted on the screen. 

The trick is done using a screen printed overlay, which is around 75 microns thick, which lowers resistance and passes more current the harder it is pressed. Cool stuff all right.

 With QTC, touch screens can be made feature rich and ultra-thin allowing for the development of even slimmer, lighter weight and lower-power portable devices. Takao Hashimoto, Director, CTO of Nissha and General Manager of Technology Research & Development, added, “QTC will be a disruptive technology for mobile phones enabling thinner phones to be designed with amazing new input interfaces.”

This BBC report on scientists communicating with brain damaged patients directly via the brain is absolutely astonishing. Apparently the boffins can now recognise patterns of thoughts and treat them as answers to questions using an MRI brain scanner. Stick a patient who is apparently in a vegetative state (i.e. completely non responsive) into a scanner, and you can ask them questions and receive answers based on what they’re thinking about.

Watch the video, it’s mind-blowing. It reminds me of that amazing film where those patients who were severely non-communicative were given some concoction and started to come alive again. Freaky stuff. More here from New Scientist.

 Awareness was detected in three other patients previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. The study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that scans can detect signs of awareness in patients thought to be closed off from the world. Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage.

Lots of talk currently doing the rounds about a mythical ‘Nirvana Phone’, which is basically the marriage of a mobile phone with thin client and wireless technology . The idea is you do away with laptops, and replace the whole computing thing with a phone hooked up to a Bluetooth keyboard and large screen.

Make no mistake, this IS the future of computing. Now that we’re starting to see cell phones with the processing power needed for the task, it’s inevitable that this idea will take off massively once the economics can be worked out. By that I mean, it all needs to fit together in an affordable package which offers the same kind of utility as a laptop does today. We’re not far off.

When you think about it most people already use their smartphone for the major part of their work needs – email, voice communication and a bit of search browsing. Once the online web app market matures a little (i.e. works reliably) and 3G wireless delivers the soon to launch 40 Mbps everywhere type speeds we’ll start to see new phone computers everywhere. Will they be Citrix/PC thin client type devices? I doubt it. More likely Google will take the lead since it understands the Web-machine interface better than most companies on the planet. And with Android it is learning fast about the needs of the new generation computing platform.

Watch this stuff, it’s going to explode over the next few years.

It’s been four years in the making but a prototype of the Solar Impulse, the HB-SIA, completed its first test run in Zurich in December. A fascinating venture to promote solar energy as a means of alternative energy-based transpiration, the Chairman of Sun Impulse and co-founder of this project Bertrand Piccard (yes, that’s really his name) hopes the craft will circle the globe in 20 days by the year 2012. To do so, it will require approximately 12000 solar cells that will need to be attached to the plane’s wings and fuselage, allowing it to store at least 14 hours of energy.

On its test run, it flew about 350 meters at an altitude of one meter. Weighing as much as a car and with the wingspan of an Airbus 340, the plane can fly up to 8500km (over 5,000 miles) with an average speed of 70kmph (almost 43 mph). For Its next scheduled test flight in April, it’s slated to fly a 36-hour flight – the equivalent of a complete day-night-day cycle – without any fuel. If successful (and we hope it will be) this could revolutionize the aviation industry.

In a world depending on fossil energies, the Solar Impulse project is a paradox, almost a provocation: it aims to have an airplane take off and fly autonomously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy, right round the world without fuel or pollution. An unachievable goal without pushing back the current technological limits in all fields.

Tags: gadget, solar+plane, solar+impulse+hb+sia

Oh good grief, the Japanese are researching technology to build remotely controlled androids. The project is called Geminoid, and when it’s finished we’re all going to be wishing batteries had never been invented. You mark my words…

[yeah, and which one is the real Prof above, and which one the android?]

 We are researching science and technology that can be used to project one’s presence over a long distance through the android Geminoid. We are using this android to research and analyze aspects of a human’s existence.

I’m not totally convinced by e-book readers, I have the feeling that long term they could go the way of the dedicated satellite navigation device, i.e. subsumed by the relentless march of the do everything smartphone. But if I were to desire one of these tools it would probably be something like this Skiff Reader.  An 11.5 inch flexible metal foil touchscreen, one week battery life, 3G and WiFi enabled, 4 GB memory and an SD memory card slot and internal speaker. What’s not to like? No price yet, due out later this year.

 The Skiff Reader is designed not just for sleekness but also for durability. It is the first consumer product to feature the next-generation of e-paper display – one based on a thin, flexible sheet of stainless-steel foil. This contrasts with the fragile glass that is the foundation of almost every electronic screen – and a primary source of vulnerability and breakage risk in the devices that incorporate them.

The RCA Airnergy WiFi Hotspot Power Harvester creates energy out of the air, at least if it’s in a WiFi zone. This amazing charger – featured at the recent CES 2010 in Las Vegas – “grabs” energy from a WiFi hot zone and converts it into electricity, while the internal battery charges itself. It can charge a Blackberry from 30% to 100% in around 90 minutes! And unlike solar chargers, it can charge itself even at night when in proximity to Wi-Fi. It’s free energy for any USB-powered device you plug it into.

Anticipated to launch this summer for around $40, the company plans to reduce the device’s size to cell phone battery size sometime next year. For around $60, that internal version would give you back-up battery capability so you’d never miss an important call.

This little box has, inside it, some kind of circuitry that harvests WiFi energy out of the air and converts it into electricity. This has been done before, but the Airnergy is able to harvest electricity with a high enough efficiency to make it practically useful: on the CES floor, they were able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% to full in about 90 minutes, using nothing but ambient WiFi signals as a power source.

Tags: gadget, usb, rca+airnergy+harvester, wifi+charger

A research team at Stanford University have created a unique photovoltaic chip – a Retinal Prosthesis – that will act as a solar cell array and provide partial vision for people who suffer from degradation in their photoreceptor cells. This chip not only generates power but it passes image data through to a processing retinal chip and on to the brain to be processed.

Placed behind the retina, this amazing system includes a goggle mounted video camera that captures the image, a pocket PC to process it in real time, and a bright, LCD infrared screen. The screen produces sufficient light to enter the eye and charge the solar cell array. The tiny 3mm (0.118″) wide chip has 3 layers, each of which has has 3 photovoltaic cells of three different sizes and is flexibly mounted on the retina using small 300 nanometer (0.0003mm) thick silicon posts.

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s for real. This photovoltaic system gives the wearer 20/100 vision – not strong enough to drive but enough to see and recognize faces and read large print. What a fantastic breakthrough for those who’ve been without sight!

We are developing an optical system for a parallel delivery of information and energy to tens of thousands of pixels in the implant. This system permits normal eye scanning to observe a large field of view, as opposed to “hard wiring” of a video camera to the retinal stimulating array using a single emitter-receiver link.

Tags: gadget, medical+gadget, macular+degeneration, retinal+prosthesis, artificial+retina

WHAT? A Tooth Mounted Hearing Aid? Speak up I can’t hear ya.

 Sonitus Medical of San Mateo in California has created a small device that wraps around the teeth. It picks up the sounds detected from a tiny microphone in the deaf ear and transforms them into vibrations. These then travel through the teeth and down the jawbone to the cochlea in the working ear, where they are transmitted to the brain providing stereo sound. The same process of “bone conduction” explains how we hear our own voices, and why they sound different when they are recorded and played back to us.

This Aura 6000 Sleep Therapy system aims to conquer sleep apnea – which is a serious and health threatening ailment – by stimulating the muscles of the tongue with an electrical charge during the night. Ghastly as it sounds, the developers believe that this is an effective way to stop the tongue falling back into the throat which is the cause of the loud snoring and the obstruction of the airways.

They reckon there are nearly 40 million people with Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) in the US alone, some of which need serious help, usually in the form of a CPAP positive air pressure machine to force air into their mouths at night. This new system would remove the need for this type of clunky device, which is relevant since a good proportion of sufferers cannot use these masks.

The bad news? The electrode of this new system has to be embedded in the lower jaw and the rechargeable pulse generator implanted under the skin in the chest area. The good news is that early trials in Brazil indicate that the system works as planned. Further trials are scheduled for next year in Europe. More here.

 It is understood that the problem with most OSA patients is that during sleep the tongue falls backwards into the throat and obstructs normal nighttime breathing. THN Sleep Therapy stimulates the nerve that provides motor innervations to tongue muscles. During sleep most muscles relax. This is true of the tongue muscles as well. By providing gentle stimulation to the hypoglossal nerve, normal daytime tongue muscle tone is restored to key muscles and the tongue does not fall into the throat, the airway is kept open and the patient can once again breathe normally during sleep.

Two companies, two completely opposing attitudes. In the green corner, Apple, champion of the lock-down, closed off, proprietary platform. Our way or the highway. In the blue corner, Google, home of the ‘do no evil’, open systems, come-one come all platform. Apple vs Android.

We’re not going to say much other than show you all this page full of 50 iPhone clones from the Far East. Sure they’re not the same as the real thing, but we all know it’s just a matter of time before they manage to produce something which is so close as to be indistinguishable (check that one out!) from the iPhone itself. And with free worldwide shipping!

You know also that you’re in trouble when there’s even a generic term to cover these iPhone clones – the HiPhone. It’s a bad sign all right, a sign that these people don’t plan to stop any time soon. Cut off one head and another 10 appear. Where have we heard that old song before?

So why do we mention Android? Well really only to point out that the open platform approach that Google is using leaves the company much more room to focus on building customer value. Instead of one team working on the issues, you build a disparate community of enthusiasts. Instead of fighting IP wars around the globe, you spend time encouraging innovation from your developers and customers. Instead of erecting high walls to protect your product ‘quality’ you allow quality to ebb and flow, and let the marketplace make its decisions along the price/quality curve.

One other thing to remember is Apple’s success relies to a huge extent on the brilliant vision and drive of its amazing CEO. When he retires, the battle could become very messy. That’s probably one reason why a more co-operative enterprise like Google has a better chance of fighting off the maturing market malaise. At least for now.

 HiPhone is a general name for iPhone similar design in China. HiPhone includes HiPhone, CiPhone, SciPhone, OPhone, UPhone etc. All of them is similar with iPhone interface, but functions are more or less, Price is always low for sure.

The boffins at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland have come up with a novel idea for detecting and repairing water pipe leaks. They did it by engineering a strain of the E. coli bacterium, they dubbed Pico Plumber, that could detect a special chemical that is released at a break in the pipe. The bacteria swim to the break and when there are sufficient bacteria at the site, they start producing a two part glue, one half of the glue is excreted externally, the other half is made internally. When it’s ready to mix the bacteria burst and the glue halves react. It’s just a proof-of-concept at the moment but self sealing water pipes have the potential to save an awful lot of water. I’m not sure about drinking a mix of smashed E. coli and two-part glue in my water though. Where’s that water purifier…

Engineered E. coli will detect leaks by homing in on a chemical signal released at the leak site. As the bacteria migrate towards the leak, they will synthesise two proteins, one on the outside of the cell, the other inside, which represent the two components of a biological, protein glue. The adhesive is only activated when the two components mix. The E. coli cells will be engineered to burst at the leak site, mixing the two glue components and creating a sticky protein plug to repair the pipe.

Tags: pico+plumber, self+sealing+water+pipes, university+of+aberdeen