GLIMPSES OF THE FUTURE
A monthly digest of technologies, developments and trends that will shape our lives. (If you would prefer not to receive these digests, flip back 'NO THANKS' and you will be removed from the list).

Colour E-Books On The Way

Sony's Reader and Amazon's Kindle may be cutting edge technology, but they're still displaying images in black and white. As this edition of Glimpses was being prepared the E Ink Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was demonstrating a colour version of its e-paper in San Antonio, Texas.

Products based on its colour e-paper will be on the market by the end of 2010. The aim is to have a reflective display that uses very little power and is as easy on the eye as the printed word. Like E Ink's monochrome e-paper, used in Sony and Amazon readers, the colour version will be based on technology called an electrophoretic display.

Bone Marrow Heals The Heart

Injecting the hearts of angina sufferers with cells extracted from their own bone marrow can reverse the condition and relieve its symptoms, according to a new study.

Dutch cardiologists behind the placebo-controlled study say that the results may lead to radical new treatments for patients for whom surgery and medication bring little or no relief from this painful and debilitating condition, which results from narrowed arteries that cannot supply enough blood to the heart during exercise. All 50 subjects involved in the study were resistant to existing treatments.

Three months after being given the injections, patients' hearts were less starved of blood, and they were able to exercise more, the researchers reported.

Researchers at MIT have developed technology to keep conversations private in public areas - such as open plan offices. Using a sensor network to work out where potential eavesdroppers are, speakers generate a subtle masking sound at just the right level to keep exchanges private.

When somebody wants to activate what the MIT researchers call the 'sound shield', they do so on their desktop computer. Knowing the position of the computer, the sensors identify the person and map out the locations of people around them. Software assesses who is so close that they must be participants in the conversation, and who might be a potential eavesdropper.

Batteries That 'Breathe' May Increase Capacity

Developers of lithium ion batteries used in laptops and mobile phones believe they are approaching the limits of energy storage capacity. But a new approach is to borrow an idea from the zinc-air batteries used in hearing aids, which get their power from the reaction of zinc with the oxygen in air.

The new battery, being developed at the University of St. Andrews, has a higher energy density than existing lithium ion batteries because it no longer contains dense lithium cobalt oxide. Instead, the positive electrode is made from lightweight porous carbon, and the lithium ions are packed into the electrolyte which floods into the spongy material.

When the battery is discharged, oxygen from the air also floods through a membrane into the porous carbon, where it reacts with lithium ions in the electrolyte and electrons from the external circuit to form a solid lithium oxide. The developers believe that energy storage capacities may be increased ten-fold.

Printing Plastic Circuits For High Performance Electronics

A new method for printing a wide variety of semiconducting organic compounds such as polymers is producing reliable high-performance electronic circuits. The technique also improves the performance of a wide variety of plastics by a few orders of magnitude

The researchers at Stanford University who developed the technique say it makes better organic transistors by focusing on smoothing the layer that lies directly underneath the electron-carrying semiconductor.

In such devices, an electric current flows at the interface between the semiconductor and this underlying layer. Though the underlying layer is insulating, the properties of the interface between it and the semiconductor determine how fast electrons can move through the device. If it's rough, electrons can get trapped, cutting into device performance. Smoothing the layer has produced significant improvements in performance.

Microcapsules Improve Drug Performance In Humans

Finding ways to improve the stomach’s uptake of poorly soluble medicines has been one of the major challenges facing pharmaceutical companies. Now scientists are reporting a potential solution to a problem that limits the human body’s ability to absorb and use medications for heart disease, Type-2 diabetes, cancer and other conditions. It is a 'nano-hybrid microcapsule' that enables the stomach to absorb more of these so-called 'poorly-soluble' medicines.

The researchers created a microcapsule made from lipid oils and nanoparticles 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. In test tube experiments, microcapsule versions of the arthritis drug, indomethacin, dissolved up to five times faster than a regular version of the drug. Lab rats given the new microcapsule version absorbed almost twice as much of the drug.

Giving Ethics To Murderous Robots

Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an 'ethical governor', a package of software and hardware that tells armed military robots when and what to fire.

Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But Professor Arkin's work is addressing what will happen when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions on their own, such as who to kill or what to bomb.

Arkin's challenge is to translate the 150-plus years of codified, written military law into terms that robots can understand and interpret themselves.

And we'll trust them?

In technology that promises to one day allow drug delivery to be tailored to an individual patient and a particular cancer tumour, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, have developed an efficient system for delivering siRNA into primary cells.

'The technique has an unbelievable potential to manage cancer and treat it,' says Steven Dowdy, professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. 'While there's still a long way to go, we have successfully developed a technology that allows for siRNA drug delivery into the entire population of cells, both primary and tumour-causing, without being toxic to the cells.'

Electronic Insoles Measure Pressure On Your Feet

ESoles Inc., which makes custom insoles for athletic shoes, has created prototype insoles with pressure sensors that relay their information wirelessly to a nearby mobile phone. Then an application on the phone can tell the wearer how much pressure he or she is applying in 11 different zones of each sole.

The system has already been used to analyse the technique of the U.S. Olympic BMX team, helping them figure out how to apply maximum power to the bicycle pedals out of the gate.

'Surround Sound' For Mobile Phones

Japan's telecom giant NTT DoCoMo says that it has developed a mobile spatial audio transmission technology that enables a mobile phone user to assign a spatial position to each sound source when listening to multiple sound sources, such as during a game or a conference call.

The technology enables a user listening with headphones to, for example, hear each speaker's voice as if it were coming from a unique direction, creating a virtual face-to-face communication environment.

Real-time web search – which scours only the latest updates to services like Twitter – is currently generating interest because it can provide a glimpse of what people around the world are thinking or doing at any given moment. Interest in this kind of search is so great that, according to recent leaks, Google is considering buying Twitter.

The latest research from the internet search giant, though, suggests that real-time results could be even more powerful – they may reveal the future as well as the present.

Google researchers Hyunyoung Choi and Hal Varian combined data from Google Trends on the popularity of different search terms with models used by economists to predict trends in areas such as travel and home sales. The result? Better forecasts in almost every case.

Waste Plastic Boosts Fuel Energy

Mechanical engineers at Iowa State University in Ames have demonstrated how to boost the power output of biodiesel simply by adding waste plastic such as styrofoam to the fuel.

Song-Charng Kong, a co-author of the study, says the experiment – funded in part by the Department of Defense – was conducted to find a way to dispose of trash and generate power under battlefield conditions.

Kong and colleagues dissolved polystyrene – a polymer used to make disposable foam plates and cups – into biodiesel at concentrations ranging from 2 to 20% polystyrene by weight.

Tests showed that as polystyrene concentrations increased to 5%, power output increased at roughly the same rate.

www.rayhammond.com

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