University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Self-healing plastic bleeds when cut, and that's a good thing
Wouldn't it be great if everything was as good at healing itself as our own skin? That's the concept behind a new self-healing plastic that's been developed over at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Unlike ordinary plastics, this one contains a thin network of tubes, aping the human vascular system, containing two separate gels that react when they come into contact with each other. When the surface of the plastic is punctured, for instance if shot by a bullet, the two gels pour out, mixing to form a surface roughly 60 percent as strong as the original -- just like a blood clot would on our bodies.
Study says what you play can affect who you are
Does playing an evil character influence gamers to be less than nice in real life? A recent study conducted at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests just that. Gunwoo Yoon, lead author on the project, told Reuters Health, "The biggest finding of the paper is that virtual representation of your avatar can profoundly affect real world behavior [...] And the fascinating thing is that the participants did not perceive these effects." The experiment involved a group of college students that played for five minutes as one of three avatars in a game: Superman (hero), Voldemort (villain), or a circle (neutral). After the gaming session, participants then had to decide how much chocolate sauce or chili sauce to give to other participants in a supposedly unrelated taste test. As it turns out, those who used the Superman avatar poured twice as much chocolate sauce (symbolizing a "good" deed) than chili sauce (a "bad" deed), whereas those who played as Voldemort did exactly the opposite. The study authors suggest a possible explanation for these effects might be related to the lasting influence of total immersion in a virtual environment. [Thanks to Jose for the tip!]
John Rogers returns with a silicon-silk circuit that dissolves inside your body
While you'd be forgiven for not knowing who John Rogers is, he's certainly graced these pages more than once. He's the research chief at the University of Illinois that's previously broken new ground in the world of invisibility cloaks and wearable technology. This time, his team has cooked up a silicon, magnesium, magnesium oxide and silk circuit that's designed to dissolve in the body in the same way that absorbable sutures are used in minor surgeries. It's thought that the tech could eventually be used to implant monitors that never need removal, reducing invasive medical procedures, or even build devices that eventually turn into compost rather than E-waste -- although we're not sure we'd appreciate our smartphone doing the same thing when we're making calls in the rain. [Image Credit: Fiorenzo Omenetto / Science]
Engineer Guy shows how a phone accelerometer works, knows what's up and sideways (video)
We love finding out how things work, and arguably one of the most important parts of the smartphones and tablets we thrive on is the accelerometer gauging our device's orientation. Imagine our delight, then, when we see the University of Illinois' Bill Hammack (i.e. The Engineer Guy) giving a visual rundown of how accelerometers work. Although it's certainly the Cliff's Notes version of what's going on in your Android phone or iPhone, the video does a great job of explaining the basic concepts behind three-axis motion sensing and goes on to illustrate how MEMS chips boil the idea down to the silicon form that's needed for our mobile hardware. Hammack contends that it's one of the coolest (and unsung) parts of a smartphone, and we'd definitely agree; you can see why in the clip after the break.
A bird in the hand thanks to a robot that can perch
Land-bound robots? Been there, done that. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are taking things up a notch with a bird-style bot capable of autonomous flight. By replicating the features that enable birds to make a soft landing -- including the flapping wings that help them change direction -- the researchers developed the first micro aerial vehicle (MAV) capable of swooping down to perch on a human hand. The craft forgoes a vertical tail, which birds also lack, to allow for enough agility to land on a small surface. Articulated wings help the robo-bird complete the maneuver successfully, by first gliding into position and then pitching up and slowing down. Who knew perching was so complicated? Besides just providing a super-nifty party trick for these lucky researchers, the autonomous aircraft could be used in urban surveillance, where a small size would come in handy. Check out the MAV in action, along with the press release, after the break.
Researchers develop self-healing electronics, adamantium sadly not included
In today's feature-laden electronics devices, the failure of one little electronic component can scuttle the entire package. To make matters worse, if the damage happens to strike something like a multilayer integrated circuit, then you pretty much need to replace the whole computer chip. But what if the chip could repair itself like a certain vertically challenged Canadian mutant? That's exactly what researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign managed to do after placing self-healing polymers on top of a gold circuit. Once a break occurred, microcapsules with liquid metal filled the crack and restored 99 percent of conductivity in mere microseconds. Self-healing electronics would especially be helpful on things like aircraft, where miles of conductive wires can make finding a break difficult, researchers said. The research is just the latest in a field that also has seen self-healing sensors and shape-memory polymers, but sadly, there's still no word on using this stuff to self-heal a broken heart....
Flexible, implantable LEDs look set to start a new body modification craze
LED lights are cool, you're cool, why not combine the two, right? We doubt that's quite the reasoning that led to this international research project, but it's certainly an appealing way to look at it. Our old buddy John Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has headed up a research team with participants from the US, China, Korea, and Singapore, who have together produced and demonstrated a new flexible and implantable LED array. Bettering previous efforts at inserting lights under the human skin, this approach allows for stretching and twisting by as much as 75 percent, while the whole substrate is encased in thin silicon rubber making it waterproof. Basically, it's a green light to subdermal illumination, which could aid such things as monitoring the healing of wounds, activating light-sensitive drug delivery, spectroscopy, and even robotics. By which we're guessing they mean our robot overlords will be able to color-code us more easily. Yeah, that must be it.
Quantum batteries are theoretically awesome, practically non-existent
Today's dose of overly ambitious tech research comes from the physics lab over at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a proposal titled "Digital quantum batteries: Energy and information storage in nano vacuum tube arrays." It's like a who's who of undelivered promises got together and united to form one giant and impossible dream, but it's one we'd prefer to believe in regardless. Aiming to improve battery performance by "orders of magnitude," the project's fundamental premise is that when capacitors -- and we're talking billions of them -- are taken to a small enough scale and packed to within 10nm of one another, quantum effects act to prevent energy loss. The projected result is a wonderful world of rapid recharges and storage of up to ten times the energy current lithium-ion packs can hold, as well as the potential for data retention. The only problem? It would take a year just to build a prototype, meaning we can expect market availability somewhere between a score from now and just prior to the underworld morphing into an ice rink.
Electronic tongue tastes, identifies sweeteners so you don't have to
The tongue, besides being creepy, offers plenty in the way of research opportunities, as you know if you're a regular visitor to this space. In the past we've seen a tongue-based computer interface or two, the BrainPort sight-via-papillae solution, and this week, at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign introduced a sensor about the size of a business card that detects and identifies fourteen common sweeteners -- including Splenda, Sugar in the Raw, and Sweet'n'Low. The product of a decade of research in colorimetric sensor arrays, it works when dipped into the substance, and takes about two minutes to get results. The team, led by a Professor Suslick (really!), hopes that this leads to a low-cost solution for anyone who needs to monitor their blood glucose levels, and eventually a way to monitor contaminants in food or in the environment at large. We recommend using with D+caf caffeine testing strips to ensure that you get nothing out of your morning coffee whatsoever. [Via CNET]
Software lets neighbors securely share WiFi bandwidth
Instead of fighting about property lines and whose dog is keeping everyone up at night, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign want you and your neighbors to get together and share your WiFi signal in a method that supposedly delivers better performance to each individual user. Assistant computer science professor Haiyun Luo and graduate student Nathanael Thompson of the school's Systems, Wireless, and Networking Group have released a free download that analyzes local airwaves and exploits unused bandwidth from one network to complement ones experiencing heavy usage, but always gives users priority access to their own signal. Part of the two-year-old PERM project, the application uses flow-scheduling algorithms to determine bandwidth allocation, and has so-far undergone testing on Linux clients and with Linksys routers. Security is obviously a key concern in such a sharing setup, so PERM developed the software to both "preserve a user's privacy and security, and mitigate the free-riding problem."[Via PCWorld]
