. . . just links from HayYoo.com and DanKostecki.com
Miniscule robotic drones might be the future, but they’ve been tricky to get off the ground. Until now, any wing-flapping insect robot had to have a power source, making it too heavy to lift off with its tiny wings. Now, however, researchers at the University of Washington have found a way to transmit power to a flying robotic insect (lovingly dubbed RoboFly) via laser, obviating the need for a separate power supply.
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Here’s an unexpected but pleasant little way tech might be able to improve a few lives: laser shoes. Yes, seriously. Shoes equipped with small laser emitters were shown in recent tests to help sufferers of Parkinson’s disease to walk normally.
According to The Harvard Gazette –
The laser-assisted direct ink writing method prints microscopic metallic, free-standing 3-D structures in one step, without auxiliary support material. Lewis’ team used an ink composed of silver nanoparticles. The ink is sent through a printing nozzle and then annealed using a precisely programmed laser that applies just the right amount of energy to drive its solidification. The printing nozzle moves along x, y, and z axes and is combined with a rotary print stage to enable freeform curvature.
Why settle for a bar of boring old regular chocolate when you can chow down on the holographic variety instead? Morphotonix, a company based in Lausanne, Switzerland, has developed a way to imprint holograms on to chocolate – without using additives. Morphotonix etches the required structure into a master mould made from metal. This is then used to make plastic moulds that in turn shape the chocolate. Both dark and milk chocolate can be used, though the complex physics and chemistry of microstructures means the hologram won’t form on some varieties. “We have been testing it with many types of chocolate. Sometimes it works great and sometimes no matter how hard we try it doesn’t mould,” says Morphotonix CEO Veronica Savu.
Building a laser requires two things: a lasing material that amplifies light from an external source (a ‘gain medium’) and an arrangement of mirrors (an ‘optical cavity’), which concentrates and aligns the light waves into a tight beam. Until now, the gain medium has only been made from non-biological substances such as doped crystals, semiconductors or gases, but in this case the researchers used enhanced green fluorescent protein (GFP) — the substance that makes jellyfish bioluminescent, which is used extensively in cell biology to label cells. The team engineered human embryonic kidney cells to produce GFP, then placed a single cell between two mirrors to make an optical cavity just 20 micrometres across. When they fed the cell pulses of blue light, it emitted a directional laser beam visible with the naked eye — and the cell wasn’t harmed. The width of the laser beam is “tiny” and “fairly weak” in its brightness compared to traditional lasers, says Yun, but “an order of magnitude” brighter than natural jellyfish fluorescence, with a “beautiful green” colour.
Car engines could soon be fired by lasers instead of spark plugs, researchers say. A team at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics will report on 1 May that they have designed lasers that could ignite the fuel/air mixture in combustion engines. The approach would increase efficiency of engines, and reduce their pollution, by igniting more of the mixture. The team is in discussions with a spark plug manufacturer.
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