Seeing Clearly Without an Optometrist
If you're reading these words through eyeglasses, consider what it took you to get them: you had to pay to visit an optometrist, go through an examination, choose a frame, and pay again to get your final prescription (more if you also ordered prescription sunglasses or contacts and we won't even talk about Lasik!). Now imagine the fate of those with poor eyesight in developing countries; they can't begin to afford what we take for granted.
But one man is working to change that. Josh Silver, a retired physics professor from Oxford University, has invented a solution so simple it can bring a clearer world to everyone, even the world's poorest people. Silver's glasses feature plastic lenses filled with clear liquid in sacs. The sacs connect to syringes housed in the arms of the glasses. Injecting more fluid from the syringes makes the lenses fatter and stronger, while removing fluid with the syringes weakens the effect.
Once the wearer is happy with the adjustment, they turn a screw and remove the syringes. Voila! Perfect eyesight with no optometrist or insurance involved. So far, 30,000 pairs of Silver glasses have been distributed in 15 countries. Silver dreams of getting his glasses onto the faces of one billion people by 2020. Already, it's having an impact. Major Kevin White, a US humanitarian worker who began distributing the Silver glasses, said that People put them on and smile. They all say, 'Look, I can read those tiny letters.' Here's to Silver and a clearer new year for everyone around the world.
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Getting Power to Enslave Roaches and Rats
Scientists have been able to use microchips implanted into rat and cockroach brains for some time to control these creatures' movements. But the control often doesn't last very long, because of the size of the batteries required to power the setup. Tiny batteries have tiny lifespans, often lasting only a few minutes. But Keisuke Morishima from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in Japan thinks he may have that problem licked.
Morishima's idea involves using the creature's own movement to create the electricity required to keep the microchip in operation. As a proof of concept, he attached a tiny piezoelectric fiber to the back of a Madagascar hissing cockroach. The roach generated electricity via the fiber simply by walking. In fact, the roach generated more than 10 millivolts not a lot, mind you, but Morishima calculates that 100 of these fibers could generate enough electricity to power an insect-brain-controlling microchip.
Kevin Warwick, a UK-based cybernetics expert, thinks 100 fibers might be too heavy a load for a single cockroach. But that particular method of power generation may have merit when applied to rats. Not only can they carry more, but their larger bodies should generate more power. Oh, and if you're wondering why scientists are even trying to control rats and cockroaches with microchips, the reasons include discovering disaster victims, spying, and taking advantage of their advanced sense of smell to detect chemicals and/or explosives.
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Now That's a Small Computer
Moore's Law faces a hard limit of sorts: just how small can you make a transistor? As tiny as they might get, we will never get down to the atomic level. Or will we? Christian Joachim is set to challenge that. He works at the French National Scientific Research Center's Center for Material Elaboration and Structural Studies in Toulouse, France. He heads up their Nanoscience and Picotechnology Group.
Though work on atom-scale computing started in the 1990s, it's only now beginning to bear some fruit. And that's not surprising, really; Joachim has observed that his field is in the same position as transistors were back before 1947, when no one knew where they would go. Plus, nanotechnology does things backwards if you consider the usual way chip design works; manufacturers, even nanotechnologists, work from the top down trying to make things smaller; Joachim's team has been trying to work from the atom up. The question we have asked ourselves is how many atoms does it take to build a computer? Joachim explains.
Joachim and his team have succeeded in constructing a simple logic gate out
of 30 atoms that does the work of 14 transistors. They are also
working on what would be necessary to carry out computing processes
inside a single molecule. For fun, and also to help their research,
Joachim's team has also built wheels, gears, motors, and nano-vehicles,
each made up of a single molecule. Could very tiny, moving nanocomputers
be on the horizon?
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