Say farewell to dead batteries
Don’t you just hate it when your laptop or cell phone’s battery runs out and you have to scramble to find a wall outlet to save your work or continue your call? Soon, you may no longer have to worry, thanks to the chemical engineers of Purdue University. At the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society today, those fine folks announced that they have developed a means by which the batteries we rely upon so much can be automatically recharged.
In their design, a credit card-sized cartridge containing hydrogen-releasing pellets would drive a fuel cell that provides charge to batteries as they are depleted. The pellets consist of compounds that produce hydrogen when reacted with water; a computer chip can monitor how many of these pellets have been used up in a cartridge and signal when a replacement is needed. Best of all, these cartridges are not only extremely portable but disposable as well; the byproducts of the reactions utilized are environmentally friendly, so used-up cartridges can easily be discarded or recycled.
Besides the obvious application in portable devices for everyone from investment bankers to Marines, the inventors mention that their device may also be considered as safe energy source for hardware in future space vehicles. Evgeny Shafirovich, a scientist who worked on the project, states:
“The Apollo 13 accident was caused by an explosion involving liquid oxygen, which is needed along with liquid hydrogen to feed a fuel cell in spacecraft. Use of chemical mixtures, such as ours, for generation of hydrogen and oxygen would eliminate the possibility of such an explosion.”
And, of course, any technology than can spare NASA further problems is a good thing.
Virtual reality offers hope for veterans
I’ve mentioned virtual reality technology in the past, specifically how it can be used to aid those undergoing skin grafts (last paragraph). Virtual reality is back in the news, this time how it can help those dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from battlefield situations.
VR has been used before to help veterans, but never so soon after a conflict. Some are veterans just returned home, and some are still on active duty. Regardless, the treatments seem to be helping.
At this University of Southern California think tank, Hollywood special-effects pros and game developers come together to develop new immersive simulation technologies for the military. Most are used as training tools, but this time, the goal is to help combatants cope with the personal psychological effects of war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
After a few minutes of increasingly intense activity, my heart speeds up, my breathing becomes more shallow, my palms become warmer — and I’m really, really ready to stop the sim.
“This is not a self-help tool, and it’s not something you download yourself off the internet,” said Rizzo, when I’m finally allowed to remove the headgear. “Everything you experienced is a function of us turning knobs and pulling switches. If we noticed your heart rate was too fast, we’d pull back on things.”
This VR simulator is a spin-off of Full Spectrum Warrior, the FPS developed as an Army training tool. The operator can select any theater of combat, and simulate almost any scenario, helping soldiers revisit traumatic situations. Developers are even working to recreate the smells from combat.
“We’re going to integrate a smell machine, to bring people back to places they’ve been before,” said Rizzo. “We’re building a collection. We already have burning rubber, diesel fuel, body odor, garbage and Iraqi spices.”
The therapy has been extremely successful:
Another of Spira’s patients in the VR program was a Marine machine-gunner who experienced nightmares and other disturbances after suffering a severe shoulder wound in combat.
“The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘The pain is pretty intense, but what’s more intense is that I hear the voices of my fallen comrades all the time,’” recalled Spira.
“I asked if he meant that he could recall their voices in his imagination, and he said, ‘No. I hear them now, calling to me, as if they are right here with us in this room.’”
Spira said the disturbances lessened after weeks of immersive sessions.
There is a video available for download so you can see what the patients using the VR goggles see and hear. It’s more realistic than Battlefield 2 (I kept twitching the mouse during playback to look around), and I can only imagine what the experience inside the simulator would be like. I nearly jumped a few times when the machinegun on the HMMVW fired unexpectedly. Coupled with the capability to add smells, the simulation is quite convincing indeed. It’s nice to see video game technology being used in such a productive, healing fashion. It’s unfortunate that positive developments such as these don’t get the press that the negative commentary on video games so often gets.
The need for (computing) speed
The advent of massively parallel computing gave scientists in many fields the ability to finally solve problems once considered intractable and run simulations of experiments that would be difficult, if not impossible, in the laboratory. Now, scientists in Japan plan to further increase the capabilities of this technology with a new supercomputer that promises to be faster than today’s 500 most powerful systems all put together.
The computer, which will be built by the collaborative efforts of NEC and Hitachi among others, is predicted to have a top speed of 10 petaflops, or 10^16 calculations per second (and cost ~$800 million to build); it would take roughly a billion desktop computers to do the same. IBM’s Blue Gene/L, the current titleholder, can only perform 1.4 x 10^14 calculations per second for comparison.
Most intriguing about this new supercomputer is its anticipated architecture. Today’s top systems (Blue Gene/L included) already use specially designed chips to enable faster memory access and other optimizations; however, the proposed design might feature an unprecedented hybridization of several different specialized processors in one machine. Such assembling of a variety of chips, produced to each perform a single calculation at incredible rates, has the potential to lend great bursts of speed to supercomputing’s very specific applications (e.g.: climate studies, protein folding simulations).
More pressing than questions of global warming and drug interactions, though, is… how can I get one of these?
Medicare to give away its medical software for free
Medicare has decided to give away its software package, called VistA, to practitioners free of charge. The software has always been freely available, but now they’re actively promoting VistA-Office as a means to fast-track the digitization of medical records in the United States. The software will be available to practitioners in August.
As someone who has been very interested in digitizing all medical records, this is very cool. The software used at VA hospitals — VistA — is among the best in the world.
Bullets: Stress, Computer games, IQ, &c…
It’s time for another sarcastic bullet round-up:
- Elderly happiness is not IQ-related. Now there’s a big surprise. Anyone who’s worked with a significant number of elderly people knows that some of the happiest elderly people out there are the ones who are completely off their rockers and don’t know their incontinence panties from a hole in the wall.
- The other part of the above article notes that a high IQ didn’t necessarily correlate to a happy or successful life. This also isn’t surprising. Alone, IQ is a worthless metric: it’s what you do with your brain that matters, not its potential. And some of the most bitter people I’ve ever known were very intelligent. And some of the happiest people I’ve ever known have been perpetually out-to-lunch. Your mileage may vary.
- Video gaming has some health benefits in children. Aside from better hand-eye coordination, video games prove to be a powerful distraction while undergoing painful treatments, or for preventing children from picking their faces. Who would have thought?
- Having a view of the sea reduces stress levels. Yes that’s probably why so many people go to the beach in one form or another when they go on vacation.
- Vitamins don’t slow the aging process. Yet another big surprise. There’s actually some cool, experimental stuff in that article that I’m going to flesh out more later.
Once again, to put the sarcasm aside for a moment…
I don’t hate elderly people, even those who are completely out in left field somewhere. Indeed, I find their airyness endearing much of the time, except when you’re trying to explain something intricate to them, in which case you’d have better luck banging your head against the wall. Nonetheless, most of them are sweet people who would probably give you anything you asked for under normal circumstances.
In the case of video games, there are more effective ways of killing pain without pain killers in extreme circumstances, as I outlined here a few weeks ago, particularly in the case of burn victims. But as someone who compulsively picked at his scalp as a child, I can guarantee you that I wouldn’t have done it if I had a computer game to occupy my hands most of the time.
A meta-analysis of the “Slashdot effect”
I have written an article on the phenomenon known as the Slashdot effect, having survived it twice in the month of July alone. I’ve analyzed traffic patterns and referrals, and I’ve got graphs and numbers: all the things a good computer dork enjoys in his spare time. An excerpt for your reading enjoyment:
The effects of the slashdot effect started very slowly until the site that recieved the full force of it picked me up as a primary mirror, and then traffic exploded. I was quite astounded since I was one layer of abstraction away, and it still blew the numbers away that I put up when I first mirrored the Episode III trailers. I’ll give you some numbers now, since geeks love numbers. The Star Destroyer story was posted on July 4:
Figures are bandwidth usage/page impressions:
Come on inside and check it out!