Future Tanks Will Be Cooler, and Thus Invisible to Thermal Detection

By David Hambling

Thermally Invisible Tank Peter Bollinger

Tanks are easy to see by day and, since they generate a lot of heat, they are also easy to spot at night, at least for those equipped with infrared imaging equipment. In August, the British company BAE Systems unveiled its new Adaptiv system, which hides a tank’s heat signature beneath hundreds of electrothermal cells bolted to the vehicle’s exterior.

Infrared sensors detect the pattern of heat reflected by a tank’s immediate surroundings and, just as a processor guides pixels in a computer screen to form an image, adjust the temperature of individual cells to collectively form a heat signature that matches the environment. In infrared, the tank appears to disappear into the background. BAE says the system will be battle-ready in two years.

HEAT-SENSITIVE CELLS

The Adaptiv system’s hundreds of 5.5-inch hexagonal cells are heated or cooled with electric current to create customized heat signatures. The system is dynamic, meaning a tank operator could match the vehicle’s heat signature to its surroundings when stationary but assume the signature of a preprogrammed object, such as a car or a cow, when moving. When friendly fire is a concern, operators could also exaggerate a tank’s signature to prevent confusion. BAE has already started testing its next generation of cells, which will include an undisclosed coating that can change color and brightness.

FAST-COOLING EXHAUST

Engine exhaust may be too hot for Adaptiv to conceal completely. But borrowing techniques from stealth aircraft construction, tank manufacturers could incorporate broad and flat vents that produce ribbons of exhaust, which mix more rapidly with cool air. The vents would also be low to the ground so that exhaust would be disguised by the heat signature of the surrounding vegetation.

QUIETER ENGINES

The Army has been testing hybrid engines in combat vehicles. In tanks, a silent electric engine could be flipped on for stealth combat missions.

MIT's Nano-Bio-Bandage Can Stop Your Bleeding Almost Immediately

By Clay Dillow

Thrombin A clotting agent already found in the blood, thrombin is being layered onto sponges that can stop bleeding almost immediately. via Wikimedia

Bleeding out on the battlefield--far from the trauma wards and triage units that might save their lives--is a scenario that soldiers simply have to live with (and try like hell to avoid). But thanks to ananoscale breakthrough at MIT, the chances of it happening could be significantly reduced. Researchers there have created a nanoscale coating that can stop bleeding nearly instantaneously using a clotting agent already found naturally in blood.

That agent, called thrombin, is coated onto sponges that can be easily packed by soldiers and field medics (or civilian medical personnel for that matter) and shaped to fit just about any kind of wound. Those pre-coated sponges are a pretty big improvement over tourniquets and gauze, which are limited in their ability to stop every kind of bleeding. Tourniquets obviously can’t be used on many parts of the body (the neck is a good example), and other glues and chemically treated bandages designed for dressing battlefield wounds come with their own complications and shortcomings.

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Science, Clay Dillow, bandages, battlefield medicine, bleeding, health, military,nanotechnology, thrombin

Thrombin, on the other hand, is already used by the body to stop bleeding. Civilian hospitals also use it already, but it’s in liquid form so sponges must be soaked immediately before they are applied to the wound, making them impractical for the battlefield. MIT’s sponge instead uses a spray-on biological nanoscale coating using alternating layers of thrombin and tannic acid, which results in a film that contains a large amount of functional thrombin with a shelf life that makes it feasible to pack them into the field. Both substances are already FDA approved, the researchers say, which means the sponges could quickly find their way into wider use.

That’s good news for soldiers, and potentially good news for anyone who sustains a trauma far from the emergency room. The MIT lab is now working on a sponge that combines a blood-clotting coating with an antibiotic layer in a single sponge to help fight off infection even as a dressing stops the initial bleeding.

Hands-On Impressions of the Lumia 900, Nokia's Great New Windows Phone

Give me this phone

By Dan Nosowitz

Lumia 900 Hands-On Dan Nosowitz

I just got back from Nokia's booth here at CES in Las Vegas, where things are decidedly focused on Windows Phone. And with good reason; the Lumia 800, which is available in Europe and on other continents in which I do not live, is the best Windows Phone on the market, and the new 900, announced officially just yesterday, is set to become the best Windows Phone in America. I played with the Lumia 900 for a little while, and came away reassured: this phone is just as good as I expected.

The Lumia 900 differs mostly from its predecessor in size. It's a 4.3-inch-screened phone, compared to the perfectly usable but slightly small Lumia 800, which clocked in at 3.7 inches. There's a slight sacrifice in aesthetics with that; in the 800, there was this cool effect where the curved screen seemed to fade away into the body of the phone, sort of like an infinity pool, due to the curved glass front and lack of visible bezel. The 900, on the other hand, does have a bezel--the Nokia rep told me they were a little unsure about how folks would respond to it. I found it not quite as nice-looking as the melty screen on the 800, but not glaring enough that it really takes away from the rest of the phone.

The rest of the phone, of course, is great. The extra screen size is ideal for Windows Phone, which seems to thrive in the extra real estate. The screen itself is an AMOLED with some kind of technology Nokia's calling ClearBlack. Whatever it is, it seems to work; phones with the Lumia 900's resolution (800x480) and size (4.3 inches) often seem kind of pixelly, but the Lumia looked great, with deep, dark blacks and clear lines. The largely black-and-primary-colors Windows Phone OS looked fantastic.

Lumia 900 ESPN Hub:  Dan Nosowitz

I also briefly took a look at the new ESPN app; Nokia will be preloading the ESPN "hub" on the Lumia 900. Hubs are kind of large-scale apps in Windows Phone, with a whole bunch of different sections and elements. The ESPN hub looks really great, despite being in some sort of pre-release state. It's got some nice social elements for finding sports chatter online, and it sorts by sport and then by team so you can get all the latest details on the team you follow. You can also buy tickets and get directed to the stadium, right from that app. All of those latter features are exclusive to the Lumia 900.

My only real concern is that it has the exact same camera sensor as the Lumia 800, which was disappointing, But software can fix a lot of problems in a phone camera, so it's possible they've made some tweaks.

I'm pretty excited about this phone--it's basically a bigger version of the Lumia 800 that works on an American LTE network, so it's got every opportunity to be one of the best phones in the country. It'll be released "in the coming months."

Follow along with all of our CES 2012 coverage here.

Scientists Build a Data Storage Device Out of Salmon DNA

By Clay Dillow

Storing Data in Salmon DNA The entire Library of Congress, on ice. Joe Mabel via Wikimedia

It’s good smoked, straight up on the grill with a little lemon and butter, or rolled into sushi. And now, thanks to researchers at Taiwan’s Tsing Hua University and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, salmon is also good sandwiched between two electrodes. Using silver nanoparticles, a couple of electrodes, and a thin layer of salmon DNA, those researchers have developed a “write-once-read-many-times” (WORM) data-storage device that they think could eventually lead to a replacement for silicon.

Their device basically works based on the way silver atoms behave inside a thin film of salmon DNA. Shine a UV light on such a system, and the silver atoms will bunch into nanoparticles within the DNA film. Add electrodes to both sides of the film, and you’ve got an optical data storage device.

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Science, Clay Dillow, data storage, dna,energy, optical data storage, optical devices,salmon, Technology

And here’s how it works: when there’s no (or little) charge passing through the device, only low (or no) current is allowed to travel through the device (which makes sense). That creates the device's “off” position. If you slowly increase the voltage however, the device is unable to hold a higher charge. That is, until you reach a certain voltage threshold (about 2.6 volts), at which point the device suddenly switches to high conductivity with good retention of that state.

That switching ability above a certain voltage threshold creates two distinct “off” and “on” states that can be used to store data like any other optical data device. And the changes in conductivity are basically irreversible, meaning once a device has been switched, it stays in that conductive state (either on or off). That means you should be able to write something into a DNA-based data storage and then retrieve that info later.

[Gizmag]

The World’s First "Nano-Ear" Can Listen to the Songs of Bacteria

Hearing sounds smaller than any we've ever heard before

By Clay Dillow

The 'Nano-Ear' Courtesy: APS via Physics World

German researchers have turned an optical tweezer device into the world’s first “nano-ear”capable of detecting sounds six orders of magnitude below the threshold of human hearing. Using an optically trapped gold nanoparticle as their listening device, the team says they can now detect sounds made at the bacterial level or use their device to tune (or perhaps to test?) the minuscule MEMS machines of the future.

The nano-ear is pretty simple, considering that it relies on technology that has been laying around in the lab for decades now. Optical tweezers are laser devices that use light to trap or manipulate a small particle in a particular point in space by drawing the particle to the most intense point in the laser beam’s electric field. By trapping a gold nanoparticle in just such a optical trap and measuring the influence of various sound waves on that particle, the found that they can “listen” to very small vibrations.

That means sound analysis at extremely low levels. The gold nanoparticle itself is just 60 nanometers (that’s 60 billionths of a meter, or roughly a thousand times smaller than a human hair), which makes it pretty sensitive to very small forces. The researchers used both a “loud” source--a tungsten needle glued to a speaker that vibrates at roughly 300 Hz--and a second source made up of bunches of other gold nanoparticles heated by a second laser to vibrate at just 20 Hz.

The nano-ear could hear them both loud and clear. The sound waves nudge the trapped gold nanoparticle in the same direction that the waves are propagating, allowing for precise measurement of the sound itself based on the particle’s motion. Experiments showed the nano-ear could detect vibrations down to about -60 decibels--or six orders of magnitude lower than human hears can. That means the device could be used to identify microorganisms or processes at the microscopic level by their sound signatures, or to help design and tune microelectrical mechanical systems.

[Physics World]