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They were all in such a twisted mess that I was reminded why I kept them all stuffed down behind my desk and kept out of sight. Untangling all of the cables and then figuring out how to connect them all to my new computer was the most time consuming part of installing the computer. If only someone would invent a way to power a computer and all of the peripheral devices without the need for all of the cables. What if there were such a thing as wireless transmission of electricity?

The concept of transmitting electricity wirelessly is actually an old one. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla both did research on wireless electricity back in the late 1800’s. Although they agreed that it was important to research how to transmit electricity wirelessly, they disagreed on how electricity should be generated. I like to think of Tesla and Edison as the original AC/DC. Tesla thought that electricity should be generated and transmitted as alternating current while Edison believed that it should be done via direct current. While we know that Tesla, over time, won that debate, it is interesting to note that both scientists agreed that it would not be very efficient to create a massive infrastructure of metal wires around the globe. Unfortunately, with wireless electricity never taking hold, what has developed over time is a massive system of hard wiring that would disappoint both Edison and Tesla.

Even though the concept of wireless electricity has, for the most part, fallen by the wayside for the past 100 years, it is now shockingly close to being commercially available. Watch the following videos and see if you find them as amazing as I do.

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This method of transmitting electricity can charge many different devices over a range of many meters. How does it work? Basically, energy is transmitted as an electromagnetic wave from a transmitter coil to a receiver coil, in much the same way that radio waves are transmitted to a stereo receiver from a radio tower. The wireless devices being shown in the videos have the main (transmitter) coil hidden in the table/counter. The main coil transmits low frequency electromagnetic waves to a receiver coil hidden in the devices being powered. The receiver coil vibrates at the same resonant frequency as the transmitter coil, absorbs the electromagnetic energy, and voltage begins to build up that can then be used as electricity. The transmitter coil can be hidden in a ceiling, behind a wall, or, as shown in the videos, under a desk or countertop. The receiver coil needs to be embedded in or attached to the device being powered.

With this type of technology you would never again have to plug in your cellphone, iPod, Blackberry, etc. Simply place them on a surface that is near a transmitter coil and they would start to charge. Imagine having a transmitter pad in your garage that you could park an electric car on. Simply pull into your garage and your car will start to charge right away. The possibilities are endless.

You won’t find this technology at your neighborhood Radio Shack, or at least you won’t find it there right now. Maybe soon? How cool would that be? Hopefully it will be quite some time before I buy a new computer but, when I do, I hope that I can simply set my new computer onto a desktop fitted with the wireless electricity technology and skip having to spend time with the mess of cables behind my desk that appear to be reproducing like tribbles.

Needless to say, a lot of thought, engineering, and safety precautions went into building this attraction.  The article has a nice graphic illustrating the engineering that went into building the glass box.

If anyone has been out on the Ledge, I’d be interested to hear about your experience.

It’s worth noting that the Sears Tower Skydeck is part of the Chicago Citypass program, which bundles dicsounted admission to four of Chicago’s best museums (Museum and Science and Industry, Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and the Field Museum) with a visit to the Hancock Observatory or the Sears Skydeck.

The piece concentrated on the DARPA-funded DEKA arm, developed by inventor Dean Kamen and his team of 40 engineers. Size and comfort were key issues in designing the limb. The final product is the size of an average person’s arm, weighs around nine pounds, and is buffered from the wearer’s body by small balloons that expand and deflate as pressure on the arm changes (the balloons inflate when the wearer picks up something heavy, and deflate when the arm is at rest).  Controlling the arm using their shoulders and pedals in a specially designed shoe, volunteers demonstrated their ability to pick up and drink from a soda bottle and eat a grape.

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The end of the segment touched on the future of prosthetic control, featuring Duke University engineer Jonathan Kuniholm. Kuniholm, who lost his forearm in Irag, demonstrated his ability to control a prosthetic hand using the nerves still intact in the remaining part of his arm. These nerves send out small electrical signals, which a processor in a prosthetic arm can be trained to interpret.

Similar work is being done here by Northwestern faculty member Todd Kuiken and his research team at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. They are using an exciting new procedure called targeted reinnervation to reroute nerves that used to control a missing limb to different, intact muscle areas (rerouting nerves that used to control an amputee’s arm to his or her chest muscles, for example). These reinnervated muscles can then communicate with a prosthesis, again allowing the wearer to control their limb intuitively. Click here to read an SiS article on the Kuiken team’s work.

Essentially, this removes another block of the argument against stem cells – by removing the need for surgery, it cuts down on the risks involved in stem cell cures dramatically. Critical injuries that would require risky surgery to fix, even without the use of stem cells (examples include the addition of metal plates to hold together bone fractures) would now be nearly as simple to deal with as going in to the doctor for a vaccination. The nanoparticles used in the stem cells are already approved for use by the US for use in MRI scans, according to the article, so there can be no concerns about safety there. Hopefully, progress on to human trials will move swiftly and with success. (However, the scientific paper referenced by the BBC is as of yet unpublished. We shall see what unfolds with that in the future.)

It would seem the benefits of stem cells are only going up, as new breakthroughs in their research are cropping up all over the place, and the reasons not to use them are getting harder and harder to defend. Thus far, research has discovered ways to harvest stem cells from human skin, rendering the ethical embryo defense useless, and now we have discovered a way to easily make use of these stem cells in everyday medical use. All steam ahead in all areas, is what I say. Policy should be reflective of these breakthroughs, and hopefully Obama’s team can make a priority of it, after solving the economic crisis of course.

She has found a way to improve the algorithms used in analyzing data produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. The LHC came online in September of last year despite fears that its activation would lead to the “end of the world” via the creation of a black hole or some other unforeseen result. However, it needed to be shut down after one of the components broke down several days after the switch was flipped.

Particle accelerators have been used by physicists to discover the nature of the universe and its components – to see how everything fits together and works. The LHC is currently our best bet to discover the ever-elusive dark matter and dark energy by its ability to recreate conditions thought to be present milliseconds after the Big Bang.

Quan, a senior in college, astounded future peers by the fact that she was an undergrad making this discovery, boding well for the direction science education is moving around the world. Despite continued assault from creationists and religious critics and all manner of opposition from those who don’t quite understand both the importance and the need for these discoveries, education of younger generations is clearly moving forward. The question here must be, is it moving fast enough and well enough to ensure our survival?

Obama’s recent call for upcoming generations to give up careers in finance in favor of engineering is evidence of the dire straights not just this country, but humanity and the world itself is in. We have problems, problems on problems, that cannot be solved overnight, or by cleverly worded legislation, or by throwing money at them. What is needed is dedicated research with encouragement and enthusiasm – an optimistic approach that is especially hard to come by these days. We all have our parts to play, young and old, politician and scientist and citizen alike. Can we stand up to the challenge, can we continue to push ahead, and take our cue from people like Quan? We have the potential, that much is evident. But do we have the drive? That remains to be seen.

Glass-half-empty, maybe this is a marquee example of the ways in which funds for science and technology are completely misdirected to frivolous endeavors, but I prefer to view it as a testament of science as an innovating force.  Scientists have taken a medium normally limited to low-quality cardboard packaged with stale, flavorless gum and transformed it into a stage on which a digitalized Ryan Howard can clean his cleats and practice his swing.

While it’s entirely possible that I just like cool, animated, 3D baseball cards, I also think that if it is possible for science to so completely transform lighthearted technology such as this one, it also must be possible to make similar revolutions in the development of cancer treatments, embryonic stem-cell research, and perhaps other serious disciplines and technologies.  But it’s true that I still do really like 3D baseball cards.

At the end of my last posting, I promised to tell a bit about my meeting with the makers of TRON 2 at a studio in LA. We met in a beautiful high-tech conference room with loads of food, a videographer recording the proceedings, and what looked to be part of some giant gear system excised from a sunken ship quietly decorating a corner. This lent an air of steampunk to the feel of the room.

The TRON 2 people solicited comments from us on the draft script that we had all read (while under careful watch from a production assistant) and then asked us for help with some specific problems they were having. It was an energetic and intense exchange, the kind where jumping in has to occur at the expense of interrupting someone. This was all done in contracted confidence for obvious reasons, so not much can be said about the specifics of what we discussed.

Participating in the exchange brought many questions to my mind about what ways entertainment industry folks and scientists can help one another.  There are two ways that seem interesting, one I call Truth is Stranger than Fiction and one I call You Gotta Know the Laws to Break ‘Em.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction: Not long ago I read a study and watched videos showing a fish (grouper) that dances for moray eels to seduce them into hunting together. One of them (the grouper) scares prey away from open water, making them hide in the crevices, while the other (the eel) can scare them out of crevices. Together they make an unbeatable team. While we are still trying to figure out how to communicate with one another, here’s two very different species of fish who not only have done this, but end up with some great sushi dinners out of the deal. There are all kinds of interesting stories like this in our work that can make exceptional raw material for the entertainment industry.

More examples:

• Ants communicate by making sounds. There’s a caterpillar that’s hacked their language and is greeted (and more importantly, fed) like a queen when it arrives in a nest.
• A robotics group in Italy is making a plant-inspired robot (plantoid) they call a SeedBot, with an artificial “root” that slowly grows and expands into the soil, as a possible planetary exploration probe.
• While I was at a robotics conference in Rome at Angelicum University, I saw a presentation on a robot that can walk on water. Watching the proceedings from the front of the room was a huge Christ on a cross (one is in every classroom of Angelicum), wearing what I imagined to be a look of “that’s SO done.”

You Gotta Know the Laws to Break ‘Em. You can only be an outlaw when you know what the laws are. A scientist is someone who knows the natural laws or regularities of their domain. Doing violence to those laws can be very useful for dramatic effect – we saw this in the first Tron with how the light cycles did turns. They performed perfect 90 degree turns without loss of speed. Nothing in the physical world can do that because of inertia. This breaking of the laws of physics effectively communicated the immateriality of the world inside the computer.

There is, of course, another way scientists can contribute: fixing gross inaccuracies in the portrayed science. A January 2009 issue of Science had a blurb on the Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). I was disappointed to read the example they chose to highlight, which was an astrophysicist (Neil deGrasse Tyson) whining to James Cameron that when Kate Winslet looked up from the deck of the Titanic, the stars in the sky were in the wrong position. Cameron’s response: “Last I checked the film’s made a billion dollars.”

I liked this response, not because of its ironically crass commercialism, but because it’s a reference to how much people enjoyed the story. Fixing star position, while perhaps worth doing, certainly doesn’t contribute to the quality of the story. This kind of fact checking, it seems to me, is the least interesting way in which we can contribute.

Finally, and more interesting than fact checking, we can help story creators develop plotlines that facilitate the audience’s suspension of disbelief when it comes to fantastic elements of the story. So, it seems clear that scientists and engineers can be useful to entertainment people — how useful can they be to us? I’ll address that in my next posting.

The goal of this blog is to share Northwestern University’s broad range of scientific interest and perspective. Accordingly, we’ve assembled a group of thoughtful individuals representing the university community: scientists & non-scientists, staff, faculty, and students.

You can read about my background here.  In a nutshell, I come from an eclectic mix of biochemistry, molecular biology, hockey, and art. And I’m passionate about communicating science with the public.

Why? For starters, it’s just plain fun. Science is truly a discipline always on the edge. Walk into a research lab – doesn’t matter if it’s chemistry, physics, or biology – and it’s possible you’ll witness an experiment being done for the first time in the history of man. Of course, it may fail miserably. Such is the process of science. Yet when it works, it leads to new experiments and collaborations, which lead to things like cancer therapies, the internet, solar panels, and tankless hot water heaters (homeowners, you need one of these).

It’s also true that scientists have an obligation to to inform and educate the public at large. Much of the basic research done at universities across the country is funded by your money (the taxpayer-funded budget for the National Institutes of Health last year was ~ $29 billion). It’s only reasonable that you ask, “What advances has my money helped support?”

Public policy also enters into the equation. We collectively need to make tough decisions about how to move forward on issues like stem cell biology and climate change. Key to making informed decisions is a basic understanding of 1) the problem, 2) available solutions, and 3) the downstream consequences. For any given issue, perfectly rational and educated people will disagree about 1-3. It happens all the time in labs, town halls, and pubs across the globe. The key is having a scientific understanding of the problem, along with its moral, legal, and social implications.

We hope this blog will highlight the issues and encourage the debate.  Please join us!

Welcome to my corner – or loose confederacy of evanescent electrons – of the Science in Society Blog. My primary charges are issues in brain science and engineering, my main areas of research. I’m an assistant professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. Because two departments means only two Christmas parties, clearly not enough, I’m also adjunct in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology.

My background is quite varied, with degrees in philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience, and on-the-job training in artificial intelligence and mechanical engineering. A highly abbreviated history is that I started out with the aim of making an artificially intelligent system with human-like capabilities, and I’ve settled for the more practical goal of making an artificially intelligent fish. This work is driven by more general questions about the ways in which the body is clever, and how that fits with more readily recognized forms of cleverness that are identified with the nervous system. The body evolved in close coordination with the nervous system over the past 635 million years, so it should be no surprise that there’s a lot going on in that interaction. The main approaches I use for working on these problems are biological investigations, computer simulations, and robotics.

I’m excited by this opportunity to blog about issues at the intersection of science and society, as I’ve long been interested in bringing research to the broader community. In the past I’ve done this through an interactive art installation project in LA and through working on projects between Northwestern University and the Shedd Aquarium.

Most recently, I was involved with the Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). SEE is a new program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, with the goal of connecting entertainment industry folks (thus far, mostly movie types) with scientists. The idea is that part of the reason there is not much science, or poorly portrayed and inaccurate science, is due to the lack of such lines of communication. Suppose you’ve got a plotline revolving around an asteroid about to collide with Earth. The first draft has an asteroid that gets a bit closer over more than a century of observation, and then enters the atmosphere only to vaporize in a ball of steam that causes a few extra days of rain in London. Not very interesting – but what is possible? How might we be surprised by a rapidly approaching asteroid that wasn’t detected until it’s almost too late? What would happen if something the size of a typical sports stadium hit the earth? SEE will get you in touch with a scientist who knows about such things.

A few weeks back, the makers of a sequel to TRON wanted to meet with some scientists at their studio in LA to brainstorm about some issues in their draft script. SEE arranged a meeting between the movie makers, myself, and four scientists who work nearby at the California Institute of Technology. Two days before the session we were asked if we could read the draft script. This has to be done under the watchful eye of an assistant to the producer — such scripts are treated like the Pentagon Papers by the industry. We all agreed to do so (which itself was an interesting experience as I’d never read a screenplay. It’s a good way to appreciate how much has to happen to words on a page to get to a movie). In my next posting, I’ll tell you about what happened. I’ll also suggest a few interesting ways I think these two very different communities can interact for mutual benefit.