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Get Ready to Fire Laser From Your Body

laser cell construction

Cyclops, a superhero from the famous comics “X men” has been the favorite of many people across the world. In the story, the character produces powerful laser beams by optical blast from his eyes. This fiction has become a reality by the joint efforts of Seok-Hyun Yun and Malte Gather, two physicists at Massachusetts General Hospital.

They were able to develop a technique by which laser can be produced from human cells. The device used to produce this laser consists of the same components that are used to produce a real time laser. That is, a pump source, an optical cavity and a gain medium. The pump source is used to produce the initial energy, the optical cavity to concentrate the energy, and the gain medium is a substance in which the electrons are exited until they go from a lower energy level to a higher energy level.

microscopic view of laser cell

The researchers began experimenting on human kidney cells to produce green florescent proteins (GFP). This substance is known to produce luminance in jellyfish. Many steps were carried out to produce the laser. They began by placing the modified cell between two mirrors there by creating an optical cavity (a cell sandwich as called by researchers). Then a blue light pulse was passed through the cell and the light bounced between the mirrors, causing the cell to glow. When the cell was observed through a microscope, they saw that the cell was glowing with a spot of laser.

Researchers suggest that this laser is suitable for many medical applications. For the diagnosis of diseases, nowadays a laser beam is passed into the body to get images or to attack the disease causing cells. There might also be a time when the human cells can be illuminated as laser. The illuminated cells can gather more information about the interior of the human body by penetrating the damaged tissues more deeply. More research has to be done to realize this as laser needs an external light source to illuminate. Some say that this technology will be more useful in gaining information about individual cell characteristics than medical applications as the laser needs an external light source and it is difficult to produce it inside human body. Yen suggests that by integrating a nano scale cavity to laser cell we can produce a cell that will illuminate itself without any external source. Let’s hope that this technology will come into reality in the near future itself – who doesn’t want to shoot a laser from our own body!!

World’s Smallest Electronic Circuit Using Nanotechnology

Smallest Electronic Circuit

Technology has been evolving time to time, from complex wired circuits to Integrated circuits(IC). Nowadays almost all electronic gadgets like smart phones, computers, global positioning systems(GPS), tablets and so on use Integrated circuits as they are more compact and efficient. In this era of nanotechnology, scientists are scaling every possible technology to nano scale without compromising its efficiency. Nano circuits were made by scaling Electronic circuits in the nano range, and that too, by rectifying the disadvantages of Integrated circuits like heat dissipation.

Recently a team of researchers headed by Guillaume Gervais of McGill’s Physics department and Mike Lilly from Sandia National Laboratories successfully developed one of the world’s smallest electronic circuits. It consisted of only two wires separated by a distance of 15 nanometers. The distance is so small that it counts up to only 150 atoms!!

On further studies, the researchers observed that a charge on one wire induces a charge on the other. This charge induced on the second wire may be positive or negative irrespective of the first wire. That is, the current flowing through both wires can be in the same or opposite direction. This experiment based on Quantum physics gave the researchers an idea about the behavior of electronic circuits in nano scale.

In case of nano circuits, heat dissipation is tremendously reduced. Although heat dissipation occurs, since the wires are very close, the heat dissipated by one will be absorbed by the other. In nano scale, electronic interactions between circuits become very complex, since a phenomenon called Coulomb drag occurs where current in one wire induces a voltage in the other wire by coulomb interactions alone. Nano circuits are economic if manufactured in large quantities.

The major institutions that funded this research were Natural science and Engineering research council of Canada, the Fonds de recherché Nature et technologies of Quebec, the Canadian Institute of advanced research and the center of Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National laboratories.

Satellite Surgery Robot Developed to Repair Satellites

da Vinci console

Artificial satellites placed in orbits are used for a variety of purposes like communication, GPS, military applications, TV broadcasting, and so on. No matter how much time and money has been spent on building these hi-tech devices, satellites are basically just machines, and constant use can damage any machine. Every year NASA is spending millions of dollars just for the maintenance of these satellites, but they have not found a feasible way to repair a damaged one. Till present, there was only one option left for the researchers –completely blow–off the satellite!!They could not find any other feasible method to repair it. They tried using manpower by sending them directly to the repair site. This turned out to be a bad idea, as they could not adapt themselves to the outer space characteristics.

NASA had to face a lot of criticism for blowing up satellites in outer space. Since a single satellite contains millions of electronic equipments, blowing them off would literally mean the disposal of e- waste all over the outer space. These toxic wastes could bring serious threats to humans by affecting the Earth’s atmosphere in the coming future.

A remotely operated robot could easily do the job but controlling of the robot will be a difficult task. Precise controlling of the robot is necessary, as things are different in outer space.

Engineers at John Hopkins University are known for designing robots for medical purposes. They have created various robots that were used in medical transplants and other complex surgeries. Currently they are working on a project in which a medical surgery robot called da Vinci console is transformed into a robot that can be used for repairing satellites.

A brief description of this robotic surgery project has been presented by two graduate students Tian Xia and Jonathan Bohren from John Hopkins’ Homewood campus . In this demonstration, researchers showed how the da Vinci console, which was used for the treatment of cancer was modified as a satellite-repairing robot. It consists of a 3D eyepiece by which the operator can remotely control the robot. By using the 3D eye piece the user gets a better vision which helps him to repair with ease .

It also includes a touch or haptic feedback to the operator. With the technology the user gets to know the exact amount of force, vibration or motion applied to the machine through computer stimulation.

This robot was successfully tested on 29th November 2011. The modified da Vinci console was used to control an Industrial robot at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre about 30 miles away . This test was successful and researchers concluded that they could use it in space mission too. The most challenging problem is that the satellites are travelling in an orbit and thus, prone to time delay for signal reception. Researchers may have used special algorithms to refine this problem. The robot can also be used for refueling satellites.

DD Using Bio-robotics:

In order to measure quantitatively the neuro-psychomotor conditions of an individual with a view to subsequently detecting his/her state of health, it is necessary to obtain a set of parameters such as reaction time, speed, strength and tremor. By processing these parameters through the use of fuzzy logic it is possible to monitor an individual's state of health, .i.e. whether he/she is healthy or affected by a particular pathology such as Parkinson's disease, dementia, etc. The set of parameters obtained is useful not only to diagnose neuro-motor pathologies (e.g. Parkinson Disease), but also to assess general everyday health or to monitor sports performance; moreover, continuous use of the device by an individual for health-monitoring purposes, not only allows for detection of the onset of a particular pathology but also provides greater awareness in terms of how life style or certain habits tend to have repercussions on psycho-physical well-being. Since an individual's state of health should be continually monitored, it is essential that he or she can manage the test autonomously without his/her emotional state being influenced: autonomous testing is important, as the individual is likely to be more relaxed thus obviating emotional problems. The new system has been designed with reference to the biomechanical characteristics of the human finger.

Disease detector (DDX) is a new bio robotic device that is a fuzzy based control system for the detection of neuro-motional and psychophysical health conditions. The initial experimental system (DD1) and the current system (DD2) are not easily portable and, even if they are very reliable, cannot estimate the patient health beyond the typical parameters of Parkinson's disease nor are they able to remotely transmit such diagnoses.

This new bio-robotic system is exploited in order to obtain an intelligent and reliable detector supported by a very small and portable device, with a simple joystick with few buttons, a liquid-display (LCD), and a simple interface for remote communication of diagnosis. It may be adopted for earth and space applications, because of its portability, in order to measure all the reactions in front of external effects.

The DDX control system consists of a small board with an internal fuzzy microcontroller that acquires, through the action on a button on the joystick, some important parameters: reaction time, motion speed, force of the finger on the button, and tremor and analyses them by fuzzy rules in order to detect the patient's disease class. Moreover this new device also includes a system to detect vocal reaction. The resulting output can be visualized tkkhuhhrough a display or transmitted by a communication interface.

Clos Architecture in OPS

The need to transmit information in large volumes and in more compact forms is felt these days more than ever before. To provide the bandwidth necessary to fulfill the ever-increasing demand, the copper networks have been upgraded and nowadays to a great extend replaced with optical fiber networks. Though initially these were deployed as point-to-point interconnections, real optical networking using optical switches is possible today. Since the advent of optical amplifiers allowed the deployment of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), the bandwidth available on a single fiber has grown significantly.

Optical communication can take place in one of the two ways - either circuit switching or else packet switching. In circuit switching, the route and bandwidth allocated to the stream remain constant over the lifetime of the stream. The capacity of each channel is divided into a number of fixed-rate logical channels, called circuits. Optical cross connects (OXCs) switch wavelengths from their input ports to their output ports. To the client layer of the optical network, the connections realized by the network of OXCs are seen as a virtual topology, possibly different from physical topology (containing WDM links). To set up the connections, as in the old telephony world, a so called control plane is necessary to allow for signaling. Enabling automatic setup of connections through such a control plane is the focus of the work in the automatically switched optical network (ASON) framework. Since the light paths that have to be set up in such an ASON will have a relatively long lifetime (typically in the range of hours to days), the switching time requirements on OXCs are not very demanding.

It is clear that the main disadvantage of such circuit switched networks is that they are not able to adequately cope with highly variable traffic. Since the capacity offered by a single wavelength ranges up to a few tens of gigabits per second, poor utilization of the available bandwidth is likely. A packet switched concept, where bandwidth is effectively consumed when data is being sent, clearly allows more efficient handling of traffic that greatly varies in both volume and communication endpoints, such as in currently dominant internet traffic.

In packet switching, the data stream originating at the source is divided into packets of fixed or variable size. In this method the bandwidth is effectively consumed when data is being sent and so allows a more efficient handling of traffic that greatly varies in both volume and communication endpoints.

In the last decade, various research groups have focused on optical packet switching (OPS), aimed at more efficiently using the huge bandwidths offered by such networks. The idea is to use optical fiber to transport optical packets, rather than continuous streams of light. Optical packets consist of a header and a payload. In an OPS node, the transported data is kept in the optical domain, but the header information is extracted and processed using mature control electronics, as optical processing is still in its infancy. To limit the amount of header processing, client layer traffic (e.g., IP traffic) will be aggregated into fairly large packets.

To unlock the possibilities of OPS, several issues arise and are being solved today. To be competitive with the other solutions, the OPS cost node needs to be limited, and the architectures should be future proof (i.e., scalable). In this context, the work of Clos on multistage architectures has been inspiring.