Tag Archives: University of Twente

Suicide at the nanoscale: the truth about silicene

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Researchers at the University of Twente (Netherlands) have shown that silicene, a material of great interest to the semi-conductor industry, has a serious drawback according to a Jan. 14, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

The semiconductor industry of the future had high expectations of the new material silicene, which shares a lot of similarities with the ‘wonder material’ graphene. However, researchers of the MESA+ Research Institute of the University of Twente – who recently managed to directly and in real time film the formation of silicene – are harshly bursting the bubble: their research shows that silicene has suicidal tendencies.

The Jan. 8, 2014 University of Twente news release, which originated the news item, describes the problem in detail starting with an explanation of silicene,

The material silicene was first created in 2010. Just like graphene, it consists of a single layer of atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. Graphene consists of carbon atoms, silicene of silicon atoms.

Because of their special properties – both materials are very strong, thin and flexible and have good electrical conductivity – graphene and silicene seem very well suited for the semiconductor industry of the future. After all, the parts on computer chips have to become smaller and smaller and the limits of the miniaturization of parts made of silicon are drawing closer and closer. The material silicene seems to be several steps ahead of graphene, because the semiconductor industry has been using silicon (which, like silicene, consists of silicon atoms) for many years now. In addition, it is easier to realize a so-called bandgap in silicene, which is a prerequisite for a transistor.

…

Researchers of the MESA+ Research Institute of the University of Twente have, for the first time, managed to directly and in real time capture the formation of silicene on film. They let evaporated silicon atoms precipitate on a surface of silver, so that a nice, almost closed, singular layer of silicene was formed.

So far so good, but the moment that a certain amount of silicon atoms fall on top of the formed silicene layer, a silicon crystal (silicon in a diamond crystal structure instead of in a honeycomb structure) is formed, which triggers the further crystallization of the material; an irreversible process. From that moment, the newly formed silicon eats the silicene, so to speak.

The reason for this is that the regular crystal structure (diamond) of silicon is energetically more favourable than the honeycomb structure of silicene and therefore more stable. Because of this property, the researchers did not succeed in covering more than 97 per cent of the silver surface with silicene, nor were they able to create multi-layered silicene. In other words: the moment a surface is almost completely covered with silicene, the material commits suicide and simple silicon is formed. The researchers do not expect it to be possible to create multi-layered silicene on a different type of surface, because the influence of the surface on the formation of the second layer of silicene is negligible.

The researchers have produced a video demonstrating their findings,

SiliceneDeposition from University of Twente on Vimeo.

 Caption: Formation of silicene on a silver surface (grey, start of the film). On top of the silver, silicene islands gradually start to form (black, halfway through the film). When the surface is almost completely covered, these collapse into silicon crystals again (black dots in grey areas, end of the film).

The news release ends on a personal note,

The research has been conducted by Adil Acun, Bene Poelsema, Harold Zandvliet and Raoul van Gastel of the department of Physics of Interfaces and Nanomaterials (PIN) of the University of Twente’s MESA+ Research Institute. The research has been published by the renowned academic journal Applied Physics Letters.  What’s even more special about this publication is that it has resulted from the final thesis research of Adil Acun, who was following the master’s programme Applied Physics at the time. He is now working as a PhD candidate at the PIN department.

Here’s link to and a citation for the paper,

The instability of silicene on Ag(111) by A. Acun, B. Poelsema, H. J. W. Zandvliet, and R. van Gastel.  Appl. Phys. Lett. 103, 263119 (2013); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4860964

This paper is open access as of Jan. 14, 2014.

Graphene hype; the emerging story in an interview with Carla Alvial Palavicino (University of Twente, Netherlands)

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i’m delighted to be publishing this interview with Carla Alvial Palavicino, PhD student at the University of Twente (Netherlands), as she is working on the topicof  graphene ‘hype’. Here’s a bit more about the work from her University of Twente webpage (Note: A link has been removed),

From its origins the field of nanotechnology has been populated of expectations. Pictured as “the new industrial revolution” the economic promise holds strong, but also nanotechnologies as a cure for almost all the human ills, sustainers of future growth, prosperity and happiness. In contrast to these promises, the uncertainties associated to the introduction of such a new and revolutionary technology, and mainly risks of nanomaterials, have elicited concerns among governments and the public. Nevertheless, the case of the public can be characterized as concerns about concerns, based on the experience of previous innovations (GMO, etc.).

Expectations, both as promises and concerns, have played and continue playing a central role in the “real-time social and political constitution of nanotechnology” (Kearnes and Macnaghten 2006). A circulation of visions, promises and concerns in observed in the field, from the broadly defined umbrella promises to more specific expectations, and references to grand challenges as moral imperatives. These expectations have become such an important part of the social repertoire of nano applications that we observe the proliferation of systematic and intentional modes of expectation building such as roadmaps, technology assessment, etc.; as well as a considerable group of reports on risk, concerns, and ethical and social aspects. This different modes of expectation building (Konrad 2010) co-exist and contribute to the articulation of the nano field.

This project seeks to identify, characterize and contextualize the existing modes of expectations building, being those intentional (i.e. foresight, TA, etc.) or implicit in arenas of public discourse, associated to ongoing and emerging social processes in the context of socio-technical change.

This dynamics are being explored in relation to the new material graphene.

Before getting to the interview, here’s Alvial Palavicino’s biography,

Carla Alvial Palavicino has a bachelor degree in Molecular Biology Engineering, School of Science, University of Chile, Chile and a Master’s degree on Sustainability Sciences, Graduate School of Frontier Science, University of Tokyo, Japan. She has worked in technology transfer and more recently, in Smart Grids and local scale renewable energy provision.

Finally, here’s the interview (Note: At the author’s request, there have been some grammatical changes made to conform with Canadian English.),

  • What is it that interests you about the ‘hype’ that some technologies receive and how did you come to focus on graphene in particular?

My research belongs to a field called the Sociology of Expectations, which deals with the role of promises, visions, concerns and ideas of the future in the development of technologies, and how these ideas actually affect people’s strategies in technology development. Part of the dynamic found for these expectations are hype-disappointment cycles, much like the ones the Gartner Group uses. And hype has become an expectation itself; people expect that there will be too many promises and some, maybe many of them are not going to be fulfilled, followed by disappointment.

I came to know about graphene because, initially, I was broadly interested in nanoelectronics (my research project is part of NanoNextNL a large Dutch Nano research programme), due to the strong future orientation in the electronics industry. The industry has been organizing, and continues to organize around the promise of Moore’s law for more than 50 years! So I came across graphene as thriving to some extent on the expectations around the end of Moore’s law and because simply everybody was talking about it as the next big thing! Then I thought, this is a great opportunity to investigate hype in real-time

  • Is there something different about the hype for graphene or is this the standard ‘we’ve found a new material and it will change everything’?

I guess with every new technology and new material you find a portion of genuine enthusiasm which might lead to big promises. But that doesn’t necessarily turn into big hype. One thing is that all hype is not the same and you might have technologies that disappeared after the hype such as High Temperature Semiconductors, or technologies that go through a number of hype cycles and disappointment cycles throughout their development (for example, Fuel Cells). Now with graphene what you certainly have is very ‘loud’ hype – the amount of attention it has received in so little time is extraordinary. If that is a characteristic of graphene or a consequence of the current conditions in which the hype has been developed, such as faster ways of communication (social media for example) or different incentives for science and innovation well, this is part of what I am trying to find out.

Quite clearly, the hype in graphene seems to be more ‘reflexive’ than others, that is, people seem to be more conscious about hype now. We have had the experience with carbon nanotubes only recently and scientist, companies and investors are less naïve about what can be expected of the technology, and what needs to be done to move it forward ‘in the right direction’. And they do act in ways that try to soften the slope of the hype-disappointment curve. Having said that, actors [Ed. Note: as in actor-network theory] are also aware of how they can take some advantage of the hype (for funding, investment, or another interest), how to make use of it and hopefully leave safely, before disappointment. In the end, it is rather hard to ask accountability of big promises over the long-term.

  • In the description of your work you mention intentional and implicit modes of building expectations, could explain the difference between the two?

One striking feature of technology development today is that we found more and more activities directed at learning about, assess, and shaping the future, such as forecasts, foresights, Delphi, roadmaps and so on. There are even specialized future actors such as consultancy organisations or foresight experts,  Cientifica among them. And these formalized ways of anticipating  the future are expected to be performative by those who produce them and use them, that is, influence the way the future – and the present- turns out. But this is not a linear story, it’s not like 100% of a roadmap can be turned practice (not even for the ITRS roadmap [Ed. Note: International Technology Roadmap for Semi-conductors] that sustains Moore’s law, some expectations change quite radically between editions of the roadmap). Besides that, there are other forms of building expectations which are embedded in practices around new technologies. Think of the promises made in high profile journals or grant applications; and of expectations incorporated in patents and standards. All these embody particular forms and directions for the future, and exclude others. These are implicit forms of expectation-building, even if not primarily intended as such. These forms are shaped by particular expectations which themselves shape further development. So, in order to understand how these practices, both intentional and implicit, anticipate futures you need to look at the interplay between the various types.

  • Do you see a difference internationally with regard to graphene hype? Is it more prevalent in Europe than in the North America? Is it particularly prevalent in some jurisdiction, e.g. UK?

I think the graphene ‘hype’ has been quite global, but it is moving to different communities, or actors groups, as Tim Harper from Cientifica has mentioned in his recent report about graphene

What is interesting in relation to the different ‘geographical’ responses to graphene is that they exemplify nicely how a big promise (graphene, in this case) is connected to other circulating visions, expectations or concerns. In the case of the UK, the *Nobel prize on Graphene and the following investment was connected to the idea of a perceived crisis of innovation in the country. Thus, the decision to invest in graphene was presented and discussed in reference to global competitiveness, showing a political commitment for science and innovation that was in doubt at that time.

In the European case with its *Graphene flagship, something similar happened. While there is no doubt of the scientific excellence of the flagship project, the reasons why it finally became a winner in the flagship competition might have been related to the attention on graphene. The project itself started quite humbly, and it differed from the other flagship proposals that were much more oriented towards economic or societal challenges. But the attention graphene received after the Nobel Prize, plus the engagement of some large companies, helped to frame the project in terms of its economic profitability.  And. this might have helped to bring attention and make sense of the project in the terms the European Commission was interested in.

In contrast, if you think of the US, the hype has been there (the number of companies engaged in graphene research is only increasing) but it has not had a big echo in policy. One of the reasons might be because this idea of global competition and being left behind is not so present in the US. And in the case of Canada for example, graphene has been taken up by the graphite (mining) community, which is a very local feature.

So answering your questions, the hype has been quite global and fed in a global way (developments in one place resonate in the other) but different geographical areas have reacted in relation to their contingent expectations to what this hype dynamic provided.

  • What do you think of graphene?

I think it’s the new material with more YouTube videos (this one is particularly good in over promising for example)  and the coolest superhero (Mr G from the Flagship). But seriously,  I often get asked that question when I do interviews with actors in the field, since they are curious to learn about the outsider perspective. But to be honest I try to remain as neutral and distant as possible regarding my research object… and not getting caught in the hype!

Thanks so much for a fascinating interview Carla and I very much appreciate the inclusion of Canada in your response to the question about the international response to graphene hype. (Here are three of my postings on graphite and mining in Canada: Canada’s contribution to graphene research: big graphite flakes [Feb. 6, 2012]; A ‘graphite today, graphene tomorrow’ philosophy from Focus Graphite [April 17, 2013[; and Lomiko’s Quatre Milles graphite flakes—pure and ultra pure [April 17, 2013] There are others you can find by searching ‘graphite’ in the blog’s search box.)

* For anyone curious about the Nobel prize and graphene, there’s this Oct.7, 2010 posting. Plus, the Graphene Flagship was one of several projects competing for one of the two 1B Euro research prizes awarded in January 2013 (the win is mentioned in my Jan. 28, 2013 posting).

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays to all!

Journal of Responsible Innovation is launched and there’s a nanotechnology connection

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According to an Oct. 30, 2013 news release from the Taylor & Francis Group, there’s a new journal being launched, which is good news for anyone looking to get their research or creative work (which retains scholarly integrity) published in a journal focused on emerging technologies and innovation,

Journal of Responsible Innovation will focus on intersections of ethics, societal outcomes, and new technologies: New to Routledge for 2014 [Note: Routledge is a Taylor & Francis Group brand]

Scholars and practitioners in the emerging interdisciplinary field known as “responsible innovation” now have a new place to publish their work. The Journal of Responsible Innovation (JRI) will offer an opportunity to articulate, strengthen, and critique perspectives about the role of responsibility in the research and development process. JRI will also provide a forum for discussions of ethical, social and governance issues that arise in a society that places a great emphasis on innovation.

Professor David Guston, director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University and co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, is the journal’s founding editor-in-chief. [emphasis mine] The Journal will publish three issues each year, beginning in early 2014.

“Responsible innovation isn’t necessarily a new concept, but a research community is forming and we’re starting to get real traction in the policy world,” says Guston. “It is our hope that the journal will help solidify what responsible innovation can mean in both academic and industrial laboratories as well as in governments.”

“Taylor & Francis have been working with the scholarly community for over two centuries and over the past 20 years, we have launched more new journals than any other publisher, all offering peer-reviewed, cutting-edge research,” adds Editorial Director Richard Steele. “We are proud to be working with David Guston and colleagues to create a lively forum in which to publish and debate research on responsible technological innovation.”

An emerging and interdisciplinary field

The term “responsible innovation” is often associated with emerging technologies—for example, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, geoengineering, and artificial intelligence—due to their uncertain but potentially revolutionary influence on society. [emphasis mine] Responsible innovation represents an attempt to think through the ethical and social complexities of these technologies before they become mainstream. And due to the broad impacts these technologies may have, responsible innovation often involves people working in a variety of roles in the innovation process.

Bearing this interdisciplinarity in mind, the Journal of Responsible Innovation (JRI) will publish not only traditional journal articles and research reports, but also reviews and perspectives on current political, technical, and cultural events. JRI will publish authors from the social sciences and the natural sciences, from ethics and engineering, and from law, design, business, and other fields. It especially hopes to see collaborations across these fields, as well.

“We want JRI to help organize a research network focused around complex societal questions,” Guston says. “Work in this area has tended to be scattered across many journals and disciplines. We’d like to bring those perspectives together and start sharing our research more effectively.”

Now accepting manuscripts

JRI is now soliciting submissions from scholars and practitioners interested in research questions and public issues related to responsible innovation. [emphasis mine] The journal seeks traditional research articles; perspectives or reviews containing opinion or critique of timely issues; and pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning responsible innovation. More information about the journal and the submission process can be found at www.tandfonline.com/tjri.

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About The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU

The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU (CNS-ASU) is the world’s largest center on the societal aspects of nanotechnology. CNS-ASU develops programs that integrate academic and societal concerns in order to better understand how to govern new technologies, from their birth in the laboratory to their entrance into the mainstream.

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About Taylor & Francis Group

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Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life.  As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, ebooks and reference works our content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, and Technology and Medicine.

From our network of offices in Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, Stockholm, New Delhi and Johannesburg, Taylor & Francis staff provide local expertise and support to our editors, societies and authors and tailored, efficient customer service to our library colleagues.

You can find out more about the Journal of Responsible Innovation here, including information for would-be contributors,

JRI invites three kinds of written contributions: research articles of 6,000 to 10,000 words in length, inclusive of notes and references, that communicate original theoretical or empirical investigations; perspectives of approximately 2,000 words in length that communicate opinions, summaries, or reviews of timely issues, publications, cultural or social events, or other activities; and pedagogy, communicating in appropriate length experience in or studies of teaching, training, and learning related to responsible innovation in formal (e.g., classroom) and informal (e.g., museum) environments.

JRI is open to alternative styles or genres of writing beyond the traditional research paper or report, including creative or narrative nonfiction, dialogue, and first-person accounts, provided that scholarly completeness and integrity are retained.[emphases mine] As the journal’s online environment evolves, JRI intends to invite other kinds of contributions that could include photo-essays, videos, etc. [emphasis mine]

I like to check out the editorial board for these things (from the JRI’s Editorial board webpage; Note: Links have been removed),,

Editor-in-Chief

David. H. Guston , Arizona State University, USA

Associate Editors

Erik Fisher , Arizona State University, USA
Armin Grunwald , ITAS , Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Richard Owen , University of Exeter, UK
Tsjalling Swierstra , Maastricht University, the Netherlands
Simone van der Burg, University of Twente, the Netherlands

Editorial Board

Wiebe Bijker , University of Maastricht, the Netherlands
Francesca Cavallaro, Fundacion Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Spain
Heather Douglas , University of Waterloo, Canada
Weiwen Duan , Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China
Ulrike Felt, University of Vienna, Austria
Philippe Goujon , University of Namur, Belgium
Jonathan Hankins , Bassetti Foundation, Italy
Aharon Hauptman , University of Tel Aviv, Israel
Rachelle Hollander , National Academy of Engineering, USA
Maja Horst , University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Noela Invernizzi , Federal University of Parana, Brazil
Julian Kinderlerer , University of Cape Town, South Africa
Ralf Lindner , Frauenhofer Institut, Germany
Philip Macnaghten , Durham University, UK
Andrew Maynard , University of Michigan, USA
Carl Mitcham , Colorado School of Mines, USA
Sachin Chaturvedi , Research and Information System for Developing Countries, India
René von Schomberg, European Commission, Belgium
Doris Schroeder , University of Central Lancashire, UK
Kevin Urama , African Technology Policy Studies Network, Kenya
Frank Vanclay , University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Jeroen van den Hoven, Technical University, Delft, the Netherlands
Fern Wickson , Genok Center for Biosafety, Norway
Go Yoshizawa , Osaka University, Japan

Good luck to the publishers and to those of you who will be making submissions. As for anyone who may be as curious as I was about the connection between Routledge and Francis & Taylor, go here and scroll down about 75% of the page (briefly, Routledge is a brand).

Artificial ‘cricket hair’ sensors from the Dutch

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What do you do when the very phenomenon you’re trying to sense (low frequency signals) frustrates your efforts? Scientists at the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology responded by moving the signals into the frequency range for the sensors, which are modeled on cricket hairs. From the June 6, 2013 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

An “artificial cricket hair” used as a sensitive flow sensor has difficulty detecting weak, low-frequency signals – they tend to be drowned out by noise. But now, a bit of clever tinkering with the flexibility of the tiny hair’s supports has made it possible to boost the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 25. This in turn means that weak flows can now be measured. Researchers at the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology of the University of Twente (NL) have presented details of this technology in the New Journal of Physics (“Uncovering signals from measurement noise by electro mechanical amplitude modulation”).

The University of Twente June 6, 2013 news release, which originated the news item, describes how  biomimicry (copying cricket hairs) combined with technology in old AM radios were combined to solve the problem,

These tiny hairs, which are manufactured using microtechnology techniques, are neatly arranged in rows and mimic the extremely sensitive body hairs that crickets use to detect predators. When a hair moves, the electrical capacitance at its base changes, making the movement measurable. If there is an entire array of hairs, then this effect can be used to measure flow patterns. In the same way, changes in air flow tell crickets that they are about to be attacked.

Tiny “hairs” of the polymer SU-8 are applied to a flexible, moving surface, the capacitance of which changes with each movement.

Mechanical AM radio

In the case of low-frequency signals, the noise inherent to the measurement system itself tends to throw a spanner in the works by drowning out the very signals that the system was designed to measure. One very appealing idea is to “move” these signals into the high frequency range, where noise is a much less significant factor. The MESA+ researchers achieve this by periodically changing the hairs’ spring rate. They do so by applying an electrical voltage.

The original signal (top), the signal at a sensor vibrating at a higher frequency (centre), and the reconstructed signal (bottom)

This adjustment also causes the hairs to vibrate at a high frequency. This resembles the technology used in old AM radios, where the music signal is encoded on a higher frequency wave. In the case of the sensor, its “radio” is a mechanical device. Low frequency flows are measured by tiny hairs vibrating at a higher frequency. The signal can then be retrieved, with significantly less noise. Suddenly, a previously unmeasurable signal emerges, thanks to this “up-conversion”.

This electromechanical amplitude modulation (EMAM) expands the hair sensors’ range of applications enormously. Now that the signal-to-noise ratio has been improved by a factor of 25, it is possible to measure much weaker signals. According to the researchers, this technology could be a very useful way of boosting the performance of many other types of sensors.

You can find out more about the paper here,

The article by Harmen Droogendijk, Remco Sanders and Gijs Krijnen, entitled “Uncovering signals from measurement noise by electromechanical amplitude modulation” has been published in the New Journal of Physics, an open-access journal.

After reading about this research I got a little curious about crickets and found an online set of instructions for drawing them. From the How to Draw a Cricket webpage on the DragonArt.com website, here’s step 6,

STEP 6. This is what your cricket should end up looking like this. Color him/her in and you have just finished this lesson on "how to draw a cricket insect step by step". Credit: Dawn

STEP 6.
This is what your cricket should end up looking like this. Color him/her in and you have just finished this lesson on “how to draw a cricket insect step by step”. Credit: Dawn

Thanks to Dawn for uploading her cricket (insect) drawing instructions.

Paying attention to cricket hairs

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Researchers at the University of Twente (Netherlands) have been working on cricket hairs or, rather, biomimicry projects based on cricket hairs for a few years now. There’s this Aug. 31, 2010 posting on ConsumerCourt.com which mentions the ‘cricket hair’ work in relationship to applications in cochlear implants (Note: A link has been removed),

Dutch scientists have recreated the tiny hairs found on a cricket that allow the insect to sense predators – a move that could lead to new cochlear implants for the hearing impaired.

A team of physicists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, led by Gijs Krijnen and Remco Wiegerink, built a mechanical array with up to a few hundred artificial hairs, says a report in the university journal’s website.

The latest work by the University of Twente team is focused on cameras according to a Mar. 11, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

Crickets use sensitive hairs on their cerci (projections on the abdomen) to detect predators. For these insects, air currents carry information about the location of nearby predators and the direction in which they are moving. These University of Twente researchers wondered whether they could use the same principle to create a new kind of “camera,” capable of imaging entire flow patterns rather than measuring flows at a single point. They mimic the cricket hairs using microtechnology.

The hairs themselves are made of a type of epoxy, which is attached to a flexible suspended plate. That acts as a capacitor, whose capacitance varies with movement. Measuring that variation gives you information about the movement. Using an entire field or array of such fine hairs, it is possible to identify patterns in the flow, in much the same way as complete images are formed from the individual pixels detected by chips in cameras.

For those interested, here’s a citation and a link to the article,

A M K Dagamseh, R J Wiegerink, T S J Lammerink and G J M Krijnen (2012). Towards a high-resolution flow camera using artificial hair sensor arrays for flow pattern observations. Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, 7 (4) 046009 doi:10.1088/1748-3182/7/4/046009

This is an Institute of Physics science journal publication and the article, published in Sept. 2012, is open access.

Prosthetics and the human brain

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On the heels of research which suggests that humans tend to view their prostheses, including wheel chairs, as part of their bodies, researchers in Europe  have announced the development of a working exoskeleton powered by the wearer’s thoughts.

First, there’s the ‘wheelchair’ research, from the Mar. 6, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

People with spinal cord injuries show strong association of wheelchairs as part of their body, not extension of immobile limbs.

The human brain can learn to treat relevant prosthetics as a substitute for a non-working body part, according to research published March 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Mariella Pazzaglia and colleagues from Sapienza University and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia of Rome in Italy, supported by the International Foundation for Research in Paraplegie.

The researchers found that wheelchair-bound study participants with spinal cord injuries perceived their body’s edges as being plastic and flexible to include the wheelchair, independent of time since their injury or experience with using a wheelchair. Patients with lower spinal cord injuries who retained upper body movement showed a stronger association of the wheelchair with their body than those who had spinal cord impairments in the entire body.

According to the authors, this suggests that rather than being thought of only as an extension of the immobile limbs, the wheelchairs had become tangible, functional substitutes for the affected body part. …

As I mentioned in a Jan. 30, 2013 posting,

There have been some recent legal challenges as to what constitutes one’s body (from The Economist article, You, robot? [you can find the article here: http://www.economist.com/node/21560986]),

If you are dependent on a robotic wheelchair for mobility, for example, does the wheelchair count as part of your body? Linda MacDonald Glenn, an American lawyer and bioethicist, thinks it does. Ms Glenn (who is not involved in the RoboLaw project) persuaded an initially sceptical insurance firm that a “mobility assistance device” damaged by airline staff was more than her client’s personal property, it was an extension of his physical body. The airline settled out of court.

According to the Mar. 6, 2013 news release on EurekAlert from the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the open access article by Pazzaglia and her colleagues can be found here (Note: I have added a link),

Pazzaglia M, Galli G, Scivoletto G, Molinari M (2013) A Functionally Relevant Tool for the Body following Spinal Cord Injury. PLOS ONE 8(3): e58312.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058312

At almost the same time as Pazzaglia’s work,  a “Mind-controlled Exoskeleton” is announced in a Mar. 7, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

Every year thousands of people in Europe are paralysed by a spinal cord injury. Many are young adults, facing the rest of their lives confined to a wheelchair. Although no medical cure currently exists, in the future they could be able to walk again thanks to a mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton being developed by EU-funded researchers.

The system, based on innovative ‘Brain-neural-computer interface’ (BNCI) technology — combined with a light-weight exoskeleton attached to users’ legs and a virtual reality environment for training — could also find applications in there habilitation of stroke victims and in assisting astronauts rebuild muscle mass after prolonged periods in space.

The Mar. 7, 2013 news release on CORDIS, which originated the news item, offers a description of the “Mindwalker” project,

‘Mindwalker was proposed as a very ambitious project intended to investigate promising approaches to exploit brain signals for the purpose of controlling advanced orthosis, and to design and implement a prototype system demonstrating the potential of related technologies,’ explains Michel Ilzkovitz, the project coordinator at Space Applications Services in Belgium.

The team’s approach relies on an advanced BNCI system that converts electroencephalography (EEG) signals from the brain, or electromyography (EMG) signals from shoulder muscles, into electronic commands to control the exoskeleton.

The Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Movement Biomechanics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) focused on the exploitation of EEG and EMG signals treated by an artificial neural network, while the Foundation Santa Lucia in Italy developed techniques based on EMG signals modelled by the coupling of neural and biomechanical oscillators.

One approach for controlling the exoskeleton uses so-called ‘steady-state visually evoked potential’, a method that reads flickering visual stimuli produced at different frequencies to induce correlated EEG signals. Detection of these EEG signals is used to trigger commands such as ‘stand’, ‘walk’, ‘faster’ or ‘slower’.

A second approach is based on processing EMG signals generated by the user’s shoulders and exploits the natural arm-leg coordination in human walking: arm-swing patterns can be perceived in this way and converted into control signals commanding the exoskeleton’s legs.

A third approach, ‘ideation’, is also based on EEG-signal processing. It uses the identification and exploitation of EEG Theta cortical signals produced by the natural mental process associated with walking. The approach was investigated by the Mindwalker team but had to be dropped due to the difficulty, and time needed, in turning the results of early experiments into a fully exploitable system.

Regardless of which method is used, the BNCI signals have to be filtered and processed before they can be used to control the exoskeleton. To achieve this, the Mindwalker researchers fed the signals into a ‘Dynamic recurrent neural network'(DRNN), a processing technique capable of learning and exploiting the dynamic character of the BNCI signals.

‘This is appealing for kinematic control and allows a much more natural and fluid way of controlling an exoskeleton,’ Mr Ilzkovitz says.

The team adopted a similarly practical approach for collecting EEG signals from the user’s scalp. Most BNCI systems are either invasive, requiring electrodes to be placed directly into brain tissue, or require users to wear a ‘wet’ capon their head, necessitating lengthy fitting procedures and the use of special gels to reduce the electrical resistance at the interface between the skin and the electrodes. While such systems deliver signals of very good quality and signal-to-noise ratio, they are impractical for everyday use.

The Mindwalker team therefore turned to a ‘dry’ technology developed by Berlin-based eemagine Medical Imaging Solutions: a cap covered in electrodes that the user can fit themselves, and which uses innovative electronic components to amplify and optimise signals before sending them to the neural network.

‘The dry EEG cap can be placed by the subject on their head by themselves in less than a minute, just like a swimming cap,’ Mr Ilzkovitz says.

Before proceeding any further with details, here’s what the Mindwalker looks like,

© MINDWALKER (downladed from http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=OFFR_TM_EN&ACTION=D&RCN=10601)

© MINDWALKER (downloaded from http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=OFFR_TM_EN&ACTION=D&RCN=10601)

After finding a way to collect the EEG/EMG signals and interpret them, the researchers needed to create the exoskeleton (from the CORDIS news release),

The universities of Delft and Twente in the Netherlands proposed an innovative approach for the design of the exoskeleton and its control. The exoskeletonis designed to be sufficiently robust to bear the weight of a 100 kg adult and powerful enough to recover balance from external causes of instability such as the user’s own torso movements during walking or a gentle push from the back or side. Compared to other exoskeletons developed to date it is relatively light, weighing less than 30 kg without batteries, and, because a final version of the system should be self-powered, it is designed to minimise energy consumption.

The Mindwalker researchers achieved energy efficiency through the use of springs fitted inside the joints that are capable of absorbing and recovering some of the energy otherwise dissipated during walking, and through the development of an efficient strategy for controlling the exoskeleton.

Most exoskeletons are designed to be balanced when stationary or quasi-static and to move by little steps inside their ground stability perimeter, an approach known as ‘Zero moment point’, or ZMP. Although this approach is commonly used for controlling humanoid robots, when applied to exoskeletons, it makes them heavy and slow – and usually requires users to be assisted by a walking frame, sticks or some other support device when they move.

Alternatively, a more advanced and more natural control strategy can replicate the way humans actually walk, with a controlled loss of balance in the walking direction.

‘This approach is called “Limit-cycle walking” and has been implemented using model predictive control to predict the behaviour of the user and exoskeleton and for controlling the exoskeleton during the walk. This was the approach investigated in Mindwalker,’ Mr Ilzkovitz says.

To train users to control the exoskeleton, researchers from Space Applications Services developed a virtual-reality training platform, providing an immersive environment in which new users can safely become accustomed to using the system before testing it out in a clinical setting, and, the team hope, eventually using it in everyday life.

By the end of this year, tests with able-bodied trial users will be completed. The system will then be transferred to the Foundation Santa Lucia for conducting a clinical evaluation until May 2013 with five to 10volunteers suffering from spinal cord injuries. These trials will help identify shortcomings and any areas of performance improvement, the project coordinator says.

In the meantime, the project partners are continuing research on different components for a variety of potential applications. The project coordinator notes, for example, that elements of the system could be adapted for the rehabilitation of stroke victims or to develop easy-to-use exoskeletons for elderly people for mobility support.

Space Applications Services, meanwhile, is also exploring applications of the Mindwalker technology to train astronauts and help them rebuild muscle mass after spending long periods of time in zero-gravity environments.

There’s more about the European Commission’s Seventh Programme-funded Mindwalker project here.

Parallel with these developments in Europe, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University has stated that he will have a working exoskeleton (Walk Again Project)  for the kickoff by a paraplegic individual for the opening of the World Cup (soccer/football) in Brazil in 2014. I mentioned Nicolelis and his work most recently in a Mar. 4, 2013 posting.

Taken together, this research which strongly suggests that people can perceive prostheses as being part of their bodies and exoskeletons that are powered by the wearer’s thoughts, we seem to be edging closer to a world where machines and humans become one.

University of Twente (Holland) researchers love their metaphors: ‘bed of nails’ and ‘soccer balls’

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In the last week there have been a couple of news releases from Dutch researchers at the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology which feature some metaphors. The first was a Sept. 20, 2012 news item on Nanowerk (Note: I have removed a link),

Nanotechnology researchers develop ‘bed of nails’ material for clean surfaces

Scientists at the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology have developed a new material that is not only extremely water-repellent but also extremely oil-repellent. It contains minuscule pillars which retain droplets. What makes the material unique is that the droplets stay on top even when they evaporate (slowly getting smaller). This opens the way to such things as smartphone screens that really cannot get dirty. The study appears today in the scientific journal Soft Matter (“Absence of an evaporation-driven wetting transition on omniphobic surfaces”).

The University of Twente Sept. 12, 2012 news release, which originated the news item explores the metaphor and the technology,

Water-repellent surfaces can be used as a coating for windows, obviating the need to clean them ever again. These surfaces have an orderly arrangement of tiny pillars less than one-hundredth of a millimetre high (similar to a bed of nails but on an extremely small scale). Water droplets stay on the tips of the pillars, retaining the shape of perfectly round tiny pearls. As a result they can roll off the surface like marbles, taking all the dirt with them.

Nanotechnologists at the University of Twente have now managed to create a silicon surface that retains not only water droplets but also oil droplets like tiny pearls …. What makes the material unique is that the droplets remain in place even when they evaporate (get smaller).

With existing materials, evaporating droplets drop down between the pillars onto the surface after a while, changing in shape to hemispheres which can no longer simply roll off the surface. The surface can therefore still get dirty. By modifying the edges and the roughness of the minuscule pillars the UT scientists have managed to create a surface on which the droplets do not drop down even when they evaporate but stay neatly on top.

The Sept. 27, 2012 news item on Nanowerk features another metaphor, one which is well known amongst followers of the nanotechnology scene,

Nanotechnologists create miniscule soccer balls

Nanotechnologists at the University of Twente’s MESA+ research institute have developed a method whereby minuscule polystyrene spheres, automatically and under controlled conditions, form an almost perfect ball that looks suspiciously like a football, but about a thousand times smaller. The spheres organize themselves in such a way that they approach the densest arrangement possible, known as ‘closest packing of spheres’. The method provides nanotechnologists with a new way of creating minuscule 3D structures.

Soccer balls usually reference buckminster fullerenes (bucky balls). The news item explains this new use further,

The method developed by the University of Twente scientists involves placing a drop of water containing thousands of polystyrene spheres one micrometre in size (a thousand times smaller than a millimetre) on a superhydrophobic surface. As the drop is allowed to evaporate very slowly under controlled conditions the distances between the spheres become smaller and smaller and surprisingly they form a highly organized 3D structure. The spheres were found to organize themselves of their own accord in such a way that the ball they form approaches the most compact arrangement possible (‘closest packing of spheres’), with 74% of the space filled by the spheres. Like a football, the structures that form are almost perfectly spherical, consisting of a large number of planes. The researchers have therefore dubbed their material ‘microscopic soccer balls’. The minuscule footballs are a hundred to a thousand micrometres in size, containing from ten thousand to as much as a billion of the tiny polystyrene spheres.

There’s more on the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology website but you will need to have Dutch language skills.

It’s always good to see metaphors and I like when scientists (or whoever’s writing the news releases) get create that way.

Zombies, brains, collapsing boundaries, and entanglements at the 4th annual S.NET conference

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My proposal, Zombies, brains, collapsing boundaries, and entanglements, for the 4th annual S.NET (Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies) conference was accepted. Mentioned in my Feb. 9, 2012 posting, the conference will be held at the University of Twente (Netherlands) from Oct. 22 – 25, 2012.

Here’s the abstract I provided,

The convergence between popular culture’s current fascination with zombies and their appetite for human brains (first established in the 1985 movie, Night of the Living Dead) and an extraordinarily high level of engagement in brain research by various medical and engineering groups around the world is no coincidence

Amongst other recent discoveries, the memristor (a concept from nanoelectronics) is collapsing the boundaries between humans and machines/robots and ushering in an age where humanistic discourse must grapple with cognitive entanglements.

Perceptible only at the level of molecular electronics (nanoelectronics), the memristor was a theoretical concept until 2008. Traditionally in electrical engineering, there are three circuit elements: resistors, inductors, and capacitors. The new circuit element, the memristor, was postulated in a paper by Dr. Leon Chua in 1971 to account for anomalies that had been experienced and described in the literature since the 1950s.

According to Chua’s theory and confirmed by the research team headed by R. Stanley Williams, the memristor remembers how much and when current has been flowing. The memristor is capable of an in-between state similar to certain brain states and this capacity lends itself to learning. As some have described it, the memristor is a synapse on a chip making neural computing a reality and/or the possibility of repairing brains stricken with neurological conditions. In other words, with post-human engineering exploiting discoveries such as the memristor we will have machines/robots that can learn and think and human brains that could incorporate machines.

As Jacques Derrida used the zombie to describe a state that this is neither life nor death as undecidable, the memristor can be described as an agent of transformation conferring robots with the ability to learn (a human trait) thereby rendering them as undecidable, i.e., neither machine nor life. Mirroring its transformative agency in robots, the memristor could also confer the human brain with machine/robot status and undecidability when used for repair or enhancement.

The memristor moves us past Jacques Derrida’s notion of undecidability as largely theoretical to a world where we confront this reality in a type of cognitive entanglement on a daily basis.

You can find the preliminary programme here.  My talk is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 25, 2012 in one of the last sessions for the conference, 11 – 12:30 pm in the Tracing Transhuman Narratives strand.

I do see a few names I recognize, Wickson, Pat (Roy)  Mooney and Youtie. I believe Wickson is Fern Wickson from the University of Bergen last mentioned here in a Jul;y 7, 2010 posting about nature, nanotechnology, and metaphors. Pat Roy Mooney is from The ETC Group (an activist or civil society group) and was last mentioned here in my Oct. 7, 2011 posting), and I believe Youtie is Jan Youtie who wss mentioned in my March 29, 2012 posting about nanotechnology, economic impacts, and full life cycle assessments.

S.NET (Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies) 2012 call for proposals

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The conference (4th annual is upcoming in Oct. 2012) and the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies are more oriented to folks in the humanities and social sciences. I don’t think they preclude other participants but the topic areas for the conference (which reflects the society’s interests) will tend to appeal to those audiences.

Here’s the invitation to the conference from their home page,

S.NET invites contributions to the Fourth Annual meeting of The Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), to be held at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, on October 22-25, 2012. The four-day conference will assemble scholars, practitioners and policy makers from around the world interested in the development and implications of emerging technologies.

There is an invitation for proposals (from the How to apply page),

Proposals will be accepted on the basis of a submitted abstract, which will be refereed. Abstracts must be between 250 and 400 words in length. Proposals for panel sessions should include a general introduction and abstracts of the separate contributions. All proposals should include the strand to which the abstract/panel session is submitted. If an abstract fits more strands, or does not fit the existing strands, simply note that in your submission.

Proposals should be submitted online before April 2, 2012. All submitters will be notified about the results of the review process by the end of May 2012.

Possible topics/themes include (from the Themes, Topics, and Conference Strands page),

Possible themes and topics have been organized into six ‘strands’. While applicants are asked to indicate the strand relevant to the topic of their paper, submissions dealing with themes or topics outside the present strands are also welcome.

1. R&D practices and the dynamics of new and emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Research networks & collaborations, emerging research fields, practices of ‘doing’ nano or other emerging fields of science and technology, including historical and philosophical studies of these practices.

2. Innovation and the use of new and emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Innovation networks and systems, commercialization, implications for industry structures, translation from lab to practice, application and use of nano-based products and other innovations, critical analyses of growth and consumption, including economic, social and cultural approaches of innovation processes

3. Governance of newly emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Regulations, anticipatory governance practices, risk assessment, risk concerns, (constructive) TA , forms of public participation and engagement, including critical evaluation of forms of governance

4. Visions and cultural imaginaries of newly emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Promises, expectations, visions, science fiction, imagination, socio-technical change, moral change, role of media, including assessments of such visions and analyses of their role in innovation processes.

5. Publics and their relations to newly emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Science communication, risk communication, public engagement, participation and discourses on NEST, science museums, informal science learning initiatives, including critical evaluation of such initiatives and the notion of ‘publics’.

6. Politics and ethics of newly emerging sciences and technologies

E.g. Responsible innovation, (in)equality, equity, development, global and social distribution of benefits and risks, sustainability, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ impacts of emerging technologies, including theoretical perspectives on NEST and global developments

Formats

S.NET encourages proposals for individual papers, posters, traditional panels, roundtable discussions and other innovative formats. All proposals for panels, roundtables and other formats, should clearly specify topic, order and timing of the different contributions.

The first conference was in Seattle in 2009.

Interacting with stories and/or with data

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A researcher, Ivo Swarties, at the University of Twente in The Netherlands is developing a means of allowing viewers to enter into a story (via avatar) and affect the plotline in what seems like a combination of what you’d see in 2nd Life and gaming. The project also brings to mind The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and its intelligent nanotechnology-enabled book along with Stephenson’s latest publishing project, Mongoliad (which I blogged about here).

The article about Swarties’ project on physorg.com by Rianne Wanders goes on to note,

The ‘Virtual Storyteller’, developed by Ivo Swartjes of the University of Twente, is a computer-controlled system that generates stories automatically. Soon it will be possible for you as a player to take on the role of a character and ‘step inside’ the story, which then unfolds on the basis of what you as a player do. In the gaming world there are already ‘branching storylines’ in which the gamer can influence the development of a story, but Swartjes’ new system goes a step further. [emphasis mine]The world of the story is populated with various virtual figures, each with their own emotions, plans and goals. ‘Rules’ drawn up in advance determine the characters’ behaviour, and the story comes about as the different characters interact.

There’s a video with the article if you want to see this project for yourself.

On another related front, Cliff Kuang profiles in an article (The Genius Behind Minority Report’s Interfaces Resurfaces, With Mind-blowing New Tech) on the Fast Company site describes a new human-computer interface. This story provides a contrast to the one about the ‘Virtual Storyteller’ because this time you don’t have to become an avatar to interact with the content. From the article,

It’s a cliche to say that Minority Report-style interfaces are just around the corner. But not when John Underkoffler [founder of Oblong Industries] is involved. As tech advistor on the film, he was the guy whose work actually inspired the interfaces that Tom Cruise used. The real-life system he’s been developing, called g-speak, is unbelievable.

…

Oblong hasn’t previously revealed most of the features you see in the later half of the video [available in the article’s web page or on YouTube], including the ability zoom in and fly through a virtual, 3-D image environment (6:30); the ability to navigate an SQL database in 3-D (8:40); the gestural wand that lets you manipulate and disassemble 3-D models (10:00); and the stunning movie-editing system, called Tamper (11:00).

Do go see the video. At one point, Underkoffler (who was speaking at the February 2010 TED) drags data from the big screen in front of him onto a table set up on the stage where he’s speaking.

Perhaps most shockingly (at least for me) was the information that this interface is already in use commercially (probably in a limited way).

These developments and many others suggest that the printed word’s primacy is seriously on the wane, something I first heard 20 years ago. Oftentimes when ideas about how technology will affect us are discussed, there’s a kind of hysterical reaction which is remarkably similar across at least two centuries. Dave Bruggeman at his Pasco Phronesis blog has a posting about the similarities between Twitter and 19th century diaries,

Lee Humphreys, a Cornell University communications professor, has reviewed several 18th and 19th century diaries as background to her ongoing work in classifying Twitter output (H/T Futurity). These were relatively small journals, necessitating short messages. And those messages bear a resemblance to the kinds of Twitter messages that focus on what people are doing (as opposed to the messages where people are reacting to things).

Dave goes on to recommend The Shock of the Old; Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton as an antidote to our general ignorance (from the book’s web page),

Edgerton offers a startling new and fresh way of thinking about the history of technology, radically revising our ideas about the interaction of technology and society in the past and in the present.

I’d also recommend Carolyn Marvin’s book, When old technologies were new, where she discusses the introduction of telecommunications technology and includes the electric light with these then new technologies (telegraph and telephone). She includes cautionary commentary from the newspapers, magazines, and books of the day which is remarkably similar to what’s available in our contemporary media environment.

Adding a little more fuel is Stephen Hume in a June 12, 2010 article about Shakespeare for the Vancouver Sun who asks,

But is the Bard relevant in an age of atom bombs; a world of instant communication gratified by movies based on comic books, sex-saturated graphic novels, gory video games, the television soaps and the hip tsunami of fan fiction that swashes around the Internet?

[and answers]

So, the Bard may be stereotyped as the bane of high school students, symbol of snooty, barely comprehensible language, disparaged as sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, representative of an age in which men wore tights and silly codpieces to inflate their egos, but Shakespeare trumps his critics by remaining unassailably popular.

His plays have been performed on every continent in every major language. He’s been produced as classic opera in China; as traditional kabuki in Japan. He’s been enthusiastically embraced and sparked an artistic renaissance in South Asia. In St. Petersburg, Russia, there can be a dozen Shakespeare plays running simultaneously. Shakespeare festivals occur in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey, to list but a few.

Yes to Pasco Phronesis, David Edgerton, Carolyn Marvin, and Stephen Hume, I agree that we have much  in common with our ancestors but there are also some profound and subtle differences not easily articulated.  I suspect that if time travel were possible and we could visit Shakespeare’s time we would find that the basic human experience doesn’t change that much but that we would be hardpressed to fit into that society as our ideas wouldn’t just be outlandish they would be unthinkable. I mean literally unthinkable.

As Walter Ong noted in his book, Orality and Literacy, the concept of a certain type of list is a product of literacy. Have you ever done that test where you pick out the item that doesn’t belong on the list? Try: hammer, saw, nails, tree. The correct answer anybody knows is tree since it’s not a tool. However, someone from oral culture would view the exclusion of the tree as crazy since you need both tools and  wood to build something and clearly the tree provides wood. (I’ll see if I can find the citation in Ong’s book as he provides research to prove his point.) A list is a particular way of organizing information and thinking about it.