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The ultimate DIY: ‘How to build a robotic man’ on BBC 4

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

British Broadcasting Corporation’s Channel 4 (BBC 4) will be telecasting the ultimate do-it-yourself (DIY) project, How to build a bionic man on Feb. 7, 2013, 9 pm GMT. Corinne Burns in a Jan. 30, 2013 posting for the Guardian science blogs describes the documentary (Note: Links have been removed),

Created by Darlow Smithson Productions (DSP, the TV company behind Touching The Void and Richard Hammond’s Engineering Connections), with the help of robotics experts Shadow Robot Company, the bionic man was conceived as a literal response to the question: how close is bionic technology is to catching up with – and even exceeding – the capabilities of the human body?

DSP got in touch with Dr Bertolt Meyer, a charismatic young researcher from Zurich University and himself a lifelong user of prosthetic technology, and invited him to, essentially, rebuild himself in bionic form. The result can be seen in How to Build a Bionic Man, to be broadcast on Channel 4 on 7 February. The Bionic Man himself will then reside in the Science Museum’s Who Am I? gallery from 7 February until 11 March.

Richard Walker (left), chief roboticist, and Dr Bertolt Meyer (right) at the Body Lab. On the table is an iWalk BiOM ankle. Photograph: Channel 4 [downloaded from http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jan/30/build-bionic-man]

Richard Walker (left), chief roboticist, and Dr Bertolt Meyer (right) at the Body Lab. On the table is an iWalk BiOM ankle. Photograph: Channel 4 [downloaded from http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jan/30/build-bionic-man]

Burns goes on to discuss some of the issues raised by the increasing sophistication of prosthetics (Note: Links have been removed),

The engineering behind modern prosthetics is certainly awe-inspiring. The iLimb Ultra, of which Bertolt is a user, is part of the new class of myoelectric prosthetics. These custom-made devices function by placing electrical sensors directly in contact with the skin. These sensors pick up the signals generated by muscular movements in the residual limb – signals that are then translated by software into natural, intuitive movement in the prosthetic limb.

We all know about prosthetic limbs, even if many of us are not aware of just how sophisticated they now are. Less familiar, though, is the idea of bionic organs. Far removed from the iron lung of yore, these new fully integrated artificial body parts are designed to plug directly into our own metabolism – in effect, they are not within us, they become us. They’re the ultimate in biomimicry.

…

It’s one thing to use a bionic organ to replace lost function. But in a future world where we could, feasibly, replace virtually all of our body, will we blur the boundaries of artificial and natural to an extent that we have to recalibrate our definition of self and non-self? That’s especially pertinent when we consider the reality of neural prosthetics, like the “memory chips” developed by Dr Theodore Berger. Instinctively, many of us are uncomfortable with brain implants – but should we be? And will this discomfort be reduced if we broaden our definition of self?

Bertolt himself is pleased with the increasing normalisation, and even “coolness”, of prosthetics. But he expresses caution about the potential for elective use of such technology – would we ever choose to remove a healthy body part, in order to replace it with a stronger, better prosthetic?

Burns’ posting isn’t the only place where these discussion points and others related to human enhancement and robotic technologies are being raised, in a Jan. 18, 2013 posting I mentioned an television advertisement for a new smartphone that ‘upgrades your brain’ that ‘normalises’ the idea of brain implants and other enhancements for everybody. As well, The Economist recently featured an article, You, robot? in its September 1st – 7th, 2012 issue about the European Union’s RoboLaw Project,

SPEAKING at a conference organised by The Economist earlier this year [2012], Hugh Herr, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described disabilities as conditions that persist “because of poor technology” and made the bold claim that during the 21st century disability would be largely eliminated. What gave his words added force was that half way through his speech, after ten minutes of strolling around the stage, he unexpectedly pulled up his trouser legs to reveal his bionic legs, and then danced a little jig. In future, he suggested, people might choose to replace an arthritic, painful limb with a fully functional robotic one. “Why wouldn’t you replace it?” he asked. “We’re going to see a lot of unusual situations like that.”

It is precisely to consider these sorts of situations, and the legal and ethical conundrums they will pose, that a new research project was launched in March. Is a prosthetic legally part of your body? When is it appropriate to amputate a limb and replace it with a robotic one? What are the legal rights of a person with “locked in” syndrome who communicates via a brain-computer interface? Do brain implants and body-enhancement devices require changes to the definition of disability? The RoboLaw project is an effort to anticipate such quandaries and work out where and how legal frameworks might need to be changed as the technology of bionics and neural interfaces improves. Funded to the tune of €1.9m ($2.3m), of which €1.4m comes from the European Commission, it brings together experts from engineering, law, regulation, philosophy and human enhancement.

There have been some recent legal challenges as to what constitutes one’s body (from The Economist article, You, robot?),

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.

RoboLaw is a European Union Framework Programme 7-funded two year project, which started in 2012. There is a conference to be held in the Netherlands, April 23 – 24, 2013, from the RoboLaw home page,

RoboLaw Authors Workshop and Volume on ‘Opportunities and risks of robotics in relation to human values’

23-24 April 2013, Tilburg University, Tilburg (The Netherlands)

Call for paper and participation. Robotic technologies, taken to encompass anything from ‘traditional’ robots to emerging technologies in the field of biomedical research, such as nanotechnologies, bionics, and neural interfaces, as well as innovative biomedical applications, such as biomechatronic prostheses, hybrid bionic systems and bio- mechatronic components for sensory and motor augmentation, will have a profound impact on our lives. They may also affect human values, such as privacy, autonomy, bodily integrity, health, etc. In this workshop, we will focus on the impact of new technologies, and particularly robotics, on fundamental rights and human values. …

Important dates
Before 1 January 2013: Send an email to Ronald Leenes confirming your attendance, expressing your intention to either submit a paper or act as a commentator/reviewer.
Before 1 February: Send a 300 word abstract of the intended paper to Ronald Leenes
Before 8 February: Notification of acceptance.
Before 1 March: If your abstract has been accepted, send a draft of your full paper in PDF format to Ronald Leenes
Before 5 March: Circulation of papers
23-24 April 2013: Workshop
10 May: Selected final papers to be handed in.

According to the schedule, it’s a bit late to start the process for submitting an abstract but it never hurts to try.

Canadian academic, Gregor Wolbring, assistant professor, Dept of Community Health Sciences, Program in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies at the University of Calgary and past president of the Canadian Disability Studies Association, offers a nuanced perspective on human enhancement issues and the term, ableism. From my Aug. 30, 2011 posting on cyborgs, eyeborgs and others,

… Gregor’s June 17, 2011 posting on the FedCan blog,

The term ableism evolved from the disabled people rights movements in the United States and Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.  It questions and highlights the prejudice and discrimination experienced by persons whose body structure and ability functioning were labelled as ‘impaired’ as sub species-typical. Ableism of this flavor is a set of beliefs, processes and practices, which favors species-typical normative body structure based abilities. It labels ‘sub-normative’ species-typical biological structures as ‘deficient’, as not able to perform as expected.

The disabled people rights discourse and disability studies scholars question the assumption of deficiency intrinsic to ‘below the norm’ labeled body abilities and the favoritism for normative species-typical body abilities. The discourse around deafness and Deaf Culture would be one example where many hearing people expect the ability to hear. This expectation leads them to see deafness as a deficiency to be treated through medical means. In contrast, many Deaf people see hearing as an irrelevant ability and do not perceive themselves as ill and in need of gaining the ability to hear. Within the disabled people rights framework ableism was set up as a term to be used like sexism and racism to highlight unjust and inequitable treatment.

Ableism is, however, much more pervasive.

Ableism based on biological structure is not limited to the species-typical/ sub species-typical dichotomy. With recent science and technology advances, and envisioned advances to come, we will see the dichotomy of people exhibiting species-typical and the so-called sub species-typical abilities labeled as impaired, and in ill health. On the other side we will see people exhibiting beyond species-typical abilities as the new expectation norm. An ableism that favours beyond species-typical abilities over species-typical and sub species-typical abilities will enable a change in meaning and scope of concepts such as health, illness, rehabilitation, disability adjusted life years, medicine, health care, and health insurance. For example, one will only be labeled as healthy if one has received the newest upgrade to one’s body – meaning one would by default be ill until one receives the upgrade.

You can find more about Gregor’s work on his University of Calgary webpage or his blog.

Finally, for anyone who wants a look at BBC 4′s ‘biionic man’,

A television company asked Dr Bertolt Meyer – who has a prosthetic arm – to rebuild himself in bionic form. Photograph: Channel 4 [downloaded from http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jan/30/build-bionic-man]

A television company asked Dr Bertolt Meyer – who has a prosthetic arm – to rebuild himself in bionic form. Photograph: Channel 4 [downloaded from http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2013/jan/30/build-bionic-man]

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Posted in biomimcry, human enhancement | No Comments »

Science and politics: the UK and the US, two different worlds

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

The UK is apparently getting ready to introduce evidence-based science into government policies and decisions. According a Jan. 18, 2013 opinion piece by Michael Brooks for New Scientist, the Department for Education will be one of the first to institute this new approach (Note: Links have been removed),

It has been a long time coming, according to Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department for Education. The civil service is not short of clever people, he points out, and there is no lack of desire to use evidence properly. More than 20 years as a serving politician has convinced him that they are as keen as anyone to create effective policies. “I’ve never met a minister who didn’t want to know what worked,” he says. What has changed now is that informed policy-making is at last becoming a practical possibility.

That is largely thanks to the abundance of accessible data and the ease with which new, relevant data can be created. This has supported a desire to move away from hunch-based politics. [emphasis miine]

Last week, for instance, Rebecca Endean, chief scientific advisor and director of analytical services at the Ministry of Justice, announced that the UK government is planning to open up its data for analysis by academics, accelerating the potential for use in policy planning.

At the same meeting, hosted by innovation-promoting charity NESTA, Wormald announced a plan to create teaching schools based on the model of teaching hospitals. In education, he said, the biggest single problem is a culture that often relies on anecdotal experience rather than systematically reported data from practitioners, as happens in medicine. [emphasis mine] “We want to move teacher training and research and practice much more onto the health model,” Wormald said.

Now what could possibly pose a problem for this charming idea of evidence-based policy planning?

In education, the evidence-based revolution has already begun. A charity called the Education Endowment Foundation is spending £1.4 million on a randomised controlled trial of reading programmes in 50 British schools.

There are reservations though. The Ministry of Justice is more circumspect about the role of such trials. Where it has carried out randomised controlled trials, they often failed to change policy, or even irked politicians with conclusions that were obvious. “It is not a panacea,” Endean says.

…

The biggest need is perhaps foresight. Ministers often need instant answers, and sometimes the data are simply not available. Bang goes any hope of evidence-based policy.

…

Crucial to the process will be convincing the public about the value and use of data, so that everyone is on-board. This is not going to be easy. When the government launched its Administrative Data Taskforce, which set out to look at data in all departments and opening it up so that it could be used for evidence-based policy, it attracted minimal media interest.

…

There are economic issues. Most of the predictable areas where data and evidence would be useful span different departments, and funding for research that involves multiple government departments is near-impossible to come by at the moment. “Only counter-terrorism gets cross-departmental funding,” Wiles says.

And those at the frontline of all this may also need convincing. Some teachers have already expressed reservations. There may be problems with parents not wanting their children to take part in education trials. For instance, in a control group they will feel left out of innovation; in the experimental arm they will worry that the old ways were better. What’s more, teachers may be tempted to halt a trial early if they feel it is not helping students. [emphasis mine]

There’s a basic assumption being made that evidence-based medicine has been a huge and howling success. I see no evidence cited either in this article or anywhere else that this has been the case. Medicine and health care research and practice have bifurcated in some fascinating ways. Researchers and clinicians live in different worlds and have very little contact. It is increasingly difficult (almost impossible) for a clinician to run a research project as the research process has become the province of professional grant writers and others who jump innumerable hoops for monies with the consequence that researchers have scant clinical experience.

No human clinical trial is ever large enough (1000 or 10000 or more) to give perfect insight into a drug’s effects once it gets used in the general population (millions and billions) which is why drugs that have managed to get approval are sometimes shown to be more dangerous and/or less effective than originally believed. There is also the problem of positive publication bias. Researchers publish studies that show positive results because journals don’t tend to print (by a wide margin) studies that have negative or inconclusive results. As for the vaunted evidence-based training process, doctors are learning to do less and less and becoming clerks who fill out referral forms and requests for tests that other professionals perform and interpret.

The loathing expressed towards hunches and anecdotes seems ironic since science is based on those two pillars. Is there a single story about a scientific breakthrough that doesn’t come down to a hunch or whatever you want to call that moment which sparked someone’s curiosity and suspicion? And, the reason for conferences is less about learned papers and more about informal conversations and meetings where people trade anecdotes.

Evidence-based science is a tool. It can be very powerful but it has to be used wisely and, in the case of those teachers who might want to withdraw students from a trial they thought was doing harm, that would be a very wise use of the evidence they’ve observed, wouldn’t it?

In the US, they’re also talking about science and politics but taking a very different perspective. Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University based in Washington DC, has written a Jan. 2, 2013 article for Nature where he opines that scientists should not show political bias,

To prevent science from continuing its worrying slide towards politicization, here’s a New Year’s resolution for scientists, especially in the United States: gain the confidence of people and politicians across the political spectrum by demonstrating that science is bipartisan.

That President Barack Obama chose to mention “technology, discovery and innovation” in his passionate victory speech in November shows just how strongly science has come, over the past decade or so, to be a part of the identity of one political party, the Democrats, in the United States. The highest-profile voices in the scientific community have avidly pursued this embrace. For the third presidential election in a row, dozens of Nobel prizewinners in physics, chemistry and medicine signed a letter endorsing the Democratic candidate.

The 2012 letter argued that Obama would ensure progress on the economy, health and the environment by continuing “America’s proud legacy of discovery and invention”, and that his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, would “devastate a long tradition of support for public research and investment in science”. The signatories wrote “as winners of the Nobel Prizes in Science”, thus cleansing their endorsement of the taint of partisanship by invoking their authority as pre-eminent scientists.

I think science groups/associations should follow the same policy a lot of business groups/organizations do, support/donate to all the viable parties and candidates but give more to your favourites. After all, you never know who’s going to be forming the next government so you want to keep in everyone’s good books.

It’s this suggestion which gives me pause,

If scientists want to claim that their recommendations are independent of their political beliefs, they ought to be able to show that those recommendations have the support of scientists with conflicting beliefs. Expert panels advising the government on politically divisive issues could strengthen their authority by demonstrating political diversity.

This rests on the notion that one’s affiliations are easily categorized. Not all Democrats are the same, nor are Republicans. While the parties are broadly Democrat and Republican within these parties there are subdivisions within subdivisions. It would likely cause more divisiveness than is worthwhile given the proposed benefit to attempt bipartisan panels, etc.

Daniel Lende in a Jan. 21, 2013 posting on the Neuroanthropology blog (member of the PLoS [Public Library of Science] blog network) comments at more length on the problems with Sarewitz’s thesis. For example,

… In Sarewitz’s world, politicians will naturally listen better to bipartisan endorsements. Take a recent example, the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan for “Financial Responsibility and Reform.” Politicians just fell over themselves to enact that bipartisan approach to dealing with a major social problem, didn’t they?

An even better example is smoking. If the model is somehow that by inserting better, more independent information into the political process, more rational and scientific decisions will be made, then that’s the wrong kind of scientific flow chart. Tobacco companies had major profits at stake, and major money to spend. They spent it on politicians and scientists alike. It wasn’t on a search for “the truth” about tobacco.

I’m not familiar enough with US politics to understand that reference to the ‘Simpson-Bowles plan’ but I take it that the bipartisan approach was a big failure in that instance. Lende also mounts an interesting discussion about social science and science as per some of Sarewitz’s comments about how the science community does not want to be perceived in the same light as the social science community (from Nature),

Conservatives in the US government have long been hostile to social science, which they believe tilts towards liberal political agendas. Consequently, the social sciences have remained poorly funded and politically vulnerable, and every so often Republicans threaten to eliminate the entire National Science Foundation budget for social science.

As scientists seek to provide policy-relevant knowledge on complex, interdisciplinary problems ranging from fisheries depletion and carbon emissions to obesity and natural hazards, the boundary between the natural and the social sciences has blurred more than many scientists want to acknowledge. With Republicans generally sceptical [sic] of government’s ability and authority to direct social and economic change, the enthusiasm with which leading scientists align themselves with the Democratic party can only reinforce conservative suspicions that for contentious issues such as climate change, natural-resource management and policies around reproduction, all science is social science.

Lende’s response echoes some of my own feelings on the topic still Sarewitz does have a point of sorts. Sarewitz dances between referring to scientists as individuals and in groups. As an individual, I think scientists should follow their own conscience with regard to whom and what they support but a science association or group should focus as much as possible on their pursuit of science irrespective of the politics. In short, you praise or condemn any and all governments according to what’s best for science.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of Canada’s Conservative party but this Conservative-led government has made some good choices, as well as, bad ones and I reserve the right to ‘praise them or bury them’ accordingly.

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Posted in science policy | 1 Comment »

An invisibility cloak close to home courtesy of HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp.

Monday, January 7th, 2013

H/T (hat tip) to My Science Academy and its early Jan. 2013 article titled 27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts in 2012 for the information about an invisibility cloak that has been developed by HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp. based in Maple Ridge, BC, Canada.  Here’s more from the company’s Oct. 19, 2012 news release,

Once thought to be only a Science Fiction/Fantasy technology, Guy Cramer, President/CEO of Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp., discusses the implications of militaries which can now become invisible with his light bending technology called “Quantum Stealth”.

Hyperstealth is a successful Canadian camouflage design company with over two million military issued uniforms and over 3000 vehicles and fighter jets using their patterns around the world.

Quantum Stealth is a material that renders the target completely invisible by bending light waves around the target. The material removes not only your visual, infrared (night vision) and thermal signatures but also the target’s shadow.

Two separate command groups within the U.S. Military and two separate Canadian Military groups as well as Federal Emergency Response Team (Counter Terrorism) have seen the actual material so they could verify that I was not just manipulating video or photo results; These groups now know that it works and does so without cameras, batteries, lights or mirrors…It is lightweight and quite inexpensive. Both the U.S. and Canadian military have confirmed that it also works against military IR scopes and Thermal Optics.

This  brief video interview of Guy Cramer highlights various company products including Quantum Stealth ,

Cramer has included a number of updates, corrections, and additions to his  company’s Oct. 19, 2012 news release (which you will see if you keep scrolling down past the original release) ,

Isn’t there a risk that someone else may figure this out or copy what you’ve done? Yes, but I’ve already developed a countermeasure for Quantum Stealth so we would be able to detect anyone else with something identical or similar to Quantum Stealth.

Do I care that people remain skeptical? Nope, the people that need to know that it works have seen it and verified it and their opinions are the only ones that matter.

Will Quantum Stealth be available for the general public or commercial market? Not in the near future unless the Military decided to release the technology and I don’t anticipate that will happen anytime soon.

Is there anything planned for the commercial market? I am working on a number of non-powered color changing camouflage materials for the commercial market which utilize different technologies than either Quantum Stealth or Smartcamo. Colors change with climate, seasons cause environmental colors to change and even the 24 hour day can cause a large color discrepancy between camouflage and the background as day becomes night. People want camouflage which can change with these variables.

Have you made camouflage obsolete? Not necessarily, standard camouflage should continue to have its place, however, on the front lines it might become your second choice behind Quantum Stealth if you’re Canadian, American or British and your group is authorized to use it.

…

Update: December 18, 2012

I, Guy Cramer, have conducted about 20 interviews on this subject, however, there are now over 5,000 worldwide news stories that have come out in the past 8 days. With the internet, one news group just plagiarizes a previous story and fact checking is out the window. Some of you may remember the game as a child where you whisper a phrase in the ear of the first person and they whisper the same phase to the next person…10 people later you ask the last person to say the phase that they just were whispered and the phase is often completely different.

Some inaccuracies have come up which need clarification – if you have read this whole page you know the photos are mock-ups to show the concept, we have never told the media that these are photos of the real technology and in fact we’ve asked them to mark the photos as mock-ups or explain it on T.V.- but doing so doesn’t sell the story, so most of the articles leave this key point out. I started the process of correcting the reporters with the first reports I could find that did not mention this correctly such as http://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-new-camoflague-technology-makes-troops-invisible-2012-12 (these two reporters never did correct it after I asked them to) but the story went viral. There is no way for me to get 5,000 news sources to mark the images as mockups that didn’t even bother to interview me in the first place. I have not been dishonest about this, the reporters have.

I’ve never been to the Pentagon and the Pentagon is not backing our Light Bending technology at this time, this inaccuracy came about from the Daily Mail article where they combined the information on this page with the CNN interview where the reported [sic] is a Pentagon correspondent – but the Daily Mail never interviewed me, their online story is one key article that caused the story to go viral. I have only claimed that two separate U.S. Military command groups have seen demonstrations of the material, this doesn’t mean the Pentagon was one of them. The Canadian Government only provided authorization 2 weeks ago to be able to move forward with the U.S. Military regarding this technology.

Canadian Foreign Affairs is involved in determining the potential restrictions and clearance in moving forward with the British Military and will not make a decision until at least the Spring of 2013. At their request, I did a presentation of the technology at British Military Headquarters in Bristol in 2011 as well as the SBS (Special Boat Service) in Poole accompanied by two former U.S. Navy SEALs, one being Bill Jarvis mentioned in an earlier update.

Some critics are claiming that our technology (if it works) must only work in one direction at one angle. I can tell you that we have demonstrated that it can work in 360 degrees meaning you will see what is on the other side of the target and some one at a different angle will see what is immediately behind the target from their vantage point.

This story is not new, the “Atlantic” magazine article published in July 2011 discussed the technology from a video I showed him and the same reporter was shown our actual Smartcamo (color changing material) and confirmed that technology really works. It is only recently that the media has become focused on light bending technology due to the CNN interview which was not our intended story with them but when a three hour interview with CNN is cut into 2 minutes, the focus of their story was on this and not on the ADS Inc./Guy Cramer US4CES Family of camouflage finalist with the U.S. Army camouflage improvement program, which is the initial story they were there for.

There was no biographical information (that I could find) for Cramer on the company website but there is this in an April 22, 2011 posting on the Tactical Gear Military Clothing News site,

Guy Cramer is the President/CEO of HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp. CCD (Camouflage, Concealment & Deception) Specialist, IT Analyst: Level 4, Inventor of the Passive Negative Ion Generator, World Expert on Air Ions as per NASA JPL. He has worked on projects with, NASA Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and Senator John Warner’s office while he was Chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Cramer also worked under the direct commission of King Abdullah II of Jordan. He is the former research assistant and grandson to Donald L. Hings, P.Eng, M.B.E. (Member of British Empire), C.M. (Order of Canada) inventor of the Walkie-Talkie prior to WWII. Cramer has designed over 9,000 camouflage patterns for over 34 countries and recently developed Smartcamo, a textile which can change color to match the surrounding environment.

It’s a shame there aren’t more technical details about Quantum Stealth as it would be interesting for someone to compare and contrast this technology with other light bending technologies (invisibility cloaks).

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Posted in military, nanotechnology | No Comments »

European Union, copyright, stakeholder meetings, and ripple effects

Thursday, December 6th, 2012

According to the Dec. 6, 2012 posting by Ben Zevenbergen on Techdirt the European Union will commence a yearlong, starting in 2013,  ‘structured stakeholder process’ to discuss copyright reform,

This exercise will assess whether “the market” is able to address the current deficiencies of copyright in the following six topics: “cross-border portability of content, user-generated content, data- and text-mining, private copy levies, access to audiovisual works and cultural heritage.“

Zevenberg goes on to analyze the six topics at more length and he also discusses the politics that led to this develoment but the part I found most interesting focuses on possible ripple effects (Note: I have removed links),

Hopefully the British will now feel supported in implementing the recommendations of the Hargreaves report. Perhaps the Dutch will also feel justified to proceed with the idea to make their copyright system more flexible. Overseas governments may also feel reinforced to open the discussions on their copyright systems and join the EU in finding the new way forward. But will the EU’s move encourage the GOP [US Republican Party] to republish their recent insightful report on copyright reform?

You can find the Hargreaves report here and Michael Geist’s May 18, 2011 posting about the report and his August 3, 2011 posting about the government’s response to the report. For anyone unfamiliar with Geist, here’s an excerpt from his blog’s About page,

Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. He has obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Master of Laws (LL.M.) degrees from Cambridge University in the UK and Columbia Law School in New York, and a Doctorate in Law (J.S.D.) from Columbia Law School.  Dr. Geist is an internationally syndicated columnist on technology law issues …

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Posted in copyright | No Comments »

Opening up Open Access: European Union, UK, Argentina, US, and Vancouver (Canada)

Monday, May 28th, 2012

There is a furor growing internationally and it’s all about open access. It ranges from a petition in the US to a comprehensive ‘open access’ project from the European Union to a decision in the Argentinian Legislature to a speech from David Willetts, UK Minister of State for Universities and Science to an upcoming meeting in June 2012 being held in Vancouver (Canada).

As this goes forward, I’ll try to be clear as to which kind of open access I’m discussing,  open access publication (access to published research papers), open access data (access to research data), and/or both.

The European Commission has adopted a comprehensive approach to giving easy, open access to research funded through the European Union under the auspices of the current 7th Framework Programme and the upcoming Horizon 2020 (or what would have been called the 8th Framework Pr0gramme under the old system), according to the May 9, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

To make it easier for EU-funded projects to make their findings public and more readily accessible, the Commission is funding, through FP7, the project ‘Open access infrastructure for research in Europe’ ( OpenAIRE). This ambitious project will provide a single access point to all the open access publications produced by FP7 projects during the course of the Seventh Framework Programme.

…

OpenAIRE is a repository network and is based on a technology developed in an earlier project called Driver. The Driver engine trawled through existing open access repositories of universities, research institutions and a growing number of open access publishers. It would index all these publications and provide a single point of entry for individuals, businesses or other scientists to search a comprehensive collection of open access resources. Today Driver boasts an impressive catalogue of almost six million taken from 327 open access repositories from across Europe and beyond.

OpenAIRE uses the same underlying technology to index FP7 publications and results. FP7 project participants are encouraged to publish their papers, reports and conference presentations to their institutional open access repositories. The OpenAIRE engine constantly trawls these repositories to identify and index any publications related to FP7-funded projects. Working closely with the European Commission’s own databases, OpenAIRE matches publications to their respective FP7 grants and projects providing a seamless link between these previously separate data sets.

OpenAIRE is also linked to CERN’s open access repository for ‘orphan’ publications. Any FP7 participants that do not have access to an own institutional repository can still submit open access publications by placing them in the CERN repository.

Here’s why I described this project as comprehensive, from the May 9, 2012 news item,

‘OpenAIRE is not just about developing new technologies,’ notes Ms Manola [Natalia Manola, the project's manager], ‘because a significant part of the project focuses on promoting open access in the FP7 community. We are committed to promotional and policy-related activities, advocating open access publishing so projects can fully contribute to Europe’s knowledge infrastructure.’

The project is collecting usage statistics of the portal and the volume of open access publications. It will provide this information to the Commission and use this data to inform European policy in this domain.

OpenAIRE is working closely to integrate its information with the CORDA database, the master database of all EU-funded research projects. Soon it should be possible to click on a project in CORDIS (the EU’s portal for research funding), for example, and access all the open access papers published by that project. Project websites will also be able to provide links to the project’s peer reviewed publications and make dissemination of papers virtually effortless.

The project participants are also working with EU Members to develop a European-wide ‘open access helpdesk’ which will answer researchers’ questions about open access publishing and coordinate the open access initiatives currently taking place in different countries. The helpdesk will build up relationships and identify additional open access repositories to add to the OpenAIRE network.

Meanwhile, there’s been a discussion on the UK’s Guardian newspaper website about an ‘open access’ issue, money,  in a May 9, 2012 posting by John Bynner,

The present academic publishing system obstructs the free communication of research findings. By erecting paywalls, commercial publishers prevent scientists from downloading research papers unless they pay substantial fees. Libraries similarly pay huge amounts (up to £1m or more per annum) to give their readers access to online journals.

There is general agreement that free and open access to scientific knowledge is desirable. The way this might be achieved has come to the fore in recent debates about the future of scientific and scholarly journals.

…

Our concern lies with the major proposed alternative to the current system. Under this arrangement, authors are expected to pay when they submit papers for publication in online journals: the so called “article processing cost” (APC). The fee can amount to anything between £1,000 and £2,000 per article, depending on the reputation of the journal. Although the fees may sometimes be waived, eligibility for exemption is decided by the publisher and such concessions have no permanent status and can always be withdrawn or modified.

…

A major problem with the APC model is that it effectively shifts the costs of academic publishing from the reader to the author and therefore discriminates against those without access to the funds needed to meet these costs. [emphasis mine] Among those excluded are academics in, for example, the humanities and the social sciences whose research funding typically does not include publication charges, and independent researchers whose only means of paying the APC is from their own pockets. Academics in developing countries in particular face discrimination under APC because of their often very limited access to research funds.

…

There is another approach that could be implemented for a fraction of the cost of commercial publishers’ current journal subscriptions. “Access for all” (AFA) journals, which charge neither author nor reader, are committed to meeting publishing costs in other ways.

Bynner offers a practical solution, get the libraries to pay their subscription fees to an AFA journal, thereby funding ‘access for all’.

The open access discussion in the UK hasn’t stopped with a few posts in the Guardian, there’s also support from the government. David Willetts, in a May 2, 2012 speech to the UK Publishers Association Annual General Meeting had this to say, from the UK’s Dept. for Business Innovation and Skills website,

I realise this move to open access presents a challenge and opportunity for your industry, as you have historically received funding by charging for access to a publication. Nevertheless that funding model is surely going to have to change even beyond the positive transition to open access and hybrid journals that’s already underway. To try to preserve the old model is the wrong battle to fight. Look at how the music industry lost out by trying to criminalise a generation of young people for file sharing. [emphasis mine] It was companies outside the music business such as Spotify and Apple, with iTunes, that worked out a viable business model for access to music over the web. None of us want to see that fate overtake the publishing industry.

Wider access is the way forward. I understand the publishing industry is currently considering offering free public access to scholarly journals at all UK public libraries. This is a very useful way of extending access: it would be good for our libraries too, and I welcome it.

…

It would be deeply irresponsible to get rid of one business model and not put anything in its place. That is why I hosted a roundtable at BIS in March last year when all the key players discussed these issues. There was a genuine willingness to work together. As a result I commissioned Dame Janet Finch to chair an independent group of experts to investigate the issues and report back. We are grateful to the Publishers Association for playing a constructive role in her exercise, and we look forward to receiving her report in the next few weeks. No decisions will be taken until we have had the opportunity to consider it. But perhaps today I can share with you some provisional thoughts about where we are heading.

The crucial options are, as you know, called green and gold. Green means publishers are required to make research openly accessible within an agreed embargo period. This prompts a simple question: if an author’s manuscript is publicly available immediately, why should any library pay for a subscription to the version of record of any publisher’s journal? If you do not believe there is any added value in academic publishing you may view this with equanimity. But I believe that academic publishing does add value. So, in determining the embargo period, it’s necessary to strike a suitable balance between enabling revenue generation for publishers via subscriptions and providing public access to publicly funded information. In contrast, gold means that research funding includes the costs of immediate open publication, thereby allowing for full and immediate open access while still providing revenue to publishers.

In a May 22, 2012 posting at the Guardian website, Mike Taylor offers some astonishing figures (I had no idea academic publishing has been quite so lucrative) and notes that the funders have been a driving force in this ‘open access’ movement (Note: I have removed links from the excerpt),

The situation again, in short: governments and charities fund research; academics do the work, write and illustrate the papers, peer-review and edit each others’ manuscripts; then they sign copyright over to profiteering corporations who put it behind paywalls and sell research back to the public who funded it and the researchers who created it. In doing so, these corporations make grotesque profits of 32%-42% of revenue – far more than, say, Apple’s 24% or Penguin Books’ 10%. [emphasis mine]

… But what makes this story different from hundreds of other cases of commercial exploitation is that it seems to be headed for a happy ending. That’s taken some of us by surprise, because we thought the publishers held all the cards. Academics tend to be conservative, and often favour publishing their work in established paywalled journals rather than newer open access venues.

The missing factor in this equation is the funders. Governments and charitable trusts that pay academics to carry out research naturally want the results to have the greatest possible effect. That means publishing those results openly, free for anyone to use.

Taylor also goes on to mention the ongoing ‘open access’ petition in the US,

There is a feeling that the [US] administration fully understands the value of open access, and that a strong demonstration of public concern could be all it takes now to goad it into action before the November election. To that end a Whitehouse.gov petition has been set up urging Obama to “act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research”. Such policies would bring the US in line with the UK and Europe.

The people behind the US campaign have produced a video,

Anyone wondering about the reference to Elsevier may want to check out Thomas Lin’s Feb. 13, 2012 article for the New York Times,

More than 5,700 researchers have joined a boycott of Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, in a growing furor over open access to the fruits of scientific research.

You can find out more about the boycott and the White House petition at the Cost of Knowledge website.

Meanwhile, Canadians are being encouraged to sign the petition (by June 19, 2012), according to the folks over at ScienceOnline Vancouver in a description o f their June 12, 2012 event, Naked Science; Excuse: me your science is showing (a cheap, cheesy, and attention-getting  title—why didn’t I think of it first?),

Exposed. Transparent. Nude. All adjectives that should describe access to scientific journal articles, but currently, that’s not the case. The research paid by our Canadian taxpayer dollars is locked behind doors. The only way to access these articles is money, and lots of it!

Right now research articles costs more than a book! About $30. Only people with university affiliations have access and only journals their libraries subscribe to. Moms, dads, sisters, brothers, journalists, students, scientists, all pay for research, yet they can’t read the articles about their research without paying for it again. Now that doesn’t make sense.

….

There is also petition going around that states that research paid for by US taxpayer dollars should be available for free to US taxpayers (and others!) on the internet. Don’t worry if you are Canadian citizen, by signing this petition, Canadians would get access to the US research too and it would help convince the Canadian government to adopt similar rules. [emphasis mine]

Here’s where you can go to sign the petition. As for the notion that this will encourage the Canadian government to adopt an open access philosophy, I do not know. On the one hand, the government has opened up access to data, notably Statistics Canada data, mentioned by Frances Woolley in her March 22, 2012 posting about that and other open access data initiatives by the Canadian government on the Globe and Mail blog,

The federal government is taking steps to build the country’s data infrastructure. Last year saw the launch of the open data pilot project, data.gc.ca. Earlier this year the paywall in front of Statistics Canada’s enormous CANSIM database was taken down. The National Research Council, together with University of Guelph and Carleton University, has a new data registration service, DataCite, which allows Canadian researches to give their data permanent names in the form of digital object identifiers. In the long run, these projects should, as the press releases claim, “support innovation”, “add value-for-money for Canadians,” and promote “the reuse of existing data in commercial applications.”

That seems promising but there is a countervailing force. The Canadian government has also begun to charge subscription fees for journals that were formerly free. From the March 8, 2011 posting by Emily Chung on the CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Quirks and Quarks blog,

The public has lost free online access to more than a dozen Canadian science journals as a result of the privatization of the National Research Council’s government-owned publishing arm.

Scientists, businesses, consultants, political aides and other people who want to read about new scientific discoveries in the 17 journals published by National Research Council Research Press now either have to pay $10 per article or get access through an institution that has an annual subscription.

It caused no great concern at the time,

Victoria Arbour, a University of Alberta graduate student, published her research in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, one of the Canadian Science Publishing journals, both before and after it was privatized. She said it “definitely is too bad” that her new articles won’t be available to Canadians free online.

“It would have been really nice,” she said. But she said most journals aren’t open access, and the quality of the journal is a bigger concern than open access when choosing where to publish.

Then, there’s this from the new publisher, Canadian Science Publishing,

Cameron Macdonald, executive director of Canadian Science Publishing, said the impact of the change in access is “very little” on the average scientist across Canada because subscriptions have been purchased by many universities, federal science departments and scientific societies.

“I think the vast majority of researchers weren’t all that concerned,” he said. “So long as the journals continued with the same mission and mandate, they were fine with that.”

Macdonald said the journals were never strictly open access, as online access was free only inside Canadian borders and only since 2002.

So, journals that offered open access to research funded by Canadian taxpapers (to Canadians only) are now behind paywalls. Chung’s posting notes the problem already mentioned in the UK Guardian postings, money,

“It’s pretty prohibitively expensive to make things open access, I find,” she {Victoria Arbour] said.

Weir [Leslie Weir, chief librarian at the University of Ottawa] said more and more open-access journals need to impose author fees to stay afloat nowadays.

Meanwhile, the cost of electronic subscriptions to research journals has been ballooning as library budgets remain frozen, she said.

So far, no one has come up with a solution to the problem. [emphasis mine]

It seems they have designed a solution in the UK, as noted in John Bynner’s posting; perhaps we could try it out here.

Before I finish up, I should get to the situation in Argentina, from the May 27, 2012 posting on the Pasco Phronesis (David Bruggeman) blog (Note: I have removed a link in the following),

The lower house of the Argentinian legislature has approved a bill (en Español) that would require research results funded by the government be placed in institutional repositories once published.  There would be exceptions for studies involving confidential information and the law is not intended to undercut intellectual property or patent rights connected to research.  Additionally, primary research data must be published within 5 years of their collection.  This last point would, as far as I can tell, would be new ground for national open access policies, depending on how quickly the U.S. and U.K. may act on this issue.

Argentina steals a march on everyone by offering open access publication and open access data, within certain, reasonable constraints.

Getting back to David’s May 27, 2012 posting, he offers also some information on the European Union situation and some thoughts  on science policy in Egypt.

I have long been interested in open access publication as I feel it’s infuriating to be denied access to research that one has paid for in tax dollars. I have written on the topic before in my Beethoven inspires Open Research (Nov. 18, 2011 posting) and Princeton goes Open Access; arXiv is 10 years old (Sept. 30, 2011 posting) and elsewhere.

ETA May 28, 2012: I found this NRC Research Press website for the NRC journals and it states,

We are pleased to announce that Canadians can enjoy free access to over 100 000 back files of NRC Research Press journals, dating back to 1951. Access to material in these journals published after December 31, 2010, is available to Canadians through subscribing universities across Canada as well as the major federal science departments.

Concerned readers and authors whose institutes have not subscribed for the 2012 volume year can speak to their university librarians or can contact us to subscribe directly.

It’s good to see Canadians still have some access, although personally, I do prefer to read recent research.

ETA May 29, 2012: Yikes, I think this is one of the longest posts ever and I’m going to add this info. about libre redistribution and data mining as they relate to open access in this attempt to cover the topic as fully as possible in one posting.

First here’s an excerpt  from  Ross Mounce’s May 28, 2012 posting on the Palaeophylophenomics blog about ‘Libre redistribution’ (Note: I have removed a link),

I predict that the rights to electronically redistribute, and machine-read research will be vital for 21st century research – yet currently we academics often wittingly or otherwise relinquish these rights to publishers. This has got to stop. The world is networked, thus scholarly literature should move with the times and be openly networked too.

To better understand the notion of ‘libre redistribution’ you’ll want to read more of Mounce’s comments but you might also  want to check out Cameron Neylon’s comments in his March 6, 2012 posting on the Science in the Open blog,

Centralised control, failure to appreciate scale, and failure to understand the necessity of distribution and distributed systems. I have with me a device capable of holding the text of perhaps 100,000 papers It also has the processor power to mine that text. It is my phone. In 2-3 years our phones, hell our watches, will have the capacity to not only hold the world’s literature but also to mine it, in context for what I want right now. Is Bob Campbell ready for every researcher, indeed every interested person in the world, to come into his office and discuss an agreement for text mining? Because the mining I want to do and the mining that Peter Murray-Rust wants to do will be different, and what I will want to do tomorrow is different to what I want to do today. This kind of personalised mining is going to be the accepted norm of handling information online very soon and will be at the very centre of how we discover the information we need.

This moves the discussion past access (taxpayers not seeing the research they’ve funded, researchers who don’t have subscriptions, libraries not have subscriptions, etc.)  to what happens when you can get access freely. It opens up new ways of doing research by means of text mining and data mining redistribution of them both.

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Posted in science, Vancouver, writing | 1 Comment »

US soldiers get batteries woven into their clothes

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Last time I wrote about soldiers, equipment, and energy-efficiency (April 5, 2012 posting) the soldiers in question were British. Today’s posting focuses on US soldiers. From the May 7, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

U.S. soldiers are increasingly weighed down by batteries to power weapons, detection devices and communications equipment. So the Army Research Laboratory has awarded a University of Utah-led consortium almost $15 million to use computer simulations to help design materials for lighter-weight, energy efficient devices and batteries.

“We want to help the Army make advances in fundamental research that will lead to better materials to help our soldiers in the field,” says computing Professor Martin Berzins, principal investigator among five University of Utah faculty members who will work on the project. “One of Utah’s main contributions will be the batteries.”

Of the five-year Army grant of $14,898,000, the University of Utah will retain $4.2 million for research plus additional administrative costs. The remainder will go to members of the consortium led by the University of Utah, including Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pennsylvania State University, Harvard University, Brown University, the University of California, Davis, and the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy.

…

The new research effort is based on the idea that by using powerful computers to simulate the behavior of materials on multiple scales – from the atomic and molecular nanoscale to the large or “bulk” scale – new, lighter, more energy efficient power supplies and materials can be designed and developed. Improving existing materials also is a goal.

“We want to model everything from the nanoscale to the soldier scale,” Berzins says. “It’s virtual design, in some sense.”

“Today’s soldier enters the battle space with an amazing array of advanced electronic materials devices and systems,” the University of Utah said in its grant proposal. “The soldier of the future will rely even more heavily on electronic weaponry, detection devices, advanced communications systems and protection systems. Currently, a typical infantry soldier might carry up to 35 pounds of batteries in order to power these systems, and it is clear that the energy and power requirements for future soldiers will be much greater.” [emphasis mine]

“These requirements have a dramatic adverse effect on the survivability and lethality of the soldier by reducing mobility as well as the amount of weaponry, sensors, communication equipment and armor that the soldier can carry. Hence, the Army’s desire for greater lethality and survivability of its men and women in the field is fundamentally tied to the development of devices and systems with increased energy efficiency as well as dramatic improvement in the energy and power density of [battery] storage and delivery systems.”

Up to 35 lbs. of batteries? I’m trying to imagine what the rest of the equipment would weigh. In any event, they seem to be more interested in adding to the weaponry than reducing weight. At least, that’s how I understand “greater leathality.” Nice of them to mention greater survivability too.

The British project is more modest, they are weaving e-textiles that harvest energy allowing British soldiers to carry fewer batteries. I believe field trials were scheduled for May 2012.

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Posted in military, nanotechnology | 3 Comments »

Nano success in NY State breed competition for credit as US election nears

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any items about nanotechnology efforts in New York state. In general, I’ve found the efforts at communication and public engagement quite impressive as they’ve been important to the overall strategy (I suspect some credit should be given to serendipity) of making New York state a center for nanotechnology research, training, and industry.

Yesterday, May 8, 2012, on the occasion of a visit from President Barack Obama there was a bit of a kerfuffle regarding who should get the credit for New York state’s leadership, Democrats or Republicans. Since this is an election year in the US, this was perhaps predictable.

From the May 8, 2012 article by Tom Precious for BuffaloNews.com,

In Albany [New York state capital] today, it’s “who is the greater visionary” time.

…

On Monday, an aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo told an Albany radio station it was first the idea of the governor’s father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, to pump state money into what has become a center with more than $13 billion of private investment and that today is undergoing a major new expansion partnering with the likes of IBM and Intel.

Hours later on Monday, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, noted that he has led the charge for two decades to support the university center that is helping to make Albany a high-tech center for nanoscience engineering, and now, chip manufacturing.

So today, a couple hours before Air Force One was set to leave Washington for Albany for the Obama stop, it was “take credit time” for the Republicans.

State Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox said the nanoscale center in Albany was “developed about 10 years ago by a Republican governor based on Republican principles.” In a conference call with reporters, Cox said the Albany facility was a result of the “leadership” of former Gov. George E. Pataki.

“Arguing over credit is something for small-minded people who get bogged down in the political headlines of the day. What I tried to do was put in place policies that speak for themselves,” Pataki said in the phone call this morning. He then pointed, for a second time in the call, to the timeline of its important events on the nanoscale facility’s web site that begins in 2001 — when Pataki was in office.

I think there’s enough credit to go around, although perhaps not during an election year. In any event, I think their initiative has been quite impressive.

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Posted in nanotechnology | 1 Comment »

Stratasys/Objet merger and a brief bit about how 3-D printing actually works

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

The industry analysts seem very excited about the newly announced merger between two companies, Stratasys and Objet, that specialize in 3-D printing as Robert Cyran states in his April 16, 2012 posting on the Fast Company website,

Making physical items from digital files is a hot technology – maybe too hot if the market reaction to the acquisition of privately held Objet by Stratasys is any guide. Despite few synergies and an odd poison pill, the buyer’s shares rose nearly 25 percent, mainly on potential revenue synergies. But the future isn’t quite here yet.

Rich Brown in his April 16, 2012 posting on C/Net seems mildly more enthused,

You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t previously heard of Stratasys Inc or Objet Ltd. Stratasys, formerly a NASDAQ-traded company from Eden Prairie, MN, has a multi-pronged business selling industrial-quality 3D printers and on-demand object printing services. Objet, of Rehovot, Israel, is a 3D printer manufacturer notable for its “polyjet matrix” technology, that can print an object using multiple different materials.

Here’s why you might care that [they] announced their intention to merge: the new company, Stratasys, Ltd. could become a third major competitor in the consumer 3D printing market.

…

Where might newly-formed Stratasys, Ltd fit in? Neither originating firm is as large as 3D Systems, but both Stratasys Inc. and Objet Ltd. saw revenue increases over 30-percent for 2011, suggesting both companies are healthy. …”

3D Systems hasn’t really established its own name among consumer 3D printers, so it’s not clear that MakerBot really has any large competition yet. If Stratasys Ltd. does enter the consumer market, and if 3D Systems does make a credible entry, consumers will get to chose from at least three major technology originators. If that happens, here’s hoping that means more competition-induced innovation, and less court-bound patent squabbling.

I will add my wishes to Brown’s hope that this move stimulates innovation and not a series of law suits.

Oddly, I had already planned to write about 3-D printing last Friday, April 13, 2012, when I found a news item by Joel L. Shurkin on physorg.com which includes a good description of the 3-D process (Note: I have removed links),

Much of modern manufacturing is by reduction. Manufacturers take blocks of plastic, wood, or metal, and grind and machine away until they get the item they want. All the plastic, wood, or metal that doesn’t make it into the item is thrown away, maybe as much as 90 percent wasted.

3-D printing puts down layers of metal powders or plastics as directed by software, just as ink is laid down on paper directed by printer drivers. After each layer is completed, the tray holding the item is lowered a fraction of a millimeter and the next layer is added. Printing continues until the piece is complete.

Molten metal is allowed to cool and harden; plastics or metal powders are hardened by heat or ultraviolet light. The ingredients aren’t limited to those substances; almost anything that flows can be accommodated, even chocolate.

There is little waste, and it is possible to change the object by simply working with the software that drives the printer the way text is changed in a word processor.

In addition to the advantages there are also some disadvantages to the technology,

“Printing a few thousand iPhones on demand (and with instant updates or different versions for each phone) at a local facility that can manufacture many other products may be far more cost-effective than manufacturing ten million identical iPhones in China and shipping them to 180 countries around the world,” the Atlantic Council wrote in a report.

Clearly, not everyone would share the advantages. Manufacturing centers like China could lose millions of jobs in that sector, and their economies could be destabilized. The industries that transport the supply line and distribute the finished product would also be hit, the council wrote. Warehouses full of parts and products could be replaced by machines that print on demand.

Closer to home, I mentioned Stratasys and 3-D printing in a Sept. 28, 2011 posting about Manitoba’s Urbee car. My most recent mention of 3-D printing was in an April 10, 2012 posting about print-on-demand robots.

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Posted in business, nanotechnology | No Comments »

Nanocellulose at the American Chemical Society’s 243rd annual meeting

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Nanocellulose seems to be one of the major topics at the ACS’s (Americal Chemical Society) 243rd annual meeting themed Chemistry of Life  in San Diego, California, March 25-29, 2012. From the March 25, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

… almost two dozen reports in the symposium titled, “Cellulose-Based Biomimetic and Biomedical Materials,” that focused on the use of specially processed cellulose in the design and engineering of materials modeled after biological systems. Cellulose consists of long chains of the sugar glucose linked together into a polymer, a natural plastic–like material. Cellulose gives wood its remarkable strength and is the main component of plant stems, leaves and roots. Traditionally, cellulose’s main commercial uses have been in producing paper and textiles –– cotton being a pure form of cellulose. But development of a highly processed form of cellulose, termed nanocellulose, has expanded those applications and sparked intense scientific research. Nanocellulose consists of the fibrils of nanoscale diameters so small that 50,000 would fit across the width of the period at the end of this sentence.

“We are in the middle of a Golden Age, in which a clearer understanding of the forms and functions of cellulose architectures in biological systems is promoting the evolution of advanced materials,” said Harry Brumer, Ph.D., of Michael Smith Laboratories, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He was a co-organizer of the symposium with J. Vincent Edwards, Ph.D., a research chemist with the Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture in New Orleans, Louisiana. “This session on cellulose-based biomimetic and biomedical materials is really very timely due to the sustained and growing interest in the use of cellulose, particularly nanoscale cellulose, in biomaterials.”

One of the presenters has a very charming way of describing the nanocellulose product his team is working on (from the news item),

Olli Ikkala, Ph.D., [Aalto University, Finland] described the new buoyant material, engineered to mimic the water strider’s long, thin feet and made from an “aerogel” composed of the tiny nano-fibrils from the cellulose in plants. Aerogels are so light that some of them are denoted as “solid smoke. [emphasis mine]” The nanocellulose aerogels also have remarkable mechanical properties and are flexible.

There were some 20 presentations in this symposium held under the auspices of the ACS annual meeting. Here’s a few of the presentations (some of these folks have been featured on this blog previously), from the news item,

Native cellulose nanofibers: From biomimetic nanocomposites to functionalized gel spun fibers and functional aerogels Olli Ikkala, Professor, PhD, Aalto University, P.O. Box 5100, Espoo, Finland, FIN-02015, Finland , 358-9-470 23154, olli.ikkala@aalto.fi Native cellulose nanofibers and whiskers attract interest even beyond the traditional cellulose community due to their mechanical properties, availability and sustainability. We describe biomimetic nanocomposites with aligned self-assemblies combining nanocellulose with nanoclays, polymers, block copolymer, or graphene, allowing exciting mechanical properties. Functional ductile and even flexible aerogels are presented, combining superhydrophobicity, superoleophobicity, oil-spill absorption, photocatalytics, optically switchable water absorption, sensing, and antimicrobial properties. Finally mechanically excellent fibers are gel-spun and functionalized for electric, magnetic, optical and drug-release properties.

Evaluation of skin tissue repair materials from bacterial cellulose Lina Fu, Miss, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, College of Life Science & Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China , 86-18971560696, runa0325@gmail.com Bacterial cellulose (BC) has been reported as the materials in the tissue engineering fields, such as skin, bone, vascular and cartilage tissue engineering. Exploitation of the skin substitutes and modern wound dressing materials by using BC has attracted much attention. A skin tissue repair materials based on BC have been biosynthesized by Gluconacetobacter xylinus. The nano-composites of BC and chitosan form a cohesive gel structure, and the cell toxicity of the composite is excellent. Unlike other groups, which showed more inflammatory behavior, the inflammatory cells of the BC group were mainly polymorph-nuclear and showed few lymphocytes. The BC skin tissue repair material has an obviously curative effect in promoting the healing of epithelial tissue and reducing inflammation. With its superior mechanical properties, and the excellent biocompatibility, these skin tissue repair materials based on BC have great promise and potential for wound healing and very high clinical value.

….

New materials from nanocrystalline cellulose Mark MacLachlan [mentioned in my Nov. 18, 2010 posting], University of British Columbia, Department of Chemistry, 2036 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada , 604-822-3070, mmaclach@chem.ubc.ca Nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) is available from the acid-catalyzed degradation of cellulosic materials. NCC is composed of cylindrical crystallites with diameters of ca. 5-10 nm and large aspect ratios. This form of cellulose has intriguing properties, including its ability to form a chiral nematic structure. By using the chiral nematic organization of NCC as a template, we have been able to create highly porous silica films and carbon films with chiral nematic organization.1,2 These materials are iridescent and their structures mimic the shells of jewel beetles. In this paper, I will describe our recent efforts to use NCC to create new materials with interesting optical properties.

Factors influencing chiral nematic pitch and texture of cellulose nanocrystal films Derek G Gray, McGill University, Department of Chemistry, Pulp and Paper Building, 3420 University Street, Montreal, QC, H3A 2A7, Canada , 1-514-398-6182, derek.gray@mcgill.ca Appropriately stabilized cellulose nanocrystal (NCC) suspensions in water form chiral nematic liquid crystalline phases above some critical concentration. In the absence of added electrolye, the chiral nematic pitch of such suspensions is longer than that of visible light. Films prepared by evaporation from the suspensions also often display the characteristic fingerprint patterns characteristic of long-pitch chiral nematic phases, but the pitch values can be shifted into the visible range by adding small quantities of electrolyte to the evaporating suspension. The factors that control the final pitch have been the subject of some confusion. While still not well understood, it is clear that at high nanocrystal concentrations and in solid films, the pitch is not simply a reversible function of nanocrystal concentration. We examine some of the factors that control the pitch and liquid crystal texture during the drying of chiral nematic NCC films.

….

Bioprinting of 3D porous nanocellulose scaffolds for tissue engineering and organ regeneration Paul Gatenholm, Professor, [mentioned in my March 19, 2012 posting] Wallenberg Wood Science Center, Chalmers, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Kemigarden 4, Goteborg, V. Gotaland, SE41296, Sweden , 46317723407, paul.gatenholm@chalmers.se Nanocellulose is a promising biocompatible hydrogel like nano-biomaterial with potential uses in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Biomaterial scaffolds for tissue engineering require precise control of porosity, pore size, and pore interconnectivity. Control of scaffold architecture is crucial to promote cell migration, cell attachment, cell proliferation and cell differentiation. 3D macroporous nanocellulose scaffolds, produced by unique biofabrication process using porogens incorporated in the cultivation step, have shown ability to attract smooth muscle cells, endothelial cells, chondrocytes of various origins, urethral cells and osteoprogenitor cells. We have developed bioprinter which is able to produce 3D porous nanocellulose scaffolds with large size and unique architecture. Surface modifications have been applied to enhance cell adhesion and cell differentiation. In this study we have focused on use of 3D porous Nanocellulose scaffolds for stem cell differentiation into osteogenic and chondral lineages.

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Posted in biomimcry, medicine, nanotechnology | 1 Comment »

YouTube space lab contest winners

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

The YouTube Space Lab contest (mentioned here in an Oct. 12, 2011 posting) recently announced its two global winners (winners will get to have their research carried out on the space station). From the March 22, 2012 Space Adventures press release,

YouTube, Lenovo, and Space Adventures today announced the two global winners of YouTube Space Lab (youtube.com/spacelab), the worldwide science competition that challenged 14-18 year-olds to design a science experiment that can be performed in space.

Amr Mohamed from Egypt (17-18 year old age group) and Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma from the U.S. (14-16 year old age group) were awarded the honor at a ceremony in Washington, DC, attended by members of Space Lab partners including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).  The students will have their experiments conducted by astronauts 250 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed to the world on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop via YouTube later this year.

…

Amr Mohamed, 18, from Alexandria, Egypt, came up with an experiment to explore the question: “Can you teach an old spider new tricks?”  Amr proposed investigating the effects of microgravity on the way the zebra spider catches its prey and whether it could adapt its behavior in this environment.  “The idea of sending an experiment into space is the most exciting thing I have ever heard in my life,” said Amr. “Winning YouTube Space Lab means everything to me, to my family, and to the people of the Middle East.”

Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma, both 16, who attend Troy High School in Troy, Michigan, created an experiment that asks: “Could alien superbugs cure disease on Earth?”  Dorothy and Sara want to send bacteria to the space station to see if introducing different nutrients and compounds can block their growth in the hopes of providing new tools to fight germs on Earth.  “The idea that something that is your experiment being sent up into space and actually becoming a reality is incredible,” said Sara. “I definitely want to pursue science as a career,” added Dorothy.

The global winners were in Washington, DC, with the regional winners, from the article by Nidhi Subbaraman on the Fast Company website,

Six teens between the ages of 14 and 18 from the U.S., Spain, Egypt, India, and New Zealand were just rewarded for their stellar science projects with a Zero-G flight above Washington, D.C., courtesy of Space Adventures.

… [Four regional winners:]

  • Patrick Zeng and Derek Chan from New Zealand hoped to see if heat transfers between hot and cold fluids would occur differently in a gravity-free environment. The results of their experiment could lead to more efficient heating and cooling systems here on Earth.
  • Spanish middle schoolers Laura Calvo and María Vilas wanted to test how weightless liquids behave–their surface behavior in low gravity have valuable insights into the construction of microelectronics.
  • Emerald Bresnahan, from the U.S., was curious to see how snowflakes would form in space.
  • Indian mechanical engineer in training Sachin Kukke is studying magnetic liquids called ferro fluids, towards understanding if they can absorb heat from the engines of spaceships, pushing them further into space.

You can find the contest videos (190 of them) here at YouTube Space Lab.  To whet your appetite, here’s the video from Amr Mohamed,

Congratulations to everyone who entered the contest.

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