Monthly Archives: September 2016

Westworld: a US television programme investigating AI (artificial intelligence) and consciousness

The US television network, Home Box Office (HBO) is getting ready to première Westworld, a new series based on a movie first released in 1973. Here’s more about the movie from its Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Westworld is a 1973 science fiction Western thriller film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton and produced by Paul Lazarus III about amusement park robots that malfunction and begin killing visitors. It stars Yul Brynner as an android in a futuristic Western-themed amusement park, and Richard Benjamin and James Brolin as guests of the park.

Westworld was the first theatrical feature directed by Michael Crichton.[3] It was also the first feature film to use digital image processing, to pixellate photography to simulate an android point of view.[4] The film was nominated for Hugo, Nebula and Saturn awards, and was followed by a sequel film, Futureworld, and a short-lived television series, Beyond Westworld. In August 2013, HBO announced plans for a television series based on the original film.

The latest version is due to start broadcasting in the US on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016 and as part of the publicity effort the producers are profiled by Sean Captain for Fast Company in a Sept. 30, 2016 article,

As Game of Thrones marches into its final seasons, HBO is debuting this Sunday what it hopes—and is betting millions of dollars on—will be its new blockbuster series: Westworld, a thorough reimagining of Michael Crichton’s 1973 cult classic film about a Western theme park populated by lifelike robot hosts. A philosophical prelude to Jurassic Park, Crichton’s Westworld is a cautionary tale about technology gone very wrong: the classic tale of robots that rise up and kill the humans. HBO’s new series, starring Evan Rachel Wood, Anthony Hopkins, and Ed Harris, is subtler and also darker: The humans are the scary ones.

“We subverted the entire premise of Westworld in that our sympathies are meant to be with the robots, the hosts,” says series co-creator Lisa Joy. She’s sitting on a couch in her Burbank office next to her partner in life and on the show—writer, director, producer, and husband Jonathan Nolan—who goes by Jonah. …

Their Westworld, which runs in the revered Sunday-night 9 p.m. time slot, combines present-day production values and futuristic technological visions—thoroughly revamping Crichton’s story with hybrid mechanical-biological robots [emphasis mine] fumbling along the blurry line between simulated and actual consciousness.

Captain never does explain the “hybrid mechanical-biological robots.” For example, do they have human skin or other organs grown for use in a robot? In other words, how are they hybrid?

That nitpick aside, the article provides some interesting nuggets of information and insight into the themes and ideas 2016 Westworld’s creators are exploring (Note: A link has been removed),

… Based on the four episodes I previewed (which get progressively more interesting), Westworld does a good job with the trope—which focused especially on the awakening of Dolores, an old soul of a robot played by Evan Rachel Wood. Dolores is also the catchall Spanish word for suffering, pain, grief, and other displeasures. “There are no coincidences in Westworld,” says Joy, noting that the name is also a play on Dolly, the first cloned mammal.

The show operates on a deeper, though hard-to-define level, that runs beneath the shoot-em and screw-em frontier adventure and robotic enlightenment narratives. It’s an allegory of how even today’s artificial intelligence is already taking over, by cataloging and monetizing our lives and identities. “Google and Facebook, their business is reading your mind in order to advertise shit to you,” says Jonah Nolan. …

“Exist free of rules, laws or judgment. No impulse is taboo,” reads a spoof home page for the resort that HBO launched a few weeks ago. That’s lived to the fullest by the park’s utterly sadistic loyal guest, played by Ed Harris and known only as the Man in Black.

The article also features some quotes from scientists on the topic of artificial intelligence (Note: Links have been removed),

“In some sense, being human, but less than human, it’s a good thing,” says Jon Gratch, professor of computer science and psychology at the University of Southern California [USC]. Gratch directs research at the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies on “virtual humans,” AI-driven onscreen avatars used in military-funded training programs. One of the projects, SimSensei, features an avatar of a sympathetic female therapist, Ellie. It uses AI and sensors to interpret facial expressions, posture, tension in the voice, and word choices by users in order to direct a conversation with them.

“One of the things that we’ve found is that people don’t feel like they’re being judged by this character,” says Gratch. In work with a National Guard unit, Ellie elicited more honest responses about their psychological stresses than a web form did, he says. Other data show that people are more honest when they know the avatar is controlled by an AI versus being told that it was controlled remotely by a human mental health clinician.

“If you build it like a human, and it can interact like a human. That solves a lot of the human-computer or human-robot interaction issues,” says professor Paul Rosenbloom, also with USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. He works on artificial general intelligence, or AGI—the effort to create a human-like or human level of intellect.

Rosenbloom is building an AGI platform called Sigma that models human cognition, including emotions. These could make a more effective robotic tutor, for instance, “There are times you want the person to know you are unhappy with them, times you want them to know that you think they’re doing great,” he says, where “you” is the AI programmer. “And there’s an emotional component as well as the content.”

Achieving full AGI could take a long time, says Rosenbloom, perhaps a century. Bernie Meyerson, IBM’s chief innovation officer, is also circumspect in predicting if or when Watson could evolve into something like HAL or Her. “Boy, we are so far from that reality, or even that possibility, that it becomes ludicrous trying to get hung up there, when we’re trying to get something to reasonably deal with fact-based data,” he says.

Gratch, Rosenbloom, and Meyerson are talking about screen-based entities and concepts of consciousness and emotions. Then, there’s a scientist who’s talking about the difficulties with robots,

… Ken Goldberg, an artist and professor of engineering at UC [University of California] Berkeley, calls the notion of cyborg robots in Westworld “a pretty common trope in science fiction.” (Joy will take up the theme again, as the screenwriter for a new Battlestar Galactica movie.) Goldberg’s lab is struggling just to build and program a robotic hand that can reliably pick things up. But a sympathetic, somewhat believable Dolores in a virtual setting is not so farfetched.

Captain delves further into a thorny issue,

“Can simulations, at some point, become the real thing?” asks Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. “If we perfectly simulate a rainstorm on a computer, it’s still not a rainstorm. We won’t get wet. But is the mind or consciousness different? The jury is still out.”

While artificial consciousness is still in the dreamy phase, today’s level of AI is serious business. “What was sort of a highfalutin philosophical question a few years ago has become an urgent industrial need,” says Jonah Nolan. It’s not clear yet how the Delos management intends, beyond entrance fees, to monetize Westworld, although you get a hint when Ford tells Theresa Cullen “We know everything about our guests, don’t we? As we know everything about our employees.”

AI has a clear moneymaking model in this world, according to Nolan. “Facebook is monetizing your social graph, and Google is advertising to you.” Both companies (and others) are investing in AI to better understand users and find ways to make money off this knowledge. …

As my colleague David Bruggeman has often noted on his Pasco Phronesis blog, there’s a lot of science on television.

For anyone who’s interested in artificial intelligence and the effects it may have on urban life, see my Sept. 27, 2016 posting featuring the ‘One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)’, hosted by Stanford University.

Points to anyone who recognized Jonah (Jonathan) Nolan as the producer for the US television series, Person of Interest, a programme based on the concept of a supercomputer with intelligence and personality and the ability to continuously monitor the population 24/7.

What’s a science historian doing in the field of synthetic biology?

Dominic Berry’s essay on why he, a science historian, is involved in a synthetic biology project takes some interesting twists and turns, from a Sept. 2, 2016 news item on phys.org,

What are synthetic biologists doing to plants, and what are plants doing to synthetic biology? This question frames a series of laboratory observations that I am pursuing across the UK as part of the Engineering Life project, which is dedicated to exploring what it might mean to engineer biology. I contribute to the project through a focus on plant scientists and my training in the history and philosophy of science. For plant scientists the engineering of biology can take many forms not all of which are captured by the category ‘synthetic biology’. Scientists that aim to create modified organisms are more inclined to refer to themselves as the latter, while other plant scientists will emphasise an integration of biological work with methods or techniques from engineering without adopting the identity of synthetic biologist. Accordingly, different legacies in the biosciences (from molecular biology to biomimetics) can be drawn upon depending on the features of the project at hand. These category and naming problems are all part of a larger set of questions that social and natural scientists continue to explore together. For the purposes of this post the distinctions between synthetic biology and the broader engineering of biology do not matter greatly, so I will simply refer to synthetic biology throughout.

Berry’s piece was originally posted Sept. 1, 2016 by Stephen Burgess on the PLOS (Public Library of Science) Synbio (Synthetic Biology blog). In this next bit Berry notes briefly why science historians and scientists might find interaction and collaboration fruitful (Note: Links have been removed),

It might seem strange that a historian is focused so closely on the present. However, I am not alone, and one recent author has picked out projects that suggest it is becoming a trend. This is only of interest for readers of the PLOS Synbio blog because it flags up that there are historians of science available for collaboration (hello!), and plenty of historical scholarship to draw upon to see your work in a new light, or rediscover forgotten research programs, or reconsider current practices, precisely as a recent Nature editorial emphasised for all sciences.

The May 17, 2016 Nature editorial ‘Second Thoughts’, mentioned in Berry’s piece, opens provocatively and continues in that vein (Note: A link has been removed),

The thought experiment has a noble place in research, but some thoughts are deemed more noble than others. Darwin and Einstein could let their minds wander and imagine the consequences of certain actions or natural laws. But scientists and historians who try to estimate what might have happened if, say, Darwin had fallen off the Beagle and drowned, are often accused of playing parlour games.

What if Darwin had toppled overboard before he joined the evolutionary dots? That discussion seems useful, because it raises interesting questions about the state of knowledge, then and now, and how it is communicated and portrayed. In his 2013 book Darwin Deleted — in which the young Charles is, indeed, lost in a storm — the historian Peter Bowler argued that the theory of evolution would have emerged just so, but with the pieces perhaps placed in a different order, and therefore less antagonistic to religious society.

In this week’s World View, another historian offers an alternative pathway for science: what if the ideas of Gregor Mendel on the inheritance of traits had been challenged more robustly and more successfully by a rival interpretation by the scientist W. F. R. Weldon? Gregory Radick argues that a twentieth-century genetics driven more by Weldon’s emphasis on environmental context would have weakened the dominance of the current misleading impression that nature always trumps nurture.

Here is Berry on the importance of questions,

The historian can ask: What traditions and legacies are these practitioners either building on or reacting against? How do these ideas cohere (or remain incoherent) for individuals and laboratories? Is a new way of understanding and investigating biology being created, and if so, where can we find evidence of it? Have biologists become increasingly concerned with controlling biological phenomena rather than understanding them? How does the desire to integrate engineering with biology sit within the long history of the establishment of biological science over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries?

Berry is an academic and his piece reflects an academic writing style with its complicated sentence structures and muted conclusions. If you have the patience, it is a good read on a topic that isn’t discussed all that often.

Using fish ‘biowaste’ for self-powered electronics

Researchers in India have found a way to make use of fish ‘biowaste’ according to a Sept. 6, 2016 news item on Nanowerk,

Large quantities of fish are consumed in India on a daily basis, which generates a huge amount of fish “biowaste” materials. In an attempt to do something positive with this biowaste, a team of researchers at Jadavpur University in Koltata, India explored recycling the fish byproducts into an energy harvester for self-powered electronics.

Caption: Waste fish scales (upper left corner) are used to fabricate flexible nanogenerator (lower left) that power up more than 50 blue LEDs (lower right). An enlarged microscopic view of a fish scale shows the well-aligned collagen fibrils (upper right). The possibility of making a fish scale transparent (middle) and rollable (extreme left lower corner) is also illustrated. Credit: Sujoy Kuman Ghosh and Dipankar Mandal/Jadavpur University

Caption: Waste fish scales (upper left corner) are used to fabricate flexible nanogenerator (lower left) that power up more than 50 blue LEDs (lower right). An enlarged microscopic view of a fish scale shows the well-aligned collagen fibrils (upper right). The possibility of making a fish scale transparent (middle) and rollable (extreme left lower corner) is also illustrated. Credit: Sujoy Kuman Ghosh and Dipankar Mandal/Jadavpur University

A Sept. 6, 2016 American Institute of Physics news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, describes the research in more detail,

The basic premise behind the researchers’ work is simple: Fish scales contain collagen fibers that possess a piezoelectric property, which means that an electric charge is generated in response to applying a mechanical stress. As the team reports this week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, they were able to harness this property to fabricate a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator.

To do this, the researchers first “collected biowaste in the form of hard, raw fish scales from a fish processing market, and then used a demineralization process to make them transparent and flexible,” explained Dipankar Mandal, assistant professor, Organic Nano-Piezoelectric Device Laboratory, Department of Physics, at Jadavpur University.

The collagens within the processed fish scales serve as an active piezoelectric element.

“We were able to make a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator — a.k.a. energy harvester — with electrodes on both sides, and then laminated it,” Mandal said.

While it’s well known that a single collagen nanofiber exhibits piezoelectricity, until now no one had attempted to focus on hierarchically organizing the collagen nanofibrils within the natural fish scales.

“We wanted to explore what happens to the piezoelectric yield when a bunch of collagen nanofibrils are hierarchically well aligned and self-assembled in the fish scales,” he added. “And we discovered that the piezoelectricity of the fish scale collagen is quite large (~5 pC/N), which we were able to confirm via direct measurement.”

Beyond that, the polarization-electric field hysteresis loop and resulting strain-electric field hysteresis loop — proof of a converse piezoelectric effect — caused by the “nonlinear” electrostriction effect backed up their findings.

The team’s work is the first known demonstration of the direct piezoelectric effect of fish scales from electricity generated by a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator under mechanical stimuli — without the need for any post-electrical poling treatments.

“We’re well aware of the disadvantages of the post-processing treatments of piezoelectric materials,” Mandal noted.

To explore the fish scale collagen’s self-alignment phenomena, the researchers used near-edge X-ray absorption fine-structure spectroscopy, measured at the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology in Indore, India.

Experimental and theoretical tests helped them clarify the energy scavenging performance of the bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator. It’s capable of scavenging several types of ambient mechanical energies — including body movements, machine and sound vibrations, and wind flow. Even repeatedly touching the bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator with a finger can turn on more than 50 blue LEDs.

“We expect our work to greatly impact the field of self-powered flexible electronics,” Mandal said. “To date, despite several extraordinary efforts, no one else has been able to make a biodegradable energy harvester in a cost-effective, single-step process.”

The group’s work could potentially be for use in transparent electronics, biocompatible and biodegradable electronics, edible electronics, self-powered implantable medical devices, surgeries, e-healthcare monitoring, as well as in vitro and in vivo diagnostics, apart from its myriad uses for portable electronics.

“In the future, our goal is to implant a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator into a heart for pacemaker devices, where it will continuously generate power from heartbeats for the device’s operation,” Mandal said. “Then it will degrade when no longer needed. Since heart tissue is also composed of collagen, our bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator is expected to be very compatible with the heart.”

The group’s bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator may also help with targeted drug delivery, which is currently generating interest as a way of recovering in vivo cancer cells and also to stimulate different types of damaged tissues.

“So we expect our work to have enormous importance for next-generation implantable medical devices,” he added.

“Our end goal is to design and engineer sophisticated ingestible electronics composed of nontoxic materials that are useful for a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications,” said Mandal.

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

High-performance bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator made with fish scale by Sujoy Kumar Ghosh and Dipankar Mandal. Appl. Phys. Lett. 109, 103701 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4961623

This paper appears to be open access.

Windows in Swiss trains are about to combine mobile reception and thermal insulation

A Sept. 2, 2016 news item on Nanowerk announces a whole new kind of train window,

EPFL [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne; Switzerland] researchers have developed a type of glass that offers excellent energy efficiency and lets mobile telephone signals through. And by teaming up with Swiss manufacturers, they have produced innovative windows. Railway company BLS is about to install them on some of its trains in order to improve energy efficiency.

An Aug. 26, 2016 EPFL press release, by Anne-Muriel Brouet, which originated the news item,

Train travel may be fast, but mobile connectivity onboard often lags behind. This is because the modern train car is a metal box that blocks out microwaves – in physics, this is called a Faraday cage. Even the windows contain an ultra-thin metal coating to improve thermal insulation. But EPFL researchers, working with manufacturing partners, have developed a new type of window that guarantees a comfortable temperature for passengers while at the same time letting mobile phone signals through.

In the rail industry, energy use is critical: around one third of the energy consumed by trains goes into providing heating and air conditioning in the train cars. And around 3% of this escapes through the windows. Double-glazed windows with an ultra-thin metal coating increase energy efficiency by a factor of four compared with untreated windows.

But the problem is that the metal sharply weakens the telecommunication signals. The solution that mobile phone operators and railway companies have used until now consists of placing signal boosters – or repeaters – in the trains. But they are expensive to install and maintain and have to be replaced regularly to keep pace with rapidly changing technologies. And each repeater consumes electricity.

A laser-scribed coating

Andreas Schüler, from EPFL’s Nanotechnology for Solar Energy Conversion Group, had another idea: “A metal coating that reflects heat waves (which are micrometric in size) but lets through both visible light (which is nanometric in size) and the electromagnetic waves of mobile phones (microwaves, which are centimetric in size).” But how is this done? “We breach the Faraday cage by modifying the metal coating with a special laser treatment. The windows then let the signals through,” said Schüler, a specialist in the optical and electronic properties of ultra-thin coatings.

To do this, a special structure is scribed into the metal coating with the aid of a high-precision laser. No more than 2.5% of the surface area of the metal coating is ablated by laser scribing. The resulting pattern is nearly invisible to the naked eye and does not affect the window’s insulating properties.

A manufacturing partnership pays off

Initial laboratory tests were extremely convincing. Several manufacturing partners were brought into the team in order to apply the method on a large scale. Thanks to the skills of glassmaker AGC Verres Industriels and the expertise of Class4Laser, prototype glass samples were produced and tested. “Measurements taken by experts from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) have demonstrated that this works,” said Schüler.

Energy savings for BLS

But the innovative glass needed to prove its mettle under real-life conditions. BLS was enthusiastic about testing the new windows as part of ongoing studies aimed at improving the energy efficiency of its trains. The first full-size windows were produced in the AGC Verres Industriels workshop and installed throughout a NINA-type self-propelled regional train.

The field tests met the partners’ expectations. Swisscom and SUPSI tested the efficacy of the new windows, both in BLS’s workshops and on the Bern-Thun train line. “Mobile reception is just as good in the train through laser-treated insulating glass as it is through ordinary glass,” said Schüler.

As a result, BLS has decided to install the new windows in most of its 36 NINA regional trains, replacing the old, non-insulating windows. Installation will begin in September 2016 as part of the company’s train modernization program. “Our commitment will help bring to market an innovative product designed to improve the energy efficiency of trains without compromising mobile reception for passengers,” said Quentin Sauvagnat, NINA fleet manager at BLS. Thanks to this product, those expensive signal repeaters will no longer be needed.

Are frequency-selective buildings next?

This proven and developed technology could be applied to buildings next. This is because, according to Schüler, “some glass buildings also act like Faraday cages. And as the internet of things continues to grow, there is a real interest in improving the properties of building materials that allow mobile signals through. More broadly, by making materials more frequency-selective, we could, for example, imagine a building that lets electromagnetic waves through but blocks Wi-Fi waves, thus enhancing corporate security.”

I have a friend who may find this train window innovation quite handy. As for frequency selective buildings, I imagine that would open up many possibilities for hackers.

Cientifica’s latest smart textiles and wearable electronics report

After publishing a report on wearable technology in May 2016 (see my June 2, 2016 posting), Cientifica has published another wearable technology report, this one is titled, Smart Textiles and Wearables: Markets, Applications and Technologies. Here’s more about the latest report from the report order page,

“Smart Textiles and Wearables: Markets, Applications and Technologies” examines the markets for textile based wearable technologies, the companies producing them and the enabling technologies. This is creating a 4th industrial revolution for the textiles and fashion industry worth over $130 billion by 2025.

Advances in fields such as nanotechnology, organic electronics (also known as plastic electronics) and conducting polymers are creating a range of textile–based technologies with the ability to sense and react to the world around them.  This includes monitoring biometric data such as heart rate, the environmental factors such as temperature and The presence of toxic gases producing real time feedback in the form of electrical stimuli, haptic feedback or changes in color.

The report identifies three distinct generations of textile wearable technologies.

First generation is where a sensor is attached to apparel and is the approach currently taken by major sportswear brands such as Adidas, Nike and Under Armour
Second generation products embed the sensor in the garment as demonstrated by products from Samsung, Alphabet, Ralph Lauren and Flex.
In third generation wearables the garment is the sensor and a growing number of companies including AdvanPro, Tamicare and BeBop sensors are making rapid progress in creating pressure, strain and temperature sensors.

Third generation wearables represent a significant opportunity for new and established textile companies to add significant value without having to directly compete with Apple, Samsung and Intel.

The report predicts that the key growth areas will be initially sports and wellbeing

followed by medical applications for patient monitoring. Technical textiles, fashion and entertainment will also be significant applications with the total market expected to rise to over $130 billion by 2025 with triple digit compound annual growth rates across many applications.

The rise of textile wearables also represents a significant opportunity for manufacturers of the advanced materials used in their manufacture. Toray, Panasonic, Covestro, DuPont and Toyobo are already suppling the necessary materials, while researchers are creating sensing and energy storage technologies, from flexible batteries to graphene supercapacitors which will power tomorrows wearables. The report details the latest advances and their applications.

This report is based on an extensive research study of the wearables and smart textile markets backed with over a decade of experience in identifying, predicting and sizing markets for nanotechnologies and smart textiles. Detailed market figures are given from 2016-2025, along with an analysis of the key opportunities, and illustrated with 139 figures and 6 tables.

The September 2016 report is organized differently and has a somewhat different focus from the report published in May 2016. Not having read either report, I’m guessing that while there might be a little repetition, you might better consider them to be companion volumes.

Here’s more from the September 2016 report’s table of contents which you can download from the order page (Note: The formatting has been changed),

SMART TEXTILES AND WEARABLES:
MARKETS, APPLICATIONS AND
TECHNOLOGIES

Contents  1
List of Tables  4
List of Figures  4
Introduction  8
How to Use This Report  8
Wearable Technologies and the 4Th Industrial Revolution  9
The Evolution of Wearable Technologies  10
Defining Smart Textiles  15
Factors Affecting The Adoption of Smart Textiles for Wearables  18
Cost  18
Accuracy  18
On Shoring  19
Power management  19
Security and Privacy  20
Markets  21
Total Market Growth and CAGR  21
Market Growth By Application  21
Adding Value To Textiles Through Technology  27
How Nanomaterials Add Functionality and Value  31
Business Models  33
Applications  35
Sports and Wellbeing  35
1st Generation Technologies  35
Under Armour Healthbox Wearables  35
Adidas MiCoach  36
Sensoria  36
EMPA’s Long Term Research  39
2nd Generation Technologies  39
Google’s Project Jacquard  39
Samsung Creative Lab  43
Microsoft Collaborations  44
Intel Systems on a Chip  44
Flex (Formerly Flextronics) and MAS Holdings  45
Jiobit  46
Asensei Personal Trainer  47
OmSignal Smart Clothing  48
Ralph Lauren PoloTech  49
Hexoskin Performance Management  50
Jabil Circuit Textile Heart Monitoring  51
Stretch Sense Sensors  52
NTT Data and Toray  54
Goldwin Inc. and DoCoMo  55
SupaSpot Inc Smart Sensors  55
Wearable Experiments and Brand Marketing  56
Wearable Life Sciences Antelope  57
Textronics NuMetrex  59
3rd Generation Technologies  60
AdvanPro Pressure Sensing Shoes  60
Tamicare 3D printed Wearables with Integrated Sensors  62
AiQ Smart Clothing Stainless Steel Yarns  64
Flex Printed Inks And Conductive Yarns  66
Sensing Tech Conductive Inks  67
EHO Textiles Body Motion Monitoring  68
Bebop Sensors Washable E-Ink Sensors  70
Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research Piezolectric Polymer
Sensors  71
CLIM8 GEAR Heated Textiles  74
VTT Smart Clothing Human Thermal Model  74
ATTACH (Adaptive Textiles Technology with Active Cooling and Heating) 76
Energy Storage and Generation  78
Intelligent Textiles Military Uniforms  78
BAE Systems Broadsword Spine  79
Stretchable Batteries  80
LG Chem Cable Batteries  81
Supercapacitors  83
Swinburne Graphene Supercapacitors  83
MIT Niobium Nanowire Supercapacitors  83
Energy Harvesting  86
Kinetic  86
StretchSense Energy Harvesting Kit  86
NASA Environmental Sensing Fibers  86
Solar  87
Powertextiles  88
Sphelar Power Corp Solar Textiles  88
Ohmatex and Powerweave  89
Fashion  89
1st Generation Technologies  92
Cute Circuit LED Couture  92
MAKEFASHION LED Couture  94
2nd Generation Technologies  94
Covestro Luminous Clothing  94
3rd Generation Technologies  96
The Unseen Temperature Sensitive Dyes  96
Entertainment  98
Wearable Experiments Marketing  98
Key Technologies 100
Circuitry  100
Conductive Inks for Fabrics  100
Conductive Ink For Printing On Stretchable Fabrics  100
Creative Materials Conductive Inks And Adhesives  100
Dupont Stretchable Electronic Inks  101
Aluminium Inks From Alink Co  101
Conductive Fibres  102
Circuitex Silver Coated Nylon  102
Textronics Yarns and Fibres  102
Novonic Elastic Conductive Yarn  103
Copper Coated Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) Fibres  103
Printed electronics  105
Covestro TPU Films for Flexible Circuits  105
Sensors  107
Electrical  107
Hitoe  107
Cocomi  108
Panasonic Polymer Resin  109
Cardiac Monitoring  110
Mechanical  113
Strain  113
Textile-Based Weft Knitted Strain Sensors  113
Chain Mail Fabric for Smart Textiles  113
Nano-Treatment for Conductive Fiber/Sensors 115
Piezoceramic materials  116
Graphene-Based Woven Fabric  117
Pressure Sensing  117
LG Innotek Flexible Textile Pressure Sensors  117
Hong Kong Polytechnic University Pressure Sensing Fibers  119
Conductive Polymer Composite Coatings  122
Printed Textile Sensors To Track Movement  125
Environment  127
Photochromic Textiles  127
Temperature  127
Sefar PowerSens  127
Gasses & Chemicals  127
Textile Gas Sensors  127
Energy  130
Storage  130
Graphene Supercapacitors  130
Niobium Nanowire Supercapacitors  130
Stretchy supercapacitors  132
Energy Generation  133
StretchSense Energy Harvesting Kit  133
Piezoelectric Or Thermoelectric Coated Fibres  134
Optical  137
Light Emitting  137
University of Manchester Electroluminescent Inks and Yarns 137
Polyera Wove  138
Companies Mentioned  141
List of Tables
Table 1 CAGR by application  22
Table 2 Value of market by application 2016-25 (millions USD)  24
Table 3 % market share by application  26
Table 4 CAGR 2016-25 by application  26
Table 5 Technology-Enabled Market Growth in Textile by Sector (2016-22) 28
Table 6 Value of nanomaterials by sector 2016-22 ($ Millions)  33
List of Figures
Figure 1 The 4th Industrial Revolution (World Economic Forum)  9
Figure 2 Block Diagram of typical MEMS digital output motion sensor: ultra
low-power high performance 3-axis “femto” accelerometer used in
fitness tracking devices.  11
Figure 3 Interior of Fitbit Flex device (from iFixit)  11
Figure 4 Internal layout of Fitbit Flex. Red is the main CPU, orange is the
BTLE chip, blue is a charger, yellow is the accelerometer (from iFixit)  11
Figure 5 Intel’s Curie processor stretches the definition of ‘wearable’  12
Figure 6 Typical Textile Based Wearable System Components  13
Figure 7 The Chromat Aeros Sports Bra “powered by Intel, inspired by wind, air and flight.”  14
Figure 8 The Evolution of Smart textiles  15
Figure 9 Goldwin’s C2fit IN-pulse sportswear using Toray’s Hitoe  16
Figure 10 Sensoglove reads grip pressure for golfers  16
Figure 11 Textile Based Wearables Growth 2016-25(USD Millions)  21
Figure 12 Total market for textile based wearables 2016-25 (USD Millions)  22
Figure 13 Health and Sports Market Size 2016-20 (USD Millions)  23
Figure 14 Health and Sports Market Size 2016-25 (USD Millions)  23
Figure 15 Critical steps for obtaining FDA medical device approval  25
Figure 16 Market split between wellbeing and medical 2016-25  26
Figure 17 Current World Textile Market by Sector (2016)  27
Figure 18 The Global Textile Market By Sector ($ Millions)  27
Figure 19 Compound Annual Growth Rates (CAGR) by Sector (2016-25)  28
Figure 20 The Global Textile Market in 2022  29
Figure 21 The Global Textile Market in 2025  30
Figure 22 Textile Market Evolution (2012-2025)  30
Figure 23 Total Value of Nanomaterials in Textiles 2012-2022 ($ Millions)  31
Figure 24 Value of Nanomaterials in Textiles by Sector 2016-2025 ($ Millions) 32
Figure 25 Adidas miCoach Connect Heart Rate Monitor  36
Figure 26 Sensoria’s Hear[t] Rate Monitoring Garments . 37
Figure 27 Flexible components used in Google’s Project Jacquard  40
Figure 28 Google and Levi’s Smart Jacket  41
Figure 29 Embedded electronics Google’s Project Jacquard  42
Figure 30 Samsung’s WELT ‘smart’ belt  43
Figure 31 Samsung Body Compass at CES16  44
Figure 32 Lumo Run washable motion sensor  45
Figure 33 OMSignal’s Smart Bra  49
Figure 34 PoloTech Shirt from Ralph Lauren  50
Figure 35 Hexoskin Data Acquisition and Processing  51
Figure 36 Peak+™ Hear[t] Rate Monitoring Garment  52
Figure 37 StretchSense CEO Ben O’Brien, with a fabric stretch sensor  53
Figure 38 C3fit Pulse from Goldwin Inc  55
Figure 39 The Antelope Tank-Top  58
Figure 40 Sportswear with integrated sensors from Textronix  60
Figure 41 AdvanPro’s pressure sensing insoles  61
Figure 42 AdvanPro’s pressure sensing textile  62
Figure 43 Tamicare 3D Printing Sensors and Apparel  63
Figure 44 Smart clothing using stainless steel yarns and textile sensors from AiQ  65
Figure 45 EHO Smart Sock  69
Figure 46 BeBop Smart Car Seat Sensor  71
Figure 47 Non-transparent printed sensors from Fraunhofer ISC  73
Figure 48 Clim8 Intelligent Heat Regulating Shirt  74
Figure 49 Temperature regulating smart fabric printed at UC San Diego  76
Figure 50 Intelligent Textiles Ltd smart uniform  79
Figure 51 BAE Systems Broadsword Spine  80
Figure 52 LG Chem cable-shaped lithium-ion battery powers an LED display even when twisted and strained  81
Figure 53 Supercapacitor yarn made of niobium nanowires  84
Figure 54 Sphelar Textile  89
Figure 55 Sphelar Textile Solar Cells  89
Figure 56 Katy Perry wears Cute Circuit in 2010  91
Figure 57 Cute Circuit K Dress  93
Figure 58 MAKEFASHION runway at the Brother’s “Back to Business” conference, Nashville 2016  94
Figure 59 Covestro material with LEDs are positioned on formable films made from thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU).  95
Figure 60 Unseen headpiece, made of 4000 conductive Swarovski stones, changes color to correspond with localized brain activity  96
Figure 61 Eighthsense a coded couture piece.  97
Figure 62 Durex Fundawear  98
Figure 63 Printed fabric sensors from the University of Tokyo  100
Figure 64 Tony Kanaan’s shirt with electrically conductive nano-fibers  107
Figure 65 Panasonic stretchable resin technology  109
Figure 66 Nanoflex moniroring system  111
Figure 67 Knitted strain sensors  113
Figure 68 Chain Mail Fabric for Smart Textiles  114
Figure 69 Electroplated Fabric  115
Figure 70 LG Innotek flexible textile pressure sensors  118
Figure 71 Smart Footwear installed with fabric sensors. (Credit: Image courtesy of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)  120
Figure 72 SOFTCEPTOR™ textile strain sensors  122
Figure 73 conductive polymer composite coating for pressure sensing  123
Figure 74 Fraunhofer ISC_ printed sensor  125
Figure 75 The graphene-coated yarn sensor. (Image: ETRI)  128
Figure 76 Supercapacitor yarn made of niobium nanowires  131
Figure 77 StretchSense Energy Harvesting Kit  134
Figure 78 Energy harvesting textiles at the University of Southampton  135
Figure 79 Polyera Wove Flexible Screen  139

If you compare that with the table of contents for the May 2016 report in my June 2, 2016 posting, you can see the difference.

Here’s one last tidbit, a Sept. 15, 2016 news item on phys.org highlights another wearable technology report,

Wearable tech, which was seeing sizzling sales growth a year ago [2015], is cooling this year amid consumer hesitation over new devices, a survey showed Thursday [Sept. 15, 2016].

The research firm IDC said it expects global sales of wearables to grow some 29.4 percent to some 103 million units in 2016.

That follows 171 percent growth in 2015, fueled by the launch of the Apple Watch and a variety of fitness bands.

“It is increasingly becoming more obvious that consumers are not willing to deal with technical pain points that have to date been associated with many wearable devices,” said IDC analyst Ryan Reith.

So-called basic wearables—including fitness bands and other devices that do not run third party applications—will make up the lion’s share of the market with some 80.7 million units shipped this year, according to IDC.

According to IDC, it seems that the short term does not promise the explosive growth of the previous year but that new generations of wearable technology, according to both IDC and Cientifica, offer considerable promise for the market.

Ministry’s new women’s shirt: a technical marvel

It seems there’s another entry into the textile business, a women’s dress shirt made of a technical textile. A Sept. 13, 2016 article by Elizabeth Segran for Fast Company describes this ‘miracle’ piece of apparel,

There are few items of clothing professional women love more than a well-draped silk shirt. They’re the equivalent of men’s well-tailored Oxford shirts: classic, elegant, and versatile enough to look appropriate in almost any business context. But they’re also difficult to maintain: Silk wrinkles easily, doesn’t absorb perspiration, and needs to be dry cleaned.

Boston-based fashion brand Ministry (formerly Ministry of Supply) has heard our lament. …

Ministry gathered …  feedback and spent two years creating a high-performance women’s work shirt as part of its debut womenswear collection, launching today [Sept. 13, 2016]. Until now, the five-year-old company has been focused on creating menswear made with cutting-edge new textiles, but cofounder Gihan Amarasiriwardena explains that when they were developing the womenswear collection, they didn’t just remake their men’s garments in women’s sizes.

Here’s an image of the shirt in black,

[downloaded from http://ministry.co/collections/womens]

[downloaded from http://ministry.co/collections/womens]

Segran’s article mostly extolls its benefits but there is a little technical information,

Their brand-new, aptly named Easier Than Silk Shirt looks and feels like silk, but is actually made from a Japanese technical fabric (i.e., a textile engineered to perform functions, like protecting the wearer from extremely high temperatures). It drapes nicely, wicks moisture, is wrinkle-resistant, and can be thrown in a regular washer and dryer. I tested the shirt on a typical Monday. This meant getting dressed at 7 a.m., taking my baby to a health checkup—where she proceeded to drool on me—wiping myself off for a lunch interview, then heading to a coffee shop to write for several hours before going to a book launch party. By the time I got home that evening and looked in the mirror, the shirt was somehow crease-free and there were no moisture blotches in sight.

When Ministry claims to “engineer a shirt,” it does not mean this in a metaphorical sense. The by [sic] three MIT students, Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, and Kit Hickey; the former two were trained as engineers. Every aspect of Ministry’s design process incorporates scientific thinking, from introducing NASA temperature-regulating textile technology into dress shirts to using equipment to test each garment before it hits the market. The Ministry headquarters in Boston is full of machines, including one that pulls at fabric to see how well it is able to recover from being stretched, and computer systems that offer 3D modeling of the human form.

I wonder if Teijin (first mentioned here in a July 19, 2010 posting about their now defunct ‘morphotex’ [based on the nanostructures on a Morpho butterfly’s wing] fabric) is the Japanese company producing Ministry’s technical textile. Ministry’s company website is less focused on the technology than on the retail aspect of their business so if the technical information is there, it’s not immediately obvious.

Carbon nanotubes that can outperform silicon

According to a Sept. 2, 2016 news item on phys.org, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have produced carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art silicon transistors,

For decades, scientists have tried to harness the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to create high-performance electronics that are faster or consume less power—resulting in longer battery life, faster wireless communication and faster processing speeds for devices like smartphones and laptops.

But a number of challenges have impeded the development of high-performance transistors made of carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders made of carbon just one atom thick. Consequently, their performance has lagged far behind semiconductors such as silicon and gallium arsenide used in computer chips and personal electronics.

Now, for the first time, University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers have created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art silicon transistors.

Led by Michael Arnold and Padma Gopalan, UW-Madison professors of materials science and engineering, the team’s carbon nanotube transistors achieved current that’s 1.9 times higher than silicon transistors. …

A Sept. 2, 2016 University of Wisconsin-Madison news release (also on EurekAlert) by Adam Malecek, which originated the news item, describes the research in more detail and notes that the technology has been patented,

“This achievement has been a dream of nanotechnology for the last 20 years,” says Arnold. “Making carbon nanotube transistors that are better than silicon transistors is a big milestone. This breakthrough in carbon nanotube transistor performance is a critical advance toward exploiting carbon nanotubes in logic, high-speed communications, and other semiconductor electronics technologies.”

This advance could pave the way for carbon nanotube transistors to replace silicon transistors and continue delivering the performance gains the computer industry relies on and that consumers demand. The new transistors are particularly promising for wireless communications technologies that require a lot of current flowing across a relatively small area.

As some of the best electrical conductors ever discovered, carbon nanotubes have long been recognized as a promising material for next-generation transistors.

Carbon nanotube transistors should be able to perform five times faster or use five times less energy than silicon transistors, according to extrapolations from single nanotube measurements. The nanotube’s ultra-small dimension makes it possible to rapidly change a current signal traveling across it, which could lead to substantial gains in the bandwidth of wireless communications devices.

But researchers have struggled to isolate purely carbon nanotubes, which are crucial, because metallic nanotube impurities act like copper wires and disrupt their semiconducting properties — like a short in an electronic device.

The UW–Madison team used polymers to selectively sort out the semiconducting nanotubes, achieving a solution of ultra-high-purity semiconducting carbon nanotubes.

“We’ve identified specific conditions in which you can get rid of nearly all metallic nanotubes, where we have less than 0.01 percent metallic nanotubes,” says Arnold.

Placement and alignment of the nanotubes is also difficult to control.

To make a good transistor, the nanotubes need to be aligned in just the right order, with just the right spacing, when assembled on a wafer. In 2014, the UW–Madison researchers overcame that challenge when they announced a technique, called “floating evaporative self-assembly,” that gives them this control.

The nanotubes must make good electrical contacts with the metal electrodes of the transistor. Because the polymer the UW–Madison researchers use to isolate the semiconducting nanotubes also acts like an insulating layer between the nanotubes and the electrodes, the team “baked” the nanotube arrays in a vacuum oven to remove the insulating layer. The result: excellent electrical contacts to the nanotubes.

The researchers also developed a treatment that removes residues from the nanotubes after they’re processed in solution.

“In our research, we’ve shown that we can simultaneously overcome all of these challenges of working with nanotubes, and that has allowed us to create these groundbreaking carbon nanotube transistors that surpass silicon and gallium arsenide transistors,” says Arnold.

The researchers benchmarked their carbon nanotube transistor against a silicon transistor of the same size, geometry and leakage current in order to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

They are continuing to work on adapting their device to match the geometry used in silicon transistors, which get smaller with each new generation. Work is also underway to develop high-performance radio frequency amplifiers that may be able to boost a cellphone signal. While the researchers have already scaled their alignment and deposition process to 1 inch by 1 inch wafers, they’re working on scaling the process up for commercial production.

Arnold says it’s exciting to finally reach the point where researchers can exploit the nanotubes to attain performance gains in actual technologies.

“There has been a lot of hype about carbon nanotubes that hasn’t been realized, and that has kind of soured many people’s outlook,” says Arnold. “But we think the hype is deserved. It has just taken decades of work for the materials science to catch up and allow us to effectively harness these materials.”

The researchers have patented their technology through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Interestingly, at least some of the research was publicly funded according to the news release,

Funding from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office and the Air Force supported their work.

Will the public ever benefit financially from this research?

Innovation and two Canadian universities

I have two news bits and both concern the Canadian universities, the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the University of Toronto (UofT).

Creative Destruction Lab – West

First, the Creative Destruction Lab, a technology commercialization effort based at UofT’s Rotman School of Management, is opening an office in the west according to a Sept. 28, 2016 UBC media release (received via email; Note: Links have been removed; this is a long media release which interestingly does not mention Joseph Schumpeter the man who developed the economic theory which he called: creative destruction),

The UBC Sauder School of Business is launching the Western Canadian version of the Creative Destruction Lab, a successful seed-stage program based at UofT’s Rotman School of Management, to help high-technology ventures driven by university research maximize their commercial impact and benefit to society.

“Creative Destruction Lab – West will provide a much-needed support system to ensure innovations formulated on British Columbia campuses can access the funding they need to scale up and grow in-province,” said Robert Helsley, Dean of the UBC Sauder School of Business. “The success our partners at Rotman have had in helping commercialize the scientific breakthroughs of Canadian talent is remarkable and is exactly what we plan to replicate at UBC Sauder.”

Between 2012 and 2016, companies from CDL’s first four years generated over $800 million in equity value. It has supported a long line of emerging startups, including computer-human interface company Thalmic Labs, which announced nearly USD $120 million in funding on September 19, one of the largest Series B financings in Canadian history.

Focusing on massively scalable high-tech startups, CDL-West will provide coaching from world-leading entrepreneurs, support from dedicated business and science faculty, and access to venture capital. While some of the ventures will originate at UBC, CDL-West will also serve the entire province and extended western region by welcoming ventures from other universities. The program will closely align with existing entrepreneurship programs across UBC, including, e@UBC and HATCH, and actively work with the BC Tech Association [also known as the BC Technology Industry Association] and other partners to offer a critical next step in the venture creation process.

“We created a model for tech venture creation that keeps startups focused on their essential business challenges and dedicated to solving them with world-class support,” said CDL Founder Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the Rotman School of Management and UBC PhD alumnus.

“By partnering with UBC Sauder, we will magnify the impact of CDL by drawing in ventures from one of the country’s other leading research universities and B.C.’s burgeoning startup scene to further build the country’s tech sector and the opportunities for job creation it provides,” said CDL Director, Rachel Harris.

CDL uses a goal-setting model to push ventures along a path toward success. Over nine months, a collective of leading entrepreneurs with experience building and scaling technology companies – called the G7 – sets targets for ventures to hit every eight weeks, with the goal of maximizing their equity-value. Along the way ventures turn to business and technology experts for strategic guidance on how to reach goals, and draw on dedicated UBC Sauder students who apply state-of the-art business skills to help companies decide which market to enter first and how.

Ventures that fail to achieve milestones – approximately 50 per cent in past cohorts – are cut from the process. Those that reach their objectives and graduate from the program attract investment from the G7, as well as other leading venture-capital firms.

Currently being assembled, the CDL-West G7 will be comprised of entrepreneurial luminaries, including Jeff Mallett, the founding President, COO and Director of Yahoo! Inc. from 1995-2002 – a company he led to $4 billion in revenues and grew from a startup to a publicly traded company whose value reached $135 billion. He is now Managing Director of Iconica Partners and Managing Partner of Mallett Sports & Entertainment, with ventures including the San Francisco Giants, AT&T Park and Mission Rock Development, Comcast Bay Area Sports Network, the San Jose Giants, Major League Soccer, Vancouver Whitecaps FC, and a variety of other sports and online ventures.

Already bearing fruit, the Creative Destruction Lab partnership will see several UBC ventures accepted into a Machine Learning Specialist Track run by Rotman’s CDL this fall. This track is designed to create a support network for enterprises focused on artificial intelligence, a research strength at UofT and Canada more generally, which has traditionally migrated to the United States for funding and commercialization. In its second year, CDL-West will launch its own specialist track in an area of strength at UBC that will draw eastern ventures west.

“This new partnership creates the kind of high impact innovation network the Government of Canada wants to encourage,” said Brandon Lee, Canada’s Consul General in San Francisco, who works to connect Canadian innovation to customers and growth capital opportunities in Silicon Valley. “By collaborating across our universities to enhance our capacity to turn the scientific discoveries into businesses in Canada, we can further advance our nation’s global competitiveness in the knowledge-based industries.”

The Creative Destruction Lab is guided by an Advisory Board, co-chaired by Vancouver-based Haig Farris, a pioneer of the Canadian venture capitalist industry, and Bill Graham, Chancellor of Trinity College at UofT and former Canadian cabinet minister.

“By partnering with Rotman, UBC Sauder will be able to scale up its support for high-tech ventures extremely quickly and with tremendous impact,” said Paul Cubbon, Leader of CDL-West and a faculty member at UBC Sauder. “CDL-West will act as a turbo booster for ventures with great ideas, but which lack the strategic roadmap and funding to make them a reality.”

CDL-West launched its competitive application process for the first round of ventures that will begin in January 2017. Interested ventures are encouraged to submit applications via the CDL website at: www.creativedestructionlab.com

Background

UBC Technology ventures represented at media availability

Awake Labs is a wearable technology startup whose products measure and track anxiety in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder to better understand behaviour. Their first device, Reveal, monitors a wearer’s heart-rate, body temperature and sweat levels using high-tech sensors to provide insight into care and promote long term independence.

Acuva Technologies is a Vancouver-based clean technology venture focused on commercializing breakthrough UltraViolet Light Emitting Diode technology for water purification systems. Initially focused on point of use systems for boats, RVs and off grid homes in North American market, where they already have early sales, the company’s goal is to enable water purification in households in developing countries by 2018 and deploy large scale systems by 2021.

Other members of the CDL-West G7 include:

Boris Wertz: One of the top tech early-stage investors in North America and the founding partner of Version One, Wertz is also a board partner with Andreessen Horowitz. Before becoming an investor, Wertz was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, which sold to Amazon in 2008. He was responsible for marketing, business development, product, customer service and international operations. His deep operational experience helps him guide other entrepreneurs to start, build and scale companies.

Lisa Shields: Founder of Hyperwallet Systems Inc., Shields guided Hyperwallet from a technology startup to the leading international payments processor for business to consumer mass payouts. Prior to founding Hyperwallet, Lisa managed payments acceptance and risk management technology teams for high-volume online merchants. She was the founding director of the Wireless Innovation Society of British Columbia and is driven by the social and economic imperatives that shape global payment technologies.

Jeff Booth: Co-founder, President and CEO of Build Direct, a rapidly growing online supplier of home improvement products. Through custom and proprietary web analytics and forecasting tools, BuildDirect is reinventing and redefining how consumers can receive the best prices. BuildDirect has 12 warehouse locations across North America and is headquartered in Vancouver, BC. In 2015, Booth was awarded the BC Technology ‘Person of the Year’ Award by the BC Technology Industry Association.

Education:

CDL-west will provide a transformational experience for MBA and senior undergraduate students at UBC Sauder who will act as venture advisors. Replacing traditional classes, students learn by doing during the process of rapid equity-value creation.

Supporting venture development at UBC:

CDL-west will work closely with venture creation programs across UBC to complete the continuum of support aimed at maximizing venture value and investment. It will draw in ventures that are being or have been supported and developed in programs that span campus, including:

University Industry Liaison Office which works to enable research and innovation partnerships with industry, entrepreneurs, government and non-profit organizations.

e@UBC which provides a combination of mentorship, education, venture creation, and seed funding to support UBC students, alumni, faculty and staff.

HATCH, a UBC technology incubator which leverages the expertise of the UBC Sauder School of Business and entrepreneurship@UBC and a seasoned team of domain-specific experts to provide real-world, hands-on guidance in moving from innovative concept to successful venture.

Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub, a program base at the UBC Sauder Centre for Social Innovation & Impact Investing focused on developing ventures with the goal of creating positive social and environmental impact.

About the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto:

The Creative Destruction Lab leverages the Rotman School’s leading faculty and industry network as well as its location in the heart of Canada’s business capital to accelerate massively scalable, technology-based ventures that have the potential to transform our social, industrial, and economic landscape. The Lab has had a material impact on many nascent startups, including Deep Genomics, Greenlid, Atomwise, Bridgit, Kepler Communications, Nymi, NVBots, OTI Lumionics, PUSH, Thalmic Labs, Vertical.ai, Revlo, Validere, Growsumo, and VoteCompass, among others. For more information, visit www.creativedestructionlab.com

About the UBC Sauder School of Business

The UBC Sauder School of Business is committed to developing transformational and responsible business leaders for British Columbia and the world. Located in Vancouver, Canada’s gateway to the Pacific Rim, the school is distinguished for its long history of partnership and engagement in Asia, the excellence of its graduates, and the impact of its research which ranks in the top 20 globally. For more information, visit www.sauder.ubc.ca

About the Rotman School of Management

The Rotman School of Management is located in the heart of Canada’s commercial and cultural capital and is part of the University of Toronto, one of the world’s top 20 research universities. The Rotman School fosters a new way to think that enables graduates to tackle today’s global business and societal challenges. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.

It’s good to see a couple of successful (according to the news release) local entrepreneurs on the board although I’m somewhat puzzled by Mallett’s presence since, if memory serves, Yahoo! was not doing that well when he left in 2002. The company was an early success but utterly dwarfed by Google at some point in the early 2000s and these days, its stock (both financial and social) has continued to drift downwards. As for Mallett’s current successes, there is no mention of them.

Reuters Top 100 of the world’s most innovative universities

After reading or skimming through the CDL-West news you might think that the University of Toronto ranked higher than UBC on the Reuters list of the world’s most innovative universities. Before breaking the news about the Canadian rankings, here’s more about the list from a Sept, 28, 2016 Reuters news release (receive via email),

Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University top the second annual Reuters Top 100 ranking of the world’s most innovative universities. The Reuters Top 100 ranking aims to identify the institutions doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies and help drive the global economy. Unlike other rankings that often rely entirely or in part on subjective surveys, the ranking uses proprietary data and analysis tools from the Intellectual Property & Science division of Thomson Reuters to examine a series of patent and research-related metrics, and get to the essence of what it means to be truly innovative.

In the fast-changing world of science and technology, if you’re not innovating, you’re falling behind. That’s one of the key findings of this year’s Reuters 100. The 2016 results show that big breakthroughs – even just one highly influential paper or patent – can drive a university way up the list, but when that discovery fades into the past, so does its ranking. Consistency is key, with truly innovative institutions putting out groundbreaking work year after year.

Stanford held fast to its first place ranking by consistently producing new patents and papers that influence researchers elsewhere in academia and in private industry. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ranked #2) were behind some of the most important innovations of the past century, including the development of digital computers and the completion of the Human Genome Project. Harvard University (ranked #3), is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and has produced 47 Nobel laureates over the course of its 380-year history.

Some universities saw significant movement up the list, including, most notably, the University of Chicago, which jumped from #71 last year to #47 in 2016. Other list-climbers include the Netherlands’ Delft University of Technology (#73 to #44) and South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University (#66 to #46).

The United States continues to dominate the list, with 46 universities in the top 100; Japan is once again the second best performing country, with nine universities. France and South Korea are tied in third, each with eight. Germany has seven ranked universities; the United Kingdom has five; Switzerland, Belgium and Israel have three; Denmark, China and Canada have two; and the Netherlands and Singapore each have one.

You can find the rankings here (scroll down about 75% of the way) and for the impatient, the University of British Columbia ranked 50th and the University of Toronto 57th.

The biggest surprise for me was that China, like Canada, had two universities on the list. I imagine that will change as China continues its quest for science and innovation dominance. Given how they tout their innovation prowess, I had one other surprise, the University of Waterloo’s absence.

Graphene in the bone

An international team of US, Brazilian, and Indian scientists has developed a graphene-based material they believe could be used in bone implants. From a Sept. 2, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

Flakes of graphene welded together into solid materials may be suitable for bone implants, according to a study led by Rice University scientists.

The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and colleagues in Texas, Brazil and India used spark plasma sintering to weld flakes of graphene oxide into porous solids that compare favorably with the mechanical properties and biocompatibility of titanium, a standard bone-replacement material.

A Sept. 2, 2016 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains the work in more detail,

The researchers believe their technique will give them the ability to create highly complex shapes out of graphene in minutes using graphite molds, which they believe would be easier to process than specialty metals.

“We started thinking about this for bone implants because graphene is one of the most intriguing materials with many possibilities and it’s generally biocompatible,” said Rice postdoctoral research associate Chandra Sekhar Tiwary, co-lead author of the paper with Dibyendu Chakravarty of the International Advanced Research Center for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials in Hyderabad, India. “Four things are important: its mechanical properties, density, porosity and biocompatibility.”

Tiwary said spark plasma sintering is being used in industry to make complex parts, generally with ceramics. “The technique uses a high pulse current that welds the flakes together instantly. You only need high voltage, not high pressure or temperatures,” he said. The material they made is nearly 50 percent porous, with a density half that of graphite and a quarter of titanium metal. But it has enough compressive strength — 40 megapascals — to qualify it for bone implants, he said. The strength of the bonds between sheets keeps it from disintegrating in water.

The researchers controlled the density of the material by altering the voltage that delivers the highly localized blast of heat that makes the nanoscale welds. Though the experiments were carried out at room temperature, the researchers made graphene solids of various density by raising these sintering temperatures from 200 to 400 degrees Celsius. Samples made at local temperatures of 300 C proved best, Tiwary said. “The nice thing about two-dimensional materials is that they give you a lot of surface area to connect. With graphene, you just need to overcome a small activation barrier to make very strong welds,” he said.

With the help of colleagues at Hysitron in Minnesota, the researchers measured the load-bearing capacity of thin sheets of two- to five-layer bonded graphene by repeatedly stressing them with a picoindenter attached to a scanning electron microscope and found they were stable up to 70 micronewtons. Colleagues at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center successfully cultured cells on the material to show its biocompatibility. As a bonus, the researchers also discovered the sintering process has the ability to reduce graphene oxide flakes to pure bilayer graphene, which makes them stronger and more stable than graphene monolayers or graphene oxide.

“This example demonstrates the possible use of unconventional materials in conventional technologies,” Ajayan said. “But these transitions can only be made if materials such as 2-D graphene layers can be scalably made into 3-D solids with appropriate density and strength.

“Engineering junctions and strong interfaces between nanoscale building blocks is the biggest challenge in achieving such goals, but in this case, spark plasma sintering seems to be effective in joining graphene sheets to produce strong 3-D solids,” he said.

The researchers have produced an animation depicting of graphene oxide layers being stacked,

A molecular dynamics simulation shows how graphene oxide layers stack when welded by spark plasma sintering. The presence of oxygen molecules at left prevents the graphene layers from bonding, as they do without oxygen at right. Courtesy of the Ajayan and Galvão groups

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

3D Porous Graphene by Low-Temperature Plasma Welding for Bone Implants by Dibyendu Chakravarty, Chandra Sekhar Tiwary, Cristano F. Woellner, Sruthi Radhakrishnan4, Soumya Vinod, Sehmus Ozden, Pedro Alves da Silva Autreto, Sanjit Bhowmick, Syed Asif, Sendurai A Mani, Douglas S. Galvao, and Pulickel M. Ajayan. Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201603146 Version of Record online: 26 AUG 2016

© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.