New fluid-repellent paper could lead to inexpensive diagnostic devices
May 31, 2013
The new fluid-repellent paper was developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have produced a new kind of paper that repels a range of liquids, including water and oil. The new paper shows significant promise as an affordable and recyclable packaging material, but it's the paper’s potential as an inexpensive biomedical diagnostic tool that has really got the researchers excited.
By applying a chemical coating and creating new surface patterns at the nanometer and micron-scale, the researchers are able to reproduce the same repellent effect in the paper that is observed in the leaves of the lotus plant. This changes the paper from an absorbent material to one which repels all fluids.
"Paper is a very heterogeneous material composed of fibers with different sizes, different lengths and a non-circular cross-section," explains Dennis Hess, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "We believe this is the first time that a superamphiphobic surface – one that repels all fluids – has been created on a flexible, traditional and heterogeneous material like paper."
The paper can be produced from standard softwood and hardwood fibers, and its manufacture involves breaking cellulose into even smaller structures by using a mechanical grinder, before it is pressed in water (as is the case in traditional paper manufacturing). The water is then removed, and chemical butanol is used to inhibit the hydrogen bonding of the cellulose fibers. This affords the scientists better control of the bonding, which is key to producing the desired repellant effect.
The cellulose material is further subjected to an oxygen plasma etching process which removes the absorbent cellulose surface material and exposes a second, rougher level, which sports the necessary geometry to repel liquids. Finally, a thin coating of a fluoropolymer (Teflon) is also applied.
The researchers printed patterns onto their paper with hydrophobic ink and a desktop printer. Fluid droplets introduced to the pattern remained in place, repelled by the adjacent fluid-repellant surface. This suggests that the paper could perform as a diagnostic tool in the future.
According to the research team, antigens could be passed in liquid form across the printed patterns, which would also, crucially, contain diagnostic chemicals too. The interaction between the diagnostic chemicals and the antigens could indicate the presence of a disease.
So far, the new paper has only been produced in samples of roughly four inches (10 cm) on a side, but the researchers are confident that the process can be scaled-up.
Shortly after his world history students began a pilot program testing a digital textbook for the iPad, Ken Halla noticed something different: His students were actually readingtheir textbooks.
“How crazy is that?” said Halla, a ninth-grade teacher at Hayfield Secondary School in Alexandria, Virginia. “To me, it’s really great when the kids get excited to read.”
Of course, Halla admits, the $15 iBook textbook his students used—World History: Patterns of Interaction from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—went beyond the usual text-on-paper approach found in textbooks. Students were taking interactive quizzes, watching videos; even touring ancient European caves to look at prehistoric drawings.
“To call it a book anymore,” Halla said, “is a false pretense.”
It’s been more than a year since Apple held an event to announce a new focus on education. At that event in January 2012, the company launched the free iBooks 2 app(
) for interacting with multimedia textbooks and also the free iBooks Author (
), an app that lets writers and publishers create their own digital texts. The aim? To finally create a digital textbook market, using the iPad as the platform.
) for interacting with multimedia textbooks and also the free iBooks Author (), an app that lets writers and publishers create their own digital texts. The aim? To finally create a digital textbook market, using the iPad as the platform.
“We think Apple is uniquely positioned to be the first to make this work,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, said at the time.
As the school year comes to a close, Macworld decided to check in on Apple’s progress. Here’s what we found.
Early days still for digital textbooks
A year later, Apple’s digital textbook effort still seems to be in the early stages. According to the company’s public statements, more than 4.5 million iPads have been sold to U.S. schools—and yes, more than 10,000 books have been published using iBooks Author. More than 2,500 schools across the country are now using the iPad in the classroom. Where they’re used, the tablet and the digital textbooks find enthusiastic responses.
But there’s a long way to go before students using iPads to read their iBooks becomes the rule, rather than the leading-edge exception, in American education. One of the biggest problems is still a lack of textbooks.
Waiting on textbooks: “Textbooks for middle school aren’t available,” said Marsha Messinger, language arts and social studies teacher at Robert Saligman Middle School of Perelman Jewish Day School in Philadelphia. “They [the textbook publishers] are working their way from college down.”
“It’s moving steadily forward,” said Tim Bajarin, president at Creative Strategies Inc., a tech industry research firm. He predicts that it will take two to three more years for the digital textbook industry to reach critical mass, and that he believes Apple now has a head start. “In many ways, you have to look at this as an Apple evangelistic move. The textbook industry has been relatively slow.”
Waiting on schools: At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mary Cullinane, chief content officer and executive vice president, says her company is ready to push iBooks and other digital textbooks when more schools are ready to buy.
“Once the early adopters demonstrate the validity of the opportunity, you’ll see more folks come on board,” she said, “but that transition hasn’t happened yet.”
How digital textbooks are being used
Where iBooks have made inroads, it appears schools have found a variety of ways to use them in the classroom:
As textbooks that are better than, well, textbooks: This may seem obvious, as it’s what Apple clearly was aiming for when it launched the service. But the same educators who complain about the lack of available content also offer high praise for the iBooks that do exist.
“We want them to be interactive, we want them to have videos embedded, we want them to be easy to purchase,” said Eric Anderson, director of information technology for Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, California. His school has testedChemistry and Biology iBooks fromPearson this year. Both iBook editions cost $15 per copy.
“This is our model book,” Anderson said of the science iBooks. “If every book on our campus was like this, we would be thrilled.”
As easy collectors of custom content: Teachers have never relied entirely on textbooks. Often they cobble together lessons out of worksheets and other reading materials that fade as copies are made from copies. College students have traditionally bought class “readers” filled with excerpts and articles.
Now? If teachers find an article or a PDF that illustrates their point, they can plug it into iBooks Author and distribute custom-tailored, in-house digital supplements for their students. Little of this content is original material, though, so none of it finds its way to the iBookstore, where it might set off a copyright claim.
“They don’t really have a set textbook, so the little bits and pieces that they’ve found to teach from, that’s the way they pull it all together,” Brad Bergsma, chief information officer for Northwest Kansas Technical College in Goodland said of the computer graphics instructors at his school.
“For the faculty that has been using it, aggregation has been a key driver,” he said. “Rather than run off a four-page PDF, they take it and dress it up with some video and pictures.”
For student presentations: At Perelman Jewish Day School’s middle school in Philadelphia—where the iPad program is sponsored by the Kohelet Foundation’s SmartSchool program—teachers have put iBooks Author into the hands of students to create their own multimedia presentations, often shared with classrooms via AirPlay over Apple TV.
That’s helped teacher Marsha Messinger to become a believer. “I think the iPad … has a jump on education,” she said.
What's next
The great digital textbooks that are already out there are likely to help more schools make the move to adopt the technology, said Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Cullinane. Both the hardware and the software are ready now, she said.
“Four or five years ago, you saw early adopters struggling,” she said. “Now they can make the jump easier.”
Who will dominate digital textbooks?: But the battle over who will dominate the education market—or how—has yet to be settled. Amazon is competing in the digital textbook market, letting users rent digital textbooks for up to 80 percent off the original hardcover cost. This can reduce the cost of a textbook, for example, from $185 in hardcover to just more than $40 for a digital rental. It's possible to read Amazon's books on a $200 Kindle Fire, or by using the free Kindle app for iPad, Android tablet, PC, or Mac.
GOOGLE GLASS
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)
GOOGLE GLASS
The frothing excitement around this prototype, titanium-framed wearable computer has the tech world tripping over itself in a mad dash for Glass access. Ten thousand or more Google Glass units are now shipping to beta testers and winners of the If I Had Glass contest -- for a $1,500 price tag. But the big what, why, and how questions remain.
The answer, for now, is simple: Google Glass is Google on your face. These early frames ship with the ability to take the very most recent communications from your smartphone or Google accounts and show them to you in a head-up display. They take phone calls. They send texts, take photos and video, and show maps. They deliver search results. If you've played with Google Now, the Glass interface is strikingly similar.
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Google Glass Explorer Edition is intended for developers and "early testers," and while this group of customers may include those who feel like they can afford a $1,500 wearable device, everyday people aren't the primary target yet. But yes, Google Glass is a very real product, and it really works, but its app support remains pretty limited. It looks like Google Glass -- the consumer version -- will arrive sometime in 2014. In the meantime, app developers and Google will be using this model to develop software and experiences that will be incorporated into the consumer version.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)
What does Google Glass actually do?
Glass takes photos and videos, sends text messages, engages in FaceTime-like Google Hangouts, makes phone calls, searches Google, and gets turn-by-turn navigation with maps. It can show the weather, the time, and headlines from The New York Times that have been pushed to the device, with spoken headline summaries. For now, anyway, that's about it. Some features require tethering -- GPS-based functions that use the phone, such as turn-by-turn directions. Others, like Google Hangouts and Google Search, can also be performed over Wi-Fi. When offline, Glass only takes photos and videos.
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)The hardware: Design and features
This product is often incorrectly referred to as "Google Glasses" with good reason. But it's really more of a lensless eyeglasses frame, with a mobile computing device built into the stem that sits on your right ear. That right arm wraps around to a small transparent display that sits above your right eye. Imagine if a wearable side-mounted camera grew a glasses-frame construct, and that's Glass.
Glass is lightweight, more so than you'd think. The titanium frame is bendable. Little nose contacts can be bent and adjusted for individual fit. The right side of Glass has a thick back part that houses the battery, and all the rest of the electronics: buttons, touch pads, and speaker.
The Glass Explorer package comes with the Glass unit itself (in a variety of colors), a snap-on sunglasses visor, a clear visor, and a Micro-USB charger. There's a rigid cloth pouch to store Glass in, but the frame can't be folded up like regular sunglasses -- at least, in its current iteration. It's more like a visor, so you'd need some sort of larger bag.
Glass runs on Android, but can connect to both iOS and Android devices. It can connect via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to a phone, a laptop, or a home Wi-Fi network, or even work alone as a disconnected offline camera. The 5-megapixel camera shoots 720p video, 10 seconds at a time by default. It has 12.5GB of onboard storage and a battery that's meant to last a day.
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)Into the future of the unexpected
Regardless of whether you believe wearable smart devices are the future of how we interact with the world around us, Google appears ready and engaged in taking us there. Glass is a technology, not a product. Sure, it's a $1,500 pair of wearable titanium glasses today, with a battery-powered 5-megapixel camera and bone-conducting speakerphone bonded to a hovering interactive display. It's usable as a phone accessory. It could be used around the home.
Google Glass has its discomforts and its disconnects. It's an early product that's clearly in beta, but it's also an experiment. It's a social-interaction project, it's a living debate on wearable tech, and it's an app platform in need of apps. It's not necessarily a device that needs to exist, but it could have uses for some. And some of its uses may not have been invented yet.
CALGARY- No one likes a traffic jam, and now researchers from the University of Calgary are looking at ways to use new technology to reduce congestion.
New technology could be key to eliminating traffic tie-ups
CALGARY- No one likes a traffic jam, and now researchers from the University of Calgary are looking at ways to use new technology to reduce congestion.
The traffic lab is looking at the dynamics of road tie-ups, by installing sensors along an eight kilometre stretch of Deerfoot Trail, between McKnight Blvd. and Peigan Trail.
“They will be transmitting information about the traffic, the speeds, the density of traffic in real time,” explains Lina Kattan, professor of Transportation Systems Optimization. “We can see the benefits…what are going to be the reduction in travel times? What are going to be the improvements in speed, and so on.”
The information is run through computer simulations to test different scenarios, and one solution researchers are looking at involves the use of ramp meters to control the flow of traffic. The meters activate traffic lights during peak hours, and have already proven effective in the U.S.
“It will come gradually, in the next 10 years,” predicts Behrouz Far, from the University of Calgary’s electrical and civil engineering department. “I think the future of traffic is in using this technology. Because we have limited capacity of roads, limited capacity of infrastructure, better use of it is the target.”
The Alberta Motor Association contributed $750,000 towards the lab, which opened earlier this month.
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