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'Chameleon' Crystals Could Camouflage Clothing & Cars

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'Chameleon' Crystals Could Camouflage Clothing & Cars

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scientist are trying to use chameleon camuflage abilities in real life objects.

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Just as a chameleon can instantly morph its skin color to match its surroundings, a new method of controlling crystals using light and chemistry could make clothing or cars change color on demand.

The method involves shining a laser on tiny latex particles to make them assume a 3D crystalline shape or pattern, such as a letter M. When the laser is switched on or off, the crystals appear or disappear.

Unlike for chameleons or octopuses, creating man-made materials that change color on demand is really difficult, said Mike Solomon, a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and senior researcher of a study detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Nature Communications. [ Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

"Wouldn't it be neat if you could change some attribute - such as a display, part of car, or clothing - on demand?" Solomon told Live Science. Solomon and his graduate student, Youngri Kim, sought to develop technology that could ultimately do just that.

Chameleon crystals

Traditionally, researchers have sought to create camouflaged materials by applying electric or magnetic fields to particles. But these methods are cumbersome and expensive, Solomon said.

By contrast, Kim and her team found a way to achieve shape- and color-changing effects using latex paint microparticles - tiny particles about 0.001 millimeters (4/100,000 th inch) in diameter - in a kerosene-like fluid, by shining a laser on them. By manipulating these "camouflage crystals," the researchers were able to construct a letter "M," for the University of Michigan. They have also experimented with making optical lenses.

"We can shine the light in a certain region, and the particles create a crystalline region where they all come together and create this crystal structure," Kim said in a statement.

The researchers found that shining light on the microparticles made them react chemically with a layer of indium tin oxide on the bottom of the pool of fluid. The reaction produces an electric current in the fluid, which causes the particles to rearrange themselves.

If the particles are negatively charged, they flow toward the illuminated region of the surface; if the particles are positively charged, they flow away from the area under the light, creating a void there.

Camouflaged clothes and cars

The new method of making materials change their shape or color has many exciting applications. For instance, it could be integrated into clothing or automobile paint, for camouflage purposes, or just for aesthetic reasons.

A significant challenge will be adapting a fluid-based material for use in fabrics or vehicle paints (which ultimately dry). Another question is how much light is needed for the particle method to work. Right now, the technique relies on lasers, but those would be impractical for many applications. Future studies will need to address these issues, Solomon said.

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'Chameleon' Crystals Could Camouflage Clothing & Cars

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Just as a chameleon can instantly morph its skin color to match its surroundings, a new method of controlling crystals using light and chemistry could make clothing or cars change color on demand. The method involves shining a laser on tiny latex particles to make them assume a 3D crystalline shape or pattern, such as a letter M.

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Tiny Insect Parts Revealed in New 3D, True-Color Images

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Tiny Insect Parts Revealed in New 3D, True-Color Images

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3D painting revels insects parts.

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A new, simple scanning system can create precise 3D models of insects in color.

The system uses off-the-shelf equipment, including a camera and a computer, to obtain detailed, true-color 3D images of insects.

"To our knowledge, this is the first system that can capture 3D models of tiny objects," which can be as small as 0.11811 inches (3 millimeters) long in their natural colors, said study author David Lovell, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia. [ 3-D Insect Models by New Scanning System Reveal True Color | Video]

"Existing 3D capture systems are designed for larger, less-detailed objects and don't handle reflective, transparent or iridescent surfaces well," Lovell told Live Science. There is another scanning system called micro computed tomography (Micro CT) that can capture both the internal and external structure of tiny objects in exquisite resolution, as an X-ray imaging method, but it can't capture color, he said.

For the insect images obtained through the new system, the file sizes are relatively small, about 10 megabytes each. This means users such as insect researchers can embed the models into Web pages and documents, and view them on their mobile devices.

The system itself is simple, and it uses a camera and flash, a rotating mounting stage, a rail along which the camera can slide to get shots at different points of the insect's body, a computer and reconstruction software, Lovell said. To obtain 3D insect models, the researchers took many 2D pictures of each insect, from different perspectives.

The 3D system can be used by institutions that store physical specimens of insect species, to make them available more broadly, the researchers said.

"One of the primary motivations behind this research is to help unlock knowledge about rare, often unique, specimens held in biological collections," Lovell said, adding that the actual specimens are often vulnerable to damage and have to be carefully protected.

"Digital color 3D models of sufficient detail will enable collections managers to liberate these precious specimens for much wider use and analysis," he said.

The 3D models could also allow scientists and educators to communicate more effectively about insect species, which, typically, are described only through words, and regular 2D photos or drawings.

Another potential application is in biosecurity. "Quarantine officers could carry a gallery of 3D insect models with them on an iPad to help discriminate between invasive and native species," Lovell said.

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Tiny Insect Parts Revealed in New 3D, True-Color Images

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A new, simple scanning system can create precise 3D models of insects in color. The system uses off-the-shelf equipment, including a camera and a computer, to obtain detailed, true-color 3D images of insects.

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Mantis Shrimp's Attack Claw Inspires Tough New Material Design

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Mantis Shrimp's Attack Claw Inspires Tough New Material Design

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Animals inspire people to create objects related to their abilities.

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Credit: Carlos Puma

The weapon with which mantis shrimp attack their prey, including mollusks and crabs, is no ordinary appendage. This clublike claw accelerates faster than a .22-calliber bullet, delivers an impact more than 1,000 times the shrimp's own body weight, and stays intact even after thousands of blows.

Researchers think studying the structure of the club could inspire biology-mimicking materials to make stronger airplanes, cars, body armor and football helmets.

In fact, researchers found in recent tests that a shrimp-inspired material design proved tougher and more impact-resistant than a standard material structure used in the aerospace industry.

"The more we study the club of this tiny crustacean, the more we realize its structure could improve so many things we use every day," study researcher David Kisailus, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, said in a statement. [ Photos: Mantis Shrimp's Googly Eyes]

In previous work, Kisailus and his colleagues examined the structure of the club and found an endocuticle region in which mineralized fibers are arranged in layers and act as a shock absorber. Each layer is rotated slightly compared to the one below, creating a spiraling, or helicoidal, pattern.

The researchers created carbon fiber-epoxy composites containing layers at three different helicoidal angles. Then, using a drop weight system similar to the kind used for materials testing in the aircraft industry, they tested the shrimp-inspired composites against two control materials. One control contained layers with fibers running parallel to one another and the second control contained layers in an alternating configuration used in the aerospace industry.

The shrimp-inspired materials fared better than either control in the impact, compression and ultrasound testing, the researchers reported in an article published online last month in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.

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Mantis Shrimp's Attack Claw Inspires Tough New Material Design

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The weapon with which mantis shrimp attack their prey, including mollusks and crabs, is no ordinary appendage. This clublike claw accelerates faster than a .22-calliber bullet, delivers an impact more than 1,000 times the shrimp's own body weight, and stays intact even after thousands of blows.

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New fitness gear has been created by Samsung

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The Samsung Gear Fit is not just a fitness tracker, or a smartwatch - it's both. The device, which costs about $200, combines smartwatch features, such as call and alarm notifications, with the functions of a more traditional fitness tracker, such as the ability to track daily steps and calories burned. It even includes a heart rate monitor that works when you're at rest or exercising. But is this hybrid better than a normal tracker? I tested the device to find out.

The pros of the Gear Fit include its sleek design and interactive display, the ability to receive notifications, and the inclusion of a "coach" in some versions of the tracker app that provides tips on how to live a healthy lifestyle.

The cons of the Gear Fit include the need for multiple apps to manage the device and view data, bugs in the app used on older versions of the Galaxy phone, and a lack of motivational messages.

Design/Comfort: 9/10

The Gear Fit stands out among smartwatches for its design. It has a sleek, slightly curved, rectangular screen that's big enough to read, without feeling bulky. An adjustable strap lets you fit the device snugly on your wrist. A single button will turn the display on and off, but the screen will also light up when you twist your wrist to look at the display, so you can see the screen even if your hands are full.

Since it is a smartwatch, wearing the device is like having a minicomputer or smartphone on your wrist. The display is colorful, and you can view different icons by swiping the screen. You can also pick from more than a dozen wallpapers to use as the screen background, so it's easy to color-coordinate the smartwatch with your outfit, if you're so inclined. (The wristband also comes in three colors: black, orange or grey.)

The Samsung Gear Fit allows receiving notifications of incoming calls, emails or alarms.

Features on the device include a timer, stopwatch and pedometer. It also provides a way to track your sleep and exercise (including walking, running, cycling or hiking), and check your heart rate. (The Gear Fit does not continuously track your heart rate, except during exercise sessions.) You can view most of your data on the Gear Fit itself. For example, selecting the pedometer icon shows you how many steps you walked; you can see a history of your daily steps over the last week, too.

You can also set the device to receive notifications, including alerts of incoming calls, emails or alarms. The watch will sync wirelessly with your phone, though it only works with Samsung phones.

User-friendliness: 2/10

Using the smartwtach itself is fairly straightforward, but I encountered a number of frustrating moments while setting up the device and working with the accompanying apps.

First, if you use the smartwatch with a phone as old as or older than the Galaxy S4, you'll have to install not only an app to manage the device (the Gear Fit Manager), but also a separate app to view your data (the Fitness with Gear app). I didn't realize at first that I needed to take this extra step. If you have a Galaxy S5 phone, you can use the watch with the S Health app, which comes installed. Regardless of the version of your phone, you'll have to create a Samsung account. (Note: The Galaxy S4 does have an older version of the S Health app, but for some reason, you are not prompted to pair the Gear Fit with this app.)

The Fitness with Gear app had some bugs. At first, I could not see the details of my data because the app told me I needed to "sync with my Samsung account," even though I'd already done that. No further instructions were provided. Eventually, I was able to see these details, which included information like my total average steps and a monthly history of my activity. But the app would occasionally give me error messages, and I'd just have to try again later.

The S Health app is much nicer and does not have the same bugs. But it's still not particularly user-friendly. For one, it does not automatically sync with the pedometer on your Gear Fit. Instead, it uses the phone's built-in pedometer. To sync with your Gear Fit's pedometer, you have to select Pedometer in the S Health app, then the three-dots menu button, then select "Phone data to view" and then choose the Gear Fit device. This is not particularly intuitive.

The Galaxy S5 phone has a way to check your heart rate as well, and every time you open the Heart Rate section on the S Health app, it prompts you to place your finger on the phone's heart rate sensor. If you're interested in viewing the heart rate information you collect with the Gear Fit, you'll want to look at the heart rate Log section of the S Health app. Also, the Exercise section of the S Health app keeps a log of the calories you burn in a workout, and your average heart rate, but not your steps.

Although the older Fitness with Gear app has a section to view details about your sleep data, the newer S Health app does not. So if you track your sleep with your Gear Fit, you'll only be able to view the data on the Gear Fit device itself, unless you download a separate app called S Health Sleep. Three apps for one tracker (Gear Fit Manager, S Health and S Health Sleep) seems a bit much.

Finally, although the Gear Fit device has a pedometer, it does not start counting your steps until you hit the Start icon on the device. Once you do, it will always count your steps, unless you hit Pause on the pedometer.

Value of Information: 4/10

The Coach section of the S Health app on the Galaxy S5 provides some information to put the data you're tracking into context. In this area, you can perform an assessment of your exercise, food and sleep habits, as well as your stress level and weight. For example, if the assessment finds that you are not exercising very often, Coach will suggest that you increase the number of times you exercise a week, also offering specific "missions" that you can carry out to accomplish your goal, such as taking a speedy, 20-minute walk twice a week or upping your steps to 10,000 per day.

Information from the workouts you track with Gear Fit or the Galaxy S5 itself will automatically go toward completing these missions/exercise goals, or you can simply tell Coach that you completed a goal that day.

If you're interested in improving your sleep, Coach will suggest tips such as "dim your lights two hours before bedtime to create a soothing environment that promotes sleep." It also explains that light before bedtime "keeps your brain active." However, the device does not actually use the information from your Gear Fit to see how well you've been sleeping. On the Gear Fit itself, you can track your total sleep time and "motionless sleep," but as previously mentioned, this data does not sync with the S Health app (only with a separate app).

Although both the Gear Fit and Galaxy S5 measure heart rate, neither device explains why knowing your heart rate is useful (such as how you could use it to improve your exercise habits).

Finally, if you have an older phone and are using the Fitness with Gear app, you don't get the information from Coach, so you're left with a bunch of numbers (your daily steps, time spent asleep, etc.) and no context for them.

Enjoyment/Inspiration: 6/10

The design of the smartwatch itself, including the colorful screen and interactivity, made me want to wear it every day - to use it as a watch, if for no other reason.

The tips from the Coach section of S Health app and the ability to track progress toward my goals provided some motivation to keep using the device. If you complete all five assessments in Coach (exercise, food, sleep, stress and weight), you'll get an overall "lifestyle score" (out of 100), providing a ballpark measure of your health.

However, unlike some other fitness trackers, the Gear Fit and S Health app don't provide you with motivational messages or tell you when you're close to completing your goals.

Editor's Note: In February 2015, we changed the rating system we use in our fitness tracker reviews from a 5-star system to a 10-point system. Not all of our ratings were a straight conversion (i.e. 2/5 stars = 4/10 points). Instead, we adjusted some of them in order to give our readers a better idea of how these devices perform in relation to each other.

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The Samsung Gear Fit is not just a fitness tracker, or a smartwatch - it's both. The device, which costs about $200, combines smartwatch features, such as call and alarm notifications, with the functions of a more traditional fitness tracker, such as the ability to track daily steps and calories burned.

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Scientist suggest that space can be a type of fluid.

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Crack In Space Time by CS Ostini (cropped from original)

Credit: vegas_buff via flickr | http://bit.ly/1n2VPkc

(ISNS) -- Spacetime is a somewhat slippery concept -- Einstein described the universe in four dimensions, combining the well-known three dimensions of space with time. Physicists now suggest that spacetime may itself be a fluid, a very slippery type known as a superfluid.

These new findings could help scientists in their quest for a theory of everything that explains how the cosmos works in its entirety.

Scientists have long sought to develop a theory that can describe every aspect of how the universe operates. Currently, researchers have two disparate theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Respectively, these two theories can mostly explain the cosmos on its tiniest scales and its largest scales. Quantum mechanics can explain the behavior of all the known particles, while general relativity describes the nature of spacetime and gravity.

When it comes to "quantum gravity" theories that seek to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, there are currently two main scenarios. One suggests the force of gravity can be described in terms of packets of energy known as gravitons, just as light is embodied by photons. The other suggests the fundamental constituents of spacetime essentially condense together like a fluid. The properties of gravity would emerge from the overall behavior of this fluid, rather than its individual parts, just like the flow of water is explained by fluid equations and not the properties of the individual molecules that make it up.

This analogy is not supposed to suggest that spacetime flows anywhere, but is meant to help envision the fabric of spacetime as emerging from more basic entities, said theoretical physicist Luca Maccione at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. These fundamental constituents of spacetime would be below the size at which space and time is smooth and continuous - a Planck length, or roughly 100 billion billion times smaller than the width of a proton.

Now researchers suggest that if spacetime is a fluid, it must be an extraordinary kind of fluid known as a superfluid. These findings could help test models of quantum gravity.

A superfluid is a fluid that flows with virtually zero friction or viscosity. In comparison, water might seem as slow as molasses. Liquid helium can behave like a superfluid when cooled to temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature.

Scientists have looked for paradoxical or unlikely predictions in models that treat spacetime as a fluid in order to support or disprove these models. For instance, past research suggested that photons might travel at different speeds depending on their energy if spacetime is a fluid.

If spacetime is a fluid, it might have viscosity. This means it could impede anything traveling within it, reasoned Maccione and his colleague Stefano Liberati, a theoretical physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy.

The researchers found that if spacetime was a viscous fluid, it would rapidly dissipate the energy of photons and other particles along their paths. Since astronomers can see photons traveling from stars and galaxies located billions of light years away, Liberati and Maccione's calculations revealed that if spacetime is a fluid, it must be a superfluid.

"This type of general knowledge about what properties spacetime and gravity can fundamentally have is very important to guide the development of the theory of quantum gravity," said theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, Sweden, who did not contribute to this paper.

The scientists do not rule out models where spacetime has some miniscule level of viscosity to it. They suggest analyzing gamma rays and high-energy neutrinos from deep space, and if any of their energy dissipated, that could reveal that spacetime is a fluid, greatly backing specific models of quantum gravity.

"This model provides a significant new probe of the nature of spacetime and possible quantum gravity theories by using high-energy astrophysical observations," said theoretical astrophysicist Floyd Stecker at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, who did not participate in this study.

The fact that quantum gravity models often depend on physics at the remote, infinitesimal levels of the Planck scale has greatly discouraged researchers in the field. By introducing possible visible dissipative effects of spacetime, "effects analogous to the 'oomph' we exert in stirring honey that originate at the Planck scale, this result opens up a new observational window of possible quantum gravity effects," said theoretical physicist Seth Major at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, who did not take part in this research.

Liberati and Maccione detailed their findings online April 14 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Charles Q. Choi is a freelance science writer based in New York City who has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, Science, Nature, and many other news outlets. He tweets at @cqchoi.

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(ISNS) -- Spacetime is a somewhat slippery concept -- Einstein described the universe in four dimensions, combining the well-known three dimensions of space with time. Physicists now suggest that spacetime may itself be a fluid, a very slippery type known as a superfluid.

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Super-Strong Graphene Has an Achilles' Heel

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Super-Strong Graphene Has an Achilles' Heel

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a new type of ressitive material has been created.

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Graphene, a hexagonal arrangement of single carbon atoms that extends across two dimensions, lighter than steel but many times stronger, with better electrical conductivity than copper.

Credit: nobeastsofierce | Shutterstock

Updated at 12:31 p.m. ET.

Graphene is often touted as a miracle material- it easily conducts electricity and it's hundreds of times stronger than steel. But now tests of real-world samples of graphene show that while the carbon material is possibly the strongest material produced today, it's also as brittle as ordinary ceramic.

Result? It can crack.

A team of scientists from Rice University and the Georgia Institute of Technology tested small pieces of "bilayer" graphene, two single-atom-thick sheets of pure carbon resting one atop the other,by making tiny cracks in them with focused beams of ions. They then pulled the graphene, to see how fast the cracks expanded until the material broke. [ 8 Chemical Elements You've Never Heard Of]

"It's very sensitive to [the] presence of [a] crack. In steel if you have a crack, there, it's not so dangerous. Steel has a huge resistance to crack extension. Graphene is more like window glass," said Ting Zhu, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and one of the authors of the study.

An electron microscope image shows a pre-crack in a suspended sheet of graphene used to measure the overall strength of the sheet in a test at Rice University.

Credit: The Nanomaterials, Nanomechanics and Nanodevices Lab/Rice University

The measure of a material's resistance to cracks, called fracture toughness, is not just the tensile strength - how likely it is to break when tugged on. It also measures how much punishment a given substance can take before cracking when being twisted. Metals, for instance, are ductile; it takes a lot of twisting and bending to break a spoon. A piece of glass resists twisting and doesn't stretch, but it breaks quickly if any twisting or pulling force is applied past a certain threshold, and even a tiny crack will make it shatter.

Zhu, working with Jun Lou at Rice, found that graphene with cracks is 10 times more prone to breakage than steel, and closer in fracture toughness to aluminum oxide or silicon carbide-based ceramics.

The relatively low fracture toughness means that it takes only a small crack in a piece of graphene to weaken it. And such small cracks are a natural consequence of making graphene.

Graphene is made in several ways, among them chemical vapor deposition, in which carbon vapor is allowed to cool and settle on a surface, and exfoliation, in which graphite (from which graphene is derived) is put into a solvent. The sheets of graphene can be large in the former case, but they aren't perfect. The resulting lattice of carbon atoms that makes up the graphene has small defects - an atom missing or misaligned here and there. The defects won't make much difference when using graphene as a conductor or semiconductor, but for mechanical applications, such as making flexible displays or boosting structural strength of other materials, the imperfections start to matter.

Perfect graphene can take about 100 Gigapascals (14 million pounds per square inch) of force before it breaks. But the imperfect graphene the researchers made can withstand only a tiny fraction of that, about 4 Megapascals (580 pounds per square inch).

The experiments aren't just important for the study of graphene. Other materials that can take on a two-dimensional structure might behave in a similar way, and as such the new research, detailed today (April 29) in the journal Nature Communications, might offer important insights.

"This kind of modeling could be applied to study many other 2D materials, such as molybdenum disfulfide or boron nitride," Zhu said.

Editor's Note: This article was updated to correct the last quote, which had aluminum sulfide instead of molybdenum disfulfide.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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Super-Strong Graphene Has an Achilles' Heel

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Updated at 12:31 p.m. ET. Graphene is often touted as a miracle material- it easily conducts electricity and it's hundreds of times stronger than steel. But now tests of real-world samples of graphene show that while the carbon material is possibly the strongest material produced today, it's also as brittle as ordinary ceramic.

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The Future of Drones: Sky-High Hopes vs. Regulatory Realities

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The Future of Drones: Sky-High Hopes vs. Regulatory Realities

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Drones would be use to travel and to deliver thing in the future.

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Could the skies one day be blackened by drones? Advances in technology suggest so, though the U.S. may fall behind as the tech flounders in regulatory limbo.

Credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist

When Raphael Pirker needed overhead shots for a commercial he was filming at the University of Virginia, instead of spending thousands of dollars to rent a helicopter, he attached a camera to a 5-lb. (2.3 kilograms) model airplane, creating a custom drone to capture high-flying aerial views of the campus. A year earlier, the 29-year-old photographer piloted a similar drone around the Statue of Liberty in New York, buzzing the monument's iconic crown and recording stunning close-up views of Liberty Island and downtown Manhattan.

Drones have been used by the military for decades, but Pirker's videos offer a glimpse of just one possible way these robotic fliers could be used in the future. As advances in technology have made drones smaller and more accessible, their potential applications are extending far beyond their use as warfighters for the military or toys for hobbyists.

And people are taking notice. In December 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos created a buzz throughout the tech world when he introduced the idea of using drones to deliver goods to online shoppers. The proposal sparked people's imaginations for how drones could be used commercially - bringing to mind images of city skies full of delivery drones carrying parcels to people's doorsteps. [ 5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future]

The technology for this same-day delivery service, dubbed Prime Air, is already being tested, according to Amazon, but the futuristic endeavor hinges on forthcoming guidelines from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the regulatory agency charged with overseeing civil aviation.

A new industry

Still, Amazon is not the only company investigating future uses for drones. In late March, Facebook purchased Ascenta, a U.K.-based aerospace company that manufactures solar-powered drones, for $20 million. And earlier this month, Google acquired Titan Aerospace, a solar-powered drone company that Facebook had reportedly also been courting, for an undisclosed amount.

The tech giants are thought to be using their fleets of high-altitude, solar-powered drones to extend the reach of Internet connectivity across the entire planet.

But tech entrepreneurs, artists and innovators are noticing the power of drone technology as well. Like Pirker, Hollywood filmmakers say drones offer an inexpensive way to capture aerial footage without the noise and unavoidable vibrations of helicopters; nonprofit organizations are experimenting with using drones to deliver provisions or medical supplies to desperate communities in remote locations; conservationists are already using drones to monitor animals in the wild without disturbing their natural habitats; and private companies are developing drones to assist with disaster-relief and search-and-rescue operations.

"Robotics - including drones - is going to be one of the most important and influential technologies of the 21st century," John Villasenor, a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. "So it's not surprising that they have led to so much interest and discussions, not only in the business community but also more broadly."

While still a burgeoning industry, worldwide spending on drones is expected to more than double over the next decade, totaling just more than $89 billion by the year 2023, according to a market study published last year by Teal Group Corp., an aerospace and defense research company based in Fairfax, Va. In fact, the FAA estimates that as many as 7,500 small commercial drones could be operational within five years in the United States.

"We are going to see an explosion of drone entrepreneurship in the coming years," said Timothy Reuter, president of the D.C. Area Drone User Group, a community organization dedicated to teaching people how to build and operate personal drones. "Aerial photography and videography will be the gateway drug, but it's going to extend so far beyond that, and we're going to see people do really exciting things with this technology." [ How Unmanned Drone Aircraft Work (Infographic)]

What the future holds

But the road ahead could take more complicated efforts than merely tinkering with the technology and adjusting to the thought of seeing drones whiz by overhead, experts say. And it's Pirker who's been at the center of these discussions.

Pirker's aerial tours over lower Manhattan and the University of Virginia made him something of a pioneer, but the trailblazer is also at the heart of a decisive legal battle against the U.S. government.

In 2011, Pirker became the first and only drone operator fined by the FAA for flying a drone without a license. The agency fined Pirker $10,000 for his aerial stunt over the University of Virginia, claiming the photographer flew recklessly close to buildings and people. The first-of-its-kind penalty was appealed and brought before Patrick Geraghty, a federal judge with the National Transportation Safety Board. Last month, Geraghty ruled that despite the FAA's protestations, there are currently no laws in place banning commercial drones, and effectively dismissed the fine against Pirker.

The ruling was considered a victory for the burgeoning domestic drone industry, but it was just the beginning of a complex legal fight.

Pirker may have found himself at the vanguard of drone technology - what some predict could revolutionize the field of personal robotics - but he is hardly the only innovator who sees vast commercial potential for drones. Yet with the technology currently floundering in regulatory limbo, the United States may be in danger of falling behind in the industry, with innovation and the potential economic benefits from drones mired in bureaucracy, experts say.

"One of the things that's sad is the U.S. regulatory environment is really holding us back," Reuter told Live Science. "While the rest of the world is rapidly moving ahead, we are losing ground in international competitiveness."

Legal hurdles

The FAA, which did not respond by publish time to multiple requests for comment from Live Science, has barred the commercial use of drones until regulations are developed to ensure the unmanned aerial bots can be safely operated in cities, near buildings and people, and in the same airspace as manned aircraft. Late last year, the agency released a preliminary road map detailing its plan to adopt oversight of unmanned aircraft operations. Still, regulations for small drones that weigh less than 55 lbs. (25 kg) are expected no earlier than 2015, and it could be years later before rules are finalized for larger vehicles.

"In a way, drones have advanced so quickly that the law hasn't caught up with the technology," said Daniel Burrus, a technology futurist and the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a Wisconsin-based research and consulting firm. "Until we get a ruling, it's a bit like the Wild West."

Meanwhile, other countries - including Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom - have already enacted more favorable policies toward the development of drones and commercial applications of the technology, said Brendan Schulman, Pirker's attorney and a special counsel at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel in New York City.

In Japan, for instance, some farmers have been using a radio-controlled drone designed by the Yamaha Motor Co. to spray fertilizers and pesticides over crops for the past 20 years.

But there are regulatory bodies in other countries that are taking just as restrictive an approach to drones as the FAA, at least for the time being, Schulman said.

"Ours is not a unique position in the world, but it's certainly not progressive at all," he added. "There are countries that are far ahead of ours, in terms of supporting, promoting and authorizing the commercial use of drones." [ Photos from Above: 8 Cool Camera-Carrying Drones]

This is precisely why industry stakeholders are closely following the Pirker case, said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington in Seattle. Pirker's case represents the first time the legality of the FAA's commercial ban has been examined, and the outcome could have important implications for drone operators in the future.

Even though the judge ruled in Pirker's favor last month, the FAA has appealed the decision, and the ensuing legal process could alter the current regulatory environment and offer a glimpse into how the agency may handle the 2015 regulations.

"Pirker is a really good test case," Calo told Live Science. "Ultimately, I don't see a scenario where what the FAA does collapses the industry, but it could delay things and give other countries a competitive advantage. Arguably, it has already slowed the development of the industry."

Regulation vs. innovation

Still, regulations are a necessary part of integrating any type of emerging technology into societies, Burrus said.

"Whenever you have a new technology that could create a hazard or could hurt people, you need rules and regulations," he explained.

Amazon's "Prime Air" drones are being designed as a same-day delivery system.

Credit: Amazon.com

As part of the regulatory process, the FAA will also have to consider the limits of just how much commercial drone activity is safe. If Amazon's Prime Air is approved, Burrus said, what would stop other companies from following suit with similar delivery services? And if that's the case, would densely populated cities see swarms of drones constantly flying overhead?

"If this is happening over parts of the countryside, it might be fine, but if all these drones are flying over Manhattan, it could be crazy and, not to mention, dangerous," Burrus said.

The possible ubiquity of drones has also ignited debates about privacy rights. Advocacy groups worry that drones used in law enforcement, for example, could open the door to abuses of power.

"Our belief is that we need a system of rules to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of drone technology - and that includes the benefits with private uses of drones - without bringing us closer to a surveillance society," said Allie Bohm, an advocacy and policy strategist with the nonprofit American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a nonpartisan organization dedicated to defending the rights and liberties of Americans, based on the country's laws and Constitution.

Even hobbyist drones could be used for nefarious purposes, such as snooping on people, spying through windows or gaining unauthorized access to people's backyards, Bohm said.

Yet many of these issues fall under the purview of existing "Peeping Tom" laws and privacy torts, Schulman said. Many of the privacy concerns raised so far, he claims, have been knee-jerk responses to a new technology, and have strayed from the root of the problem.

"The reaction thus far has been to try to restrict or target the technology for regulation, as opposed to targeting the offensive conduct," Schulman said. "I think that's the wrong approach to have. We should certainly have discussions about privacy, but we need to focus on what really matters."

Finding a balance

To help with the regulatory process, the FAA selected six test sites across the country to conduct research on the certification and operational requirements needed to integrate drones into the national airspace. On April 21, the agency announced its first test site - a location in North Dakota - is now operational.

As the FAA crafts the rules that will shape the drone industry, the tricky part will be to find the appropriate balance between regulating against reckless behavior and allowing enough freedom for innovation to occur naturally within the rapidly advancing field, experts say.

Schulman's concern is that the FAA's rules will be too restrictive, which could create an unreasonable burden on the emerging technology. He compares the process unfolding now between the FAA and the commercial drone industry to what happened in the mid-1990s during the commercialization of the Internet, which was initially created as a tool for the government and the military.

"If, at that time, a federal agency said to the American public that they cannot commercialize the Internet until all regulations are in place concerning its use, it would have prevented many of the most valuable companies from emerging - everything from eBay to Yahoo to Google," Schulman said. "If the government had stood in the way of the commercial use of the Internet, it would have been very damaging to the American economy."

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The Future of Drones: Sky-High Hopes vs. Regulatory Realities

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When Raphael Pirker needed overhead shots for a commercial he was filming at the University of Virginia, instead of spending thousands of dollars to rent a helicopter, he attached a camera to a 5-lb. (2.3 kilograms) model airplane, creating a custom drone to capture high-flying aerial views of the campus.

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Sweaty Hands? New Fingerprinting Method Takes Pore Prints

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Sweaty Hands? New Fingerprinting Method Takes Pore Prints

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Finger printers are being updated with the purpose of making them more effective.

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Sweat pore imaging on a fingertip with a hydrochromic sensor film.

Credit: Kim et al

Criminals might not get away so easily, thanks to a new fingerprinting method that may be faster and more reliable than traditional methods, researchers say.

The method images the sweat pores in a human hand using a polymer that glows fluorescent and changes color when it comes in contact with tiny droplets of water. Only a small fraction of the fingerprint is needed to identify an individual, according to the new study.

"The sensor technology developed in this study has the potential of serving as a new method for fingerprint analysis and for the clinical diagnosis of malfunctioning sweat pores," the researchers wrote in the study, detailed today (April 29) in the journal Nature Communications. [ 5 Crazy Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech]

The idea of using sweat pores for fingerprinting isn't new, but this is the first time that fast, reliable and cheap methods have been available.

A team led by Jong-Man Kim, a chemical engineer at Hanyang University in South Korea, developed a new fingerprinting method that uses a simple color-changing polymer that can be deposited using an ink-jet printer. When a fingertip is pressed against it, the polymer changes color from blue to red and glows in the places where it comes into contact with sweat, producing a dotted pattern that constitutes a unique fingerprint.

Traditional fingerprinting, which captures the characteristic ridge patterns on the fingertip, requires a large area to produce a reliable print and is prone to error. In contrast, the sweat-pore method requires only a small fraction of the fingertip to match it to its owner and is more reliable, researchers said.

The new method could also be used to diagnose sweat-pore disorders, because it can distinguish functioning pores from nonfunctioning ones.

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Sweaty Hands? New Fingerprinting Method Takes Pore Prints

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Criminals might not get away so easily, thanks to a new fingerprinting method that may be faster and more reliable than traditional methods, researchers say. The method images the sweat pores in a human hand using a polymer that glows fluorescent and changes color when it comes in contact with tiny droplets of water.

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Earth Is Safe: No Black Holes Spun Out of Atom Smasher, Yet

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Earth Is Safe: No Black Holes Spun Out of Atom Smasher, Yet

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No black holes have been created yet.

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Even if an atom smasher were to create black holes, there is no danger of those dense objects destroying Earth, scientists say. Here, a black hole sucks in material from a companion star.

Credit: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA

The most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, has not yet created any black holes as some have feared, researchers say.

Even if this atom smasher does create black holes, there is no danger of those black holes destroying Earth, added scientists of the new study published online March 5 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Black holes get their names from their gravitational fields, which are so fiendishly powerful that nothing can escape, not even light. Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun are thought to lurk at the heart of virtually every galaxy. [ The Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth]

Quantum black holes

A black hole is normally thought to form when the remains of a dead star collapses under its own gravity, scrunching all that mass together. However, some researchers have suggested that " quantum black holes" - ones smaller than a proton - can exist if extra, hidden dimensions of reality also exist.

In theories aiming to describe how the cosmos works in its entirety, scientists have proposed that extra dimensions might exist. Currently, researchers have two disparate theories - general relativity and quantum mechanics - which, respectively, can mostly explain the nature of gravity and the behavior of the particles seen around the universe.

"Quantum theories of almost all of the forces around us, electricity and magnetism as well as the weak and strong nuclear forces, have been developed over the last 70 years and tested with high precision," said study author David Strom, a particle physicist at the University of Oregon at Eugene, who is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider. "It has been much more difficult to make progress on both theoretical and experimental aspects of a quantum theory of gravity," Strom said.

A number of quantum gravity theories propose that extra dimensions are folded up into sizes ranging from smaller than a proton to as big as a fraction of a millimeter. At distances comparable to the sizes of these extra dimensions, these models suggest that gravity could become far stronger than normal. If so, a powerful enough particle accelerator might concentrate enough mass and energy together to generate black holes. [ The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe]

When the most powerful atom smasher in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was coming online, scientists wondered if it might become a "black hole factory," generating a black hole as often as every second. Atomic nuclei - either those of hydrogen or lead - zip at high speeds around the 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular particle accelerator before colliding into targets at near the speed of light.

No chance of destroying Earth

The potential for a black hole factory raised fears that a stray black hole could devour our planet whole. However, any quantum black holes the Large Hadron Collider might generate would pose no risk to Earth.

To start with, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking calculated that all black holes should lose mass by emitting radiation, and that quantum black holes should lose more mass than they absorb, evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, before they could devour any significant amount of matter.

"If we detect quantum black holes, they will be among the most quickly decaying objects ever produced at an accelerator," Strom said. "They pose no threat to the Earth."

Even if Hawking is wrong, nearly all of the quantum black holes the particle accelerator would generate would be traveling fast enough from it to rip free of Earth's gravity. Furthermore, even if any quantum black holes do get trapped within the Earth, they are so tiny that it would take each one more than the current age of the universe to destroy even a milligram of Earth matter.

No quantum black holes seen

In any case, researchers now reveal they have not yet detected any sign of quantum black holes being created by the LHC.

Scientists running the particle accelerator's ATLAS detector - one of the two detectors involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson - performed an extensive search for quantum black holes by probing all the data from the atom smasher's most powerful collisions during 2012. Had quantum black holes been created, they would have decayed into pairs of particles and jets of radiation that ATLAS could detect.

These findings suggest that quantum black holes smaller than 5 trillion electron-volts do not exist - that is, about 5,330 times the mass of a proton.

"Our findings show that if these quantum black holes exist, they must be beyond the current energy reach of the LHC," Strom said.

In 2015, the LHC will restart and be capable of producing nearly twice the energy as it has in previous runs. This will help researchers see if heavier quantum black holes might exist, as well as extra dimensions of reality.

"We will be looking for quantum black holes from the first day that the LHC turns on at higher energy, early in 2015," Strom said.

Even if the production of quantum black holes is ultimately out of the LHC's reach, "there may be other, subtle effects of extra dimension theories that we can find in our data," Strom said. "It may also be that there are no extra dimensions, and that we need to seek different theories that explain why the force of gravity appears to be so different from the other forces that we observe in nature."

Some of these competing theories, such as supersymmetry, "predict particles that are candidates for the dark matter that we know forms most of the mass of our galaxy and that can also be produced at the LHC," Strom said. "It may be that we have already produced many of the these dark matter particles in our experiment, but we have not been clever enough to find them."

When the LHC upgrades to hurl particles with more energy and throw more particles at targets per run, "it should be easy to find these particles," Strom added.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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Earth Is Safe: No Black Holes Spun Out of Atom Smasher, Yet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, has not yet created any black holes as some have feared, researchers say. Even if this atom smasher does create black holes, there is no danger of those black holes destroying Earth, added scientists of the new study published online March 5 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future

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5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future

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Drones are being used for positve outcomes in the future.

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Author Bio

Denise Chow, Assistant Managing Editor

Denise Chow is the Assistant Managing Editor at Live Science. Before joining the Live Science team in 2013, she spent two years as a staff writer for Space.com, where she wrote about rocket launches and covered NASA's final three space shuttle missions. A Canadian transplant, Denise has a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, and a master's degree in journalism from New York University.

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5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Author Bio Denise Chow, Assistant Managing Editor Denise Chow is the Assistant Managing Editor at Live Science. Before joining the Live Science team in 2013, she spent two years as a staff writer for Space.com, where she wrote about rocket launches and covered NASA's final three space shuttle missions.

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Brain Cells Viewed 'Talking' at Molecular Level

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Brain Cells Viewed 'Talking' at Molecular Level

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Brain scans detect how the brain communicate.

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MRIs work by aligning the magnetic spin of the hydrogen molecules in the body.

Credit: Image courtesy of MGH-UCLA Human Connectome Project.

Brain scans are now starting to peer down to the molecular level, revealing what brain cells are telling one another, researchers say.

This new technique could illuminate the behavior of the human brain at its most fundamental level, yielding insights on disorders such as addiction, the scientists added. Right now the technique has been tested only on rats.

"This demonstrates a new way to study the brain - no one has ever mapped brain activity in this way before," said study author Alan Jasanoff, a bioengineer and neuroscientist at MIT.

One of the key ways researchers use to scan brains is magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. These scanners immerse people in strong magnetic fields and then hit them with radio waves, encouraging atoms - usually hydrogen atoms - to emit signals that yield insights on the body.

By using MRIs to look at the hydrogen atoms in water, scientists can follow the flow of blood in the brain, shedding light on brain activity. However, this strategy, known as functional MRI, or fMRI, essentially reveals only what parts of the brain are talking, not what different areas of the brain are saying to each other. [ See 3D Images of the Human Brain]

Now scientists are using novel molecules that can help them use fMRI to see what specific messages brain cells are sending each other.

The molecules they developed are based on a protein known as BM3h. "It's a heme protein, a type of protein that has an iron atom incorporated into its chemical structure, much like how the oxygen-carrying protein in your blood hemoglobin does," Jasanoff told Live Science. "The iron heart of BM3h is magnetically active, and can perturb the signal that water gives off during fMRI."

In past work, the researchers altered BM3h to make it capable of binding onto neurotransmitters, the chemicals that brain cells use to send messages to each other. When these proteins bind onto their targets, "you will then see a little dip in the fMRI signal," Jasanoff said.

One of the modified proteins, known as BM3h-9D7, latches onto the neurotransmitter dopamine, which plays a major role in behavior stimulated by rewards. "This protein acts like a sensor for dopamine," Jasanoff said.

In their latest work, Jasanoff and his colleagues injected BM3h-9D7 into the brains of rats to measure dopamine activity in the ventral striatum, a reward-processing brain region. "We then gave the animals little electrical jolts to that part of the brain, stimuli much like what one might see in drug addiction," Jasanoff said. [ Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time]

The scientists generated a 3D map of dopamine release in the brains of the rodents.

"We showed dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core, a brain region we knew was a target for dopamine, but seeing it as the brightest spot in the brain map was a new finding, one consistent with some previous results," Jasanoff said. "Our sensor also found evidence of dopamine release in parts of the brain not usually studied in invasive studies."

Although scientists did previously have ways of analyzing molecular activity in the brain, these are typically invasive strategies involving either cadaver brains or small portions of living brains. "Here, we're getting the best of both worlds - the level of detail one can get with invasive strategies and the chance to look at the whole brain with noninvasive strategies such as fMRI," Jasanoff said.

Jasanoff did caution that since BM3h-9D7 latches onto dopamine, it might somewhat disturb normal dopamine function in the brain, potentially skewing results. Still, he said the levels of BM3h-9D7 they use are much lower than the concentrations of dopamine at the synapses, the gaps between neurons where brain cells do most of their communication with each other.

The research team is now working on sensor proteins that bind to other neurotransmitters such as serotonin. However, there is currently no way to use several of these sensor proteins at the same time to track multiple neurotransmitters simultaneously. Essentially, these sensor proteins all look the same to fMRI, so researchers have no way of distinguishing the effects of one from another.

"You can think of them as not being different colors, but all the same color, so you can't tell them apart if you use more than one at once," Jasanoff said.

The researchers now aim to improve the sensitivity of their technique. "This can't be used on humans yet," Jasanoff said.

Ultimately, "we hope to use these sensors to study and help develop better models of the brain, such as models of how the brain behaves when learning a task, or better models of addiction," Jasanoff said. "Once we have better models of addiction, perhaps we can test treatments for addictions to different drugs."

The scientists detailed their findings in tomorrow's (May 2) issue of the journal Science.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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Brain Cells Viewed 'Talking' at Molecular Level

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Brain scans are now starting to peer down to the molecular level, revealing what brain cells are telling one another, researchers say. This new technique could illuminate the behavior of the human brain at its most fundamental level, yielding insights on disorders such as addiction, the scientists added.

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New State of Light Revealed in Photon-Trapping Method

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New State of Light Revealed in Photon-Trapping Method

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Alex Kruchkov, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, demonstrates how light can be trapped inside a system.

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Alex Kruchkov, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, demonstrates how light can be trapped inside a system, for example in a glass lens.

Credit: Alain Herzog/EPFL

A theoretical physicist has explained a way to capture particles of light called photons, even at room temperature, a feat thought only possible at bone-chillingly cold temperatures.

Alex Kruchkov, a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), has built the first quantitative mathematical model for trapping and condensing light under realistic conditions.

Light consists of tiny quantum particles called photons. One of the most spectacular properties of quantum particles is that they can condense or lose their individual identity and behave like clones of each other, becoming a single gigantic wave called a Bose-Einsteincondensate (BEC). [ Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

Usually, it happens at extremely low temperatures - less than a micro-kelvin, or a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. But "one of the most exciting things about the BEC of light is that it happens at room temperature," said Henrik Ronnow of EPFL, who didn't take part in the study.

If scientists could create this wave using photons, it could have significant applications in laser and solar panel technology.

Although Albert Einstein predicted BEC for massive particles in 1924, for a long time scientists considered it impossible to create a BEC made of light, because photons have no mass, which is a key requirement for a Bose-Einstein condensate.

'Light at the end of the tunnel'

In 2010, four physicists from Bonn University in Germany turned this assumption on its head. The scientists -Jan Klaers, Julian Schmitt, Frank Vewinger and Martin Weitz - successfully condensed photons in a micro-cavity made of two mirror surfaces positioned close to one another. A photon trapped in such a cavity behaves as if it had mass; in other words, the cavity creates a "trapping potential," keeping the photons from escaping.

However, to verify a scientific finding, it must be possible for others to reproduce the experiment. Four years after the 2010 success, though, no one has yet been able to do so for the micro-cavity results, said Kruchkov.

"Understanding of the condensation of photons was like the light at the end of the tunnel. Experimentalists were waiting for some simple but effective model, containing 'a recipe' to 'cook' light condensates," he said.

So Kruchkov created a recipe. Using mathematics and building on previous models, the physicist developed a theoretical model for condensing light in three-dimensional space and under realistic conditions.

"Additionally, I showed that the energy of light can be accumulated in the condensed state of photons," he said.

The researcher says his model of photon condensation explains experimental measurements very nicely - showing that photons can indeed be captured in a Bose-Einstein condensate state, and at room temperature and pressure.

"Now, it is actually possible to predict the behavior of the system for other experimental conditions. It also explains the temperature reaction of the experimental setup," he said. "I show all the stages of the process that one needs to know to reproduce these experiments.

"So in principle, if you know how to deal with a laser without hurting yourself, you can conduct the experiments even in your backyard," he added.

Physicist SergiyKatrych, also at the EPFL but not involved in the study,said the research was important primarily because a Bose-Einstein condensate of photons would represent a totally new state of light. "In some sense, the BEC of light is a bridge between light and matter - the bridge unknown before."

A paper detailing Kruchkov's research appears in the journal Physical Review A.

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New State of Light Revealed With Photon-Trapping Method

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A theoretical physicist has explained a way to capture particles of light called photons, even at room temperature, a feat thought only possible at bone-chillingly cold temperatures. Alex Kruchkov, a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), has built the first quantitative mathematical model for trapping and condensing light under realistic conditions.

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Human Brain Microchip Is 9,000 Times Faster Than a PC

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Human Brain Microchip Is 9,000 Times Faster Than a PC

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Scientist developed a microchip faster than a common PC.

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Bioengineer Kwabena Boahen's Neurogrid can simulate one million neurons and billions of synaptic connections.

Credit: Screenshot, Stanford University

Despite advances in computing, today's computers remain far less efficient than the 3-lb. (2.3-kg) hunk of matter in our skulls. But a new microchip modeled on the human brain is much faster and more efficient than a typical computer, researchers report.

The microchip - called " Neurogrid" - could open up windows into understanding the human brain and developing new forms of computing patterned after brain circuits. Researchers are now investigating how these chips could be used to control prosthetic limbs.

"From a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match," Kwabena Boahen, the bioengineer at Stanford University who led the chip's development, said in a statement. Not only are personal computers slower, they take 40,000 times more power than the brain to run, Boahen said. [ Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Neurogrid consists of 16 custom-designed Neurocore chips in a device the size of an iPad, which can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synapses, or brain connections. That's a vast improvement over previous brain simulations, but still only a fraction of the roughly 80 billion neurons in a human brain, researchers said.

Neurogrid uses about 9,000 times less power than a typical PC, by having synapses share hardware circuits, and about the same amount of power as a tablet.

In addition to modeling the human brain, Boahen is working with other Stanford researchers to adapt Neurogrid for controlling prosthetic limbs for paralyzed people. The chip would translate brain signals into movements of the limb, without overheating the brain. Another possible application is using Neurogrid to control humanoid robots.

Currently, programming the chip requires an understanding of how the brain works. But Boahen wants to create a "neurocompiler" that would let engineers and computer scientists with no neuroscience knowledge to program Neurogrid.

The Stanford team's work is just one of many efforts to model the human brain using computers. The European Union's Human Brain Project aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. The U.S. BRAIN Initiative (short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) takes a more general approach, developing new tools for measuring neuron and brain circuit activity.

IBM's SyNAPSE project (short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) aims to design chips, called Golden Gate chips, modeled after the vast number of connections among neurons in the brain that help it solve problems efficiently. Each Golden Gate chip consists of 256 digital neurons with 1,024 digital synapses each, and the company plans to increase these numbers.

Germany's Heidelberg University has its BrainScales project, which aims to create analog chips that mimic neurons and synapses that could model drug interactions at a faster rate than currently possible. Researchers have developed the HICANN chip (short for High Input Count Analog Neural Network), which can simulate 512 neurons with 224 synapses each, which they also plan to expand soon.

These various efforts have made different trade-offs in capability and performance, but Neurogrid was the most cost-effective, Boahen said.

The prototype Neurogrid chip cost about $40,000 to make, but researchers hope to cut the cost 100-fold using modern manufacturing techniques. Even so, modeling the human brain at the same energy efficiency remains a major challenge, according to researchers.

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Human Brain Microchip Is 9,000 Times Faster Than a PC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite advances in computing, today's computers remain far less efficient than the 3-lb. (2.3-kg) hunk of matter in our skulls. But a new microchip modeled on the human brain is much faster and more efficient than a typical computer, researchers report.

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Canine 2.0: Dogs in High-Tech Gear Could Aid Search-and-Rescue Efforts

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Canine 2.0: Dogs in High-Tech Gear Could Aid Search-and-Rescue Efforts

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High technological vestments are used with dogs to detect survivors.

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The high-tech harnesses can monitor environmental pollutants, monitor the dogs' wellbeing or relay commands.

Credit: Alper Bozkurt

High-tech-equipped dogs could be deployed as a fleet of roving sensors in a disaster zone to locate victims quickly and easily while relaying data about environmental hazards and other information in real time, scientists say.

Researchers are developing sophisticated harnesses for rescue dogs that aid in disaster relief and recovery. The vests are equipped with sensors and communication devices to help rescue teams leverage the dogs as part of a coordinated response.

After a disaster in a populated urban area, rescue teams must race to find and rescue people trapped in the rubble. Although well-trained search-and-rescue dog-and-handler teams are becoming increasingly critical to locating trapped survivors, they are still relatively rare, the researchers said. [ 10 Surprising Facts About Dogs]

"We have developed techniques and technological platforms to improve the efficiency of search-and-rescue dog training and to augment the current capabilities of search-and-rescue dogs in the field," Alper Bozkurt and David Roberts, researchers at North Carolina State University, told Live Science in an email.

Bozkurt and Roberts are part of a multi-institutional team that developed the Smart Emergency Response System (SERS), a coordinated group of humans, dogs, robots and drones that work together to find and save people during an emergency.

High-tech harnesses

The researchers modified off-the-shelf harnesses to combine microphones, cameras and environmental sensors that could transmit data from a disaster area.

The harnesses could be customized depending on the situation. For example, if there was a natural-gas leak, the harness could be fitted with a natural-gas sensor. Or, if there were radiation, a Geiger counter could be attached.

The vests also include sensors that can monitor the dog's behavior and physiology, such as a heart-rate monitor, to track the dog's health or determine if the dog found a scent or object of interest.

The high-tech harnesses aren't meant to replace dog handlers, but rather to work with them. Wireless communications devices could send information about the environment or the dogs' well-being to a command center or to dog handlers nearby.

The researchers embedded communication technology into the harness - speakers and vibration devices - so that handlers could remotely relay commands to the animals, such as "perform a search" or "return back." They are training the animals to respond to nudges from the vest, "like a vibrating cellphone," using reward-based training.

Dogs do what robots can't

The harness technology will be especially useful for times when search-and-rescue dogs are sent off-leash to explore larger areas or to climb rubble piles away from their handlers, the researchers said.

Dogs can perform tasks that today's robots can't, Bozkurt and Roberts said. For instance, robots can't match the dogs' cognitive capacity, eyesight, hearing range or sense of smell, all of which remain efficient even after long hours in dangerous environments. In addition, the animals can climb obstacles and locate victims easily and accurately, the researchers said.

This summer, the SERS team will compete against 20 other teams in the Smart America Challenge, a competition to highlight state-of-the-art innovations from U.S. research that will be held in Washington, D.C.

"We are still in the testing process, and our preliminary results are very promising," Bozkurt and Roberts wrote.

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Canine 2.0: Dogs in High-Tech Gear Could Aid Search-and-Rescue Efforts

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High-tech-equipped dogs could be deployed as a fleet of roving sensors in a disaster zone to locate victims quickly and easily while relaying data about environmental hazards and other information in real time, scientists say. Researchers are developing sophisticated harnesses for rescue dogs that aid in disaster relief and recovery.

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US Army Testing Pilotless Black Hawk Helicopter

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US Army Testing Pilotless Black Hawk Helicopter

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The U.S.A army is testing new technological advances with black hawk helicopters.

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An unmanned Black Hawk helicopter could one day deliver cargo autonomously.

Credit: Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.

The U.S. Army is testing an unmanned version of its famous Black Hawk helicopter. The pilotless, 5-ton drone could one day be used to deliver cargo and supplies to troops autonomously.

The so-called Optionally Piloted Black Hawk (OPBH) Demonstrator, built by defense contractor Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., completed its first test flight on March 11. Ground controllers demonstrated crucial flight operations, and engineers tested the aircraft's ability to hover over ground autonomously.

"The autonomous Black Hawk helicopter provides the commander with the flexibility to determine crewed or un-crewed operations, increasing sorties while maintaining crew rest requirements," Mark Miller, vice president of research and engineering at Sikorsky, said in a statement. [ 5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future]

Helicopter drones could also help the Army reduce troop size and lower operational costs, Miller added.

"This allows the crew to focus on the more 'sensitive' operations, and leaves the critical resupply missions for autonomous operations without increasing fleet size or mix," Miller said.

The helicopter is part of Sikorsky's Manned/Unmanned Resupply Aerial Lifter, or MURAL, program. The Connecticut-based aircraft manufacturer has been working on the technology since 2007, and last year, was awarded funding from the Army to expand its research and development efforts.

These technologies are designed to "enhance the capability, affordability, readiness and safety of Department of Defense aviation systems," William Lewis, director of the U.S. Army Aviation Development Directorate, said in a statement.

"The optionally piloted Black Hawk helicopter functionality stands to bring added value to [Department of Defense] aviation systems, through the innovations being tested on the Black Hawk helicopter in the MURAL program," Lewis said.

Sikorsky is incorporating systems and software from its Matrix Technology research program to improve the reliability and safety of autonomous, or optionally piloted, aircraft.

At the core of the company's Matrix Technology program is Sikorsky's Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA), an unmanned helicopter designed to test cutting-edge drone technologies. The SARA helicopter first flew on July 26, 2013, but continues to be an important platform for testing high-tech systems that require minimal human oversight, according to Sikorsky officials.

"Applying Matrix Technology to an already robust, reliable, and safe platform leverages these capabilities while expanding the system's effectiveness," Miller said.

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US Army Testing Pilotless Black Hawk Helicopter

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The U.S. Army is testing an unmanned version of its famous Black Hawk helicopter. The pilotless, 5-ton drone could one day be used to deliver cargo and supplies to troops autonomously. The so-called Optionally Piloted Black Hawk (OPBH) Demonstrator, built by defense contractor Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., completed its first test flight on March 11.