Technology that a decade ago would be considered as science fiction
There are creations that have made everyday applications in, medicine, space exploration, the kitchen and home as well as in every avenue of industry, faster and more efficient. Only a decade ago, some of these would have been considered science fiction and figments of imagination but today they are real. Take a look at 10 new technologies that will blow you away completely.
Electronic Skin
The first generation prototype of E-Skin was first developed by the Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, School of Engineering, in the University of Tokyo. Today it has advanced into featuring skin that is extremely light and can be worn on regular skin like an artificial tattoo. E-skin even mimics itself and can repair itself.
It consists of pressure and temperature sensitive material that can even stretch like normal skin. It also contains an electronic circuit that is extremely thin perhaps ten times thinner than a human skin cell and contains biological sensors that can perform a number of functions. The E skin is attached using a process called the Van Der Vals method where no adhesive is used but rather depends on the attraction between molecules. The E-skin circuit uses solar cells to remain charged.
E-skin can be used in mobile technology and robotics
While the main aim of E skin is to be used for prosthetic and robotic arms. Scientists also plan to use it to detect valuable information in the human body that will go a long way into providing medical information of a patient, athletes and workers. Moreover, scientists say that E skin technology can also be integrated with the functions of cell phones and other IT gadgets. Imagine you could be wearing your phone as a thin layer of skin instead
Light Fidelity
Imagine a WIFI signal which is 100 times faster and can give you speeds of 224 gigabytes per second. If you thought that was amazing, then consider the same being provided through your LED light bulbs used at home. That’s astounding and has been aptly coined as “LI-FI”.
Research successfully transmitted data at a rate of 224 gigabytes per second and has implemented the technology in industrial applications in Estonia where the rate of 1 GB per second was achieved. In the initial research phase when the technology was first invented, creator Harald Haas from Edinburgh University, Scotland demonstrated the application of LIFI at 224 GB per second using a light flickering at speeds that no human eye could detect to transmit the data. This is almost like 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded in one second.
Transparent Aluminum Armor
Aluminum armor has the potential to stop a .50 caliber BMG armor piercing bullet. That’s like the Elvish armor worn by Frodo in LOTR. Known as ALON (aluminum oxynitrate), it is a compound consisting of aluminum, oxygen and nitrogen.
Today it is the hardest transparent ceramic substance known to man. The substance can be used in production of windows, automobiles, domes, rods and tubes. It is transparent and as hard as a sapphire that can withstand heated temperatures upto 2,100 degrees centigrade.
Color-Changing Contact Lenses for Monitoring Glucose Levels
Can you imagine the scope of such technology in saving millions of lives and also making life for diabetics more convenient? The color changing lenses technology was created by Professor Jin Zhang Chemical and Biochemical Engineering professor from the University of Western Ontario. The technology used engineered nanoparticles embedded in hydrogel lenses that were engineered to react with glucose molecules found in tears. Each time sugar levels rose or fell a chemical reaction would make the lenses change color.
The technology called multifunctional nanocomposites also has other applications like food technology where nanocomposite wrapping film can keep oxygen, carbon dioxide and moisture from food or be used to measure toxicity levels and detect contamination. Research is still continuing and expects the application to go commercial in 2020.
Wireless Energy Transmission
Research in Japan has successfully delivered 1.8 KW of power to a facility 55 meters away using microwaves and no wires. The wireless technology research has become a prime subject of focus for Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency or JAXA where solar power satellites is integrated with capabilities to harness solar power and beam it back for use on earth using microwaves.
The process converts solar energy to DC and then to microwave. It then reconverts to DC after which it is delivered to its target as AC current. The process has been found to be 80% efficient with negligible loss of power in the process.
JAXA is now planning to deploy a 10,000 metric ton geosynchronous solar collector which will be located 36,000 km from earth. AN operational plant with the capacity of 1 gigawatt hopes to go commercial by 2013.
Transparent Solar Panels
Transparent solar panels are a brainchild of a research team at Michigan State University that used organic salts with a high capacity to absorb nonvisible wavelengths. The TLSC enables the passage of light to pass through and use UV and infrared light to generate power instead. Lead researcher Richard Lunt said they could be implemented from anywhere, a rooftop or even used to power electric cars. The technology uses materials that pick up UV light and near-infrared wavelengths which are then guided to a surface edge where it would be converted to electricity by the thin strips of Photovoltaic cells.
The system uses materials to pick up ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths, which are guided to the edge of the surface they are on for it to be converted into electricity by thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells.
According to Professor Lunt’ “We will see commercial products become available over the next few years,” Richard Lunt, an associate professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at MSU, tells Newsweek. “We are just beginning to hit performance metrics that make sense to scale up.”
Femto-Photography: lightning speed photography
MIT researchers have invented an imaging system that acquires data at speeds beyond anyone’s imagination. 1 trillion exposures a second is what the system is capable of acquiring and uses a process called Femto-photography. The technology was a result of research carried out by Ramesh Sarkar at the MIT Media Lab and a joint collaboration with Graphics and Imaging Lab at Zaragoza University, Spain. The process used a streak camera that was synchronized to a pulsed laser modified for capturing 2D images rather than a single scan line.
The technique allowed researchers to capture extremely short exposures in which light talked just0.6mm within that period. The technique was also capable of reconstructing and capturing images in corners outside of the line of sight or in this case camera.
5D Glass Discs
Imagine a tiny little glass disc that can store 360 TB of data. Not only that, UK scientists have created these glass discs to store data in 5D for 13.8 billion years and can withstand temperatures of up to 1000 degrees centigrade.
Much like the femto-camera, researchers at Southampton University created femtosecond laser writing technology in 2013 where the ultrafast laser using short intense pulses of light wrote data in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by 0.005mm. Dubbed the superman memory crystal, it can be used in large applications like national data, archiving, libraries and as researcher Peter Kazansky said "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we've learned will not be forgotten."
Oxygen producing leaf
Well, it’s a synthetic one of course but the biological leaf is a major breakthrough made by suspending chloroplasts in a silk protein matrix which then absorbs water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen like a natural plant and could also be used in space travel.
The synthetic oxygen producing plant will help NASA as interplanetary exploration is slowly becoming a reality and such technology will improve life in space. Called the Melchiorri Silk leaf it was created by Julian Melchiorri from a matrix of protein extracted from silk and chloroplasts which is the substance that enables plants to perform the process of photosynthesis in which oxygen is produced.
According to Melchiorri, it is extremely light and consumes low energy and moreover, although synthetic, it is also completely biological. Melchiorri also used the technology to create lighting for his house and to produce oxygen.
Aerogel
Mange new technologies is Aerogel where An object coated with an Aerogel block can be heated to 2,200 degrees centigrade and held by bare hands. That’s Aerogel for you. Aerogel is an ultralight porous material; created from a gel whose liquid component is substituted with gas. A similar silica Aerogel was also used to coat the Mars rover.
Aerogel is also called frozen smoke or solid cloud and is solid with low thermal conductivity and low density where the liquid component of the gel is extracted by a process of supercritical drying. Aerogel was first created in 1931 but has evolved to the lighter aero-graphene that has the density of air at room temperature.
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