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Scientists demonstrate a low-power “wake-up” receiver one-tenth the size of other devices.

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This is according to a press release by the University of Chicago published last week.

As a ‘smart knee’ that transmits data rolls out, medical specialists and engineers predict sensors will be added to artificial hips, shoulders and spinal implants.

The team developed a cyclical process in which the device is rinsed with water, dried in relatively low heat, and printed on again.

In the electronics industry, placing several layers of components on top of each other to develop complex devices is no easy task. And with printed electronics, the task is more complicated.

“If you’re making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, one layer on either slice of bread is easy,” Aaron Franklin, the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke, said in a statement. “But if you put the jelly down first and then try to spread peanut butter on top of it, forget it, the jelly won’t stay put and will intermix with the peanut butter.

Continue reading “Researchers print fully recyclable electronics that replace toxic chemicals with water” »

Summary: Researchers found a way to assess consciousness without external stimulation, using a little-used approach where volunteers squeeze a force sensor with their hand when they breathe in and release it when they breathe out, resulting in more precise and sensitive measurements that may help improve treatment for insomnia and coma reversal.

Source: picower institute for learning and memory.

Studies of consciousness often run into a common conundrum of science—it’s hard to measure a system without the measurement affecting the system. Researchers assessing consciousness, for instance as volunteers receive anesthesia, typically use spoken commands to see if subjects can still respond, but that sound might keep them awake longer or wake them up sooner than normal.

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second.

To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.

Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.

The first SPAD camera.

TOKYO, April 3, 2023—Canon Inc. announced today that the company is developing the MS-500, the world’s first¹ ultra-high-sensitivity interchangeable-lens camera (ILC) equipped with a 1.0 inch Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) sensor² featuring the world’s highest pixel count of 3.2 megapixels³. The camera leverages the special characteristics of SPAD sensors to achieve superb low-light performance while also utilizing broadcast lenses that feature high performance at telephoto-range focal lengths. Thanks to such advantages, the MS-500 is expected to be ideal for such applications as high-precision monitoring.

“Clinical cases of infections caused by C. auris almost doubled in 2021, according to research published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine. And the number of cases resistant to echinocandins, the first-line treatment for C. auris infections, tripled. While the fungus generally isn’t a threat for healthy people, it can be dangerous for those with weakened or compromised immune systems, and people using feeding tubes or catheters—in other words, a large proportion of patients in hospitals. The fungus can cause a bloodstream infection whose symptoms include fever, chills, sweats, and low blood pressure. It’s still rare in the U.S., but roughly one in three patients with an invasive infection will die from it; the fungus poses an “urgent threat,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Here’s a scenario that may sound familiar to fans of the postapocalyptic TV drama ‘The Last of Us’: a hard-to-kill fungus is beginning to spread among—and infect—vulnerable populations. Only this time, it’s real.

In the pearly light of the pocket nucleo-bulb…’ — Isaac Asimov, 1951.

Cheap Paper-Based Sensors Let You Snoop For Pesticides ‘…the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers.’ — Frank Herbert, 1965.

Modern App Provides Video Technology From Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ ‘A special spot-wavex scrambler also caused his televised image, in the area immediately about his lips, to mouth the vowels and consonants beautifully.’ — Ray Bradbury, 1953.