Tag Archives: Technology

IEEE Spectrum, News

Machine Vision Sees Into Chickens’ Futures

A jump to the left and a step to the right are signs of healthy activity, as chicken farmers who stroll among their flocks already know. Now a team led by robotics engineer Stephen Roberts at the University of Oxford has found that patterns in the collective motion of a flock of chickens can help farmers predict disease weeks before onset. Call it a chicken time warp.

Roberts and animal-welfare researchers at Oxford first tested their pattern-detection system by asking it to warn farmers before a flock got “peckish.” That’s not a euphemism for “hungry.” Well-fed hens, it turns out, sometimes take out their worm-hunting instincts on one another. The system, which consisted of cameras recording a flock, followed by computer analysis of the footage, beat human experts at flagging the at-risk flocks before the madness took its toll [“Computer System Counters Hen Horrors,” September 2010].

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News, Technology Review

Biometric Bracelet Lets a Medical Device Recognize its Wearer

A device that measures someone’s unique response to a weak electric signal could let medical devices such as blood-pressure cuffs automatically identify the wearer and send measurements straight to his or her electronic medical record.

For now, nurses, patients, and doctors juggle the job of keeping patients’ identities straight. But computer scientist Cory Cornelius at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, has developed a wristwatch-like device that measures a person’s “bioimpedance” to identify him or her to medical monitoring devices.

Cornelius and colleagues presented a prototype sensor at the Usenix Advanced Computing System Association workshop in Bellevue, Washington, on Monday. Individual impedance varies because each person’s wrist, for example, is a unique jumble of bone, flesh, and blood vessels. Continue reading Biometric Bracelet Lets a Medical Device Recognize its Wearer →

IEEE Spectrum, News

Lithium-Air Batteries Get a Recharge

Lithium, the lightest metal, when paired with oxygen from the atmosphere, makes for a tantalizing partnership in a lightweight battery. In theory, this “lithium-air battery” offers several times the energy per kilogram of today’s lithium-ion batteries. But so far, in laboratory tests the lithium gets distracted by dead-end chemical reactions that prevent the batteries from recharging. A one-shot battery is fine for a wristwatch, but not for a next-generation electric vehicle.

Last month, researchers in Rome and Seoul, South Korea, reported designing a lithium-air battery that did not have the recharging problem, achieving approximately 100 charge and discharge cycles with little capacity loss. And this week, a research team led by chemist Peter Bruce of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, reports in the journal Science a differently designed lithium-air battery that reached 100 cycles, losing only 5 percent of its capacity in the process. Bruce says that these recent results show that lithium-air batteries can sustain “a truly reversible reaction.” The group measured the mix of chemicals involved, showing that the lithium was really being recycled through a reversible substance, lithium peroxide (Li2O2), during each charge and discharge. Continue reading Lithium-Air Batteries Get a Recharge →

News, Technology Review

Iceland exports energy as data

Iceland’s main exports are aluminum and fish. Now the isolated nation is hoping to offer the world a new commodity: a cheap, guiltless way to store its data.

In February, a startup called Verne Global opened a large server farm on an old NATO base near Iceland’s main airport and began offering “100% renewable” computing services to the rest of the world. It’s one of three data centers in Iceland and part of what Iceland’s government hopes will be a new local industry. Continue reading Iceland exports energy as data →