While today's high-efficiency washing machines use far less water than their predecessors, they still consume between 10 and 24 gallons of water per loadand as much as 9,000 gallons per US household per year. That's a lot of water just for cleaning clothes, especially with the growing drought conditions throughout the American West. But Xeros' revolutionary washing machines could reduce our laundry water usage to a trickle, using... plastic beads?
Developed by Stephen Burkinshaw at the University of Leeds, the Xeros washing machine leverages the mechanical force of specially designed polymer beads, rather than water, to loosen and lift soil stains from fabrics.
As the Xeros website explains:
In any textile cleaning process the combination of mechanical action on the cloth, chemistry from detergents and temperature to activate this, all act together over the wash cycle. The higher the action, the more detergent and the higher the temperature used, generally the better the cleaning. Large amounts of water are required too, to allow the suspension of the soil and its removal, and then again during rinsing.
Xeros takes these elements required for good cleaning, and completely reinvents them. The polymer beads provide a gentle, uniform mechanical action on the cloth, aiding the removal of stain and soil. Their hydrophobic nature allows better removal of oily and greasy stains than with water based systems, and their polar surface chemistry attracts and retains all types of stain as it is transported away from the cloth surface. Some polymers even have the ability to absorb stains into their molecular structure.
As a result, great cleaning can be achieved at lower temperatures, and with less detergent than has previously been possible. Water acts as a lubricant in the Xeros process rather than as the main wash medium, and hence much less water is required. Rinse water too is reduced, as there is less detergent to be rinsed away.
So instead of pouring gallons of water into every load, the Xeros requires just a small cup full of water and detergent. What's more, the beads can be reused over and over, for up to six months (roughly 100 loads), before being recycled. Consumers stand to save up to 47 percent in electricity costs and 72 percent in water usage.
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The Xeros machines are already used by a small number of professional cleaners, athletic clubs, and Hyatt hotelsbut they're expected to hit the wider consumer market over the next few years.
The use of 3D printers has allowed Nike's designers to prototype and test new footwear designs with a remarkably quick turnaround. And the latest shoe born from that new process is the Vapor HyperAgility cleat featuring re-engineered studs that Nike claims will give football players the necessary grip to explode off the line, but also stop and turn on a dime to evade an opponent.
Nike has been prototyping shoes using 3D printers for a while now, and the first shoe produced using that process was the Vapor Laser Talon cleat that was only made available to a handful of athletes. It served as a proof of concept more than anything, but that shoeand the innovative process behind its creationwent on to inspire the Vapor Carbon 2014 Elite cleat which was actually worn by football players during this year's Super Bowl, and this new cleat that's also destined for the gridiron.
The Vapor HyperAgility cleat features an aggressive-looking tri-star stud design that Nike believes will give football players the speed they need for running down the field, while at the same time providing extra grip for making sudden stops and direction changes while playing on artificial turf.
Engineered to improve an athlete's time during a 5-10-5 or 'shuttle' drill, the Vapor HyperAgility's studs are almost engineered to serve as brakes as much as they provide extra traction when it's time to accelerate. And it's not just the bottom of the shoe that helps an athlete's performance. The shoe's upper is made using Nike's woven Flywire cabling which is threaded through the cleat itself to help prevent slippage during a dash, while a compression collar inside the shoe helps it tightly hug your foot without feeling the studs underneath.
Not surprisingly, these aren't shoes you're going to find on the shelf at your local Foot Lockernot that you'd want to wear them around all day anyways. And as for pricing, the Vapor HyperAgile cleats are most likely targeted at well-funded NFL teams who are happy to spend whatever's needed to get their team to the Super Bowl.
Oh baby. The US Navy is saying a prototype of the solid state Laser Weapons System (LaWS) is ready for deployment. This summer in the Persian Sea, the USS Ponce will be outfitted with lasers that can shoot down aerial drones, speedboats and swarm boats that are miles away. It's going to be Star Wars in the open sea.
It's a big leap forward not only because of the pew pew-aspect but because it'll save, excuse me, boat loads of money. The lasers only need 30 kilowatts of energy and one sailor to operate it. Compare that to today, where Discover Magazine says current weaponry cost about $1.4 million a shot.
Lasers don't work well when it's rainy or dusty or cloudy but here's some test footage that we've previously seen of the LaWS. It shows a drone burning up from the power of lasers:
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And like the top image, here is the laser when it was set up as a "technology demonstrator":
Growing older comes with a few nice things. Knowledge evolves into wisdom. Context informs perspective. A long life's ups and downs are woven into a rich tapestry of memories. But it also comes with a number of consequences that almost everyone would just as soon avoid. Footing becomes unsure. Bones grow fragile. A task as simple as rising from bed or navigating a room becomes fraught with danger when a fall could mean a broken hip or being unable to get up again.
Such a fall is among the great fears of caretakers, whether it's a relative or a nursing home. What if no one is home when the accident happens? How will a nurse know if the injured person has tumbled to the ground on the far side of the bed?
A German startup is offering a high-tech monitoring system for this problem, which is set to grow more urgent as the developed world begins dealing with a spike in senior citizens. The company has developed an advanced, conductive textile floor covering they call SensFloor that detects when people are walking or lying on it. The innovation is already alerting European nursing homes when a senior has fallen.
"The floor is the best place to discover what a person is doing," says Axel Steinhage, research and development director of Future-Shape. "Except when you're sleeping, you're always in contact with this surface called the floor. I feel it's strange that people don't use this surface for more sensor information input."
Sensing your field
Their flooring is a polyester fleece textile measuring just eight-hundredths of an inch in thickness. They use an ordinary textile production process to laminate a thin, conductive piece of metal into the fleece to make patterns like those found on circuit boards. Some parts of the pattern become sensor fields and others become conductive lanes. These are connected to embedded radio modules that communicate real-time data to the system's cigarette-box-sized controller.
These whole-floor sensors measure capacitance, changes to the local electric field caused by a person or any other conductive object coming near them. It's the same phenomenon your touchscreen device uses to tell where your finger is tapping. "When I come toward the floor sensors, the electric field rises and sensors can detect it," says Steinhage. "The sensor then puts out a message saying something is nearby."
Based on the area of the disturbance to the electric field, the sensors and the wireless controller can tell if a person is standing on the floor or lying on it. It can also detect the direction and velocity of movement across the floor. Because the device doesn't work on physical contact, it can be laid under regular flooring like carpet, tile or wood.
It can also tell the number, location and movement of several people, including those in wheelchairs. Because water is a conductor, it can monitor for liquid spills, and can be tasked to control lights and automatic doors when a person draws near. These capabilities, Steinhage says, mean the system could also be used for home and business security or to analyze how long a customer stands in front of a display, signaling the goods that most attract attention in stores.
He presented the company's work refining how the system analyzes capacitance data at this month's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"The floor knows where the person is and that he's not in his bed. We can exactly tell about the situation in the room," he says. "Wherever the person is, the sensor detects the increase in capacitance. In essence, the whole room becomes a touchscreen."
Assistive tech with a significant price tag
SensFloor is an expensive investment, though the company asks that the technology be considered, and compared to, a home automation system rather than flooring. The price stands at around $270 for every 11 square feet, which means an average apartment costs around $27,000 for full coverage. Steinhage estimates that if they scale their production up to higher volumes of the textile, they could get the price down to around $68 for every 11 square feet.
Future-Shape argues that SensFloor is a better alternative to motion sensors because people move in their sleep enough to require very sensitive detectors. Also, such monitors must keep lights on beyond when they no longer detect motion because a person might just be standing still. And not many people are interested in being monitored by video cameras, especially in the bathroom where many falls occur, even if such devices are automated and running image-processing algorithms.
So far, the system has been installed in 20 facilities, research institutes and homes in European countries. The latest, laid down in 2012 to cover almost 14,000 square feet of living space, is now monitoring 70 rooms in a nursing home in Alsace, France. The system turns on lights when a resident first puts feet on the floor and calls to the nurses' station when it detects a fall.
"In the first four months, we had 28 falls discovered by our system and none were false alarms," Steinhage says. "One nurse told us that she wouldn't have seen one of the falls because the person fell on the far side of the bed where she wouldn't have been discovered."
Do you ever feel like lights don't move enough? That's a serious question! After all, humans are constantly in motionso wouldn't it make sense for our lights to follow?
Thibaut Sld certainly thinks so. The Canadian designer's latest project aims to be the ultimate interactive lighting system. It involves wand-shaped fixtures made of cast polyurethane resin that are tricked out with LEDs, motion sensors, and motorized widgets. The idea is that the lights raise or lower based on who's in the room and what they're doing. Several fixtures can be used to create dynamic arrangements.
It's hard to tell how well the system works without trying it out. Boy, are they pretty, though. The fixtures themselves are like a high art version of the nasty fluorescent lights in your elementary school, and the technology itself is nothing short of space age. Even the exploding, animated GIFs that Thibaut posted on his website to show how the hardware is built are total eye candy. Here's the light fixture:
Here's the wench:
There's no word yet on when they'll be availablebut if you're really desperate, you could always grab a motion sensor, a fluorescent light, and tiny motor and get to work.
Who of us hasn't wished for their own Purple Crayon like Harold's? While this new graphite-based piezoresistive sensor won't make your home come alive with creatures from your imagination, it will provide an inexpensive, easily-applied means of measuring mechanical stresses. You'll just need a pencil and paper.
Piezoresistive sensors (PZRs) quantify mechanical stress by measuring a drop in resistance that occurs when the sensor is put under strainthat is, the more force that's applied, the more the sensor's electrical resistance drops. They're commonly used as pressure sensors and accelerometers. Typically, PZRs are made of silicon, which produces very accurate readings but is relatively expensive to manufacture. Recently, however, a team from Cheng Shiu University in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, discovered that regular graphitelike, from pencilscan be utilized as well.
These sensors' accuracy are measured along the gauge factor (GF). Silicon sensors rate around 100, while the graphite sensors measure ways down in the single digits. Surprisingly, the team found that the grade of the pencil lead used affected its GF rating. As Physorg points out:
In experiments, [lead researcher, Ting-Kuo Kang] used 12 different grades of graphite pencils to draw U-shaped PZR sensors on paper. The pencils are graded by their ratio of graphite to clay. Grades ranged from 9B to 2H, where H denotes the hardness caused by the pencil's clay content, and B denotes the blackness due to the graphite content.
The sensors were drawn on paper that was placed on an electric scale in order to measure and maintain a consistent drawing force for each pencil-drawn sensor. The drawings were then glued on printed circuit board (PCB) strips, and a strain gauge mounted on each PCB strip. Then Kang applied cycles of stress to the sensor using a four-point bending technique, and measured the sensor's voltage change under the applied stress through an electric circuit.
Even so, the graphite variety costs a fraction of what silicon does to produce. As the technology develops, it could very well usher in a new wave of low-cost, disposable stress sensors that could be applied to infrastructure like bridges and overpasses, reporting developing structural failures before they become dangerous.
