Top TechTop Tech #65: Self-charging phones, instructive robots, Printing skin
Highlighting interesting or important innovations with long-term promise.
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Your phone will charge itself
• Learn faster while holding a robot
ª Printing skin for treating burns
Your phone will charge itself
Earlier this month we covered technology for partially powering a mobile device with ambient energy from nearby WiFi signals. Now a new idea takes that notion one step further: drawing power from the phone’s own radio transmission.
Nope, it’s not quite a perpetual motion machine: if it works, it’ll only extend standard battery life by about 30 percent.
Engineers at Ohio State University say their circuit converts cellular signals “emanating from a phone into direct current power, which then charges the phone’s battery,” Kurzweil AI reports. The energy is otherwise wasted on inefficient transmission — nearly 97 percent of cell phone signals never reach a destination and are simply lost.
Learn faster while holding a robot
Intelligent handheld robots could make is easier for people to learn new skills, Kurzweil AI reports.
At the University of Bristol, they’re testing intelligent handheld robots that guide users through new skilled activities. “The aim with handheld robots is to capitalize on exploiting the intuitiveness of using traditional handheld tools while adding embedded intelligence and action to allow for new capabilities.”
The researchers add that they are “currently investigating further topics on interaction, shared intelligence, and new applications for field tasks” — and “due to the difficulties of starting in a new area of robotics,” their designs are open source and available via http://www.handheldrobotics.org/
Printing skin for treating burns
Artificial human skin is now made for both medical reasons and for testing make-up. But soon, using 3D printing techniques to make it may result in major improvements in treating burn victims.
Make-up maker L’Oreal “makes human skin,” Wired reports here, “created in a lab, so it can test its products without using people or animals. Now it’s talking about printing the stuff, using 3-D bio printers that will spit out dollops of skin into nickel-sized petri dishes.”
The cosmetics company is working with San Diego-based bio printing firm Organovo, which reports on its “3D Human Tissues for Medical Research & Therapeutics” work here and has an informative video here.
The two firms announced their partnership here.
The Wake Forest School of Medicine is another partner in the venture, and says here that “Skin is the body’s largest organ. Loss of the skin barrier results in fluid and heat loss and the risk of infection. The traditional treatment for deep burns is to cover them with healthy skin harvested from another part of the body. But in cases of extensive burns, there often isn’t enough healthy skin to harvest… Scientists designed, built and tested a printer designed to print skin cells onto burn wounds. The “ink” is actually different kinds of skin cells. A scanner is used to determine wound size and depth. Different kinds of skin cells are found at different depths. This data guides the printer as it applies layers of the correct type of cells to cover the wound. You only need a patch of skin one-tenth the size of the burn to grow enough skin cells for skin printing.”
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