iPhone maker Apple, this time, is ready to bring yet another change in its revolutionary products. According to patent applications filed by Apple and published by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the company is developing hydrogen fuel cell technology to power portable computing devices.
The patent application, entitled 'Fuel Cell System to Power a Portable Computing Device',
says, "The disclosed embodiments relate to the design of a fuel cell
system which is capable of both providing power to and receiving power
from a rechargeable battery in a portable computing device. This
eliminates the need for a bulky and heavy battery within the fuel cell
system, which can significantly reduce the size, weight and cost of the
fuel cell system."
"Our country's continuing reliance on fossil
fuels has forced our government to maintain complicated political and
military relationships with unstable governments in the Middle East, and
has also exposed our coastlines and our citizens to the associated
hazards of offshore drilling. These problems have led to an increasing
awareness and desire on the part of consumers to promote and use
renewable energy sources."
According to Apple, hydrogen fuel cells
have a number of advantages. Such fuel cells and associated fuels can
potentially achieve high volumetric and gravimetric energy densities,
which can potentially enable continued operation of portable electronic
devices for days or even weeks without refueling.
"However, it is
extremely challenging to design hydrogen fuel cell systems which are
sufficiently portable and cost-effective to be used with portable
electronic devices."
By bringing their talents to the male-dominated engineering field, women are sparking innovation.
by Carla Diana
Most designers and engineers have childhood stories about fantastic
Lego creations or amazing home-built projects that hinted at their early
propensity toward design. For me, my nascent interest in mechanics
manifested itself in my Matchbox car collection. One day, a neighbor's
mother saw me with my miniature parking lot and cried, "Cars are for
boys! Those aren't for you!"
Decades later, I still remember that moment. It was my first real
awareness that my penchants didn’t fulfill gender expectations. But I
wasn’t deterred. I embraced my “oddball” identity all the way through
engineering school (where I was one of two women in a class of 40),
through industrial design studies, and into job roles that have always
been challenging, inspiring, fundamentally technical, and
male-dominated.
A shift toward "socially aware machines" has drawn women to robotics.
Though
I take pride in my career path, I remember facing a good deal of
confidence-dashing resistance from people with old-fashioned gender
definitions. Unfortunately, many young women and girls defer to these
expectations. According to the Industrial Design Society of America,
only 11.5% of its professional members are women and the more technical
areas of design have even fewer. In a recent Fast Company article,“Ladies Who Hack,”
Jed Lipinksi describes how social stigmas can prevent women from
getting into programming: “Less than 20% of undergraduate
computer-science and engineering degrees are given to women, and big
tech companies are almost entirely run by men.”
With so few women designing hardware/software solutions, it’s no
wonder that many women don’t relate well to the products being made. In
fact, a poll at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show found that only 1% of
women felt that manufacturers had them in mind when they were
developing electronic products. This divide between the designers
(mainly technically oriented men) and the users of electronic stuff (the
rest of the population) limits the full potential of technology. To
bolster the development of game-changing developments, the field needs
to attract a more diverse group of developers and designers, especially
more women.
New tools, new attitudes
During the early 2000s, I lived in San Francisco. I reveled in the emerging art and technology scenes and observed how a revised take on DIY
led to new attitudes toward technology. It put electronics know-how in
the hands of a more diverse demographic. At the same time, the new Arduino platform
for electronics was taking the community by storm, making it easier
than ever to wire up your own robot or gizmo. Then the launch of Make Magazine spread technical DIY information to an even broader audience. Make’s founder, Dale Dougherty, wanted to do for electronics hacking what Popular Mechanics
did for wood craftsmanship. While of the magazine contained spreads
reminiscent of 1950s tableaus of fathers and sons making stuff in garage
shops (a poignant reminder of how making wasn't for girls), a new
explosion of accessible tools and publicly available technical
information actually attracted more women to the field.
The LilyPad Arduino
Around the same time Make came around, a variation of Arduino, called the LilyPad Arduino, was being developed by Leah Buechely at MIT's Hi-Lo Tech lab.
Buchely focused on creating a platform for electronics that could be
embedded in clothing and soft goods. By replacing wires with conductive
thread--a simple but fundamental change--electronic components like
lights and speakers and switches could be sewn directly into the fabric.
Because most people already know basic sewing (whereas wiring and
soldering can require new learning), the LilyPad opened the electronics
scene to a far greater number of participants.
65% of LilyPad creators were female. For basic Arduino? 2%.
This
was particularly exciting for girls. Because the system is based on
sewing (a traditionally "female" activity), an entire set of skills
around technology and science suddenly became more accessible to girls.
Wearable computing classes saw the number of girls rise and thrive in
workshops previously favored by boys. Unsurprisingly, in 2010, the MIT
researcher Benjamin Mako Hill found 65% of LilyPad-based project
creators were female, compared to only 2% for the basic Arduino.
Hill describes the phenomenon further in "On Feminism and Microcontrollers,"
claiming that LilyPad projects are more imaginative, since the
inventions and applications are more unexpected and come from a more
diverse group of creators. He writes, “Although LilyPad and Arduino are
the same chips and the same code, we suggest that LilyPad's design, and
the way the platform is framed, leads to different types of projects
that appeal to different types of people. For example, Arduino seems
likely to find its way into an interaction design project or a fighting
robot. LilyPad seems more likely to find its way into a smart and
responsive textile.”
A sample embroidery project centered around the Lilypad Arduino board. Photo and embroidery by Becky Stern.
Social robots open new doors
Robotics has also been a traditionally male-dominated clubhouse. But
in the past two decades, a shift toward "socially aware machines"
(social robotics) has drawn women to the field. As technology has
enabled more sophisticated programmed behaviors, machines have evolved
to interact with us by communicating through spoken words, gestures, and
other social cues.
These robots blend hard-core computer science with an understanding
of psychology and social science--fields that have generally appealed
more to women. It’s therefore not surprising that many of the leaders in
this field, like Cynthia Breazeal, Andrea Thomaz, and Jodi Forlizzi,
are women. In this specialty, being able to empathize and express
emotion is just as important as knowing mechanics and computer
programming, and like the LilyPad, these female-centric skill sets have
opened the door for women to succeed in an area where they were
previously underrepresented.
The mix of social and electronic skills I learned designing robots is something that I use daily.
I, too, was intrigued by this area, so I joined the core team for the creation of Simon,
a socially aware robot, while I was teaching at the Georgia Institute
of Technology. The Simon project focuses on crafting a machine that
people can interact with in a natural, human way. You can gesture in
front of it, talk to it, and even hand it objects. The robot responds
with emotional expressions that are easy for humans to comprehend, like
shrugging its shoulders when it doesn’t understand, blinking a colored
light when it recognizes an object, or even talking. It has a humanoid
form, meaning that it sports arms, hands, a torso, and a head with
eyelids and eyeballs that move to show what the robot is “thinking.” It
can recognize objects and actively learn instructions on what to
do--like putting certain colored objects in a matching colored bin--just
through interacting with people.
The goal is to have a robot that doesn’t require any learning to use,
because you interact with it intuitively, the way you would another
person. The mix of social and electronic skills I learned during the
robot design work is something that I use daily in my work at Smart
Design, and it’s becoming more valuable to industry as people have come
to expect their products to communicate and respond in more
sophisticated ways through light, sound, screens, and movement.
My very first project at Smart Design happened to be for a company called Neato Robotics,
a client that understood the importance of building an emotional
connection between people and products. With many groundbreaking
features that would be new to consumers, the team focused on how it
could best communicate what the product was doing in human terms by
using words, iconography, and even facial expressions. Though the Simon
project was driven by academic research, I have been able to draw a
great deal of learning from the field of social robotics and apply it to
products that we use in our everyday lives by thinking about ways that
products can have expressive behaviors and then building an abstracted
version of those animated responses into the design.
Simon
is a socially aware humanoid robot platform currently under development
at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Socially Intelligent
Machines Lab, led by Dr. Andrea Thomaz (right).
The future of technology
Seeing the changing attitudes toward girls and technology has been
especially exciting for me. Although I had no exposure to woodshop
classes and building techniques in high school, my own alma mater, the Marymount School for Girls
in New York City, recently approached me to discuss their plans to
install a "Fab Lab," a workshop built around fabrication techniques such
as laser cutting and 3-D printing. The idea of girls having this
formative, hands-on experience in digital making and design technology
is an indication that the skills associated with science, technology
engineering, and math are no longer considered male-only. "Girls are
just as good as boys at this stuff," says Jaymes Dec, the program
manager at Greenfab, an NSF-funded Fab Lab for high school students in
the Bronx. "They are great at working through logic and manipulating
small parts like electronics with their hands."
By involving girls today, we are preparing more women for
technology-focused design fields in the future. Areas that have long
been male-dominated will surely see a rise in women, due to shifts in
tools, skill sets, and collaborative systems. This involvement will not
only change demographics but contribute new innovations and business
opportunities, which will undoubtedly emerge from fresh attitudes and
approaches to science and technology. And soon we’ll hear that many more
than 1% of women feel that manufacturers took them into account when
designing an electronic gadget.
Silicon Labs’ New 8051 Chips May Run Afoul of Luddites
by Jim Turley
When I was a kid, the garbage men would come into our backyard. Every
week they’d park the big truck out front, hop down from the cab, let
themselves in through the side gate, and walk around back to where our
round metal garbage can waited on the porch outside the kitchen door.
One burly man would hoist the can onto his shoulder; if we filled two
cans that week, they’d both carry one. They’d retrace their steps, dump
everything into the back of their big truck and make a final round trip
to replace the empty can(s) on our back porch.
Fast-forward forty years, and the situation has changed completely.
The galvanized metal can with the round lid (you know, the kind Oscar
the Grouch inhabits) has been replaced by three color-coded plastic
bins: one for recyclables, one for yard waste, and one for actual
garbage. Significantly, the garbage bin is the smallest of the three. I
now do the work of hauling the bins out to the street, placing them by
the curb in a neat row, adequately spaced with clearance between each
one and well clear of parked cars or other obstructions.
In the morning, the piloted garbage robot (I can scarcely call it a
truck) comes by to collect them. It reaches out with its oversized
mechanical arm to pick up each bin in turn, lifting it high into the air
before upending it over the open top of the truck. Sometimes the
behemoth shakes the bin with an almost human vigor before gently setting
it back down on the ground more or less where I’d left it. The drivers
(there are two) are now less burly than pudgy. They remain seated in
their heated cab the whole time, listening to either classical music or
Mexican ranchero music (depending on whose turn it is to choose the
radio station, I assume). The lift-and-shake process repeats three
times, once for each bin, before the whole clattering contraption moves
down the street to the next house.
I’m sure this new way of collecting garbage saves time and therefore
saves me money as a ratepayer. The garbage men—I’m sorry,
waste-management specialists—can cover more territory than they could 40
years ago. They don’t have to jump in and out of the truck every 50
feet and they rarely lug heavy cans anymore. Since I’ve already
presorted the recyclables from the garbage and separated out the
(literally) green yard waste, the landfill isn’t growing so rapidly and,
judging from the relative sizes of my bins, most of what I’m tossing
can be recycled and/or composted. That’s all good. This is what’s known
in technical circles as Progress.
Much more recently, my local electrical monopoly—I’m sorry,
energy-service provider—made a similar transformation. Before, the meter
reader would quietly make his rounds once a month, walking through the
neighborhood reading the electrical and gas meters on the side of
everyone’s house. In some cases, the meters were visible from the
street. In other cases, he’d pop into the backyard just long enough to
eyeball the meter and mark his clipboard. He knew his route well and was
very quick. Unless you happened to be watching at the exact moment he
came to your house you’d never know he was there. (On the rare occasions
I did see him I noticed he carried a big walking stick with a tennis
ball stuck to one end. Turns out it’s for warding off aggressive and
territorial dogs.)
That all stopped a few months ago when the utility company installed
“smart meters” in our area. First we got a notice in the mail saying the
installer would come by in a few weeks, and that there may be a brief
electrical interruption while he/she replaced our old electric meters
with new ones. Sure enough, the installer showed up at the door, flashed
his ID, and asked permission to swap out the meter. Being a nerd, I
asked to watch. “How long does the installation take,” I asked? “About
three seconds,” he replied. “Oh, so you’ve done this a few times
before.”
It was like watching Indiana Jones in the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
He placed one hand on the old meter and, holding the new meter in his
other hand, pulled the old meter out and plugged the new one in with one
swift motion. The clocks in my house didn’t even reset. Muhammad Ali
once bragged that he was so quick he could switch off his bedroom light
and be under the blankets before the room got dark. I think this guy
could actually do it.
The purpose of this upgrade exercise, of course, is to make walking
meter readers obsolete. Smart meters can wirelessly transmit their
readings to a nearby utility truck. Like the garbage men, the meter
reader can stay warm and dry while making easy drive-by readings once a
month. No need to battle dogs, inclement weather, or locked gates. He
can probably finish his whole monthly route in one-tenth the time it
took to walk it, and it’s safer for everyone concerned.
The only problem he ever encounters, he told me, is when homeowners
object to having smart meters installed on their houses. Seems a few of
my Luddite neighbors have taken to wearing tinfoil hats. The meters emit
too much radiation, they complain. Or they’re not accurate. Or they
allow the utility company to shut off your gas or electricity remotely
(as if they couldn’t shut off your power before). Science be damned,
these people have somehow been led to believe that smart meters are the
work of the devil.
All of which brings us to this week’s new chip. Silicon Labs has a
new line of 8051 microcontrollers, and they are special for two reasons:
they’re extremely power-efficient, and (ironically) they’re meant to be
used in electric smart meters. I would’ve thought that any product
attached directly to the municipal power grid and mounted outdoors would
have essentially infinite power and heat-dissipation limits, but
apparently not. Utility companies are very keen to make their smart
meters energy-efficient. Go figure.
The power-efficiency side of these new MCUs is applicable to anybody,
and it’s worth a look if you’re designing battery-powered devices that
need an LCD display and/or a wireless connection. Among the usual
power-saving tricks is a new one I haven’t seen. The new Silicon Labs
chips include their own voltage regulator specifically for the RF
companion chip. By powering the RF device through the MCU, the microcontroller can effectively manage the power based on what it knows about wireless traffic.
For the smart-meter designers among us, the new chips have a lot to
like, too. They’re designed to interface directly to the registers of
the metering mechanicals. (Did you know flow meters have standardized
register interfaces?) They sleep most of the time, but they can wake on
any number of conditions, such as a preset reading or an error
condition. They’ve got programmable pull-ups and programmable debounce
and, remarkably, consume only 300nA at 3.6 volts.
In short, if you’re making some wee small device for metering or
monitoring, the new C8051F96x, Si102x, or Si103x chips may be just what
you’re looking for. The hardest part may be getting your end customer to
agree to it. Maybe the datasheets should come with a phone number for a
counseling program. Good luck with that.
A recent study shows that teens are much more interested in engineering when they’re simply exposed to it.
Engineers do cool stuff. They build cities, save lives, create music
and design computer systems. Plus, they make a ton of money, relatively
speaking.
All these things are the stuff teen dreams are made of, and just
hearing about them can help turn young students — including teenage
girls — on to engineering as a college major and career option.
In an Intel-commissioned study
of 1,000 teenagers, researchers found that around 63 percent of teens
ages 13 to 18 had never considered a career in engineering.
But after hearing how much money engineers make ($75,000 annually, on
average), around 60 percent of the subjects said they were more likely
to consider engineering as a career. Learning that engineers suffer less
during periods of high unemployment also went over well, persuading
more than 50 percent of the teens in the study to look at engineering
careers.
The majority of the teens in the study said they were also more
interested in engineering “by understanding what engineers do, such as
playing a role in rescuing the Chilean miners who were trapped in 2010,
delivering clean water to poor communities in Africa, designing the
protective pads worn by athletes and constructing dams and levees that
keep entire cities safe,” the study’s findings read.
That’s really the most important take-away from the study: Teens
become more interested in engineering simply by knowing what engineers
do and what opportunities exist for engineers.
Currently, around one-third of teens can’t name any potential job
opportunities in engineering fields. Roughly 13 percent don’t think that
an engineering degree would be more likely to lead to a great job than
any other major. And a full 20 percent of these teens have no concept of
just how much engineering shapes the world around us.
Engineering, however, is a multifaceted field with many areas of
specialization. And teens are apparently intrigued by those different
areas.
Fifty-three percent of teens in the study said they were more likely
to consider an engineering career after they learned that engineers help
make music and video games. And here’s one for the nerds: 50 percent of
the teens said they were more interested in engineering due to
engineers’ roles in texting and social networking.
The teens also showed some interest in how engineers can achieve
widespread social benefit. Around 52 percent of them said they would
think twice about the career after learning about how engineers helped
to rescue trapped Chilean miners or create clean water for folks in
underdeveloped areas.
What about the girls?
Since there’s a markedly lower number of women choosing engineering
education and careers, we asked Intel’s researchers about the specifics
between teen boys’ and teen girls’ motivations.
“There was a difference in interest between male and female students,” a representative told.
“After telling the teens facts about engineering, such as the breadth
of what engineers actually do and how much money they earn, our survey
found that girls are harder to persuade than boys because even after the
messaging, only 35 percent of girls will consider engineering. After
messaging, 60 percent of boys will consider it.”
However, while money-focused stats left the young ladies cold, they
were motivated by how much social benefit engineers can create.
“As other studies have indicated, messages that emphasized the
emotional appeal of engineering — for example, that engineers play a
role in delivering clean water to communities in Africa — were most
effective in getting girls to change their minds about the field,” the
spokesperson continued.
There was also an interesting gender split in the types of
engineering the teens found interesting. While all the teens found
computer and software engineering to be the most fascinating area of
study (22 percent of the teens polled said they wanted to get into that
kind of tech), the study showed that only girls were more likely to be
interested in architectural engineering (18 percent of female
respondents versus 9 percent of male respondents)
How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Imagine being able to access the Internet through the contact lenses
on your eyeballs. Blink, and you'd be online. Meet someone, and you'd
have the ability to immediately search their identity. And if your
friend happens to be speaking a different language, an instantaneous
translation could appear directly in front of you.
That
might sound farfetched, but it's something that might very well exist
in 30 years or less, says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.
"The first people to buy these contact lenses will be college students studying for final exams," he tells Fresh Air's
Terry Gross. "They'll see the exam answers right in their contact
lenses. ... In a cocktail party, you will know exactly who to suck up
to, because you'll have a complete read out of who they are. President
Barack Obama will buy these contact lenses, so he'll never need a
teleprompter again. ... These already exist in some form [in the
military]. You place [a lens] on your helmet, you flip it down, and
immediately you see the Internet of the battlefield ... all of it, right
on your eyeball."
But Internet-ready contact
lenses aren't the only futuristic item we're likely to see. Kaku
describes some of the inventions that may appear throughout the coming
century — based on developments currently taking place in
nanotechnology, astronautics, medicine and material science — in his
book Physics of the Future. Kaku details some of these
inventions, including disposable computers, space elevators and
driverless cars — which will likely be ready in the next decade and will
completely eliminate the need for high school driver's ed classes.
"In
the future, you'll simply jump into your car, turn on the Internet,
turn on a movie and sit back and relax and turn on the automatic pilot,
and the car will drive itself," he says. "Unlike a human driver, it
doesn't get drunk, it doesn't get distracted and certainly does not have
road rage."
The cars will be equipped with radar in the fenders that will communicate with road signs and sensors along highways.
"When
the car comes to an intersection, the GPS system will alert the
computer [inside the car] that there is an intersection coming up," he
says. "[The GPS system] will look onto the [roadside] sensor and then
slow down."
Kaku also explains how, in the
future, our brains might be able to interface with artificial
intelligence. He describes one study in which computer chips were placed
into the brains of paralyzed stroke patients at Brown University. The
patients learned that by thinking certain thoughts, they could
manipulate a cursor on a computer screen.
"It takes awhile — it takes a few hours — but after a while, you
realize that certain thoughts will move the cursor in certain
directions," he says. "After a while ... [the patients] were able to
read email, write email, surf the Internet, play video games, guide
wheelchairs — anything you can do on a computer, they can do as well,
except they're trapped inside a paralyzed body."
Similar technology could be used in the future to control robots that can go places where humans can't, says Kaku.
"It's
very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's
radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites," he says. "It'd be much
better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to
astronauts on the Earth. So you'd go inside a pod, you mentally make
certain thoughts, which then [could] control the robots on the moon."
Kaku,
a professor of theoretical physics with the City College of New York,
also talks about his childhood, his work with Edward Teller, a member of
the Manhattan Project, and his work on the development of string field
theory. He is the author of several books, including Physics of the Impossible, Parallel Worlds and Beyond Einstein. He has also hosted scientific documentaries for the Discovery Channel, the BBC and the Science Channel.
