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Welcome to the March 2009 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
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The most advanced prosthesis of its kind, the RIC neuro-controlled bionic arm allows an amputee to move his or her prosthetic arm as if it is a real limb simply by thinking. To provide the neuro-controlled movement of RIC's bionic arm technology, nerves located in the amputee's shoulder, which once went to the amputated arm, are re-routed and connected to healthy muscle in the chest. This surgical process is called targeted muscle reinnervation. The muscle reinnervation procedure allows the re-routed nerves to grow into the chest muscle and direct the signals they once sent to the amputated arm instead to the robotic arm via surface electrodes. Then, when the patient thinks about moving his or her arm, the action is carried out as voluntarily as it would be in a healthy arm allowing for smoother and easier movement of the prosthetic.
To date, more than 400 amputee patients who have served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been treated in Army hospitals. RIC's bionic arm technology has the potential to benefit amputees such as those returning from war.
The treatment used in clinical trials conducted by Dr. Richard B. Lipton, a researcher in the cause and treatment of migraines, utilized a portable transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) device to treat patients suffering from migraines with auras, perceptual disturbances that warn of oncoming episodes in some sufferers.
The device used by Lipton addresses a problem more often treated by drugs. People who frequently experience migraines may receive a preventative drug. Those who have migraines periodically may take both a preventative as well as an acute drug taken at the time the headache appears. In fact, acute drug therapy, typically a class of agents known as triptans, is the most common form of migraine treatment. However, only 50 to 60 percent of migraine sufferers in the U.S. respond favorably to prescription drug-based treatments.
The device, developed by Neuralieve, a medical technology company, works by creating a focused magnetic pulse that passes non-invasively through the skull and induces an electric current that sends signals to disrupt the abnormal brainwaves. The TMS-based device would not replace use of all migraine drugs, but it could replace the use of some drugs for some individuals. An estimated 30 million Americans suffer from migraines, with more than 50 percent reporting severe impairment or requiring bed rest during an episode. The National Headache Foundation estimates that migraines cause 157 million lost work days each year due to pain and accompanying symptoms. The missed days cost employers some US$13 billion annually.
Who wants to push buttons to control your TV when you can flick your wrist? Two new remote control technologies are emerging that use gestures instead of the traditional multi-buttoned remote. Hillcrest Labs, which has been working on a motion-controlled remote, announced a partnership with Texas Instruments on a handheld that supports air pointing, similar to the Nintendo Wii. Hillcrest's technology lets you control the TV by moving a remote up and down, and side to side. Or, you could dump a remote altogether and just wave your hands. That's what a new Hitachi set does. Using a combination of technologies from chip company Canesta and aptly named gesture-tracking software GestureTek, the Hitachi set has a sensor built in that creates a 3-D map of what's in front of it. Wave your hand in front of the TV to turn it on. The user can swipe from side to side to control options, or use both arms to move through different menu functions.
A big trend for TV manufacturers this year will be plugging their sets directly into the Internet, eliminating the need for an external set-top box to deliver content. Sony, Vizio, and LG were just a few of the consumer electronics companies announcing that their TVs will be connected to the Internet and offer a much wider range of video options.
Widgets were another buzzword from the CES show floor. All sorts of folks are working to bring widgets to your big screen. Yahoo and Intel are going to stream extra information, like sports stats and current weather, to widgets that run on your TV. For years, the news about televisions was all about better pictures, bigger screens. Now it's not just about how your TV picture looks, but what your TV can do.
What the researchers found was that most individuals travel just short distances -- only a few regularly move over hundreds of miles -- and that we all follow a simple pattern. According to distinguished professor of physics and director of the Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR) at Northeastern University, Albert-László Barabási, "We found that human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations, like home and work. What practical application can such a study serve? According to the study understanding the patterns in which humans travel has important implications for such applications as urban planning, traffic forecasting and predicting the spread of biological and mobile viruses.
Standard lithium-ion batteries use graphite anodes that are capable of holding only a limited amount of charged lithium particles. Replacing the graphite anodes with silicon nanowires would increase the battery's charge storage capacity. "Silicon is an attractive anode material for lithium batteries because it has a low discharge potential and the highest known theoretical charge capacity," the report says. However, the researchers needed to solve a longstanding problem surrounding the use of silicon in lithium-ion batteries. The repeated insertion and extraction of lithium ions causes the minuscule silicon wires to degrade and eventually fall apart, which leads to poor battery performance over the long run.
Cui, along with his fellow researchers, solved the problem by growing silicon nanowires directly on a stainless steel substrate that served as the current collector. The nanowires were able to inflate up to four times their normal size--one-thousandth the thickness of a piece of paper--as they absorbed the lithium without any breakage. The anodes were then able to attain the maximum theoretical charge capacity of silicon on the first charge cycle and remained close to 75 percent of their maximum over the course of many charge and discharge cycles. The new lithium batteries could be available within several years.
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