Thought-controlled cars
Can cars be controlled and driven purely by thought? This appears to be impossible, but in this strange and wondrous world of science, anything is possible. Indeed cars can now be driven purely by mind control.
A team of researchers at the Freie Universität, Berlin, using a commercially available Emotiv EPOC brain-machine gaming interface, have succeeded in controlling the driving functions of a car just by thought control. The driver wears a special headset fitted with 16 EEG (electro encephalographic) sensors and the system (appropriately known as ‘BrainDriver’) detects the mental commands and transmits them to the car’s drive-by-wire computer controls. The steering, acceleration and braking can thus be continuously controlled. The measurement of brain's electrical activity is called electroencephalography, or EEG. It is a noninvasive technique which means that nothing is inserted into the brain but electrodes are simply placed on the scalp of the user.
The driver needs a short period of training on a software tool kit through which he/she learns to move a cube on a computer screen by alteration of thought patterns. These patterns are then detected by ‘BrainDriver’ when the car is being driven and transmitted to the control systems of the car.
The technology of controlling computers by thought was first shown by an Austrian company ‘g.tec’ at a major Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany in 2007. The demonstration in 2007 involved the operator wearing a cap with sensors which detected tiny changes in electrical voltages in the brain. These were then analysed by the computer which figured out what these messages meant and then transformed into commands to the computer.
Street lamps that generate electricity
Street lamps have always been considered as consumers of energy. Now new types of street lamps have been developed by Scotia, based in Aarhus, Denmark that generate electricity from sun light during the day which is fed into the national grid. At night they use electricity from the grid. These lamps are covered with photovoltaic solar cells to give maximum surface area, and the solar cells can even generate electricity on cloudy days. The street lamps generate more electricity than they consume and are therefore considered to be environmentally friendly.
Brainy satellites
As the amount of junk in space increases, there is a growing risk of damage to satellites by collision with such floating junk. Satellites are expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and have highly sensitive equipment involved in their manufacture. There is therefore a need for satellites to have some mechanism of jumping away out of danger when they find junk floating right at them on a collision course.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have now developed a brain with a built-in collision avoidance system which can be incorporated into the satellites. Known as ‘sysbrain’ the software in this system allows the satellites to read instruction manuals in English. Using this, the satellites can carry out various tasks, including moving out of danger if another object approaches them. The satellites can read such instructions directly from the internet and can therefore update themselves remotely.
Planet -munching bloated stars
Some hungry stars have been detected across the galaxy. They are munching away in a feeding frenzy—and gobbling up entire planets! The stars have been become bloated as a result of this binge and have been named ‘bloatars’ by Loredana Spezzi at the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, who has been trying to explain their bloated shape. A group of nine such stars were detected by the Hubble telescope about 20 light years away from us in a young cluster of stars. The work will be published in The astrophysical journal (arxiv.org/1101.4521).
Illusion cloaks
Magicians have been practicing a trick for centuries—making pretty girls disappear before our very eyes. Now science can do the same by actually bending light around objects through the use of ‘metamaterials’. Moreover it may also be possible to replace the real objects by others, so that you see something else instead.
The researches have been carried out by Wei Xiang Jiang and Tie Jun Cui's team at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. Cui and coworkers had earlier developed the ‘electromagnetic black hole’ for light in 2009. Now they have created a new type of metamaterial that changes the manner in which radio waves interact with copper, making it appear as if it was made of another substance. This discovery can find applications in defense, by cloaking aircraft or submarines, and making them appear as objects with another shape and not made of metal—flying birds in the sky instead of attacking planes or sharks under water instead of submarines, for instance.