#vending telemetry

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Elemental mapping of the location of iron atoms (blue) in the magnetic nanoparticles and cadmium (red) in the fluorescent quantum dots provide a clear visualization of the way the two kinds of particles naturally separate themselves into a core-and-shell structure.

A team of researchers has developed particles that can glow with color-coded light and be manipulated with magnets, improving the likelihood of tracking the position of the nanoparticles as they move within the body or inside a cell.

A long-sought goal of creating particles that can emit a colorful fluorescent glow in a biological environment, and that could be precisely manipulated into position within living cells, has been achieved by a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions. The finding is reported this week in the journal Nature Communications.

The new technology could make it possible to track the position of the nanoparticles as they move within the body or inside a cell. At the same time, the nanoparticles could be manipulated precisely by applying a magn 3g router etic field to pull them along. And finally, the particles could have a coating of a bioreactive substance that could seek out and bind with particular molecules within the body, such as markers for tumor cells or other disease agents.

“It’s been a dream of mine for many years to have a nanomaterial that incorporates both fluorescence and magnetism in a single compact object,” says Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry at MIT and senior author of the new paper. While other groups have achieved some combination of these two properties, Bawendi says that he “was never very satisfied” with results previously achieved by his own team or others.

For one thing, he says, such particles have been too large to make practical probes of living tissue: “They’ve tended to have a lot of wasted volume,” Bawendi says. “Compactness is critical for biological and a lot of other applications.”

In addition, previous efforts were unable to produce particles of uniform and predictable size, which could also be an essential property for diagnostic or therapeutic applications.

Moreover, Bawendi says, “We wanted to be able to manipulate these structures inside the cells with magnetic fields, but also know exactly what it is we’re moving.” All of these goals are achieved by the new nanoparticles, which can be identified with great precision by the wavelength of their fluorescent emissions.

The new method produces the combination of desired properties “in as small a package as possible,” Bawendi says — which could help pave the way for particles with other useful properties, such as the ability to bind with a specific type of bioreceptor, or another molecule of interest.

In the technique developed by Bawend cloud platform  i’s team, led by lead author and postdoc Ou Chen, the nanoparticles crystallize such that they self-assemble in exactly the way that leads to the most useful outcome: The magnetic particles cluster at the center, while fluorescent particles form a uniform coating around them. That puts the fluorescent molecules in the most visible location for allowing the nanoparticles to be tracked optically through a microscope.

“These are beautiful structures, they’re so clean,” Bawendi says. That uniformity arises, in part, because the starting material, fluorescent nanoparticles that Bawendi and his group have been perfecting for years, are themselves perfectly uniform in size. “You have to use very uniform material to produce such a uniform construction,” Chen says.

Initially, at least, the particles might be used to probe basic biological functions within cells, Bawendi suggests. As the work continues, later experiments may add additional materials to the particles’ coating so that they interact in specific ways with  Industrial IoT Manufacturer  molecules or structures within the cell, either for diagnosis or treatment.

Watch how supernanoparticles are made to glow and manipulated with magnets inside a cancer cell. Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT

The ability to manipulate the particles with electromagnets is key to using them in biological research, Bawendi explains: The tiny particles could otherwise get lost in the jumble of molecules circulating within a cell. “Without a magnetic ‘handle,’ it’s like a needle in a haystack,” he says. “But with the magnetism, you can find it easily.”

A silica coating on the particles allows additional molecules to attach, causing the particles to bind with specific structures within the cell. “Silica makes it completely flexible; it’s a well developed material that can bind to almost anything,” Bawendi says.

For example, the coating could have a molecule that binds to a specific type of tumor cells; then, “You could use them to enhance the contrast of an MRI, so you could see the spatial macroscopic outlines of a tumor,” he says.

The next step for the team is to test the new nanoparticles in a variety of biological settings. “We’ve made the material,” Chen says. “Now we’ve got to use it, and we’re working with a number of groups around the world for a variety of applications.”

Christopher Murray, a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania who was not connected with this research, says, “This work exemplifies the power of using nanocrystals as building blocks for multiscale and multifunctional structures. We often use the term ‘artificial atoms’ in the community to describe how we are exploiting a new periodic table of fundamental building blocks to design materials, and this is a very elegant example.”

The study included researchers at MIT; Massachusetts General Hospital; Institut Curie in Paris; the Heinrich-Pette Institute and the Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany; Children’s Hospital Boston; and Cornell University. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the Department of Energy.

Publication: Ou Chen, et al., “Magneto-fluorescent core-shell supernanoparticles,” Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5093; doi:10.1038/ncomms6093

Image: Courtesy of the researchers

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Engineers at MIT have taken a first step in designing a computer chip that uses a fraction of the power of larger drone computers and is tailored for a drone as small as a bottlecap.

A team of engineers at MIT has developed a method for designing efficient computer chips may get miniature smart drones off the ground.

In recent years, engineers have worked to shrink drone technology, building flying prototypes that are the size of a bumblebee and loaded with even tinier sensors and cameras. Thus far, they have managed to miniaturize almost every part of a drone, except for the brains of the entire operation — the computer chip.

Standard computer chips for quadcoptors and other similarly sized drones process an enormous amount of streaming data from cameras and sensors, and interpret that data on the fly to autonomously direct a drone&rs remote connectivity  quo;s pitch, speed, and trajectory. To do so, these computers use between 10 and 30 watts of power, supplied by batteries that would weigh down a much smaller, bee-sized drone.

Now, engineers at MIT have taken a first step in designing a computer chip that uses a fraction of the power of larger drone computers and is tailored for a drone as small as a bottlecap. They will present a new methodology and design, which they call “Navion,” at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held this week at MIT.

The team, led by Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, and Vivienne Sze, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, developed a low-power algorithm, in tandem with pared-down hardware, to create a specialized computer chip.

The key contribution of their work is a new approach for designing the chip hardware and the algorithms that run on the chip. “Traditionally, an algorithm is designed, and you throw it over to a hardware person to figure out how to map the algorithm to hardware,” Sze says. “But we found by designing the hardware and algorithms together, we can achieve more substantial power savings.”

“We are finding that this new approach to programming robots, which involves thinking about hardware and algorithms jointly, is key to scaling them down,” Karaman says.

The new chip processes streaming images at 20 frames per second and automatically carries out commands to adjust a drone’s orientation in space. The streamlined chip performs all these computations while using just below 2 watts of power — making it an order of magnitude more efficient than current drone-embedded chips.

Karaman, says the team’s design is the first step toward engineering “the smallest intelligent drone that can fly on its own.” He ultimately envisions disaster-response and search-and-rescue missions in which insect-sized drones flit in and out of tight spaces to examine a collapsed structure or look for trapped individuals. Karaman also foresees novel uses in consumer electronics.

“Imagine buying a bottlecap-sized drone that can integrate with your phone, and you can take it out and fit it in your palm,” he says. “If you lift your hand up a little, it would sense that, and start to fly around and film you. Then you open your hand again and it would land on your palm, and you could upload that video to your phone and share it with others.”

Karaman and Sze’s co-authors are graduate students Zhengdong Zhang and Amr Suleiman, and research scientist Luca Carlone.

From the ground up

Current minidrone prototypes are small enough to fit on a person’s fingertip and are extremely light, requiring only 1 watt of power to lift off from the ground. Their accompanying cameras and sensors use up an additional half a watt to operate.

“The missing piece is the computers — we can’t fit them in terms of size and power,” Karaman says. “We need to miniaturize the computers and make them low power.”

The group quickly realized that conventional chip design techniques would likely not produce a chip that was small enough and provided the required processing power to intelligently fly a small autonomous drone.

“As transistors have gotten smaller, there have been improvements in efficiency and speed, but that’s slowing down, and now we have to come up with specialized hardware to get improvements in efficiency,” Sze says.

The researchers decided to build a specialized chip from the ground up, developing algorithms to process data, and hardware to carry out that data-processing, in tandem.

Tweaking a formula

Specifically, the researchers made slight changes to an existing algorithm commonly used to determine a drone’s “ego-motion,” or awareness of its position in space. They then implemented various versions of the algorithm on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), a very simple programmable chip. To formalize this process, they developed a method called iterative splitting co-design that could strike the right balance of achieving accuracy while reducing the power consumption and the number of gates.

A typical FPGA consists of hundreds of thousands of disconnected gates, which researchers can connect in desired patterns to create specialized computing elements. Reducing the number gates with co-design allowed the team to chose an FPGA chip with fewer gates, leading to substantial power savings.

“If we don’t need a certain logic or memory process, we don’t use them, and that saves a lot of power,” Karaman explains.

Each time the researchers tweaked the ego-motion algorithm, they mapped the version onto the FPGA’s gates and connected the chip to a circuit board. They then fed the chip data from a standard drone dataset — an accumulation of streaming images and accelerometer measurements from previous drone-flying experiments that had been carried out by others and made available to the robotics community.

“These experiments are also done in a motion-capture room, so you know exactly where the drone is, and we use all this information after the fact,” Karaman says.

Memory savings

For each version of the algorithm that was implemented on the FPGA chip, the researchers observed the amount of power that the chip consumed as it processed the incoming data and estimated its resulting position in space.

The team’s most efficient design processed images at 20 frames per second and accurately estimated the drone’s orientation in space, while consuming less than 2 watts of power.

The power savings came partly from modifications to the amount of memory stored in the chip. Sze and her colleagues found that they were able to shrink the amount of data that the algorithm needed to process, while still achieving the same outcome. As a result, the chip itself was able to store less data and consume less power.

“Memory is really expensive in terms of power,” Sze says. “Since we do on-the-fly computing, as soon as we receive any data on the chip, we try to do as much processing as possible so we can throw it out right away, which enables us to keep a very small amount of memory on the chip without accessing off-chip memory, which is much more expensive.”

In this way, the team was able to reduce the chip’s memory storage to 2 megabytes without using off-chip memory, compared to a typical embedded computer chip for drones, which uses off-chip memory on the order of a few gigabytes.

“Any which way you can reduce the power so you can reduce battery size or extend battery life, the better,” Sze says.

This summer, the team will mount the FPGA chip onto a drone to test its performance in flight. Ultimately, the team plansindustrial 3g m2m to implement the optimized algorithm on an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, a more specialized hardware platform that allows engineers to design specific types of gates, directly onto the chip.

“We think we can get this down to just a few hundred milliwatts,” Karaman says. “With this platform, we can do all kinds of optimizations, which all m2m communication  ows tremendous power savings.”

This research was supported, in part, by Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Publication:

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A professional applicator applies coal-tar-based sealcoat to a test plot used to measure emission of polycyclic aromatic carbons (PAHs) into the air. Image: Justin McInnis, USGS

According to several newly published reports by the U.S. Geological Survey, coal-tar-based sealants are emitting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) into the air at rates possibly greater than annual emissions from automobiles in the US.

Four new reports examine the contaminants polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) found in house dust, streams, lakes, soil, and air.

Coal-tar-based sealants are emitting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) into the air at rates that may be greater than annual emissions from vehicles in the United States, according to new reports by the U.S. Geological Survey, published in the scientific journals Chemosphere an Industrial Wireless M2M d Atmospheric Environment.

Children living near coal-tar-sealed pavement are exposed to twice as many PAHs from ingestion of contaminated house dust than from food, according to a separate new study by Baylor University and the USGS, published in the journal Environmental Pollution. Several PAHs are probable human carcinogens and many are toxic to fish and other aquatic life.

USGS scientists prepare a sampler used to measure emission of polycyclic aromatic carbons (PAHs) into the air. Image: Jennifer Wilson, USGS

These results and those of previous research on environmental contamination and coal-tar-based pavement sealants are summarized in a feature article appearing today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The article is jointly authored by researchers with the USGS, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, University of New Hampshire, City of Austin Texas, and Baylor University. Links t Industrial LTE Cat 1 router o the four new articles on this topic can be found on the USGS website on PAHs and sealcoat. Coal-tar-based sealant is the black liquid sprayed or painted on many parking lots, driveways, and playgrounds. An estimated 85 million gallons are used each year, primarily in the central and eastern U.S. Coal tar is known to cause cancer in humans and is made up of more than 50 percent PAHs.

“The value of this research is that it identifies the pathways by which PAHs move from pavements to people and measures the contribution in relation to other sources,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “The most striking finding is that pavement sealcoat contaminates virtually every part of our every-day surroundings, including our air and our homes.

Scientists estimate that the amount of PAHs released to air nationwide each year from new applications of coal-tar-based sealant are similar to or greater than annual PAH emissions from vehicles. USGS scientists measured PAHs in air above parking lots, with and without sealcoat, in suburban Austin, Texas. In a second study, PAH levels in air and in dried sealant were tracked for one year following sealant application to a parking lot. Two hours after sealcoat application, PAH emissions were 30,000 times higher than those from unsealed pavement. Parking lots with three to eight-year-old sealant released 60 times more PAHs to the air than parking lots without sealant.

Coal-tar-based sealcoat causes contamination indoors as well as outdoors. Baylor University scientist Spencer Williams used USGS measurements of PAHs in house dust to estimate the potential ingestion of PAHs by young children living near coal-tar-sealed parking lots. Ingestion of PAHs from food has long been thought to be the primary route by which children are exposed to PAHs. Williams’ analysis indicated that children living in apartments adjacent to parking lots with coal-tar-based sealcoat likely receive more than twice as much PAHs from incidental ingestion of house dust than from their diet. PAH ingestion by children in those settings was estimated to be 14 times higher than by children in apartments adjacent to unsealed parking lots.

Some governments have taken action on use of coal-tar-based sealcoat.Fifteen municipalities and two counties in four states (Minnesota, New York, Texas, and Wisconsin), the District of Columbia, and the state of Washington all have enacted some type of ban, affecting almost 10.4 million people. Several national and regional hardware and home-improvement retailers have voluntarily ceased selling coal-tar-based driveway-sealer products.

Two kinds of sealcoat products are widely used: coal-tar-bas 3g modem  ed and asphalt-based. The coal-tar products have PAH levels about 1,000 times higher than the asphalt products. Asphalt-based sealcoat is more commonly used on the West Coast and coal-tar-based sealcoat is more commonly used in the Midwest, the South, and the East. Consumers can determine whether a product contains coal tar by reading the product label or the associated Materials Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), available from the applicator, retailer, or on the Internet.

Image: USGS

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This art cellular router icle was originally published by International Business Times.

ClearMacro CEO Mike Simcock, who has 25 years of professional asset management experience, says he started the company to help investment managers that were drowning in a deluge of data.

There has been a massive explosion in data sources, many offering the prospect of mo IoT gateway re timely information and more impactful signals.

But the big data revolution is actually compounding a problem that was already there, says Simcock. "If you are a chief information officer or a portfolio manager, not only have you got all of the traditional data sets to evaluate, but you have all of these new entrants coming in from satellites, Google trends, all different sources."