Wireless electricity?Really!!!

What's the trick?

"We're going to transfer power without any kind of wires," says Dr Hall, now Chief Technology Officer at WiTricity, a startup developing wireless "resonance" technology.

"But, we're not actually putting electricity in the air. What we're doing is putting a magnetic field in the air."

It works like this: WiTricity builds a "Source Resonator," a coil of electrical wire that generates a magnetic field when power is attached.

If another coil is brought close, an electrical charge can be generated in it. No wires required.

"When you bring a device into that magnetic field, it induces a current in the device, and by that you're able to transfer power," explains Dr Hall.

And like that, the bulb lights up.

Wireless homes

Don't worry about getting zapped: Hall assures that the magnetic fields used to transfer energy are "perfectly safe" -- in fact, they are the same kind of fields used in Wi-Fi routers.

In the house of the future, wire-free energy transfer could be as easy as wireless internet.

If all goes to WiTricity's plans, smartphones will charge in your pocket as you wander around, televisions will flicker with no wires attached, and electric cars will refuel while sitting on the driveway.

WiTricity has already demonstrated the ability to power laptops, cell-phones, and TVs by attaching resonator coils to batteries -- and an electric car refueler is reportedly in the works.

Hall sees a bright future for the family without wires:

"We just don't think about it anymore: I'm going to drive my car home and I'm never going to have to go to the gas station and I'm never going to have to plug it in.

"I can't even imagine how things will change when we live like that."

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HOUSE THAT WALKS

A House That  Walks:-

                                                                    Don't want to leave home than take home with you....

 Houses are normally fairly stationary objects, and that's not considered a bad thing. But innovation never stands still, and a new prototype house that can walk on six legs has been built . The house is ten feet high, powered by solar panels, and is outfitted with a kitchen, toilet, bed, and wood stove. Last week, the house, a collaboration between MIT and the Danish design collective N55, took a journey through Cambridgeshire in England as part of an art project at the Wysing Art Center. Designed to move at the muscle speed of a human, the house walked at about five kilometers an hour around the 11-acre campus.

Samuel Kronick, an MIT student, designed the legs and wrote the software so that the house can move.

"Leg systems require a software algorithm to calculate the position of each articulated element based on the desired location of the foot," says Kronick. "This process is called inverse kinematics (IK). IK algorithms are fairly well-developed for rotary joint systems, like servo-based hexapod walkers, but since we came up with the tetrahedral legs, I had to write my own IK system."

The six legs provide high stability even over unpredictable terrain. And, with high motor function, the house can turn left and right, move forward and back, and even change height as needed. Kronick says the walking house is a first of its kind, although there have been Russian folktales that describe walking houses. N55 says the walking house is meant to be an ecological concept that is not harmful to the environment and inspires nomadic excursions.

Kronick says he would love to test the walking house in Africa with a herd of elephants, and has ideas about an amphibious version that can float on water as well as walk on land.

"We plan to make the house walk well and reliably enough that you could program a set of GPS waypoints via the onboard computer, remotely from an iPhone or over the internet through a Google Maps interface or similar, and have the house follow that path," he says.

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3D - PEN

Three Dimensional Printing :-

                                                                              Who says we can't write in air  Inventors Max Bogue and Peter Dilworth have invented a unique pen that draws in the air.

A colorful spool of plastic thread is fed into the pen.

The thread is then extruded as heated plastic that cools and solidifies instantly as it exits the tip.

This allows solid 3D structures to be drawn on any surface or from any surface into the air.

The pen, called a 3Doodler, weights approximately 7 ounces (198 g) and is 7 inches (17.7 cm) long. It requires no technical knowledge or software and plugs into an electrical outlet.

Max and Peter have received over 2.2 million dollars worth of advanced orders for their three dimensional printing pen.

They expect to fulfill those orders and launch the product in the fall of this year.

The co-inventors met while working for WowWee, a company based in Hong Kong that develops consumer technologies.

Peter consulted WowWee as an independent inventor. He had previously worked on robotics at MIT and contributed to a number of innovations including the infamous Uno Dicycle motorcycle.

Max was an R&D project manager with WowWee and has extensive experience in bringing products to market.

Here is some examples of this pen great work:-

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ROBO-BEE

Fly-sized Robot Takes First Flight

Flies have tiny wings and even tinier brains, yet they are capable of flying swiftly and agilely through even turbulent air. How do they do it?

And could we create a robot capable of doing the same?

That's the question that's been buzzing around Harvard professor Robert Wood's head for 12 years now. And finally, after years of testing and the invention of an all-new manufacturing technique inspired by children's pop-up books, Wood and his team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created a robot the size of a penny that is capable of remote-controlled flight.

You'd think that the smaller something is, the easier it'd be to make. But there's a point at which making things smaller becomes harder rather than easier, which is why making a functional fly-sized robot has proved such a challenge.

The so-called RoboBee flaps its wings approximately 120 times per second, almost faster than the eye can track, and is capable of hovering and flying horizontally in multiple directions like a helicopter.

At 80 milligrams, which is less than one-twentieth the weight of a dime, the robot is so small that traditional components of flight-capable machines simply wouldn't work, so the team had to create new ones.

"Large robots can run on electromagnetic motors, but at this small scale, you have to come up with an alternative, and there wasn't one," Kevin Ma, a co-lead author and graduate student at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said in a statement.

In place of electromagnetic motors, the team used ceramic strips that can expand or contract when hit with an electric field, a technique known as piezoelectricity. 

The problem of building these parts at a fly-sized scale was also an enormous obstacle. For example, the robot has no onboard power source — instead, it receives electricity via a thin wire connected to an external battery.

To build the other parts, the team looked for inspiration not from the natural world, but from children's pop-up books and origami.

Their solution is a groundbreaking technique that involves layering and folding sheets of carbon fiber, brass, ceramic and other materials, and then using extremely precise lasers to cut these sheets into structures and circuits. After that, the sheets can be assembled into extremely small but entirely functional devices in a single movement, just like a children's pop-up book.    

Wood and his team devised the pop-up technique in 2011, publishing a paper on it in February 2012. And last summer, after years of failed prototypes, the first RoboBee took flight in a Harvard robotics lab at 3 a.m.

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Kill The Need For Flash In Camera

New Camera Sensor Eliminates Need for Flash

No flash? No problem. A new imaging sensor could soon make it possible for photographers to take clear, sharp photos, even in dim lighting.

Created by a team of researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, the new sensor is highly sensitive to both visible and infrared light, which means it could be used in everything from the family Nikon to surveillance and satellite cameras. 

The sensor, which is 1,000 times more sensitive to light than the imaging sensors of most of today's cameras, gets this high photoresponse from its innovative structure.

It's made of graphene

GRAPHENE is a super strong carbon compound with a honeycomb structure that is as flexible as rubber, more conductive than silicon and which resists heat better than a diamond.

Graphene, which is a one atom-thick layer of the mineral graphite, has already earned a reputation as the building material of the future. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov took home the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for their work with the compound.

The inventor of the new sensor, Wang Qijie, an assistant professor at NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, said this is the first time that a broad-spectrum, high photosensitive sensor has been made using pure graphene.

"We have shown that it is now possible to create cheap, sensitive and flexile sensors from graphene alone," said Wang. "We expect our innovation will have great impact not only on the consumer imaging industry, but also in satellite imaging and communication industries, as well as the mid-infrared applications."

Wang said the key to his new sensor is the use of "light-trapping" nanostructures that use graphene as a base. The nanostructures hold onto light-generated electron particles for much longer than conventional sensors.

This results in a stronger than usual electric signal, which can be processed into an image, like a photograph captured by a digital camera.

Most of today's camera sensors use a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor as a base. But Wang said that his graphene base is far more effective, producing clearer, sharper photos.

And, according to Wang, he even took current manufacturing practices into account when designing this new sensor. In principle, the camera industry will be able to keep using the same process to make its sensors, but simply switch out the base materials for graphene.

If the industry chooses to adopt his design, Wang said it could lead to cheaper, lighter cameras with longer battery lives for all.

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INVISIBLE CAR

'Invisible' Mercedes car

Everyone from Harry Potter has already got an invisibility cloak. 

But scientists have now figured out how to make an entire car disappear. 

Using optical camouflage technology boffins at Mercedes Benz created the illusion that their new zero emissions F-Cell car is not even there at all. 

Taking the principal that to see through something you need to see what's behind it, they covered the driver's side of the car in mats of LEDs, and mounted a digital SLR camera on the opposite side of the vehicle.

The camera shoots video on the passenger side of the car and the video is displayed in real time on the driver side of the automobile. 

This ingenious approach, originally pioneered by scientists at the University of Tokyo, works on the same principles of the blue screen used by TV weather forecasters and Hollywood filmmakers.

The idea also mimics the iPad 2 Halloween costume that seems to displays a gaping hole in the human body.

The next conundrum-what to do with an invisible car ? Take it on a week long tour of Germany, obviously. 

In Mercedes' promotional video, stupefied Muggles stare and fall about in shock as the team put the car through its paces along the highways of Hamburg and the bridges of Bavaria.

Meanwhile online. while some pessimistic YouTube users were wary, anticipating that invisible cars would no doubt lead to brutal crashes, others fantasised about bring able to park anywhere at all, without getting a ticket.

Hi tech: Scientists have now figured out how to make an entire car invisible

Mind blowing: Using optical camouflage technology boffins at Mercedes Benz created an illusion

See though: Scientists covered the driver's side of the car in mats of LEDs, and mounted a digital SLR camera on the opposite side of the vehicle

How it works: The camera shoots video on the passenger side of the car and the video is displayed in real time on the driver side. It can also be lit up with a pattern or message

Ingenious: The approach originally pioneered by scientists at the University of Tokyo works on the same principles of the blue screen used by TV weather forecasters and Hollywood filmmakers

Preparation: Mercedes-Benz engineers kit out the car with LEDs

While Mercedes-Benz claims to be ready to mass produce hydrogen-powered vehicles, the cost of production is still prohibitive. 

Engineers have created a low-cost catalyst for hydrogen production, but the actual cost of the vehicles is out of reach for most European and American customers,digital trends.com reported.

A Mercedes-Benz F-CELL car can travel up to 250 miles using an electric engine equivalent to 134 horsepower. 

Commercial hydrogen-powered cars may not arrive for real until 2015, analysts anticipate, the major problem in the US being the cost of establishing proper equipment at gas stations.

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SEE THROUGH WALLS

Researchers See Through Walls With 'WiVi'

Want X­ray vision like the man of steel?    A technology that lets you see behind walls could soon be built in to your cell phone.

MIT professor Dina Katabi and graduate student Fadel Adib have announced Wi­Vi, a demonstration of a technology that uses Wifi to allow a viewer to "see" a person moving behind a wall. (Wi­Vi stands for "Wi­Fi" and "vision.")

Previous work demonstrated that the subtle reflections of wireless inter signals bouncing off a human could be used to track that person's movements, but those previous experiments either required that a wireless router was already in the room of the person being tracked, or "a whole truck just to carry the radio," said Katabi.

The new device uses the same wireless antenna as is found in a cell phone or laptop and could in theory one day be embedded in a phone. 

The trick is canceling out all interfering signals – Wi-Fi doesn't just bounce off humans, but also walls, floors, and furniture. And those signals are 10,000 to 100,000 times more powerful than the reflections off a human body.

Katabi's wi­vi sends out two wireless signals, one of which is the inverse of the other. In what Katabi calls "interference nulling," the two signals cancel each other out unless they hit a moving target – such as a human.

"To silence the noise, we change the structure of the Wi-Fi signal so all the undesired reflections cancel," she said.

The device is meant to be portable so, for example, a person worried that someone was hiding in the bushes could do a quick scan for her personal safety.

Wi­Vi could also serve as a high tech baby monitor or help Superman – or just cops – catch baddies.

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