Second Annual EurekaFest Showcases Young Innovators

Credit: Lauren Rugani

At today's second annual EurekaFest, top high-school innovators from around the country gathered at MIT to demonstrate their inventions. One of the most notable was a motorcycle designed to be both safer and greener than the average 'cycle: it's electrically powered and built with an enclosure fitted with compressible brackets--"crush zones"--in case of a collision.

The motorcycle operates on five lithium-ion batteries and can recharge in three hours from a standard wall outlet. It weighs only about 220 pounds and is designed with a low center of gravity for stability. It can reach about 60 miles per hour and can go 40 miles without a recharge, which can be done onboard. The first prototype cost around $12,000 to build, but the team that invented it, from Saint Thomas Academy, in Minnesota, expects that subsequent models will be about half the price, since part of the cost was designing and developing custom molds.

This year's $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, around which EurekaFest is organized, will be presented tonight to Joseph DeSimone, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has done work developing polymers for medicine, particularly drug delivery, and green manufacturing. Martin Fisher, CEO of KickStart, won the $100,000 award for sustainability research for his work on human-powered irrigation pumps.

Miles-Per-Gallon Math

Say you've got two cars in your garage. One of them gets 34 miles per gallon; the other gets only 12. You drive both cars 10,000 miles in the course of a year.

Would you save more gas by a) trading in the 34-miles-per-gallon car for one that gets 50 miles per gallon, or by b) trading in the 12-miles-per-gallon car for one that gets 14 miles per gallon?

New experiments suggest that people tend to pick a). After all, a 16-miles-per-gallon improvement seems better than an improvement of just 2 miles per gallon.

The right answer is b).

If you start driving the 50-miles-per-gallon car instead of the 34-miles-per-gallon car, you'll save 94.1 gallons of gas per year.

If you start driving the 14-miles-per-gallon car instead of the 12-miles-per-gallon car, you'll save 119 gallons per year.

The math is simple arithmetic. Divide the total number of miles driven (10,000) by the miles per gallon to get the total gallons used to drive that distance. For 12 miles per gallon, the answer is 833. For 14 miles per gallon, it's 714.

The fact that people guess a) rather than b) suggests that miles per gallon isn't a useful metric for describing a vehicle's gas consumption, say the researchers who did the recent experiments. A much more direct way to measure fuel consumption is an estimate of the amount of gas required to travel a given distance.

Such a number would also make it easier to convey just how much could be saved by moving closer to work or taking public transportation. And it renders the difference between a 12-miles-per-gallon SUV and a 50-miles-per-gallon hybrid more impressive, making it clear just how much fuel gas guzzlers are using. It takes 833 gallons to travel 10,000 miles in the former vehicle; it only takes 200 gallons to go 10,000 miles in the latter.

Plug-in Hybrid Catches Fire

Earlier this month, a plug-in hybrid caught on fire. In May, another one had suffered a "meltdown" of the battery pack. In both cases, no one was hurt. But some advocates of the technology are worried that, because of the incidents, plug-ins will get a bad name, and potential buyers will steer clear.

They shouldn't be worried.

Plug-in hybrids are like ordinary hybrids, but they have bigger battery packs that can be recharged by plugging them in. That gives cars extended electric range compared with conventional hybrids, which cuts down on gas consumption.

Plug-ins are all the rage these days with politicians and automakers, in whose minds they have apparently supplanted hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles as the cars of the future. It seems unlikely that the recent incidents will do much to change this. Both cars were aftermarket conversions of conventional hybrids. Cars designed from the ground up as plug-in hybrids aren't available yet. So the incidents throw into question the skill of those who did the conversions; the incidents don't suggest that plug-in hybrids are, in principle, a bad idea.

There might have been more cause for concern if the fire were the result of the battery cells. One of the conversions reportedly used battery cells from a company enlisted to supply batteries for plug-in hybrids from GM. It wouldn't look good if the batteries that GM intends to use started going up in flames.

But apparently, the batteries weren't the problem in either case. The fire and meltdown seem to have been caused by the electronics used in the conversions. One hopes that offerings from major auto companies will be better put together.

Right now, GM engineers are rushing to develop the GM Volt, a type of plug-in hybrid that's supposed to be available by the end of 2010. If those start bursting into flames after they roll off the assembly line, that would indeed be bad news for the future of plug-in hybrids.

Examining Chinese Internet Censorship

At the Beijing Olympics, foreign journalists may encounter systems designed to give the false appearance that Chinese Internet controls are minimal, according to Ronald Deibert, an associate professor of political science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. Today, Deibert, whose research group makes the censorship-circumvention tool Psiphon, will address the Beijing Olympics and other issues related to Chinese censorship in testimony to the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission in Washington, DC, as part of a hearing on access to information and media control in China.

From his testimony:

"There is considerable speculation as to how the Chinese government will deal with Internet controls during the upcoming Olympic games in Beijing. At least 30,000 foreign journalists are accredited to the Olympic games, and Beijing is contractually obliged to the International Olympic Committee to provide free Internet access for them. How and whether that will be accomplished is so far unknown, but there are several possible scenarios short of the unlikely rolling back of all filters. For example, China may reduce or eliminate controls over access to popular English language websites, news services, and blogging platforms, while keeping in place or even enhancing filters on the local language equivalents. This policy would give outsiders the impression that restrictions are minimal while targeting those sources of information that matter most for domestic policy. Already there is evidence that such a policy has begun, with long-standing restrictions on the English language version of the BBC news now lifted while the Chinese version of BBC remains inaccessible to users in China. China may also set aside a block of IP addresses for journalists that the routers will ignore; it is unclear, however, how that system would work for journalists accessing the Internet through multiple locations while traveling, such as in Internet cafes outside of official Olympic sites. Whatever method is ultimately employed, it seems highly probable that after the Olympics the controls will return to the status quo ante. Journalists covering the Olympic games would do well to come prepared with a reliable circumvention method and a list of banned Chinese language websites to check for accessibility."

Deibert's full testimony, which also addresses ethical compromises made by U.S. companies operating in China and the basic methods by which the Chinese government controls the Internet, is available for download here.

Touchy-Feely Robot Hand

Robots are mainstays in factories and manufacturing plants, but in most parts of the world, they aren't found in homes, interacting with people. Part of the problem, says Intel senior researcher Josh Smith, is that today's robots don't have the capability to perform spontaneous close-range interactions well. Grabbing a silicon wafer is one thing, but gently helping an elderly person out of a chair is something completely different.

So last September, Smith and his team developed a technology they call pre-touch, which can sense the location of an object about an inch away from the robot grabber. Pre-touch electrodes, positioned at the ends of robot fingers, emit a small electrical field. When a conducting object, such as metal or anything with water in it, comes within range, it changes the fingers' electric field. Algorithms process this change in electric field and essentially create a visual map of an object's position.

At a recent Intel Research event in Mountain View, CA, Smith showed off his latest version of the robot hand. In addition to the pre-touch sensors, he's added a strain gauge that measures the amount of force exerted by each robotic finger. The force applied by each finger can indicate to the robot that an object is slipping or that it's securely encircled by all fingers. Once the object is positioned well, the mechanical fingers close around it, squeezing only hard enough to keep the object from slipping. See a video of the action below.

Olympics for Robots

Credit: Kaist

Today kicks off Robogames, in San Francisco, the world's largest open robot competition, which has been ranked by Wired magazine and ESPN as a "top ten" event. Some of the 70-odd robot sports include kung fu fighting, humanoid sumo wrestling, biped soccer, and firefighting. There is also a junior league for roboticists under 18 and a host of "art bots" (bartending, musical, and painting are some of the categories). One of the most popular events from last year was the combat robots. Aside from offering the appeal of robotic fights, the competition drives some very creative designs.

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