A Monitor at Every Power Pole
An
Iowa State University research team led by Arun Somani, chair and Jerry R. Junkins professor of electrical and computer engineering, is working to develop a network of wireless sensors that could monitor the country's electricity transmission system. While the sensors could pick up suspicious activity at power poles, they'd be especially useful at quickly locating any breakdowns.
America has a lot of transmission lines, substations and generators that could use some monitoring. The Department of Energy reported the country had 157,810 miles of transmission lines in 2004.
The monitoring system depends on sensors housed in black boxes just a few inches across. Somani recently picked up one of the sensors inside Iowa State's Wireless and Sensor Networking Laboratory and showed off the electronics capable of watching out for conductor failures, tower collapses, hot spots and other extreme conditions. A tiny camera can also be mounted in the sensor to look for suspicious movements around power lines.
This might leave the ordinary person with the choice of having a monitor camera outside their window or having no electricity.
Just hope that your activities do not look 'suspicious' to your power company monitors.
News Service: Iowa State University
Smell-o-vision
From
New Scientist:
Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan are building an odour recorder capable of recording and playing back smells. Simply point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals.
While a number of companies have produced aroma generators designed to enhance computer games or TV shows, they have failed commercially because they have been very limited in the range of smells they can produce, says Pambuk Somboon of the Tokyo team.
So he has done away with pre-prepared smells and developed a system that records and later reproduces the odours. It's no easy task: "In video, you just need to record shades of red, green and blue," he says. "But humans have 347 olfactory sensors, so we need a lot of source chemicals."
Somboon's system will use 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or electronic noses, to pick up a broad range of aromas. These are then used to create a digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be chosen according to the purpose of each individual gadget. When you want to replay a smell, drops from the relevant vials are mixed, heated and vaporised. In tests so far, the system has successfully recorded and reproduced the smell of orange, lemon, apple, banana and melon.
"We can even tell a green apple from a red apple," Somboon says. Smell researchers are interested in the institute's work. "It would be interesting to know just what range of smells this new system can detect and recreate," says Stephen Brewster, a computer scientist at the University of Glasgow, UK, who is studying whether smell can be used to help people quickly identify digital photos without opening them. "This could be an interesting delivery system for our work."
Record now and smell-back later
