Camera phones will be high-precision scanners 16:12 14 September 2005 NewScientist.

com news service Duncan Graham-Rowe

The software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page. Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work. This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images. But with the new software entire documents can be captured. As a page is being scanned the OCR software takes dozens of still images of the page and effectively merges them together using the outline of the page as a reference guide. The software can also detect the curvature of the page and correct any distortion so caused, enabling even the areas near the binding to be scanned clearly. Copyright furore Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least 20centimetres away, an A4 sized page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan. This produces between 21 and 35 images which the software merges together to extract the text and record any images. The goal of our research is to enable mobile phones to be used as portable faxes or scanners that can be used any time, an NEC spokesman told New Scientist. But the concern now is that this technology will catapult the publishing industry into a copyright furore similar to that which has gripped the recording industry in recent years. Theres no easy solution, says Andrew Yates, intellectual property adviser to the UKs Periodical Publishers Association in London. The music industry has been struggling with this for some time, he says. But with music the issue is whether or not you allow people to copy music they have already purchased, says Yates. Cause for alarm With print publishing the situation appears to be even more intractable because the new software will make it possible to make copies without even purchasing the original, he says. Licensing agreements may be one option he says. But also people will have to learn that certain rules of conduct still apply. It is true that this technology may cause copyright issues if it were to be used in an unorthodox way, says the NEC spokesman. But NEC would never encourage such behaviour, he adds.

According to NEC, their software is designed to sound an alarm when being used, to avoid any copyright conflicts. The company claims that any attempts to mute the device somehow or plug in headphones will not affect the audibility of this alarm. NEC and NAIST say they do not plan to commercialise their software for three years.

First robot moved by muscle power 18:17 27 February 2004 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Anil Ananthaswamy

A silicon microrobot just half the width of a human hair has begun to crawl around in a Los Angeles lab, using legs powered by the pulsing of living heart muscle. It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine. This distinctly futuristic development could lead to muscle-based nerve stimulators that would allow paralysed people to breathe without the help of a ventilator. And NASA which is funding the research hopes swarms of crawling "musclebots" could one day help maintain spacecraft by plugging holes made by micrometeorites. Whatever the ultimate applications of the technology, no one was more surprised to see the tiny musclebots finally move than Carlos Montemagno, the microengineer whose team is developing them at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has spent three disappointing years trying, and failing, to harness living muscle tissue to propel a micromachine. But when he and his team looked into their microscopes, they were amazed to see the latest version of their musclebot crawling around.

The device is an arch of silicon 50 micrometres wide. Attached to the underside of the arch, the team has grown a cord of heart muscle fibres (see graphic). It is the contraction and relaxation of this cardiac tissue that makes the arch bend and stretch to produce the bot's crawling motion. And the muscle is fuelled by a simple glucose nutrient in a Petri dish. Arch-shaped skeleton The prospect of using living muscle to power microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is an attractive alternative to micromotors. While motors need electricity, muscles can draw their energy from glucose - perhaps deposited on the surface where the robot will be working. The UCLA team's breakthrough is to have developed an automated way of anchoring muscle tissue to a substance like silicon. The team carved an arch-shaped skeleton from a wafer of silicon using automated microchip manufacturing equipment, and coated it with an etchable polymer. They then etched away the coating on the underside of the arch and deposited a gold film there. This acts as an adherent for the muscle cells. To grow the muscle, the skeleton was placed in a Petri dish containing rat cardiac muscle cells in a glucose culture medium. Over three days, the muscle cells grew into muscle fibres that attached themselves to the gold underside, forming a cable of cardiac muscle running the length of the arch. During this process, the arch was held in place by a restraining beam. When this was removed the musclebot immediately started crawling at speeds up to 40 micrometres per second. The geometry of the musclebot ensures that its flexing pushes it in one direction, rather than simply contracting and relaxing on the spot. Phrenic nerve Montemagno now wants to use the technology to help people who have damaged phrenic nerves. These stimulate the diaphragm to make us breathe and damage means patients often need ventilators instead. Rather than moving the legs of a musclebot, the muscle fibres would flex a piece of piezoelectric material and generate a few millivolts to stimulate the phrenic nerve. Using cells from the patient's own heart would prevent rejection of the implant, and the muscle could be powered by blood glucose. Montemagno's initial brief from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts was to design a muscle-powered micromachine that could seek and repair micrometeorite punctures on spacecraft. However, he stresses that such applications are several decades away. "The issue of all of the microbots talking to one another hasn't even been addressed," he stresses. Or, indeed, how they would be fuelled. Watch out for the sugar-coated space station.

Tiniest remote-controlled robot created 18:56 16 September 2005 NewScientist.com news service Celeste Biever

The tiniest mobile robot ever has been created by US researchers. It is a sliver of silicon one hundredth of a millimetre thick that can be precisely steered like a remote-control car to move in any direction across the surface of a special plate. Powered by a grid of electrodes underneath a surface layer and steered by its tiny silicon paddle, the bot crawls around at a speed of about 200 micrometres per second and can push specks of dust, or other dead robots. I believe this is the smallest untethered mobile silicon structure in a dry environment, says Ron Fearing, a micro-roboticist at the University of California, Berkeley. I would certainly consider it a robot - it does a lot more than a simple actuator. At 250 by 60 micrometres, the bot is narrower than a human hair and shorter than a full stop at the end of a sentence. It could be deployed to build or prototype other robots or micro-electromechanical systems. Its creators lead by Bruce Donald of Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire will present it at the International Symposium for Robotics Research on 14 October. To see movies of the micro-robot moving click here. Zebra crossing Although micro-scale objects have been steered to move previously, they either required suspension in water or were made partially of animal muscle cells and so could not be fuelled indefinitely and were difficult to control. Other micro-bots, also known as walking chips, consist of a computer chip equipped with legs and a solar panel, but are over 10 times bigger than the new robot - it is just a small, flat sheet of silicon, bent asymmetrically like the letter L. It requires no motor to move, but instead sits on the surface of an electronic plate with the corner pointing upwards and only its two ends touching the surface. The plate is a zebra crossing of alternating positive and negative gold electrodes. When the electrodes are charged, the full length of the robot becomes oppositely charged. The plate and the robot attract each other so that the L-shape of the robot suddenly stretches out to maximise the attraction, flattening its shape (see image). To unstretch the robot, the charge in the plate is switched off, and then the corner of the L pops back up. And because it is asymmetric, the robot always ends up about 12 nanometres closer to the short end than it was before it snapped up. Each of these up-down motions is a tiny robot step. These things just go and go and go, says cocreator Christopher Levey. Robot pivot In 2003, Donalds group demonstrated this type of motion on untethered robots, but the bots could only move in straight lines. Now they can be steered around the

surface of the plate in any direction just by tuning the voltage. Moving anywhere we want to in 2D is the most important feat we have accomplished, says Levey. The secret is to add a tiny silicon paddle coated on the upside with chromium which allows the robot to turn with a changing voltage. The paddles motion can be controlled separately to that of the main body of the robot as it only responds to a larger voltage. At a higher voltage the paddle becomes charged and uncurls so it can stretch out along the surface too, acting like a pivot to turn the robot. The same principle could be used to steer several robots on the same plate at the same time, says Levey. However, they will always be limited in what they can do because they only work when sitting on a special grid of electrodes, he adds.

Whole-ovary transplant successful in sheep 13:10 15 September 2005 NewScientist.com news service Anna Gosline

Whole, frozen and then thawed ovaries have been successfully transplanted in sheep, resulting in viable embryos. The technique offers the hope of motherhood to young women about to undergo cancer therapies known to cause infertility. Aggressive radiation or chemotherapy treatments for cancer can destroy ovaries. Unfortunately just 2% of human eggs, or oocytes, survive the freezing and thawing process necessary to preserve them for future use. Fertilised eggs have a much better track record, but for that, a woman must already have chosen the father. The best treatment so far is frozen and thawed ovarian grafts. These small sections of tissue are harvested before cancer treatment and then transplanted back into the body into the ovaries, arm or abdomen when treatment is finished. Two direct grafts back onto ovaries have resulted in successful, natural pregnancies in humans. But without built-in blood vessels, up to half of the surviving follicles sacs of cells in the ovary, each containing a maturing ovum die immediately after transplantation due to lack of blood supply. Grafts also tend to be short lived. The benefit of transplanting the whole ovary, the organ and blood vessels, is that you have immediately renewed blood flow. There is a much better chance of survival for the follicles, says co-author Yehudit Nathan at IMT Ltd in Ness Ziona, Israel, a research company specialising in cryobiology.

Slow freeze Nathan and her colleagues removed both ovaries from eight sheep, being careful to take the delicate blood vessels attached to the right ovary, too. They then slowly froze the right ovaries at a steady rate to control ice crystal growth if crystals grow too large, they can damage and kill fragile cells. Two weeks later, they thawed and implanted the ovaries back into the sheep, into the place previously occupied by the left ovary. Five of the eight ovaries showed immediate blood flow and were considered a success. One month later, the team successfully retrieved egg cells from two of the sheep. At four months, one of these two ewes produced another four egg cells. The team used chemicals to mimic fertilisation to avoid the complications of varying sperm quality and found that all eggs grew into viable embryos. Three years on, and MRI imaging and hormone tests showed that the ovaries were still functioning normally. The feat, previously only accomplished in rats, is a significant step forward, says ovarian cryopreservation expert Kutluk Oktay at Weill Medical College at Cornell University, US. But he warns that the benefits of whole-ovary transplant must be weighed against the risks: it is literally putting half a womans eggs in one vulnerable basket. Human ovaries are three to four times larger than sheep ovaries and may not survive freezing and thawing so well, as size is a crucial variable to success the bigger they are, the more difficult to safely freeze. Preserving grafts may end up being safer and more effective in the end. One would need a head-to-head comparison of those two techniques. But if the survival rate after freezing is similar then the [whole-ovary] technique would be superior, Oktay told New Scientist.

Robot, make thyself 14 February 2004 Celeste Biever Magazine issue 2434

Mass-produced micromachines are an engineer's dream, but piecing together all those tiny parts is a huge challenge. So why not get them to assemble themselves, asks Celeste Biever AS MILA BONCHEVA opens a drawer in a sideboard in her office, you might mistake her for a jeweller showing off her prized wares. She proudly pulls out perfectly intertwined spirals of pearly white beads, spine-like metallic necklaces, and hexagonal, red and green patterned copper twists, each precious object nestled in a felt-lined box. But these delicate, decorative pieces are not jewellery, and Boncheva wouldn't dream of wearing them for fear of causing damage. They are the results of the many experiments she has run to develop methods for manufacturing three-dimensional microchips. Boncheva is one of many researchers worldwide who are striving to master the production of microscale 3D designs, with the eventual aim of mass-producing micromachines. With complex moving parts and their own embedded circuitry, such devices could have myriad applications, from tiny "smart dust" surveillance motes to nanobots that could be sent into the human body to deliver ...

Wi-Fi camera emails pictures without a PC 16 September 2005 Barry Fox

Magazine issue

Kodak is to offer consumers a camera that can email high-quality images to friends and store the shots automatically in an online image bank Kodak is to offer consumers a Wi-Fi enabled camera that can take high-quality digital pictures, then email them to friends and store them automatically in an online image bank all without the need to use a PC. The new EasyShare-one camera is a pocket emailer, with direct connection to the internet via a public Wi-Fi hotspot or a home Wi-Fi system. Kodak research suggests 60% of digital photographers do not upload their pictures to a PC, either because they do not know how, cannot be bothered or are away from home. People go on holiday, fill up the memory card, then delete their pictures and start again, says Philippe Kalmbach, Kodaks marketing director in Europe. The same research shows that 70% of digital snapshooters never share pictures. If they use a camera phone to send pictures, the Multimedia Messaging System they use restricts the file size and degrades the ...

Self-cloning robots are a chip off the old block 11 May 2005 Special Report from New Scientist Print Edition Justin Mullins

BIRDS and bees do it - now machines can reproduce too. The first scalable robot to have built an exact copy of itself could herald a fundamental rethink of how robots may be used to explore other planets. Hod Lipson and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, built their selfreplicating device using small mechanical building blocks that can swivel, and also attach themselves to one another using electromagnets. Each 10 centimetre cube contains a microprocessor, and they are all equipped with an identical set of instructions that tell the block how to connect and swivel, depending on the way it is linked to other blocks. The instructions are designed to make the blocks work together to self-replicate.

For example, three or four blocks piled on top of each other to form a tower can create an identical tower by swivelling round like a crane to pick up other nearby blocks and pile them on top of each other (Nature, vol 435 p 163). "The instructions aren't complex. In fact, they turn out to be surprisingly simple," Lipson says. Because the blocks are identical, larger structures can be made by adding more blocks. This scalability is important, Lipson says. Previous work on self-replication has involved only simulations and specially designed machines. "But ours is not a one-off. It proves that there is a whole family of self-replicating machines that can do this." See footage of the process here (Windows Media Video, 5.42MB, courtesy of Hod Lipson, Cornell University). "It's a neat piece of work. If you could miniaturise these blocks and manufacture them cheaply in large numbers, you could build some interesting structures," says Adrian Bowyer from the University of Bath, UK, who specialises in self-replication. Lipson hopes to do just that by reducing the size of his blocks. Self-replication could have major implications for how robots are used in remote environments where repairing them is difficult. "Self-replication is the ultimate form of repair," Lipson says. "You can imagine robotic systems on Mars or at the ocean bottom repairing themselves using a mechanism like this."