Tag: device

A Simple and Elegant Cloaking Device

By Anupum Pant

In the year 2011, UTD NanoTech unveiled their carbon nanotube invisibility cloak, making us move one more step closer to realizing a piece of magical cloth which fictional characters often use to turn themselves invisible. And then there was a 3D printed invisibility cloak too.

A few researchers at the University of Rochester have now created their own elegant version of an invisibility cloak. It’s, in principle, a fairly simple optical device which uses just four lenses to cloak objects behind it, keeping the image behind it still visible.

In fact, whatever it does, it does it in 3 dimensions. That means, the viewer looking through the device can actually pan to change the viewing angle and can still see the image of the background, undistorted, as if there were no lenses in between, in real-time. And it is probably the first ever cloaking device to be able to do that.

The device has a blind spot (sort of). In a way that It doesn’t cloak anything that lies in the axis of the lens system. The cloaking area is in the shape of a dough nut. Any part of the object that accidentally enters the axis area becomes visible and conceals the background. The device is simple and cheap enough to be easily scaled to cover greater area, as long as lenses of that size can be made. The video explains it better.

via [Quarks to Quasars]

A Fan With No Blades

By Anupum Pant

Fans have always had blades which chop up the air and send a turbulent gush towards you. Also, “you can’t put your head or hand through the traditional fan”. Although these things aren’t big problems that the device says it’d solve, I still like how different and innovative this thing is. Certainly worthy of sharing in my engineering section…

This one, one of the many amazing things invented by sir James Dyson, is a blade-less fan. Or as the man likes to call his invention – an air multiplier. As the name suggests, the device has no blades and yet it is capable of shooting out a steady stream of air on your face.

It’s amazing how it works. Watch Sir James Dyson himself explain it to you.

Weather Reporting Leeches

By Anupum Pant

Of all the creatures in the whole wide world, you’ll be surprised to know that leeches have played a fairly important role in the history of weather forecasting. An incredibly bizarre device invented by Dr. George merry weather, in the 19th century, called the tempest prognosticator, was basically a barometer powered by leeches.

Dr. George Merryweather, aptly named, was a surgeon by profession who was a lot into leeches. Since barometers were already being used for a long time then, to indicate approaching storms, he knew that air pressure was crucial in determining weather. However, Dr. Merryweather, an ingenious man, hell-bent on doing things the different way, had a different plan in his mind.

In his profession, he came across medicinal leeches all the time. In course of time, with a keen ability to notice details, he noticed that leeches were sensitive to electrical variations in the atmosphere.
He noticed a peculiar behaviour among these creatures. He observed that the leeches often started squirming around in a chaotic manner before a storm arrived.

Putting this practical knowledge to use, and experimenting with a number of designs, Dr. Merryweather devised a contraption. It consisted of 12 pint-sized bottles arranged in a circle. Each of which contained a leech in one-and-half-inch deep rain water. The top of every bottle had a tube into which the leech could crawl and disturb a mechanism, which in turn would activate a hammer to hit a bell – indicating that a storm is coming.

When a storm would come, the leeches were expected to crawl up the bottle, into the little pipe and activate a Heath-Robinson like mechanism which would make a hammer hit the bell. When the leech had completed its job it would fall down into the water and the hammer would go back to its place.

However, a number of times the leeches would give a false alarm. That was the reason he decided to use a jury of 12 leeches. And said,

The more of them that rang the bell, the more likely it was that a storm would be on its way.

If you ever go to Devon, you must take some time out to visit the Barometer World Museum to check out a full-scale working model of this device. Or you could go to the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire to see the other working model.

Harnessing The Power of Nature – Biological Data Storage

by Anupum Pant

The present storage technology

Storage technology has come long way from the year 1956 when IBM, the massive corporation started pushing this technology. Its journey started with data storage densities of orders as low as 40 bits per square inch in 1956 (RAMAC 350). This effort from their side indeed brought in great results and IBM could set a record of density record of 14.3 billion bits per inch, by the year 2000.

Today, in the year 2013, most HDDs (Hard Disks Drives) are able to store with densities of around 500 Billion bits per square inch; technology at this level has brought Terabyte sized HDDs to our computers. The research being done on increasing density of data is still a bustling area. As a result, we often see news breaking in with breath-taking new storage technologies almost every month.

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Just a few months back, using a technique called nanopatterning a team from Singapore was able to show 3300 billion bits per square inch. That is almost 6 times the density of a normal HDD. It means that a 1TB HDD of present size could hold 6TB if this could come to manufacturing units.

Seagate, in another story, promised data densities of the order 1TB per square inch (8000 billion bits per square inch) within the next decade. Which would enable hard drives of up to 60 TB in capacity.

A similar thing has happened to compact disks. From CDs to DVDs to Dual Layer DVDs to BluRays and several other storages that didn’t last – from zip drives to holographic storage. The data storage densities have improved dramatically.

Is it enough?

Although, our present ability to store a lot of data in small physical spaces is enough for now, to meet the future demands we will need to keep progressing with an unbelievable rate. The fact – physical storage is reaching its limit gradually, could bottleneck our progress in the future.

Biological Storage Devices

The exact storage concept used in amazing natural systems like the human brain and DNA has remained elusive for decades now. To keep up with the rapid pace of development it is important that we step up our work in this area. I think, the answer to our demands lies with the nature.

A brain, for instance, is estimated to be able to store something closer to 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). The sad part, we don’t exactly know how it stores. Moreover, we don’t even know how we could precisely calculate their storage limits. These estimates are just a theoretical calculation. We still have a long way to go.

The greatest storage device

Recent successful experiments with storage and retrieval of data in the human DNA has come with a new hope for the future. Teams at the EU Bioinformatics Institute and Harvard University have successfully stored famous speeches, photos, and entire books, and then retrieved them with 99.99% accuracy.

Being able to store data in the DNA will confer upon us three advantages. Firstly, it will be fast (very), yes, faster than the flash drive. Secondly, it won’t age with repeated storage cycles (around 10,000 years), at least not like HDDs which have moving parts. Finally, DNA will enable us to reach data densities of unimaginable levels. Imagine being able to store of half a million DVD disks in a single gram of DNA!  Technically that would amount to 700 terabits per gram (measuring in area is difficult for an entity like this). Others have reached to densities as much as 2.2 petabytes per gram.

Bring DNA drives to our PCs I say!