A Prosthetic Foot that lets disabled wear heels

                Researchers have developed the first non-custom prosthetic foot to help women who have lost a leg to disease or injury, adapt heels up to four inches high. Women adjusting to life with a prosthetic limb face the same challenges as men, with perhaps one added complication: how to wear high-heels.

                A team of researchers has developed ‘Prominence’, the first prosthetic foot on the market that is nor custom made that adapts to popular fashion for heels up to four inches high. High heels have become an integral part of the female lifestyle in modern society, permeating through all aspects of life – professional and social. Scores of prosthetic feet are available on the market, but most are built to fit men’s shoes and none can adjust to a heel more than two inches high. That is less than the average women’s heel height in the US.

                With some 2,100 American women who lost a leg or foot in military service, and more women entering combat assignments, the demand for a prosthesis that accommodates women’s fashion footwear is sure to grow, researchers said.

                The challenge was creating a foot that adjusts without a separate tool to a range of heel heights, holds position without slipping, supports up to 113 kg, weighs less than over 1kg  and is slender enough to accommodate a woman’s shoe. The researchers’ work unfolded as a mix of mathematical calculations on paper and trial and error involving tests by machines and people.

New Form of Light Discovered

                Scientists have discovered a new form of light, which will impact our understanding of the fundamental nature of light. One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum. Until now, it was thought that in all forms of light the angular momentum would be a multiple of Planck’s constant – the physical constant that sets the scale of quantum effects.

                Now, researchers have demonstrated a new form of light where the angular momentum of each photon (a particle of visible light) takes only half of this value. This difference though small is profound, researchers said. “We’re interested in finding out how we can change the way light behaves, and how that could be useful. What we think is so exciting about this result is that even this fundamental property of light, that physicists have always thought was fixed, can be changed,” researchers said.

                This discovery will have real impact for the study of light waves in areas such as secure optical communications. In the 1830’s, the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and physicist Humphrey Lloyd found that, upon passing through certain crystals, a ray of light became a hollow cylinder. The team used this phenomenon to generate beams of light with a screw-like structure.

                Analyzing these beams within the theory of quantum mechanics they predicted that the angular momentum of the photon would be half-integer, and devised and experiment to test their prediction. Using a specially constructed device they were able to measure the flow of angular momentum in a beam of light. They were also able, for the first time, to measure the variations in this flow caused by quantum effects. The experiments showed a tiny shift, one half of Planck’s constant, in the angular momentum of each photon.

Tom Cruise's Minority Report Tech Arrives a Few Years Early

                The gesture tracking technology used by Tom Cruise’s precrime-fighting police officer in Minority Report, the sci-fi movie set in 2054, has arrived a few years early. Tiny radar chips by Infineon Technologies AG paired with algorithms by Alphabet Inc.’s Google help devices detect the finest gestures from several meters away, the German chipmaker says. The first gadgets to use the so-called Soli technology, presented at Google I/O event on Friday, are prototypes of an LG Electronics Inc. smartwatch and a Harman Kardon loudspeaker.

                While coarser gesture detection has been around for a bit, for example in gaming consoles such as Wii, the new chips are more precise. They can detect fine hand movements, like twisting your thumb and index finger when winding a watch from several feet away. This tech will revolutionize human-machine interaction far beyond the touchscreen of smartphones and even voice recognition. Since mankind started using tools 2.4 million years ago, this is the first time tools adapt to the user instead of the other way around.

Infineon, which teaming with Google to sell its chips paired with the US company’s software from mid 2017, expects the tech to provide new user experiences and inspire new devices, like the iPhone did with the touchscreen technology. Paired with the right software the radar chips are able to recognize people when they enter a room, detect finger and hand movements up to 15 feet away, and help workers steer machines and tools as industries digitize their factories.

New Method Generates Power From Seawater

                Scientists have used sunlight to efficiently turn seawater into hydrogen peroxide, which can then be used in fuel cells to generate electricity. It is the first photo-catalytic method of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) production that achieves a high enough efficiency so that the H₂O₂ can be used in a fuel cell. Researchers developed a new photo-electro chemical cell, which is basically a solar cell that produces H₂O₂. When sunlight illuminates the photo-catalyst, it absorbs photons and uses the energy to initiate chemical reactions in a way that ultimately produces H₂O₂. After illuminating the cell for 24 hours, the concentration of H₂O₂ in the seawater reached about 48 Millimolar. Researchers found that the negatively charged chlorine in seawater is mainly responsible for enhancing the photo-catalytic activity. The system has a total solar-to-electricity efficiency of 0.28%.

A Nanocarrier to Deliver Drugs to Brain Tumour Cells

                A nano-carrier engineered to be small enough to get past the blood-brain barrier could be targeted to deliver a chemotherapeutic drug more efficiently to tumour cells on the brain. Researcher said “I was surprised by how efficiently and well it worked once we got the nano-carrier to those cells.” Initial results were promising. It potentially points the way to a new treatment option for patients with conditions such as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). The brain tumour has a significant overall mortality, in part due to its location, difficulty of surgical treatment and the inability to get drugs through the blood-brain barrier. This led researchers to nanotechnology. They took what they know about the cancer’s biology and of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF). They engineered a micelle that is a phospholipid nano-carrier, a bit of fat globule, deliver a concentrated close of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ) to the GBM tumour cells.

Ocean on Jupiter Moon compatible host for life

The ocean on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may have the Earth-like balance of chemical energy necessary for life, even if it lacks volcanic hydrothermal activity. Europa is strongly believed to hide a deep ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell. In the study, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) compared Europa’s potential for producing hydrogen and oxygen with that of Earth, through processes that do not directly involve volcanism. The balance of these two elements is a key indicator of the energy available for life. The study found that the amounts would be comparable in scale; in both worlds, oxygen production is about 10 times higher than hydrogen production.

'Space Veggies' being grown at Dutch university

                Establishing a human colony on the Moon and travelling to Mars had been the stuff of dreams since the dawn of the space age. But, how can humans survive for months or years in the ultra-hostile environment of space? What, for instance, will they eat?

Researchers at a Dutch university are growing vegetables in soil similar to those found on Moon and Mars. When people go to the Moon and Mars they also have to eat, and it’s easiest for them to grow their own food. For the soil, the researchers had to depend on NASA, which makes ground similar to that on the Moon from sand found in an Arizona desert, while Mars’ crimson “soil” is scooped from a volcano in Hawaii. The first experiments started in 2013 researchers received and order of 100 kg of NASA’s imitation “space soil” – at a hefty price of $2,285. Researchers stuck tomatoes, peas, cress and other plants in pots containing the simulated soil.

The ground at first did not absorb water, but soon turned out to be good potting soil. In the Martian soil, plants were growing fast. They even started to flower. However, Martian and lunar soil, including NASA’s own imitation, may contain heavy metals, which may be deadly for humans. The soil can be purified by growing other plant species such as violets which absorb the poisons. However, the experiment has a drawback – it is being conducted in non-sterile conditions on Earth where only the nutrient quality of the soil is being assessed.

Extremely cold temperatures – dropping to minus 62 degrees Celsius on Mars – as well as a lack of oxygen means lunar or Martian vegetables could only be grown in a closed and controlled environment. The facility would have to be pressurized to normal atmospheric conditions on Earth, heated and lit, and protected from cosmic radiation, which damages plant DNA.