Electric motorcycles rev up design and performance (w/photos)

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Summary: Manufacturers are raising the performance bar for electric motorcycles, rapidly catching up to their gas-guzzling counterparts. Here are five battery-powered machines guaranteed to turn heads.

As an enthusiast of motorcycles (I own two) and a resident of the Bay Area, I’ve noticed a surge in buzz surrounding electric two-wheelers and I’m not alone. Reporting today on the recent unveiling of Red Shift, an all-electric “supermoto” from San Francisco start-up BRD Motorcycles, Jeanne Carstensen at the New York Times, writes; “With Mission Motors, also in San Francisco, and Zero Motorcycles in Santa Cruz, as well as others, the region is becoming a hub for electric motorcycle companies.”

Speaking of Mission Motors, the company made history a few weeks ago at the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix at Laguna Seca. The company’s race bike, Mission R, posted a qualifying time of 1:31.3, the fifth fastest for the weekend’s AMA Supersport race, and a track record for an electric vehicle of any kind. Motorcycle traditionalists were left scratching their heads.

As the performance of electric motorcycles closes in on their gas-guzzling counterparts, they’re also becoming increasingly practical and cost-effective. The market for electric scooters and motorcycles is taking off worldwide with about a half a billion in use across the globe by 2016, estimates Pike Research.

For whatever shortfalls exist today with electric motorcycles, such as a max ranges that peak out between 60 - 100 miles and the lack of a gas engine growl, manufacturers are wasting no time compensating with designs and technology that could permanently impact both, motorcycling industry and culture.

Below is a sample of the latest electric motorcycles at various stages of development plus a $35K hybrid bicycle that must be seen to be believed: (Make | Model | Energy Storage | Horsepower | Top Speed | MSRP)

[ Site | Specs | Photos]

[ Site | Specs | Photos]

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[ Site | Specs | Photos]

[ Site | Specs | Photos]

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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One step closer to quantum computers

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Summary: Rice University physicists have created a tiny “electron superhighway” that could one day be useful for building a quantum computer.

The promise of quantum computing is largely predicated on whether or not physicists can keep quantum bits, or “qubits,” from slipping out of their two-state existence due to quantum fluctuations. This fundamental limitation has spawned research into different approaches to creating qubits.

Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

The latest comes from Rice University, where physicists have created a device called a “quantum spin Hall topological insulator” which acts as a tiny electron superhighway designed for increased fault-tolerance.

The researchers claim that the device is one of the building blocks needed to create quantum particles that store and manipulate data.

A quantum computer uses quantum particles in place of the digital transistors found in today’s microchips. These particles — atoms, electrons, or qubits — can be both ones and zeros at the same time, thanks to the quirks of quantum mechanics. This gives quantum computers a huge edge in performing intense computing tasks like code-breaking, climate modeling and biomedical simulation.

“In principle, we don’t need many qubits to create a powerful computer. In terms of information density, a silicon microprocessor with 1 billion transistors would be roughly equal to a quantum processor with 30 qubits,” said Rui-Rui Du, a Rice physicist behind the research.

Du and colleague Ivan Knez describe their approach to topological quantum computing in a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters.

According to Rice, “topological designs are expected to be more fault-tolerant than other types of quantum computers because each qubit in a topological quantum computer will be made from a pair of quantum particles that have a virtually immutable shared identity.”

But there is a catch to the topological approach. Physicists have yet to create or observe one of these stable pairs of particles, which are called “Majorana fermions” (pronounced MAH-yor-ah-na FUR-mee-ons).

Majorana fermions were first proposed in 1937 and the search for the elusive particles is becoming an obsession in the condensed-matter community. Physicists believe the particles can be made by marrying a two-dimensional topological insulator — like the one created by Du and Knez — to a superconductor.

According to Knez, if a small square of a topological insulator is attached to a superconductor then the elusive Majorana fermions are expected to appear precisely where the materials meet. If this proves true, the devices could potentially be used to generate qubits for quantum computing.

Knez spent more than a year refining the techniques to create Rice’s topological insulator. The device is made from a commercial-grade semiconductor that’s commonly used in making night-vision goggles.

Du said it is the first 2-D topological insulator made from a material that physicists already know how to attach to a superconductor.

“We are well-positioned for the next step,” Du said. “Meanwhile, only experiments can tell whether we can find Majorana fermions and whether they are good candidates for creating stable qubits.”

Related:

Breakthrough removes major hurdle for quantum computing
Scientists create a single-electron transistor: A big step for quantum computing?

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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Viruses harnessed as molecular building materials

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Summary: Researchers at UC Berkeley have turned a benign virus called M13 into an engineering tool for assembling materials that mimic collagen, one of nature’s building blocks. The process they developed could eventually be used to create bone, skin, and corneas.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a technique to coax benign viruses called M13 phages to serve as structural building blocks for complex biological materials.

The materials created with the help of viruses could eventually be used to create complex biological tissues, such as cornea, skin and bones. Credit: Woo-Jae Chung, UC Berkeley

“We took our inspiration from nature,” said Seun-Wuk Lee, an associate professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley who describes his team’s self-templating, bio-material assembly process in the journal Nature. “Nature has a unique ability to create functional materials from very basic building blocks. We found a way to mimic the formation of diverse, complex structures from helical macromolecules, such as collagen, chitin and cellulose, which are the primary building blocks for a wide array of functional materials in animals and plants.”

Lee points to the blue-faced Mandrill as as a source of inspiration. It derives its coloring not from pigment, but from the specific scattering of light formed when thin fibers of collagen are twisted and layered in its skin.

The researchers began studying collagen, particularly the factors influencing the formation of the protein’s hierarchical structures. But they hit a wall. “Unfortunately, collagen is a difficult material to study because it is hard to tune its physical and chemical structures. We needed a convenient model system to solve this problem,” said Lee.

The teamed turned to the common bacteria-attacking virus, the M13 bacteriophage, which is routinely engineered for applications from nanomaterials to green energy and harmless to humans. They found that its long, “chopstick-like” shape with a helical groove on the surface closely resembled collagen fibers.

The scientists added varying concentrations of the virus to a soup of saline solution in. Next, they dipped a sheet of glass into the bath of M13 and pulled it out at slow, precise speeds to control the liquid’s viscosity, surface tension, and rate of evaporation–all factors which determined the type of pattern formed by the viruses. As each sheet emerged, a fresh film of viruses was attached. This technique altered the physical environment for the viral filaments and ultimately produced three distinct film patterns.

The next step was to engineer the virus to express specific peptides that influence the growth of soft and hard tissue for use in biomedical applications. They used the resulting viral films as tissue-guiding templates to form a composite similar to tooth enamel that could potentially be used as regenerative tissue.

According Lee, their technique’s simplicity is key; by setting very specific parameters, they just let self-assembly slowly take place: “We let this run overnight, and by the next morning there were trillions of viral filaments arranged in patterns on our substrate.”

One of their key findings, Lee said, is that “we have started to understand nature’s approach to creating such complex structures, and we have developed an easy way to mimic and even extend it.”

Sources: UC Berkeley, NSG.gov

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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Apple Siri, Google Voice could help save the world's languages

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Summary: 80% of all web communication is in ten languages, yet 95% of humanity speaks roughly 300 languages. As digital services and devices move to voice control, the commercial opportunity could help close the digital linguistic divide, says the Long Now Foundation.

The majority of the world’s languages have only a few thousand speakers each, therefore, provide no commercial incentives to preserve or to enable on the web.

If you look to the left of the long tail, however, said Dr. Laura Welcher, Director of Operations for the Rosetta Project at the Long Now Foundation, there are about 300 widely spoken languages that do provide motivation for providers of digital services and devices because this group accounts for 95% of all people on earth. (See the yellow colored band in the image).

Credit: Dr. Laura Welcher, Long Now Foundation

In a recent talk given at UC Berkeley’s Language Center, Welcher described her organization’s goal of creating an open public digital collection of all human language as well as an analog backup– the Rosetta Disk– a solid nickel surface with 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation that can last for thousands of years.

Experts say that we lose a language every two weeks and up to 90% of roughly 7,000 languages will go extinct in 100 years. To counter the trend, the Long Now Foundation is leading a herculean effort to preserve thousands of endangered languages around the world.

In her talk, Welcher applauded Google’s plan to sample 300 languages from around the world to help improve its Voice Search product, saying that ideally the data collected would find its way into the public domain such as Language Commons or Rosetta Language Base on Freebase (an open platform owned by Google).

Welcher said that the long tail of roughly 6,500 languages could benefit from development of the 300 (and vice versa) if we build better algorithms that can work with less data. Long tail languages can also be helped through philanthropic efforts.

“As companies make corpora, if it is open then linguists can access it and help build a platform to help endangered languages of the world,” she asserted.

Welcher did not cover Apple’s Siri voice controlled personal assistant technology. But it currently supports three languages (English, French, German) and in 2012 will include most of the top ten used languages on the web, namely Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. As Siri grows in both linguistic diversity and capability, any second-tier languages may take less resources to support, giving Apple the green light to contribute to open resources on human languages.

If there is anything that the Rosetta Project needs to fulfill its objective, it’s help. The current collection contains 100,000 pages of scanned material documenting over 2,500 languages, as well as a growing library of crowd-sourced audio and video recordings. But that’s just a scratch on the surface. There is substantial machine readable corpora for only about 20-30 of the world’s languages. Welcher expects to add only 500 more into the digital domain over the next 10 years unless she can substantially scale the effort.

Programs like the 300 Languages Project and “Record-a-thon” are helping to close the gap, but it will take more to reach her goal of documenting at least 5,000 languages before they disappear. Welcher asked: “How do we get the isocode for all human languages and develop a universal corpus with reliable machine translation?”

Welcher ended her talk with a vision of a free and open encyclopedia of human languages that could model Wikipedia and the encyclopedia of life.

Further reading:

Internet Archive: The Rosetta Project
The DVD-Sized Rosetta Disk Will Preserve Human Language For Eternity
Found in Translation: The blog of the Berkeley Language Center

Related:

A ’stone-like’ optical disc that lasts for millennia
The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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A 'stone-like' optical disc that lasts for millennia

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Summary: With a belief that there’s a future in optical drives, start-up Millenniata and LG have partnered to commercialize a disc that lasts ‘forever.’

Start-up Millenniata and Hitachi-LG have teamed up to create a new optical disc along with a read/write player that will store any data — movies, photos, and music — forever. The disc is compatible with any current DVD or Blu-ray player.

Millenniata calls the product the M-Disc, and claims that it “cannot be overwritten, erased, or corrupted by natural processes.” In fact, if you were so inclined, you can dip it in liquid nitrogen and then boiling water without harming it (See video).

The M-Disc platters resemble typical DVDs and Blu-ray discs in that they are made up of multiple layers of material sans a reflective or dye layer. During the recording process, a laser “etches” permanent pits onto a proprietary rock-like data layer using higher temperatures and as much as five times more energy than ordinary optical discs.

Credit: Millenniata, Inc.

A U.S. Department of Defense study found the resiliency of the product to be greater as compared to other leading optical disc competitors.

The platters can be read on any machine that can read a DVD, however, Millenniata’s machine is required to write it. Currently, the discs can store about the same amount of data as a DVD (4.7GB) but only write at 4x or roughly half the speed of today’s DVD players. Plans to ramp up recording speed are underway.

Millenniata will target consumers first when it launches the M-Disc read-write player in early October. After that, the company plans to make a foothold in the long-term data archive market as an alternative to cloud and other storage and backup technologies.

(via Computerworld)

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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NASA aiming to make 'tractor beams' a reality

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Summary: A team of laser experts are studying different techniques for corralling particles and transporting them via laser light to instruments on rovers and orbiting spacecraft.

Tractor beams trap and move objects using laser light. If you’ve seen one in action you were probably watching Star Trek or a science fiction movie.

Tractor beam on rover concept (Credit: Dr. Paul Stysley)

However, laser-based trapping of particles isn’t fanciful or beyond technological know-how says Paul Stysley, one of three NASA scientists who recently won funding to study methods for corralling particles and transporting them via laser light to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis.

“The original thought was that we could use tractor beams for cleaning up orbital debris,” Stysley said. “But to pull something that huge would be almost impossible — at least now. That’s when it bubbled up that perhaps we could use the same approach for sample collection.”

Current sample-collection techniques work but are expensive and have a limited range and sample rate. Tractor beams, reason the scientists, could grab desired molecules from the upper atmosphere on an orbiting spacecraft or trap them from the ground or lower atmosphere from a lander.

“They could continuously and remotely capture particles over a longer period of time, which would enhance science goals and reduce mission risk,” Stysley said.

The scientists have identified three different approaches for transporting particles, as well as single molecules, viruses, ribonucleic acid, and fully functioning cells, using the power of light. They’ll pursue the technique which they determine is most technologically feasible:

The optical vortex or “optical tweezers” method — This method involves two counter-propagating beams of light that form a ring-like geometry which confines particles to the dark core of the overlapping beams. By alternately strengthening or weakening the intensity of one of the light beams — in effect heating the air around the trapped particle — researchers at Australian National University have shown in laboratory testing that they can move the particle along the ring’s center. This technique, however, requires the presence of an atmosphere.Optical solenoid beams — These light beams’ intensity peaks spiral around the axis of propagation. Testing has shown that the approach can trap and exert a force that drives particles in the opposite direction of the light-beam source. In other words, the particulate matter is pulled back along the entire beam of light. Unlike the optical vortex method, this technique relies solely on electromagnetic effects and could operate in a space vacuum, making it ideal for studying the composition of materials on one of the airless planetary moons, for example.Bessel beams – This technique exists only on paper and has never been demonstrated in the laboratory. Normal laser beams when shined against a wall appear as a small point, but with Bessel beams, rings of light surround the central dot. In other words, when seen straight on, the Bessel beam looks like the ripples surrounding a pebble dropped in a pond. According to theory, the laser beam could induce electric and magnetic fields in the path of an object. The spray of light scattered forward by these fields could pull the object backward, against the movement of the beam itself.

“We want to make sure we thoroughly understand these methods. We have hope that one of these will work for our purposes,” said team member Barry Coyle at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Once we select a technique, we will be in position to then formulate a possible system” and compete for additional [NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts] NIAC funding to advance the technology to the next level of development.”

“We’re at the starting gate on this,” Coyle added. “This is a new application that no one has claimed yet.”

Related:

A ‘laser-pointer’ for detecting roadside bombs

NASA unveils new deep-space rocket design

Laser warfare takes to the high seas

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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$1,000 house a step closer for world's poor

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Summary: MIT architects have produced the first prototype “Pinwheel House” in an effort to see if low-cost homes can be constructed for $1,000, total.

The brainpower at MIT has been harnessed to help improve housing conditions for the billions of people living in poor rural conditions on less than $1 per day.

The first prototype from the Institute’s “1K House” project–an effort launched in 2009 to see if low-cost homes can be constructed for $1,000–has been constructed in Mianyang, in Sichuan Province, China, an area ravaged by the 2008 earthquake.

Pinwheel House interior. Credit: Ying Chee Chui

Pinwheel House is modular dwelling consisting of two natural materials, earth block and bamboo, that can be easily assembled via interlocking rectangular room units that surround a central courtyard space.

It was designed by Ying Chee Chui, a graduate of MIT’s Department of Architecture and currently an architectural practitioner in New York City.

“The module can be duplicated and rotated, and then it becomes a house,” Chui says. “The construction is easy enough, because if you know how to build a single module, you can build the whole house.”

Drawing inspiration from One Laptop Per Child, the idea for a $1,000 homes was first conceived as a design challenge by Tony Ciochetti who chairs MIT’s Center for Real Estate.

Chui’s house is one of 13 plans that emerged from the first 1K House design studio. It features hollow brick walls with steel bars for reinforcement, wooden box beams, and is intended to withstand a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. The first prototype measured 800 square feet and turned out to be more costly, at $5,925, but still very inexpensive in relative terms.

A 500 square feet version of the house could be built for about $4,000, according to Chui, and still lower if a large number of the homes were built at once. Nonetheless, Yung Ho Chang, a professor of architectural design at MIT who helped oversee the 2009 1K House design studio, thinks the prototype has fulfilled the promise of Chui’s design. “The house Chee built has good ventilation and good light,” Chang says.

But plenty of hurdles remain before any home can be manufactured for $1,000 or less. “If it were easy, somebody would have done it,” Ciochetti says.

The house is made of modules 13.8 sqm. The assembly method is the same for each unit, thus, if you know how to build one module, you know how to build them all. Credit: MIT

At any rate, the project’s success has spawned a related effort for home designs intended for Japan, A new MIT design studio is working on a home that would cost $10,000 to build. It would provide housing for victims of natural disasters, such as the earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan last March.

Ultimately, convening further studios in the vein of the 1K House project will allow more designs to move from the drawing board and onto solid ground, according to Chang. “The inexpensive laptop got to be more than an idea, it became available for children. I hope one day we’ll be in the same position.”

Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.

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