It's not often that we need to look up the definition of a word in a press release – isn't the whole idea to make information easy to understand? – but we admit to not knowing what "eclosion" meant. Turns out, it's "The emergence of an adult insect from its pupal case, or the hatching of an insect larva from an egg. From the French eclosion, from eclore, to open." So, world, meet China's latest bug car.

We're talking about the Geely IG, which was first seen in concept form at the 2009 Shanghai Auto Show. At the time, we said the IG "would make a great electric car." At the Beijing Auto Show this week, Geely brought the new version, which doesn't go full electric, but does add wings seagull doors and shifts from a 3+1 seating arrangement to a 2+2 with a hybrid powertrain.

Geely is also showing off two pure electric models called the EK-1 and the EK-2. The EK-1 uses lead acid batteries to get up to 80 kilometers per hour while the EK-2 is powered by a lithium iron phosphate battery that can skedaddle up to 150 kmh. The ranges are 80 kilometers and 180 km, respectively. Geely also displayed the GSC (Geely Intelligent Stop-Go System) and the GPEC (Geely Plug-in Electric Hybrid Vehicle). Geely has two GPEC models, one in the EC7 model that uses an iron phosphate battery in a serial setup with a 1.0-liter engine and has a 60-km electric-only range. The other is in an EC8 in parallel with a 2.4-liter engine.

Japan plans to develop "mind-reading" robots and consumer electronics that can be controlled by thought alone and hopes to market them within a decade, the Nikkei daily reported.

The sci-fi like devices would employ so-called brain-machine interface technology, which analyses users' brain waves and brain blood-flow patterns detected through sensor-mounted headsets.

The envisaged devices would include television sets that can be operated without lifting a finger and mobile phones that send text messages composed purely through thought, the business daily said.

The initiative, to be launched this fiscal year, is a partnership between the government and the private sector, the report said, citing unnamed communications ministry sources.

Other applications could include a car navigation system that searches for restaurants when the driver thinks of having a meal, and air-conditioners that adjust the temperature when people in the room feel too warm or cold.

They could also include robots that know when an elderly or physically disabled person needs help carrying a heavy load, the Nikkei said.

Scientists have developed a brain implant that melts into place, fitting to the brain's surface like shrink-wrap.

The ultrathin flexible implants, made partly from silk, can record brain activity more accurately than thicker implants embedded with similar electronics, say the researchers.

The arrays could be used to detect when epileptic seizures first begin, and deliver pulses to shut the seizures down. In people with spinal cord injuries, the technology has promise for reading complex signals in the brain that direct movement, and routing those signals to healthy muscles
or prosthetic devices.

"These implants have the potential to maximize the contact between electrodes and brain tissue, while minimizing damage to the brain," says Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

"They could provide a platform for a range of devices with applications in epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders."

The implants contain metal electrodes that are just 500 microns thick. The absence of sharp electrodes and rigid surfaces should improve safety, with less damage to brain tissue.

Also, the implants' ability to mold to the brain's surface could provide better stability; the brain sometimes shifts in the skull and the implant could move with it. Finally, by spreading across the brain, the implants have the potential to capture the activity of large networks of brain cells.

In the future, the researchers hope to design implants that are more densely packed with electrodes to achieve higher resolution recordings.

"It may also be possible to compress the silk-based implants and deliver them to the brain, through a catheter, in forms that are instrumented with a range of high performance, active electronic components," said John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois.

Apr 13, 2010 11:00 pm

Simon the robot, who has the ability to learn new tasks, got his first public outing at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Atlanta Monday.

To view a full video report click here.

Prior to the show he was a project of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Socially Intelligent Machines lab for three years.

"We're interested in machine learning algorithms where you don't need to necessarily be an expert in machine learning to interact," said Andrea Thomaz. She and her team of researchers are working on robots that could be installed in the home and don't need to be preprogrammed with a set of tasks.

At the CHI conference Simon's job was identifying a few colorful items: a blue book, a green plastic case, a red flower and several others, and putting them into the corresponding color's bin.

To begin teaching Simon, a researcher asks him, "Simon, can you hear me?" He responds in the ubiquitous text-to-speech voice, "Yes." The researcher then asks him if he wants to learn something and he reaches out his robotic arm and grabs whatever the researcher is holding. He brings it towards his face and looks at it. In one demonstration he was given a blue book and told to put the book in the blue bin. He rotated, dropped the book in the bin and said, "There you go."

Touch screen interfaces may be trendy in gadget design, but that doesn't mean they do everything elegantly. The finger is simply too blunt for many tasks. A new interface, called Manual Deskterity, attempts to combine the strengths of touch interaction with the precision of a pen.

"Everything, including touch, is best for something and worse for something else," says Ken Hinckley, a research scientist at Microsoft who is involved with the project, which will be presented this week at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Atlanta.

The prototype for Manual Deskterity is a drafting application built for the Microsoft Surface, a tabletop touchscreen. Users can perform typical touch actions, such as zooming in and out and manipulating images, but they can also use a pen to draw or annotate those images.

The interface's most interesting features come out when the two types of interaction are combined. For example, a user can copy an object by holding it with one hand and then dragging the pen across the image, "peeling" off a new image that can be placed elsewhere on the screen. By combining pen and hand, users get access to features such as an exacto knife, a rubber stamp, and brush painting.

WITH his jeans, white trainers and stripy top, Bob is every inch the well-dressed 6-year-old. He's standing in the middle of a hotel car park and, scarily, I'm driving straight at him. Instead of hitting the brakes, I put my foot down on the accelerator. With just 10 metres to go, a row of red lights flashes across my windscreen and there's an urgent, high-pitched beeping sound. An instant later, I am jerked forward as the brakes slam on automatically and the car screeches to a halt just short of Bob's stomach.

This is what Bob is for. The child-sized dummy has just helped me test the first in-car system that can sense an imminent collision with pedestrians and brake automatically if the driver doesn't. It is being put through final trials before being launched in May by Swedish car maker Volvo in its new S60 model.

The Volvo system is the latest in a line of developments made possible by sophisticated sensors based on cameras, radar and lasers. These sensors already provide drivers with adaptive cruise control, which alters a car's speed to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front, as well as technology such as semi-autonomous parking systems. Yet according to Jonas Ekmark, a researcher at Volvo near Gothenburg, this is just the start.

Imagine if your computer only allowed you to see one line at a time, no matter what you were doing – reading e-mail, looking at a Web site, doing research. That’s the challenge facing blind computer users today. But new research from North Carolina State University is moving us closer to the development of a display system that would allow the blind to take full advantage of the Web and other computer applications.

“Right now, electronic Braille displays typically only show one line of text at a time. And they’re very expensive,” says Dr. Neil Di Spigna, a research assistant professor at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. In order to develop a more functional, and affordable, tool that would allow the blind to interface with their computers, Di Spigna and his colleagues are working to develop a full-page, refreshable Braille display. Braille uses a series of raised dots to represent letters and numbers, allowing blind people to read.
The researchers have developed a concept called a “hydraulic and latching mechanism,” which would allow the development of a full-page, refreshable Braille display system.

The researchers have developed a concept called a “hydraulic and latching mechanism,” which would allow the development of a full-page, refreshable Braille display system.

Such a display would also translate images into tactile displays, effectively mapping pixels in an image and allowing the full-page Braille display to represent the images as raised dots.

The researchers have developed a concept called a “hydraulic and latching mechanism,” which would allow the development of such a display system. The mechanism would be made of an electroactive polymer that is very resilient and inexpensive, when compared to current Braille display technologies. “This material will allow us to raise dots to the correct height, so they can be read,” says Dr. Peichun Yang, a postdoctoral research associate at NC State and co-author of the paper. “Once the dots are raised, a latching mechanism would support the weight being applied by a person’s fingers as the dots are read. The material also responds quickly, allowing a reader to scroll through a document or Web site quickly.”

A multidisciplinary research team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found* that an organic semiconductor may be a viable candidate for creating large-area electronics, such as solar cells and displays that can be sprayed onto a surface as easily as paint.

While the electronics will not be ready for market anytime soon, the research team says the material they studied could overcome one of the main cost hurdles blocking the large-scale manufacture of organic thin-film transistors, the development of which also could lead to a host of devices inexpensive enough to be disposable.

Silicon is the iconic material of the electronics industry, the basic material for most microprocessors and memory chips. Silicon has proved highly successful as a substance because billions of computer elements can be crammed into a tiny area, and the manufacturing process behind these high-performance chips is well-established.

But the electronics industry for a long time has been pursuing novel organic materials to create semiconductor products—materials that perhaps could not be packed as densely as state-of-the-art silicon chips, but that would require less power, cost less and do things silicon devices cannot: bend and fold, for example. Proponents predict that organic semiconductors, once perfected, might permit the construction of low-cost solar cells and video displays that could be sprayed onto a surface just as paint is.

Tapping your forearm or hand with a finger could soon be the way you interact with gadgets.

US researchers have found a way to work out where the tap touches and use that to control phones and music players.

Coupled with a tiny projector the system can use the skin as a surface on which to display menu choices, a number pad or a screen.

Early work suggests the system, called Skinput, can be learned with about 20 minutes of training.

"The human body is the ultimate input device," Chris Harrison, Skinput's creator, told BBC News.