Prototype BMW car door detects hazards

If you've ever had a tired cyclist--or worse, a tired driver--careen into your car door as you open it, you'll appreciate a new prototype being developed in Germany. It's a new technology that allows doors to resist being opened when they sense an oncoming hazard.

BMW's Michael Graf and a team at the Technical University of Munich are pioneering the project, which uses ultrasonic sensors to detect hazards approaching a vehicle. When they see an oncoming cyclist, or van, or bears, a bar running through the car door prevents it from being opened.
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The new TV remote: Your bare hand?

The TV remote control of the future isn't an expensive device with an LCD screen and blinking lights. It's your hand.

The classic TV remote control most of us have grown up with has been around in essentially the same incarnation for half a century. It's been tweaked over the years, but now one company is looking at ditching the remote altogether and using a camera mounted below a TV screen that senses hand motions instead of button pushes. The result is something that seems right out of Minority Report.
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Awww, eerie CB2 child-bot is growing up

If a child ever had skin as ashen as this kid, it would end up in the emergency room. Fortunately, this is not a real tyke, but a "Child Robot With Biomimetic Body" (CB2 for short) that's meant to mimic its living counterparts and teach lessons about child development.

The kid-bot, which comes to us from a team at Japan's Osaka University, is equipped with 51 air-powered motors and 197 tactile sensors under the soft, light gray silicone skin covering its body.

CB2 measures about 4 feet, 3 inches tall (130cm) and weighs 73 pounds (33kg), which size-wise would put it in the third or fourth grade. However, it was designed to function as a 1- to 2-year-old.
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Scientists use virus to help build battery

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have demonstrated how a genetically modified virus can be used to construct both the cathode and anode of a lithium-ion battery.

Virus-built rechargeable batteries would have the same power capacity as the batteries used to power hybrid cars, project leader professor Angela Belcher said in an MIT press statement recently.

In a paper published in the journal Science, the research team explained that it manipulated two genes of the M13 virus to equip the bacteriophage with peptide groups that attract single-walled carbon nanotubes at one end, while the other end of the virus was equipped with peptides that nucleate amorphous iron phosphate.

Combining the nanotubes with the iron phosphate created a highly conductive material that was used in a cathode, said the MIT statement. Battery energy was transferred in "a very short time", as electrons could travel along the carbon nanotube networks and percolate throughout the electrodes.
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Vibrating touchscreen enables Braille reading

Touchscreen handsets may be the talk of the town, but they are useless to the visually impaired. A new software developed by Jussi Rantala and his colleagues at the University of Tampere in Finland attempts to address that by bringing Braille to touch-enabled mobile devices.

The team installed a software on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet with a piezoelectric layer that "displays" a raised dot on the touchscreen with a single intense vibration and an absent one with a longer and weaker pulse.
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