Active Materials

Bangalore: Indian radiologist spearheads cure for osteoarthritis …
Mangalorean.com - Mangalore,India
… The major stimulus for bone and cartilage formation is a piezoelectric signal generated when these structures are subjected to tension or compression. …

US giant buys into Essex company’s Fort Knox-style lock technology
Business Weekly - UK
… door. Servocell has cunningly updated the same basic technology that makes a quartz watch tick – the piezoelectric effect. Piezo …

Canadian teen innovators honoured for breakthrough energy saving …
Canada NewsWire (press release) - Canada
… Best Business Plan - Shad Lakehead University —– Shad Valley Lakehead developed, a piezoelectric generator designed …

Swiss Invent a Muscular Display
IEEE Spectrum - New York,NY,USA
… Others have experimented with microelectromechanical actuators, based on piezoelectric crystals that expand in response to a change in voltage. …

Brandy, red wine: hangover from hell
ChronicleHerald.ca - Halifax,Nova Scotia,Canada
… rate of specially shaped quartz crystals that vibrate when electrical voltage is applied to their surface, in what is called the piezoelectric effect. …

Sound science behind glowing sugar
PhysicsWeb - UK
… see their mouth glow. That’s because piezoelectric materials such as sugar can emit light when they are broken. Now researchers at …

My knee says I just jumped!
Coolest Gadgets - Newburry,Berkshire,UK
… With a piezoelectric power generator, (that uses the motion of the walker to power the tiny device) the tiny sensors can deduce bending, twisting, compressive …

Remote Charge Converter features ultra low noise design.
ThomasNet Industrial News Room (press release) - New York,NY,USA
… long, Model 2771C transforms piezoelectric transducer’s high impedance charge output to low impedance voltage proportional to transducer’s charge output. …

Girl sees invention become reality
The Daily Yomiuri - Osaka,Japan
… in October. As people step on the mats, their weight triggers the piezoelectric elements in the mats, generating electricity. “We …

Smart Shad teens drill for oilsands answers
Business Edge - Calgary,Alberta,Canada
… The Shad Valley Lakehead team created a self-powered hearing aid with a piezoelectric generator designed to replace the conventional hearing-aid battery. …

Project Green Light
Electronic Design - USA
… Wetzel believes he can improve green LED technology by taking advantage of the piezoelectric effect, which allows some materials to produce an electrical field …

Nanotech, Ceramic Armor to be Topics at ACerS Event
Photonics.com - Pittsfield,MA,USA
… advanced ceramic coatings; advanced processing and manufacturing technologies; porous ceramics; advanced dielectric, piezoelectric and ferroelectric materials …

Air jet dries hands at 400mph
Eureka - Dartfor,Kent,UK
… through an iodine filter. This clean water then drips onto a piezoelectric crystal about the size of a 10p piece. This fast-vibrating …

CTR Developed Sensors for Monitoring Power Lines
Earthtimes.org - USA
… The first installations are currently under way. The SAW sensor is composed of a piezoelectric crystal with metallicstructures. …

HP creates dedicated Graphic Arts division
Graphic Repro - South Africa
… The HP Scitex X2 Print-head with UV curable inks and piezoelectric inkjet technology delivers high ink flows for high quality, high-speed printing. …

World novelty: Durable position measurement of hydraulic pistons
PresseBox (Pressemitteilung)(abonnement) - Rastatt,Germany
… connection is essentially determined. These piezoelectric elements are attached laterally on the hydraulic cylinder. These elements are …

Philips X7-2 Transducer
Medgadget.com - San Francisco,CA,USA
… The other cool thing about the technology is how the piezoelectric material for such transducers is made. Read about it here: PureWave Transducer Technology.

Stepper motor controller for cost-sensitive applications
PresseBox (Pressemitteilung)(abonnement) - Rastatt,Germany
… in the field of micro- and nanopositioning technology, has been developing and manufacturing standard, custom and OEM products with piezoelectric and motor …

HVPE magnifies perfect crystals
Compound Semiconductor - Bristol,UK
… These substrates are non-polar and provide a platform for making light-emitting devices that emit polarized light and are free from piezoelectric fields, which …

TriQuint Semiconductor, Inc. Announces Third Quarter Earnings …
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA
… s products are designed on various wafer substrates including compound semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) and piezoelectric crystals such …

Researchers of the UGR apply the method of acoustic emission to …
innovations report - Bad Homburg,Germany
… This system can find out from an imperceptible fissure for the human eye to other damage by placing piezoelectric sensors that pick up the ultrasounds and send …

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=328706&ssid=68&sid=LIF

Melbourne, Oct 12: A dress with animated flowers on its neckline, shirt sleeves that make sounds in tune with your body language, and a hemline with a mind of its own have been developed by a Canadian researcher.

Professor Joanna Berzowska and international colleagues will discuss these and other examples of ‘wearable technology’ at a workshop in Australia next year called reSkin.

Berzowska’s flowery dress, named Kukkia, has a neckline with felt and silk flowers that open and close according to a special electronics embedded in the dress.

“I really wanted to make these dresses that have personalities, that move and behave almost like animals,” Berzowska, who teaches computation art at Concordia University in Montreal, was quoted by ABC online, as saying.

The flower petals are made of silk and felt, and contain thin wires of Nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium. Nitinol is a ’shape memory alloy’, which can be programmed to have different shapes at different temperatures.

When the wire heats it shrinks and pulls the petals together, closing the flower. As it cools down, the wire relaxes and the petals open.

The system is run on rechargeable lithium polymer batteries, originally designed for use in model aeroplanes, which are embedded in pouches in the dress.

Another dress with a mind of its own is Vilkas, which has a hemline that goes up and down on its own.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20061010/D8KLTTBO0.html

Oct 10, 1:55 PM (ET)

By ANDREW BRIDGESWASHINGTON (AP) - The government must balance close oversight of the fast-growing field of nanotechnology against the risk of stifling new development, a Food and Drug Administration conference was told Tuesday.

These contrasting views emerged from a host of experts that the agency brought together to how it should regulate products containing tiny particles, some as small as one-millionth the width of the head of a pin.

Increasingly, those submicroscopic particles are being incorporated in the thousands of products overseen by the FDA, including drugs, foods, cosmetics and medical devices.

Those products account for roughly 20 cents of every dollar spent each year by U.S. consumers, giving the FDA a key role in both safeguarding the public and guiding the future development of nanotechnology.

“The success of nanotechnology will rely in large part on how FDA plays its regulatory role,” said Michael Taylor of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health.

The key is to use science to weigh both the benefits and the risks of nanotechnology, said Matthew Jaffe of the U.S. Council of International Business. That’s a balance the FDA already seeks to strike in assessing other products.

“We believe the regulatory process that is in place is significant and adequate to address the issues before the FDA,” Jaffe said.

Nanotechnology involves the manufacture and manipulation of materials at the molecular or atomic level. At that scale, materials are measured in nanometers or billionths of a meter. Nanoscale materials are generally less than 100 nanometers in diameter. A sheet of paper, in comparison, is 100,000 nanometers thick. A human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick.

The FDA doesn’t believe nanotechnology is inherently unsafe, but does acknowledge that materials at the nano scale can pose different safety issues than do things that are far larger.

The FDA wants to learn of new and emerging science issues related to nanotechnology, especially in regard to safety, said Randall Lutter, the agency’s associate commissioner.

The topic vexes other countries as well.

“We cannot assume what we know about bulk-size substances applies to the nanotechnology-size substances,” Philippe Martin, of the European Commission, told the meeting.

Martin cited the ring he wears: it’s made of gold, is yellowish and inert. But take a gold nanoparticle one nanometer in size, and it turns both blue and mildly reactive. Bump the size up to three nanometers, and the gold turns a reddish hue and now acts like a catalyst.

“How do we assess such a tremendous difference in property?” said Delara Karkan, of Health Canada, in citing the same example.

Kathy Jo Wetter, of the civil society organization ETC Group, told the FDA it was understaffed, underfunded and ill-equipped to deal with nanotechnology. Wetter said hundreds of nano products have already crept onto the market with little scrutiny.

“Unfortunately, so far the U.S. government has acted as a cheerleader and not as a regulator,” Wetter said.

Carolyn Cairns, a senior researcher at Consumers Union, told the FDA that nanomaterials should be regulated like any other new chemical substances and subjected to a full battery of tests before use.

Martin Philbert, a University of Michigan professor of toxicology, counseled the FDA to “avoid overregulation while remaining vigilant.”

“The key is to manage the risk while deriving the maximum possible benefit from these materials,” Philbert said.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has cataloged more than 320 nanotech consumer products, including vitamin sprays, bedsheets and anti-bacterial food-storage bags.

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