Planetary Gear

University researchers in England and the Ukraine have built a laser that emits high-frequency sound waves instead of light beams.

Called simply the "saser," the acoustic laser uses packets of sonic vibrations called "phonons" much like a regular laser uses photons.

Specifically, the acoustic laser device consists of a sonic beam traveling through a "superlattice" constructed of 50 sheets of material each only atoms thick that are alternately made of gallium arsenide and aluminium arsenide, two materials found in semiconductors.

Sasers could have "significant and useful applications in the worlds of computing, imaging, and even anti-terrorist security screening," according to the researchers.

Anthony Kent, a professor in the University of Nottingham's School of Physics and Astronomy, led the U.K. group that worked in collaboration with Borys Glavin of the Lashkarev Institute of Semiconductor Physics in the Ukraine.

Professor Anthony Kent of the University of Nottingham.

(Credit: University of Nottingham)

The saser theory has been around for years, and several labs around the world have been working on variations of the device. But Kent's group said it has built the "first device to emit sound waves in the terahertz frequency range." The beam of "coherent acoustic waves" that it creates has nanometer wavelengths, according to the group's abstract.

The breakthrough is being published in the prestigious Physical Review journal. The researchers are also receiving a grant for just over $1 million (636,000 pounds) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the U.K..

"While our work on sasers is driven mostly by pure scientific curiosity, we feel that the technology has the potential to transform the area of acoustics, much as the laser has transformed optics in the 50 years since its invention," Kent said Wednesday in a statement.

A UPS medium-duty truck containing Eaton's hybrid hydraulic system parked near the Capitol for 'Hybrid on the Hill Day.'

(Credit: Eaton Corp.)

We often fret over our own gas mileage and that of our neighbors' cars, but how often do we stop to think about the commercial trucking industry's impact on the environment?

FedEx Express announced in November 2008 a plan to purchase vehicles that combine Azure Dynamics' hybrid system with a Ford gasoline engine and chassis. The company now claims to be one of the first to use gasoline hybrid-electric delivery trucks for commercial use.

Peterbilt began offering four hybrid models of commercial trucks in 2008.

UPS has begun using hybrid trucks containing Eaton's energy-saving Series Hybrid Hydraulic System technology.

But those changes barely made news outside of their industry despite the fact that commercial trucking is thought to be a significant contributor to carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.

Perhaps that's why the Hybrid Truck Users Forum (HTUF) Incentive Working Group and Calstart saw fit to sponsor an event on the topic this Thursday.

And that is why Capitol Hill on Thursday is getting an upfront seat to the latest available in terms of hybrid commercial trucks at the "Hybrid on the Hill Day."

FedEx Express already has hybrid medium-duty trucks in its city fleets.

(Credit: FedEx Express)

Unlike other Washington, D.C., events that have highlighted hybrid cars and SUVs, Thursday's event features 17 medium and heavy-duty commercial hybrid trucks with participants from companies in the HTUF group that include Mack, Peterbilt, Freightliner, Kenworth, and FedEx Express.

The event taking place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. EDT at the Capitol Reflecting Pool includes speakers discussing the benefits of hybrids in reducing emissions and cutting fuel use for the commercial trucking industry versus the initial cost layout of investing in new fleets during a tough economy, according to Calstart.

Duke University is also scheduled to unveil a report on the growth of the hybrid truck sector and what effects it may have on the commercial trucking industry.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has teamed up with Google on an architecture contest celebrating both the museum's 50th anniversary and the search giant's latest 3D-modeling tool.

The two iconic organizations are asking the public to submit plans for a 100-square-foot shelter using Google Sketchup, choosing a location for the shelter via Google Earth, and using Google 3D Warehouse to upload the design and submit to the official Guggenheim contest Web site.

Once a design is submitted, it will be showcased on the Guggenheim's "Design It: Shelter Competition" contest Web site using a Google Earth plug-in for all the public to view.

The submissions period began Monday and will run through August 23.

Students of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture who will narrow the submissions down to 10 finalists. Once the finalists are announced, the public will be able to vote between October 10 and 21 on a favorite design.

The winner of that popular vote will be awarded the "People's Prize," while a winner chosen by a panel of experts that includes Victor Sidy, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will be awarded the "Juried Prize."

Besides providing an opportunity to remind people of the Guggenheim's roots, the contest also presents a chance for Google to show what can be done with Google Sketchup, its 3D-modeling tool.

The winners, whose prize includes a VIP trip for two to New York, will be announced on October 21--the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, which was, of course, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright himself.

The Juried Prize winner will also receive a $1,000 cash award. But that seems to be as far as the winner will be rewarded. While the contest rules allow submissions to include photos of a built shelter, in addition to the Sketchup piece, it makes no mention of building or giving resources for the winners to make their model a reality.

Mayor Gavin Newsom unveiling San Francisco's new bus shelters.

(Credit: Office of the Mayor of San Francisco)

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) have unveiled new energy-efficient bus shelters for the city.

The first of these bus shelters has been put up on the corner of Geary Boulevard and Arguello Boulevard with plans for four more to be rolled out in the coming weeks. The city plans to evaluate the five bus shelters throughout the summer to see what, if any, changes need to be made to the existing design.

Following the evaluation, SFMTA plans to replace a minimum of 1,100 existing bus shelters throughout San Francisco beginning this year, with plans to have them all in place by 2013.

The pilot bus shelters, which were designed by Lundberg Design, incorporate a bright red plastic wavy roof containing photovoltaic panels, two maps, LED lighting, Wi-Fi, space for two advertisements, and a NextMuni display that informs users of impending arrivals.

Many will power lights and info systems via organic dye-based photovoltaic solar film that's free of heavy metals and be encapsulated in bright red plastic made of 40 percent recycled content. The bus shelter structure itself is made from steel consisting of 60-70 percent recycled material.

The LED lights being used in the new bus shelters use about 74.4 watts, making them four and half times more efficient that than fluorescent lighting in the old shelters, which uses about 336 watts, according to the Mayor's office.

The new shelters will be installed and maintained by billboard advertising giant Clear Channel Outdoor.

While the San Francisco bus shelters are progress in terms of energy efficiency, they're arguably not as high-tech as the EyeStop bus shelters recently unveiled in Florence, Italy.

The EyeStop bus shelters designed by Carlo Ratti include touch-screen computers offering real-time mapping of buses, mobile alerts for bus schedule changes, Web access, and tall beacons that brighten as buses near to alert approaching pedestrians in the distance. All the Florence, Italy, bus shelter computers can also be accessed in several languages to accommodate tourists.

"The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive" by John Graham-Cumming could be the answer to the yearly Father's Day gift dilemma.

(Although I know a lot of women who would love this book, too.)

Graham-Cumming's book is not of the tacky so-and-so-slept-here variety, but a compendium of locations of true worth in the history of science and tech breakthroughs.

(Credit: O'Reilly Media)

The book, which is organized by country, includes latitudes and longitudes for GPS devices, and info like whether a historical site is free or available for a price. It's heavy on U.K. and U.S. sites (it lists the U.S. sites by state) but does attempt to cover the entire world.

Some of the recommendations are little-known science museums that happen to have one or two holdings of great worth, but many are a bit more unusual and creative. Graham-Cumming includes things like the descendant of Isaac Newton's apple tree at Trinity College in Cambridge, England, and the first bridge ever constructed from cast iron which visitors can still walk across at the Severn River in Ironbridge, England.

In addition to listing the historical sites, the author gives background and factoids on the inventor, or team of inventors, and the story behind each breakthrough.

For example, Isaac Newton's official position at the University of Cambridge was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the title currently held by the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

Graham-Cumming discusses why Alan Turing's contribution to computer science was so significant and arguably more important than his role in breaking the Nazi Enigma code at Bletchley Park, England. He explains in detail the Turing Machine and Turing's Halting problem complete with formulas.

The thorough stories and science lessons make the book, which includes a lot of photos and illustrations, a fun summer read for the astute armchair traveler as well as a guide for those looking to explore more than the usual church, museum, and park routes of sightseeing vacations.

The author, a former programmer and computer scientist by degree, also used social-network creator Ning to build a companion social-networking site to his book, GeekAtlas.com, where readers and travelers can share their experiences, and post photos and videos of their travels.

While in this economy you may not be able to go to see Léon Foucault's Pendulum still swinging in the Pantheon in Paris, the U.S. list is so comprehensive, chances are you live within easy driving distance from at least two places and probably more.

The "The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive" will be available June 3 with a list price of $29.99 (some sites are also listing it for pre-order at $19.79).

An unmanned aerial vehicle that's intended to use a combination of solar power and stored electricity is being developed by Ascent Solar Technologies and Bye Aerospace, both companies announced Tuesday.

(Credit: Bye Aerospace)

Ascent Solar will be supplying flexible thin-film photovoltaic modules designed for Bye's drone, the Silent Sentinel.

Bye will be using a Williams International FJ33 turbofan engine that will draw power from stored electrical power in a lithium-ion battery and the photovoltaic panels on the plane.

The result will be a quiet, low-emission hybrid UAV with added endurance, according to Bye.

The Silent Sentinel is intended for military surveillance purposes, but could also be used in the commercial world for things like pipeline and power line inspection, forest fire watch, and aerial photography.

While Bye said it has had proposal meetings with U.S. government officials, no contract for the vehicle has yet been signed with the U.S. military.

Bye will not be the first to combine solar panels with a drone-type aircraft. British defense contractor Qinetiq built and tested the Zephyr, a 66-pound glider that flew an unofficial record 54 hours straight (according to Qinetiq's own report) over White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 2007. In early 2008, DARPA announced it was developing the Vulture, a solar-powered aircraft that would "fly" for 5 years straight, though arguably that UAV could be considered more of a satellite in orbit.

Matthew T. Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has won an award for his "pioneering contributions to the fundamental understanding of the mechanics of robotic manipulation and to graduate education in robotics."

The Robotics and Automation Society, which bestowed Mason with its annual Pioneer Award, is part of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). So while the monetary prize for the lifetime achievement award is only $2,000, a lot of prestige comes with the plaque he was given over the weekend.

Matthew T. Mason heads the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon)

Mason's body of work includes robotic juggling, legless robotic travel, robotic locomotion, handless robotic manipulation of objects (robot soccer), and robotic origami. Mason's famous robotic origami project, in which robots build origami cranes from paper, was lauded for the progress it made in developing robotic agility with soft objects.

Mason also wrote the book "Mechanics of Robotic Manipulation."

But the general public will likely remember Mason for something else entirely. With the help of Mason--and under Jim Morris, who was computer science school dean at the time--Carnegie Mellon opened the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003.

The hall of fame honors both real and fictional robots as a way to engage public interest in robotics and engineering. While the Robot Hall of Fame technically rewards the robots themselves and not their creators, Mason would be a likely candidate if the rules change.

Mason, who is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the IEEE, earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in computer science and artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has been a Carnegie Mellon faculty member since 1982.

For more insights on his work and thoughts on robotics, read CNET's Q&A with Mason.

Here is a mock-up of the EyeStop bus shelter.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

High-tech bus stops so cool they might actually entice you to take a ride will be installed next year in Florence, Italy.

The urban fixtures have been designed by a group of researchers led by Carlo Ratti, head of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The EyeStop is a touch-screen bus shelter that monitors environmental conditions and real-time bus movement and also provides information and communication tools that can interact with your cell phone.

The EyeStop, which has touch sensitive e-Ink screens as well as LEDs, features a bus map plotting locations in real-time, e-mail and Web access, tools for planning a best route and getting directions, a community bulletin board, and, of course, a place for silent video advertisements. It will also use sensors to monitor and display local air quality.

Riders can choose to have their local EyeStop bus stop sync with their cell phone. The EyeStop you normally frequent, for example, could twitter you that your usual bus is running late that morning.

Intended for tourists as well as locals, the EyeStop tools will be accessible in several languages.

About 1,000 EyeStop bus poles will be installed in Florence, Italy, in 2010.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

A bus pole version of the EyeStop with similar mapping, info, and communication tools will also be introduced. It glows brighter as the next bus nears the stop to signal pedestrians from afar.

The design for the EyeStop was unveiled this week at the Genio Fiorentino festival in Florence, and a prototype will soon follow.

Florence residents will start testing the high-tech bus stop's usefulness, durability, and limitations in October. Following that, about 200 bus shelters and 1,000 bus poles are expected to be installed next year. The EyeStop was developed by Ratti's project team, in collaborartion with the Province of Florence and Florence's local transportation authority.

The bus shelter and bus pole versions of the EyeStop will power themselves with solar energy, but they won't be one-size-fits-all.

Each EyeStop will be customized by a computer program that takes into account the stop's immediate surroundings. As a result, each can be built to fit into the existing space using steel, glass, and gray stone local to Florence. The software also considers maximum sunlight exposure for the location to determine power generation needs.

But is it graffiti proof?

"We have looked into special glass surfaces that are self-cleaning and graffiti proof," Ratti said in an e-mail. "However, we will perform some real tests before building the prototype in October."

This is EyeStop bus shelter with an imaginary user.

(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)

"If we were to sum this up in a bumper sticker, it would say something like: 'America, the U.S. military gave you the Hummer. Now we're taking it back."

Dennis McGinn, a retired vice admiral in the Navy and former commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, spoke those words Monday during a teleconference.

McGinn is on the military advisory board of the not-for-profit Center for Naval Analyses. The group issued a report (PDF) on Monday, stating the U.S. military must, as a matter of national security, work to reduce its dependence not just on foreign oil, but on natural gas, coal, and an increasingly unstable U.S. electrical grid.

"We believe in the study that national security, energy security, and climate change are interdependent. We've come up with a list of findings and priorities, a challenge to the DOD, an opportunity to lead," John Napman, a retired admiral, said during the teleconference.

McGinn added: "We're heavily dependent on a global petroleum market that's volatile, but it's not just restricted to oil. Natural gas and coal also ran huge spikes in the last year."

Center for Naval Analyses logo

The transfer of wealth (via fuel purchases) to nations associated with terrorism has essentially put the U.S. in the position of financing both sides of conflicts and has been a wake-up call to the military, according to McGinn.

To some degree, the Department of Defense has already made strides toward increased use of electrical vehicles for light-use and of some hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles for other uses, according to Gordon Sullivan, a retired general and former U.S. Army chief of staff.

"Throughout DOD installations, you'll find a lot of the pick-up trucks. (There's a lot of) natural gas being used. And I think in the administrative fleets, you'll see a lot of that. And some of these things that look like John Deere Gators or whatever. They're like golf carts fueled by natural gas," said Sullivan.

But reducing foreign oil dependence is not enough, according to the report.

Military installations "are almost completely dependent on commercial electrical power delivered through the national electrical grid," according to the report signed by 12 former U.S. generals and admirals, and sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Energy Foundation, and the Grayce B. Kerr Foundation.

Considering the military's increased reliance on computers to analyze data, provide tactical support to troops, and remotely fly UAVs like the Predator, the "outdated, fragile, and overtaxed national electrical grid is a dangerously weak link in the national security infrastructure," said the report.

The report also recommended a slowdown of the development of coal-to-liquid fuels for the U.S. Air Force in favor of fossil- and alternative-based blends. It pointed to DARPA's $100 million in research and development toward JP-8 blends from nonfood crops such as algae and other plant-based biomass as an area in which the DOD has already expressed interest.

By addressing its own needs with regard to developing electrical smart grids, fuel efficient vehicles, and even jet fuel, the Department of Defense can influence the general market as it did with the invention of the Humvee, according to both Sullivan and McGinn.

Only this time, that crossover vehicle from military to civilian drivers will likely be a lot more fuel efficient.