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(Credit: David Breslauer, UC Berkeley)

UC Berkeley researchers announced in April a special lens that turns a normal cell phone camera into a portable microscope powerful enough to offer bright field microscopy. They called it CellScope.

Well, the device just got even more powerful. The group announced Tuesday that the CellScope is now capable of taking color images of malaria parasites and even of tuberculosis bacteria labeled with fluorescent markers.

The version of the Cellscope introduced in April works with handhelds and even Netbooks and can be used for bright field microscopy, which uses simple white light--such as from a bulb or sunlight--to illuminate samples. The new version adds fluorescent microscopy to the repertoire. The device can now take pictures of a target--such as a parasite, bacteria, or cell--tagged with a specific fluorescent wavelength emitted by a special dye.

CellScope--photos

To achieve this, the researchers used filters to block out background light and convert the light source--a simple LED--into the 460-nanometer wavelength required to excite the green fluorescent dye in the sample. After that they were were able to take fluorescent images of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (which causes TB in humans) with a 3.2-megapixel off-the-shelf phone camera. The images were then automatically analyzed using software to show the total of bacteria in the blood sample.

This new development means the prototype of the CellScope can also be used in field settings for disease screening and diagnoses. ... Read More

(Credit: Boston Dynamics)

Here's another offering from Boston Dynamics' zoomorphic line: the RiSE V3, a multi-legged, beaver-tailed robot that can skitter along the ground, shimmy up a pole, and then quietly cling there and stare at you.

The legs are powered by a pair of electric motors and equipped with small surgical needle micro-claws, which allow the unit to dig into and climb up textured, convex, cylindrical structures at a rate of 21 centimeters per second, or just under a half a mile an hour (PDF).

"RiSE V3 is the first general-purpose legged machine to achieve this vertical climbing speed," said University of Pennsylvania Professor Daniel Koditschek, who worked on the project.

The RiSE was the result of a collaboration between Boston Dynamics, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University, with funding by DARPA.

As with the company's now famous BigDog, what distinguishes this robotic creation is its freakishly familiar gait. RiSE uses a distinctive, koala-like climbing pace, or behavioral gait, propelling the body forward while passively maintaining yaw, pitch, and roll stability. Locomotion--leg motion, strain, and joint position and foot contact sensors--is controlled by an onboard computer, naturally. The front legs are just long enough to hug a telephone pole.

The development team's aim was to reproduce movements they had observed in climbing insects. This is something else that sets this wall climber apart. Most other climbing robots have generally relied on "surface-specific attachment mechanisms," i.e. magnets and suction devices.

Watch a video of RiSE V3 below.

Today, your eyes might not deceive you. But soon, they very well might.

Some extremely clever people at Cal (the one at Berkeley) have created a material that can control the direction in which visible light travels.

Apparently, this mystery material, some details of which might be revealed in Science and Nature magazines this week (People and OK weren't interested), deflects light around an object as perceived by an insouciant eye.

"In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock," the leader of the Cal researchers, Xiang Zhang, told London's Times newspaper.

(Credit: CC dogbomb)

In essence, you are looking at, say, the Empire State Building or a John Malkovich-piloted Boeing 747 full of nasty missiles. If these objects are coated with the material, your eyes will see light from behind them, hence creating the illusion that the object in question simply isn't there. I know that there are terrible consequences that may leap to mind in these examples.

For the more technically-minded amongst you, I can tell you that the material the scientists created had to have elements engineered to within 0.00000066 of a meter. This appears to be in a realm that might make wafers suddenly feel ridiculously overweight.

If you reel in a small sub instead of a rainbow trout from the Sacramento River this summer, don't call Homeland Security.

It belongs to a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley trying to learn more about the river currents in the delta.

The researchers are working with propelled 4-foot-long submarines and floating drifters equipped with GPS-receivers for positioning, GSM-modules for communication, and sensors inside for recording temperature, salinity, and currents.

Researchers prepare to launch a submarine.

(Credit: UC Berkeley)

"We are prototyping an infrastructure and testing it in the delta," said Professor Alexander Bayen, who leads the team at UC Berkeley's Civil Systems Department.

The purpose of all this is to collect data to help the state better understand the river. And researchers have good reason to believe there's urgency to their work. With drought looming for most of California, understanding the state's water supply (much of the state's population drinks run-off from snow melting in the Sierra Nevada range) and how the system works is critical.

The Sacramento River is already monitored by 50 permanent water stations in about 1,000 miles of water channels, but that collection of data is not designed to handle emergency situations, according to the researchers.

"It's totally undersampled if you want a precise, online, real-time measurement of the whole state of the delta," Bayen said.

Heavy rains, levee breaches, or contaminant spills are situations when accurate and up-to-date data is needed. In the river delta in 2004, for example, one of the levees breached and a large agricultural area was flooded. Pumps normally move fresh water from sources in the north down to the south, but silt was confounding in the system. The pumps had to be shut down for a whole month at a cost of around $1 million a day.

"In retrospect, that was too long. But given the information they had, they were forced to act very conservatively. They could not turn the pumps on," said graduate student and researcher Andrew Tinka.

Floaters equipped with sensors deployed on site could have provided real-time information on how the water was flowing and where the silt was heading.

Development of the floating devices starts from scratch at a UC Berkeley workshop.

(Credit: Carl-Gustav Linden/CNET News.com)

In a recent workshop at UC Berkeley, undergraduate students and university staff worked on floater prototypes that will be tested this summer in the river. Inside the floaters are a GSM-module, a GPS-receiver and a $120 Gumstix computer running on Linux. (A Gumstix is a computer the size of a stick of gum.)

"They are great little computers that are about as powerful as a 1996-era Pentium. All the power you had at your disposal can be yours in a floating sensor for very little money now, and that's really cool as far as I'm concerned," Tinka said.

The self-guided submarines are developed in Portugal by the University of Porto.

That is the hardware involved. The other part of the project are the algorithms calculated for the complex hydrodynamics models. The software is based on two commercial packages, Telemac and Mike 21, with programs for GPS tracking added.

Bayen said that the combination of the hardware and software is the novelty here. He calls it a "cyber physical system," where the cyber part monitors the flow of information and the physics is the hardware--the floaters.

"In five years, cyber physical system is going to be a tech buzz word," Bayen said.

If the research project is successful, the innovations can be put to use in other parts of the world where there is a need for improved river management. The Berkeley team is already cooperating with Professor Linda Bushnell of the University of Washington on a project in the Mekong--the troubled river that floats through China, Laos, and Cambodia out in its delta in Vietnam.

Escape from Berkeley is a race planned for the July 4 weekend that will task contestants with getting an alternatively powered vehicle from Berkeley, Calif., to Las Vegas.

(Credit: Escape from Berkeley)

Update July 19, 2008: Escape from Berkeley is now scheduled for Oct. 10-13, 2008.

If you're a regular reader of Geek Gestalt, but not of its sister blog, Green Tech, I thought I'd point you to an entry I just posted there about what sounds like one heck of a cool event scheduled for this summer.

The so-called Escape from Berkeley race will task contestants with getting their non-petroleum-based fuel vehicles from the famously liberal Bay Area city to the famously outrageous Sin City, Las Vegas, over the July 4 weekend.

Part Burning Man, part Power Tool Drag Races, part DARPA Grand Challenge, Escape from Berkeley should be a sight to behold.

For more information now, however, check out my entry on Green Tech.

University of California at Berkeley's nanoradio might be a 100 billion times smaller than the first commercial radios, but it plays the hits that never die.

Alex Zettl, a professor of physics at the university, has made a radio out of a single carbon nanotube that's about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. It runs on batteries and you need headphones to use it, but it tunes in stations on the FM dial.

Zettl and his team last year received their first FM broadcast, which turned out to be "Layla" from Derek and the Dominoes. They also caught "Good Vibrations." In homage to the 100th anniversary of the first voice and music transmission, they transmitted (and tuned in to) a recording of "Largo," from the Handel opera Xerxes. It was the first successful radio transmission of music in 1906.

The nanotube serves as the antenna, tuner, amplifier, and demodulator in the radio. In an ordinary radio, these are all separate components. The nanotube vibrates thousands to millions of times per second in tune with the radio wave.

Carbon nanotubes are the miracle material of the chemistry world. Stronger than steel yet very light, nanotubes can also transmit electricity faster than metals as well as emit light. Scientists speculate that nanotubes one day could be incorporated into silicon chips, power lines, medicines, bridges, and aircraft parts. Nanotubes are essentially cylinders made completely from carbon atoms; the incredibly strong bonds that can be formed between carbon atoms are what give nanotubes their unusual properties.

Right now, though, nanotubes are mostly used to make things like tennis rackets and car panels stronger without adding weight.

"The nanotube radio may lead to radical new applications, such as radio-controlled devices small enough to exist in a human's bloodstream," wrote Zettl and his team in a paper that was released online Wednesday and will be published November 6 in Nano Letters.

The nanoradio could also be used to measure the mass of atoms.

One often-cited alternative to gasoline-powered cars is hydrogen. Editors Michael Kanellos and Brian Cooley took a look at one example of a hydrogen-powered test car, a small Mercedes. To keep Kanellos from endangering himself and said vehicle, they set the top speed on this hydro-chariot at only 85 miles per hour. Take a look.