In this episode, we talk about how MIT has built a magic carpet to avoid privacy concerns with human body tracking, an initiative from Texas A&amp;M to track nanoparticles in produce, and the novel approach from Carnegie Mellon to turn household items into sensors. As always, you can find these and other interesting &amp; impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.&nbsp;<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/822298b9-36db-465c-a645-759904d95e7a?dark=false" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true"></iframe> <h3 id="isPasted">EPISODE NOTES</h3>Take a few seconds to leave us a review. It really helps! <a href="https://apple.co/2RIsbZ2" target="_blank">https://apple.co/2RIsbZ2</a> if you do it and send us proof, we’ll give you a shoutout on the show.(1:30) - The Magic Carpet: &nbsp;MIT researchers have created a carpet with thousands of sensors to monitor pressure changes from people’s movement. The data is then fed into a machine learning algorithm that can estimate someone’s 3D positioning with a 97% accuracy.(8:40) - Detecting Nanoparticles in Food: &nbsp;Nanoparticles have been used increasingly in the farming industry and people are becoming more concerned about how much makes its way into produce. Researchers at Texas A&amp;M made a machine learning model to predict how much might be in the food you eat.(14:30) - Fabric-Friendly Sensors: &nbsp;Ever wanted the electronics in your home to do what you want without you actually having to do anything? Carnegie Mellon researchers have created a sensing system which can be seamlessly integrated into your couch, blanket, or any other fabric.--About the podcast:Every day, some of the most innovative universities, companies, and individual technology developers share their knowledge on Wevolver. To ensure we can also provide this knowledge for the growing group of podcast listeners, we started a collaboration with two young engineers, Daniel Scott Mitchell &amp; Farbod Moghaddam who discuss the most interesting content in this podcast series.&nbsp;To learn more about this show, please visit the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte" target="_blank">shows page</a>. By following the page, you will get automatic updates by email when a new show is published.Be sure to give us a follow and review on&nbsp;<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-next-byte/id1548255861?l=en" target="_blank">Apple</a> podcasts,&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6lPPsRtegnivsRUEsQ09R7?si=IPMiah7xT_apJtPjqvXMlA" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, and most of your favorite podcast platforms!

In this episode, we talk about how MIT has built a magic carpet to avoid privacy concerns with human body tracking, an initiative from Texas A&M to track nanoparticles in produce, and the novel approach from Carnegie Mellon to turn household items into sensors.

Podcast: MIT's Magic Carpet, Nanoparticles in Your Food, Turning Fabric into Smart Devices

In this episode, we talk about how a research team led by MIT has found a way to create functional textiles from polyethylene, rumors surrounding the Apple car, and EPFL&rsquo;s newest iteration of a retinal implant. As always, you can find these and other interesting &amp; impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com. &nbsp;<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/b9d818f3-5ab0-4c44-aedf-84114d57d281?dark=false" class="fr-draggable">&nbsp;</iframe><h3>EPISODE NOTES</h3>(0:43) - Sustainable FashionAn international team composed of 7 different institutions led by Dr. Svetlana Boriskina has achieved a polyethylene textile that is more breathable, moisture wicking, and environmentally friendly than the materials mostly used in the fashion industry.(7:00) -&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wevolver.com/article/the-apple-car-what-we-know-so-far" target="_blank">Apple Car Insights</a>Apple&rsquo;s secret car - which was first hinted at in 2014 as Project Titan - seems to be making progress but not without some bumps along the way.(12:10) &nbsp;- Sharper Bionic EyesEPFL has announced a new iteration of their retinal implant which offers a greater resolution and field of view to address some of the limitations of their original design that was trialed in 2013.--About the podcast:Every day, some of the most innovative universities, companies, and individual technology developers share their knowledge on Wevolver. To ensure we can also provide this knowledge for the growing group of podcast listeners, we started a collaboration with two young engineers, Daniel Scott Mitchell &amp; Farbod Moghaddam who discuss the most interesting content in this podcast series.&nbsp;To learn more about this show, please visit the <a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte" target="_blank">shows page</a>. By following the page, you will get automatic updates by email when a new show is published.Be sure to give us a follow and review on&nbsp;<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-next-byte/id1548255861?l=en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Apple</a> podcasts,&nbsp;<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6lPPsRtegnivsRUEsQ09R7?si=IPMiah7xT_apJtPjqvXMlA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Spotify</a>, and most of your favorite podcast platforms!

MIT researchers design a new kind of sustainable textile from polyethylene fibers that may help humans adapt to and combat the effects of climate change. Credits:Image: Felice Frankel, Christine Daniloff, MIT

In this episode, we talk about how a research team led by MIT has found a way to create functional textiles from polyethylene, rumors surrounding the Apple car, and EPFL’s newest iteration of a retinal implant.

Podcast: Sustainable Fashion, Apple Car Insights, Sharper Bionic Eyes

Yoel Fink stands under an unassuming LED ceiling lamp wearing what appears to be just an ordinary baseball cap. &ldquo;Do you hear it?&rdquo; he asks. Semiconductor technology within the fibers of the hat is converting the audio encoded in light pulses to electrical pulses, he explains, and those pulses are then converted to sound. &ldquo;This is one of the first examples of an advanced fabric. It looks like an ordinary hat but it&rsquo;s really a sophisticated optical communication system.&rdquo;Fink and his team are shaping a new destiny for fabrics. Clothing as a communications system: A hat that picks up light transmissions and converts them to sound can hold life-saving potential. &ldquo;Think about pedestrian safety and self-driving cars. Tremendous investments are going into cars. How about the pedestrians? Do we as pedestrians or bikers get to know if the car has detected us?&rdquo; Fink asks. &ldquo;With fabric optical communications your baseball cap can not only alert a car to your presence but importantly let you know if the car detected you. Fabrics for the self-driving future.&rdquo;This is just one example, Fink says, of how the next generation of fabrics could change how we think about all of them. An MIT professor of materials science and electrical engineering and CEO of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a $300 million institute on the edge of campus, Fink is eager to share his enthusiasm for fabrics with the MIT community. &ldquo;While all of this originated in basic science and engineering, we are focusing our efforts on transition to manufacturing and product,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;We would not be here today if not for MIT&rsquo;s focus on the importance of transitioning technology to the marketplace.&rdquo;Fink is a high-energy ideas person. He walks quickly and talks even faster during a tour of the AFFOA facility. He and his staff lean toward the same casual clothing &ndash; t-shirts and jeans (his are typically black, &ldquo;the fastest way to lose two pounds&rdquo; he quips), and there is a pronounced clarity of purpose as he darts through the building, highlighting the rapid prototyping space and describing AFFOA&rsquo;s national advanced fabric prototyping network and the dozens of fabric ventures it&rsquo;s helping to get started.The overarching plan is to increase the value of fabrics to society, transforming them from something you buy-use-throw away to a platform for experiences and services such as communications and design-on-demand. Transforming fabrics requires new types of fiber technologies that encompass communications, energy storage, color change, physiological monitoring, and more. &ldquo;We are proposing a &lsquo;Moore&rsquo;s Law&rsquo; analog for fibers,&rdquo; Fink says. Just as the capabilities of microchips have grown exponentially over the last several decades, the capabilities of fibers are about to take off.To enable a transformation of this magnitude one needs partners, AFFOA has assembled 130 organizations into a national advanced fabric prototyping network. Many from industry are involved in dozens of projects aimed at getting &ldquo;Moore&rsquo;s law fibers&rdquo; into their products and processes. To rapidly engage industry and academia AFFOA has launched an innovative MicroAward program that is 12 weeks in duration and involves rapid iterations between AFFOA and a member seeking to address challenges in getting advanced fibers into fabrics and product. &ldquo;At AFFOA our year is 90 days long. We call it shot-clock innovation,&rdquo; says Fink.These new &ldquo;advanced fabrics&rdquo; incorporate high-speed semiconductor devices, including light-emitting diodes and diode photodetectors, into soft fabric materials. &ldquo;A lot of groups in the world today talk about &lsquo;smart fabrics&rsquo; but in fact end up just inserting conductive materials into fabrics,&rdquo; Fink says. &ldquo;Metals on their own cannot do very complex operations. You can&rsquo;t compute with a piece of metal,&rdquo; Fink says. &ldquo;To get sophisticated functionality into anything, you better involve the basic ingredient of modern technology &ndash; a semiconductor, which is what we are focusing on. We like to think about fabrics as the new software, capturing the opportunities to create new experiences and services through fabrics much in the same way that software has done over the past decade. For that we need not only technology but importantly entrepreneurs and investors to achieve that transformation and industry to make the product and help inform consumer preferences.&rdquo;Fink traces the root of his success to MIT&rsquo;s meritocratic culture, it&rsquo;s entrepreneurial spirit, the presence of mentors, and embrace of game-changing ideas. As an MIT student, Fink developed the confidence to ask a group of professors a question that led him to the basis for the discovery of a new type of mirror that has since been commercialized and used to treat hundreds and thousands of patients as part of a life-saving medical device. It also laid the groundwork for the creation of AFFOA. &ldquo;I think there is a lot of respect for students built into the system at MIT. People realize that ideas come from different directions and from all levels, that student sitting in front of you may eventually discover a cure for a disease, discover a fundamental law or form a great company so you are always listening. I found my calling at MIT and that led to where I am today,&rdquo; he says.

With an enthusiastic team, Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and electrical engineering and CEO of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a $300 million institute on the edge of campus, is shaping a new destiny for fabrics.  Photo: Lillie Paquette/School of Engineering

Professor Yoel Fink is helping MIT lead the way in transforming the fabric materials in our lives.

Fabrics are the future

Smart shirts capable of tracking heart rate, skin-like sensors to measure recovery after a stroke, and tattoo-like devices to monitor glucose levels in people with diabetes &mdash; these are some of the flexible electronics that engineers hope one day to design.To facilitate this need for flexibility, Stanford researchers are reinventing wires, circuits and transistors that can stretch and bend the way our bodies do.&nbsp;Some of the strategies for designing such body-hugging circuitry are based in part on the use of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires that have been engineered for flexibility. But there&rsquo;s a catch: Experiments have shown that when flexible nanowires are stretched, these materials lose some of their conductance, which impedes their ability to transmit electricity and robs systems of the predictable performance that is the prerequisite for designing reliable products. More puzzling yet, when the stretch is released, conductance remains in a lowered state. This unpredictability has made flexible nanowires difficult to work with because engineers want to know in advance precisely how components will behave when they are used.&ldquo;This phenomenon had been reported before, but nobody had found an explanation for it,&rdquo; said <a href="https://profiles.stanford.edu/wei-cai" target="_blank">Wei Cai</a>, associate professor of mechanical engineering, senior author in a Stanford team that has not only discovered why conductivity changes but has developed a way to predict the performance of bendable nanowires.&ldquo;Instead of a big question mark or a lot of trial and error, we provide a model on which people can base their designs,&rdquo; said Cai.He <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/09/1717217115" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">published these findings</a> in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with six co-authors. By creating this predictive framework, they have laid the groundwork for engineers to not merely imagine but design, prototype and, one day, produce electronics that stretch and bend in useful ways.<h2>When nanowires stretch</h2>Our current conception of a wire is akin to a rope, which can only be tugged so far. Recognizing the need for a new paradigm to define what constitutes a wire, flexible circuit designers have turned to carbon nanotubes, conductive materials that might be imagined as infinitesimal bits of hair scattered on a barbershop floor. In a delicate process, engineers spray a network of these overlapping electron highways onto rectangles of a rubbery substance to form a stretchy sheet of circuit film. Electrons zip from one end of the carbon film to the other, moving along the tubes and, when necessary, jumping from tube to tube.How fast electrons move through the film depends on the inherent conductivity of the carbon nanotube, the length of the individual tubes, the length of the rectangle and the ease with which electrons can transfer from one tube to another.When experimentalists have stretched these rubber rectangles up to twice their original dimensions, the conductivity of the nanotube networks goes down and the resistance goes up. That makes basic electronic sense. The longer the rectangle, the further the electrons must travel.But when the rubber circuits were allowed to snap back to their original size, resistance remained high and conductivity low. Researchers didn&rsquo;t understand why until the Stanford team figured it out.Imagine a tangled web of rubber jump ropes loosely attached to an elastic tarp. When you stretch the tarp, the ropes will slide against each other and get longer. But when you release the tarp, the ropes don&rsquo;t snap back to their preliminary positions. They buckle and curl into each other, and that&rsquo;s what happens with the carbon nanotubes. They end up with a wavier shape, said Lihua Jin, a former postdoctoral candidate at Stanford, now an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, and the first author on the paper.The team saw this pattern emerge in their simulations and then reproduced those results in experiments. Using this data, they figured out how to account mathematically for this wavy transformation. &ldquo;Each tube is still conducting, but when you stretch it and then it comes back to the original shape, the tubes have a different arrangement,&rdquo; said Cai. &ldquo;That gives you a different conductivity.&rdquo;Essentially, the Stanford formula is based on the interim length between the end points of each tube. After a tube is stretched and released, it curls into itself, resembling the letter &ldquo;S.&rdquo; The Stanford engineers take the &ldquo;S&rdquo; shape and draw a straight line between the two end points. That line becomes the hypotenuse of a right triangle. The remaining two sides of the triangle give researchers two distances: one that follows the stretching direction and one that is perpendicular to the stretching direction.&ldquo;If you have a tube that lies mostly along the stretching direction, then it does not contribute to conductance in the perpendicular direction,&rdquo; said Jin. Basically, the researchers need to know the average conductivity in the stretching direction as well as the perpendicular direction.Researchers average together all the stretching distances and then all the perpendicular distances. The next step is to create a ratio between those mean lengths and the length of the rubber circuit. When that ratio changes, so do the electronic characteristics of the rubber circuit. If you stretch a film 60 percent, for example, the resistance always doubles. That&rsquo;s true no matter the starting size.&ldquo;We have stumbled upon a general behavior,&rdquo; said Cai. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not like you need carbon nanotubes from a particular vendor and with this diameter and length; as long as you have a lot of thin wires on a film, you see this principle.&rdquo;<h2>&ldquo;Closer to reality&rdquo;</h2>Their work provides circuit designers with certainty, guidelines and predictions for making these flexible material systems. The process is no longer a shot in the dark. After the first stretch, the conductivity remains constant. So, manufacturers will one day be able to pre-stretch one of these flexible nanowire constructs and, as long as they don&rsquo;t overstretch it past the pre-engineered point, be confident in its conductive stability and ultimate usefulness as a product.This knowledge could also be useful for making sensors. For example, a patient recovering from a hand injury is working on making a fist. With a sensor placed on the knuckle, each time the conductivity changes, the doctor would know that the patient has stretched a little bit more.The next step for Cai and his team at Stanford is to tackle the same question for using nanotubes as semiconductors, which involves discovering how the electrical properties of stretchable transistors change with the deformation that occurs when they are bent.&ldquo;These flexible systems are becoming closer and closer to reality,&rdquo; Cai said.

To make ‘smart clothing’ with built-in sensors, engineers need to design stretchable wire arrays.  |  Image courtesy of Wei Cai and Lihua Jin

Stretchable wires move us closer to electronics that mold to your skin

Hybrid silicone-fabric sensor detects fine motor movements by flexing with the body

Soft and stretchy fabric-based sensors for wearable robots

A nanoscale coating that&rsquo;s at least 95 percent air repels the broadest range of liquids of any material in its class, causing them to bounce off the treated surface, according to the University of Michigan engineering researchers who developed it.In addition to super stain-resistant clothes, the coating could lead to breathable garments to protect soldiers and scientists from chemicals and advanced waterproof paints that dramatically reduce drag on ships.Droplets of solutions that would normally damage either your shirt or your skin recoil when they touch the new &ldquo;superomniphobic surface.&rdquo;&ldquo;Virtually any liquid you throw on it bounces right off without wetting it. For many of the other similar coatings, very low surface tension liquids such as oils, alcohols, organic acids, organic bases and solvents stick to them and they could start to diffuse through and that&rsquo;s not what you want,&rdquo; said Anish Tuteja, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, chemical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering. Tuteja is the corresponding author of a paper on the coating published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ICw5k1tDZSk?&wmode=opaque" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" style="width: 767px; height: 432px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>Anish Tuteja, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, chemical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering, discusses and demonstrates his work with the &quot;superomniphobic&quot; coating.The researchers tested more than 100 liquids and found only two that were able to penetrate the coating. They were chlorofluorocarbons &ndash; chemicals used in refrigerators and air conditioners. In Tuteja&rsquo;s lab, in a demonstration, the surface repelled coffee, soy sauce and vegetable oil, as well as toxic hydrochloric and sulfuric acids that could burn skin. Tuteja says it&rsquo;s also resistant to gasoline and various alcohols.To apply the coating, the researchers use a technique called electrospinning that uses an electric charge to create fine particles of solid from a liquid solution. So far, they&rsquo;ve coated small tiles of screen and postage-stamp sized swaths of fabric.The coating is a mixture of rubbery plastic particles of &ldquo;polydimethylsiloxane,&rdquo; or PDMS, and liquid-resisting nanoscale cubes developed by the Air Force that contain carbon, fluorine, silicon and oxygen. The material&rsquo;s chemistry is important, but so is its texture. It hugs the pore structure of whatever surface it&rsquo;s being applied to, and it also creates a finer web within those pores. This structure means that between 95 and 99 percent of the coating is actually air pockets, so any liquid that comes in contact with the coating is barely touching a solid surface.<div class="wow fadeIn" data-wow-delay=".09s">Because the liquid touches mere filaments of the solid surface, as opposed to a greater area, the developed coating can dramatically reduce the intermolecular forces that normally draw the two states of matter together. These Van der Waals interaction forces are kept at a minimum.&ldquo;Normally, when the two materials get close, they imbue a small positive or negative charge on each other, and as soon as the liquid comes in contact with the solid surface it will start to spread,&rdquo; Tuteja said. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve drastically reduced the interaction between the surface and the droplet.&rdquo;With almost no incentive to spread, the droplets stay intact, interacting only with molecules of themselves, maintaining a spherical shape, and literally bouncing off the coating.One classification of liquid that this coating repels is the so-called non-Newtonian category, which includes shampoos, custards, blood, paints, clays and printer inks, for example. These are liquids that change their viscosity depending on the forces applied to them. They differ from the Newtonians, such as water and most other liquids, whose viscosity stays the same no matter the force applied. Viscosity is a measure of a liquid&rsquo;s resistance to flow on the application of force,and it&rsquo;s sometimes thought of as its thickness.&ldquo;No one&rsquo;s ever demonstrated the bouncing of low surface tension non-Newtonian liquids,&rdquo; Tuteja said.<hr>The paper is titled &ldquo;<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233983140_Superomniphobic_Surfaces_for_Effective_Chemical_Shielding" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Superomniphobic Surfaces for Effective Chemical Shielding</a>.&rdquo; Doctoral student Shuaijun Pan and postdoctoral researcher Arun Kota, both in materials science and engineering, are the first authors of the paper. Also contributing is Joseph M. Mabry, in the rocket propulsion division of the Air Force Research Laboratory. The work is funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.</div>

IMAGE:  Researchers in MSE Professor Anish Tuteja's Research Group, Polymers, Surfaces, and Interfaces (PSI-ψ); demonstrate use of their new development -- surfaces that repel every known liquid known as "superomniphobic surfaces." Photo: Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering Communications & Marketing

A nanoscale coating that’s at least 95 percent air repels the broadest range of liquids of any material in its class, causing them to bounce off the treated surface, according to the engineering researchers who developed it.

fabrics

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Podcast: MIT's Magic Carpet, Nanoparticles in Your Food, Turning Fabric into Smart Devices

Podcast: Sustainable Fashion, Apple Car Insights, Sharper Bionic Eyes

Fabrics are the future

Stretchable wires move us closer to electronics that mold to your skin

Soft and stretchy fabric-based sensors for wearable robots

A material that most liquids wont wet