ISS Sharack NX-15

Space-borne protective energy systems, like the deflector shields on the fictional starship U.S.S. Voyager, are on the drawing board of real-world scientists.

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology ... 00724.html

TREK TECH
40 years since the Enterprise's inception, some of its science fiction gadgets are part of everyday life
Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer

In the 23rd century universe of "Star Trek,'' people talked to each other using wireless personal communicators, had easy access to a vast database of information and spent hours gazing at a big wall-mounted video screen.

On 21st century Earth, that future is already here.

People talk to each other on wireless communicators called cell phones. They have instant access to infinite amounts of information on the Internet. And they can spend hours staring at a big wall-mounted plasma or liquid- crystal display TV watching reruns of "Star Trek." That is, if they can afford one.

Indeed, 40 years after "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry outlined his vision for the groundbreaking science-fiction TV series, some of the once- futuristic personal technology depicted in the voyages of the starship Enterprise have become a reality.

Moreover, "Star Trek" has influenced a generation of engineers and scientists, inspiring them to engage in the future they saw on TV and to "make it so."

"When I designed the UI (user interface) for the Palm OS back in '93, my first sketches were influenced by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels,'' said Rob Haitani, product design architect for Palm-One Inc., the Milpitas firm that makes the popular handheld personal computers.

"Years later, when we designed the first Treo (a combo phone and wireless PDA), it had a form factor similar to the communicators in the original series. It had a speakerphone mode so you could stand there and talk into it like Capt. Kirk.''

The show that made Capt. James T. Kirk, Lt. Cmdr. Spock and Dr. Leonard "Bones'' McCoy into pop-culture icons premiered on NBC on Sept. 8, 1966.

However, the genesis of the show dates to March 11, 1964, when Roddenberry wrote a 16-page draft pilot for a show he told network executives would be a "Wagon train to the stars,'' a nod to the many Westerns that populated TV schedules at the time. Later that year, shooting began on the first "Star Trek" pilot episode, "The Cage.''

In interviews and memoirs written before he died in 1991, Roddenberry said NBC executives rejected the pilot as "too cerebral'' but were impressed enough to green-light a second pilot.

Despite its intensely loyal following, "Star Trek" was canceled by NBC, and the last first-run episode aired in June 1969, a little more than a month before the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon.

In syndication, "Star Trek" was propelled to a higher level of popularity, and even cult status. It became one of the most lucrative franchises in the annals of entertainment industry history, with an animated series, ten theatrical movies and four spin-off TV series -- including the present "Enterprise'' on UPN.

Kirk to Enterprise

Whether it was because they were inspired by the show or because "Star Trek" writers often based science fiction on science fact, today's popular personal technology gadgets resemble or have similar functions to the show's nonworking props.

The prime example is the communicators, the portable palm-size transceivers with a flip-up cover-grid antenna that, according to "Star Trek" "technical'' data, had been used "since at least the 2240s.''

When they were on missions off the starship, seeking out new life and new civilizations, each crew member used the communicators to keep in voice contact with their shipmates.

The communicators also transmitted a special identification signal to allow the ship to gain a transporter lock on crew members, essential for beaming them back to the ship.

Similarly, today's cell phones -- many with the flip-up cover -- do more than just transmit voice signals. Newer models have global positioning system satellite technology to let emergency workers lock on to a caller's location. And some include GPS maps, helping owners to navigate unfamiliar streets.

Some cell phones also respond to simple voice commands, although it's still far from the level of sophistication depicted on the starship.

One other similarity: As with cell phones, Star Fleet communicators didn't always work. Thanks to "ion storms" or other "subspace" interference, "Star Trek" crew members had their own "dead zones" to deal with.

Also, new hands-free devices worn on the ear to connect wirelessly with cell phones loosely resemble the "ear receiver'' used by the Enterprise's communications officer, Lt. Uhura.

Time warp

To appreciate how far ahead of its time "Star Trek" was, consider that in 1964:

-- The main consumer communications device was a telephone tethered to the wall by a cord that could not be unplugged except by a trained technician from Ma Bell. Modular jacks and cordless phones were years from being average household items, so the idea of a personal wireless communications device was as alien as a Keeper on Talos IV.

-- Computers were large contraptions used by big corporations or the government, not in the home.

-- Television broadcasters and makers of TVs were still in the early stages of the transition from black-and-white to color, and many households had only one TV. A typical "big screen'' TV of that era measured 23 inches diagonally and was housed in a wooden box.

-- Audio entertainment was stored on vinyl records or spools of magnetic reel-to-reel tape.

-- Although a Sony engineer proposed the idea of a videocassette recorder that year, it would be a dozen years before the company introduced the first Betamax home video recorder in the United States.

On "Star Trek," however, computers were ubiquitous, running everything from life-support systems to long-range sensors. The voice-activated computer gave any crew member instant access to a database containing the recorded histories of Earthlings, Vulcans, Romulans and other known life forms.

"The flashing lights and teletype sounds when they were computing were silly, but the concept that computers would be ubiquitous in life as tools seemed inevitable to me, but was not a widely held belief in the 1970s,'' said "Star Trek" fan Steve Perlman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of WebTV.

Today, the Internet links personal computers in homes, schools and businesses. And computer technology is incorporated into every modern convenience, from automobiles to watches.

"Star Trek" writers "didn't succeed in predicting the Web, and they didn't predict the networking of computers,'' said David Allen Batchelor, an astrophysicist in the Science Communications Technology Branch at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

But "Star Trek" "had a huge multimedia library, accessible like the Web is now,'' Batchelor said. A lifelong "Star Trek" fan, Batchelor wrote a paper called "The Science of Star Trek,'' posted on the NASA Goddard site, that examines "Star Trek" technology that is already available, possible, unlikely or impossible.

There are no smart androids, such as "Norman'' in the episode "I, Mudd.'' But Batchelor noted there is a form of artificial intelligence not seen when that episode aired in 1967 that is taken for granted today -- phone answering systems.

"This is rather primitive usually, but there are some good systems, like the one that I use to call the Washington Post and suspend delivery at my home while I'm away,'' Batchelor said. "It's pleasant to use and performs its task automatically.''

Onscreen

"Star Trek" crews never wasted their star dates watching TV, but they were surrounded by electronic video screens called viewers, either on tabletops or affixed to workstations. The main viewer on the bridge was a wall- size screen.

In the first pilot, Mr. Spock used a viewer in a meeting room to display what resembled a primitive PowerPoint presentation to the ship's executive officers.

In the past two years, makers of consumer electronics and computers have been pushing similar-looking devices: large-screen flat-panel plasma and LCD TV monitors that can be hung on a wall.

Warp factor MP3

On "Star Trek," the crew recorded audio and video messages on square, palm-size cartridges that were played back with a computer. Today, small, square flash-memory cards are used to store digital photos, MP3s and short videos. Disk drives, CDs and DVDs also store multimedia files.

"In the '60s, it was inconceivable that you would have a miniature disk drive, let alone nonviolable semiconductor memory in a plastic square,'' said Perlman in an e-mail.

In a 2002 book, "Star Trek: I'm Working on That,'' actor William Shatner, who played Capt. Kirk, examined technologies and inventors inspired by the show. He also commented on the stunning pace of technological advancement during the "Star Trek" era.

"We're like the driver behind the wheel of a car that's suddenly accelerated from zero to 150 miles an hour in the space of a few seconds. Not only that, but we're not sure how to operate the damn thing,'' Shatner wrote.

"I suspect that one of the purposes of science fiction is to let us play out our nightmares and our dreams in the theater of the future before we turn them into reality.''

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... =printable

In the future Dr. Mccoy had the Hypospray

Hypospray- Common Starfleet medical implement used to deliver medication to a patient subcutaneously by using an extremely fine, high-pressure aerosuspension delivery system. Hypospray technology is more hygienic in that it eliminates the need for a needle to physically penetrate the skin.

In the present Dr's now have the Biojector

The Biojector® 2000 is an innovative, versatile needle-free injection system that has been used to deliver millions of injections in a wide range of healthcare settings. The Biojector has many unique features, including the ability to deliver both intramuscular and subcutaneous injections up to 1 mL in volume. Since its introduction in 1993, the Biojector has set a new standard for the comfort, safety, and convenience of injection equipment.

The Biojector has FDA clearance for delivering subcutaneous or intramuscular injections of liquid medication, including vaccines and other injected medications.

Because there is no needle, the Biojector provides healthcare workers with an unparalleled level of protection against accidental needlestick injuries. In high-risk situations, such as delivering injections to patients known to be infected with HIV or Hepatitis, the Biojector is an ideal injection system.

The Biojector works by the same principle as all of Bioject's needle-free injection systems: by forcing liquid medication through a tiny orifice that is held against the skin. This creates a very fine, high-pressure stream of medication that penetrates the skin, depositing medication in the tissue beneath.

The system has three components: a durable injection device, a disposable needle-free syringe, and a CO2 cartridge.

A hypothetical device that automatically, in real time, translates spoken words in one language to those in any other. Much use of it has been made in science fiction. For example, it is used in the Star Trek universe to avoid plot complications arising from different intelligent species, for example, humans and Klingons, attempting to communicate with each other.


Universal translator in Star Trek

According to Trek mythos, on Earth the universal translator (UT) was invented shortly before 2151 but still experimental at the time of the launch of the first starship Enterprise (ENT: "Broken Bow"). This version of the UT could be used for ship-to-ship communications only; for face-to-face communication or off-world missions, a skilled linguist was required – in Enterprise's case, Hoshi Sato. By 2267, the UT had been miniaturized into a handheld, wand-like device. Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise used one to communicate with the alien known as the Companion in the Gamma Canaris system (see plasma-based life). Responding to Zefram Cochrane's question about the theory of operation, Kirk explained that there are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. The translator compares the frequencies of brainwave patterns, selects those ideas it recognizes, and provides the necessary grammar. Kirk further explained that the device speaks with a voice, or the approximation of one, that corresponds to the identity concepts it recognizes. The Companion was revealed to be female because the universal translator detected this facet of its identity from its brainwave patterns, and assigned it a female voice (TOS: "Metamorphosis"). In the 24th century, UT technology had advanced to where it could be integrated into the combadges worn by Starfleet personnel. The universal translator fails from time to time, as with the Tamarians, whose metaphor-based language defeated the mechanism completely (TNG: "Darmok"). This failure raises the question of whether a universal translator could actually be constructed to handle alien-human communications.


Universal translator in the real world


Franklin translator
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A device created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is a step along the way to a true universal translator. Users simply have to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another. Previous translation systems used voice recognition software, which required people to speak out loud and then wait for the translation to be read out. But the Carnegie Mellon system employs electrodes attached to the neck and face to detect the movements that occur as a person silently mouths words and phrases. Using this information, a computer can work out the sounds being formed and then build these sounds up into words. The system is then able to translate the words into another language which is read out by a synthetic voice.

Another gadget reminiscent of the Star Trek device is the Franklin Speaking Global Translator, unveiled at the end of 2006. It contains over 450,000 words and 12,000 phrases, and speaks 115,000 words from 12 languages (Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish) in recorded human voice.


Talking with aliens

SETI scientists have invested a lot of effort into devising messages that could easily be interpreted by any intelligent extraterrestrials who intercepted them. Practical and theoretical work to do with communicating with advanced aliens makes up the field known as CETI (Communication with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence). It's been widely assumed that science and mathematics would provide universal concepts and constants that intelligent, technological species could use as a basis for talking to one another. SETI researchers tend to assume that advanced ET would decrypt and encrypt their messages using prime numbers, pi, the Planck constant and other presumed cosmic universals so that new members of the Galactic Club could immediately begin deciphering them. However, this assumption has been challenged on the basis of terrestrial experience in deciphering ancient Egyptian and Mayan inscriptions (see lost languages).

On closer examination of the process of decoding these scripts, it's clear that when initial assumptions are wrong, the decryption can be delayed for a long time. These tasks were long held up by Plotinus’ fallacy of treating each hieroglyph as an idea or concept in itself without reference to language, and were only accomplished with the aid of such keys as the Rosetta Stone and by studying modern forms of Egyptian and Mayan. The lesson for SETI, it seems, is to remain flexible in the initial interpretations made of messages from other worlds.

The archaeological search for peoples from another time and is somewhat analogous to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Without benefit of direct contact with living beings and without the aid of understandable written communications, archaeologists rely on inferences drawn mainly from material traces of past activity.

Warp Drive

An idea for achieving faster-than-light travel suggested by the Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.1 It starts from the notion, implicit in Einstein's general theory of relativity, that matter causes the surface of spacetime around it to curve. Alcubierre was interested in the possibility of whether Star Trek's fictional "warp drive" could ever be realized. This led him to search for a valid mathematical description of the gravitational field that would allow a kind of spacetime warp to serve as a means of superluminal propulsion. Alcubierre concluded that a warp drive would be feasible if matter could be arranged so as to expand the spacetime behind a starship (thus pushing the departure point many light-years back) and contract the spacetime in front (bringing the destination closer), while leaving the starship itself in a locally flat region of spacetime bounded by a "warp bubble" that lay between the two distortions. The ship would then surf along in its bubble at an arbitrarily high velocity, pushed forward by the expansion of space at its rear and the contraction of space in front. It could travel faster than light without breaking any physical law because, with respect to the spacetime in its warp bubble, it would be at rest. Also, being locally stationary, the starship and its crew would be immune from any devastatingly high accelerations and decelerations (obviating the need for "inertial dampers"), and from relativistic effects such as time dilation (since the passage of time inside the warp bubble would be the same as that outside).

Could such a warp drive be built? It would require, as Alcubierre pointed out, the manipulation of matter with a negative energy density. Such matter, known as exotic matter, is the same kind of peculiar stuff apparently needed to maintain stable wormholes – another proposed means of circumventing the light barrier. Quantum mechanics allows the existence of regions of negative energy density under special circumstances, such as in the Casimir effect.

Further analysis of Alubierre's warp drive concept by Chris Van Den Broeck of the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium,2 has perhaps brought the construction of the starship Enterprise a little closer. Van Den Broeck's calculations put the amount of energy required much lower than that quoted in Alcubierre's paper. But this is not to say we are on the verge of warp capability. As Van Den Broeck concludes: "The first warp drive is still a long way off but maybe it has now become slightly less improbable."

Star Trek Medical Device Uses Ultrasound To Seal Punctured Lungs

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2007) — A stretcher races through the entrance of a busy hospital. The car-accident victim lies on top and grimaces in pain. While surface injuries looks gruesome, the real medical danger is invisible - internal organ damage caused by being crushed against the steering wheel.

This isn't a scene from Seattle Grace Hospital, the set of the popular television drama Grey's Anatomy, but from its real-life model, Harborview Medical Center. Engineers at the University of Washington are working with Harborview doctors to create new emergency treatments right out of Star Trek: a tricorder type device using high-intensity focused ultrasound rays. This summer, researchers published the first experiment using ultrasound to seal punctured lungs.

"No one has ever looked at treating lungs with ultrasound," said Shahram Vaezy, a UW associate professor of bioengineering. Physicists were skeptical it would work because a lung is essentially a collection of air sacs, and air blocks transmission of ultrasound. But the new experiments show that punctures on the lung's surface, where injuries usually occur, heal with ultrasound therapy.

"The results are really impressive," Vaezy said. He cautions that this is still in the early stages and the technique is not yet being tested on humans.

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises "bloodless surgery" with no scalpels or sutures in sight. Doctors would pass a sensor over the patient and use invisible rays to heal the wound. Researchers are exploring the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound - with beams tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging - for applications ranging from numbing pain to destroying cancerous tissue.

In this case, lenses focus the high-intensity ultrasound beams at a particular spot inside the body on the patient's lungs. Focusing the ultrasound beams, in a process similar to focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass, creates a tiny but extremely hot spot about the size and shape of a grain of rice. The rays heat the blood cells until they form a seal. Meanwhile the tissue between the device and the spot being treated does not get hot, as it would with a laser beam.

"You can penetrate deep into the body and deliver the energy to the bleeding very accurately," Vaezy said. Recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes. More than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published this summer in the Journal of Trauma.

The findings suggest that ultrasound might replace what is now a painful, invasive procedure. Lung injuries are relatively common because the chest is a big surface that's often exposed to crushing or puncture wounds, said co-author Gregory Jurkovich, chief of trauma at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and a UW professor of surgery. A busy trauma room like Harborview's, he said, admits about two patients with bleeding lungs per day.

Often the bleeding can be stopped simply by packing the wound and applying pressure. In other cases, doctors insert a straw and drain the blood and air so the wound can heal. But in about one in 10 cases neither of these methods is successful, and doctors must operate to stop the bleeding. That means making a long incision and separating the ribs, and then either sewing up the organ or removing a section of the lung.

The new research shows that in these difficult cases, high-intensity focused ultrasound applied from outside could stop bleeding and air leaks. Vaezy and colleagues in the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound in the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory have been developing ultrasound for surgery for more than a decade, concentrating on frequencies in the 1 million to 10 million hertz (cycles per second). The device producing the ultrasound rays, about the size of a golf ball, is inserted into a handle that doctors use to scan the outside of the body. Previous experiments used the tool to seal blood vessels and stop bleeding in the spleen.

Someday, Jurkovich predicts, this tool might be used for image-guided therapy.

"Doctors will scan the body from the outside, recognize where the injury is, focus the beam on the injury and use the beams to seal the wound," Jurkovich said. The futuristic medical technology's promise is substantial, he said. "It would be non-invasive and it would stop the bleeding from the outside. When it happens, that's going to revolutionize how we would care for some of these injuries."

As told by Science News

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Breakthrough brings 'Star Trek' teleport a step closer
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 04 June 2007
Scientists have set a new record in sending information through thin air using the revolutionary technology of quantum teleportation - although Mr Spock may have to wait a little longer for a Scotty to beam him up with it.

A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space.

The scientists did it by exploiting the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another. Tiny packets or particles of light, photons, were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands. The photons did it by quantum entanglement and scientists hope it will form the basis of a way of sending encrypted data.

The teleporters used in Star Trek are said to have been based on the idea of quantum entanglement and the latest study demonstrates that elements of the phenomenon could have a practical use in the real world.

However, quantum entanglement has so far been carried out only on the simplest forms of matter and scientists believe that a fundamentally new approach will be needed if it can ever be used for teleporting people or even non-living objects.

Robert Ursin of the University of Vienna said the latest experiment in quantum entanglement shows its potential as a means of communicating sensitive information via satellites using quantum cryptography, that could effectively deploy an uncrackable security code.

"We really wanted to show that this can be done in the real world and our dream is to go into space and try it there. This was a feasibility study funded by the European Space Agency," Dr Ursin said yesterday. "In principle, such experiments may in future be used for teleporting information between places, but our system is not capable of transporting matter," he said.

"We think Star Trek is really very good science fiction but I'm afraid teleporting people is not possible with current technology. But we could use some scheme to teleport information."

Albert Einstein described quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance" and it relies on the fact that two photons can be created in such a way that they behave as a single object, even if they are separated by large distances. In behaving in this way they are acting as a teleportation machine because any changes to one causes similar changes to the other. The way this is done is via a third photon, which is teleported from the photon in the transmitting station to the photon in the receiver.

In the process, the third photon becomes entangled with the transmitting photon and so carries its quantum information to the receiving photon, which interacts with the third photon in such a way that it becomes identical to it - hence the information is successfully transmitted.

The study is published in the journal Nature Physic

When the crew of the Enterprise received a well-deserved shore leave, they needed some kind of money to buy goods and services. The science fiction standby of "credits" was usually brought into the picture. Today, however, real-life astronauts can use colorful QUID's (Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination), which are specially designed for use in space.

The Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination, or QUID, is the new currency of inter-planetary travelers. It was designed for the foreign exchange company Travelex by scientists from the National Space Centre and the University of Leicester.

The design intent is that QUIDs must withstand the rigors of space travel - no sharp edges and no chemicals that could hurt space tourists.


"None of the existing payment systems we use on earth - like cash, credit or debit cards - could be used in space," said Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester. "Anything with sharp edges, like coins, would be a risk to astronauts while the chips and magnetic strips used in our cards on Earth would be damaged beyond repair by cosmic radiation."
The QUID is made from a space-qualified polymer - PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene). This material is widely used by space agencies because of its durability and versatility. Earthlings know it better as "teflon," and are well-aware of its resistance to high temperatures and corrosive materials. (Merchants will like the ease with which QUIDs slide out of consumer's pockets.)

The rounded edges of the QUID make it safer, and also encompass the eight planets orbiting a sun which are part of the design. Each of the orbiting planets contain a serial number; taken together, these numbers will give each QUID disc a unique code to prevent counterfeits.

What's a QUID worth? The current exchange rate for the new currency is £6.25 to the QUID (or US$12.50 or about 8.68 Euros).



(Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination detail)
Hopefully, as we travel further from Earth and spread throughout the galaxy, people will not confuse the QUID with the "quid" - a slang term for the British pound sterling, possibly deriving from the location of the Royal mint at Quidhampton, Wiltshire, England

'Tricorder' Ready For Mars Rover This Year

As science fiction fans may recall, the tricorder was a standard issue prop in the original Star Trek series of the mid-1960's. The standard Starfleet tricorder was used for determining various characteristics of landing areas; the chemical composition of any material was easily determined. Tricorders need only be aimed at the object of study, and a material analysis is ready for the user in moments.

Of course, that's just science fiction. Or is it?

"We're developing a tricorder," declares Dr. Robert Downs of the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences. The technology is being developed to create a pocket-sized model for the 2009 Mars rover that will be able to determine the composition of minerals in Martian rocks and soil.



(Robert Downs adjusts material in a Raman spectrometer)
The new "tricorder" will have two functional parts: a very compact Raman spectrometer and a comprehensive database of Earth's minerals.

The Raman spectrometer is based on a technique developed by Sir C.V. Raman, an Indian physicist who won a Nobel prize in 1930 for the discovery. Unlike most methods of conducting an analysis of a material, it does not require destructive testing. By firing a laser at the sample, atoms are excited, which then emit a very weak light with a pattern characteristic of the material. Says Downs, "It's like a fingerprint." Dr. Bonner Denton is working on the hardware side; NASA is providing funding to develop the instrument for the 2009 Mars Rover.

The other necessary component is a database of these patterns; this requires that known samples are tested and the patterns are recorded. As you might imagine, this is a labor-intensive process; a group of undergraduate researchers is helping complete the RRUFF Project, the first comprehensive database of the Raman spectra of all of Earth's minerals. The RRUFF Project is funded by a grant from Michael Scott, founding president of Apple Computer. (RRUFF is the name of Scott's cat.)

The device will have applications in many fields, not just planetary exploration. According to Dr. Downs:

"Bonner Denton has a demonstration he uses upstairs. He takes a bottle of Tylenol, a white plastic container and the pills are inside. You can shoot the Raman [specrometer] and a laser goes through that white plastic, it identifies the three parts of Tylenol and it tells you what the plastic is made out of. It works on leaves. I can identify the species of trees by shooting their leaves. I don’t think the biologists are aware of this yet."

Several prototype PHASR weapons are being tested by the US military. The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response device is under development at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate.



(PHASR on stun)
The PHASR has been designed as a non-lethal, man-portable deterrent weapon. It uses a laser system with two different wavelengths to blind (temporarily!) the enemy.

Laser weapons that could blind were banned under a 1995 UN convention - the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. The PHASR is intended to dazzle an enemy; it is also being fitted with a range-finding device to make sure that the amount of energy received is not too bright.



(Phaser rifle from classic Star Trek)
Obviously, the PHASR name is a retrofit to a sci-fi standard; namely, the phaser used on generations of Star Trek episodes. Captain Kirk is shown below with a phaser rifle. In the fictional world of Star Trek, "phaser" stands for "phased energy rectification." In the original series, phasers had several different settings - from stun to kill to vaporize.

Keeping updated at the hospital
New technology at Washington facility puts staff in touch instantly
Sunday, May 04, 2008
By Gretchen McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A loved one is in surgery, but you don't dare leave the waiting room for even a quick cup of coffee for fear of missing an update on how the operation is going. Or maybe you're on the other end of the health-care visit; a patient who's been waiting for what seems like forever for a doctor to answer a page so the nurse can adjust your medication or help you out of bed for a shower.

Frustrating on both accounts, to be sure. But that's the lay of the land when you're in a hospital, right?

Well, not at The Washington Hospital.

Last month, the 265-bed community hospital started using an innovative science fiction-like wireless voice communications system that allows doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to instantly connect to one other with a simple tap of a button. And unlike other new technologies that typically take time to be accepted, it was an immediate hit.

So successful is the so-called Vocera badge and its accompanying software that more than 1,400 people-- everyone from nurses, lab technicians and doctors to housekeeping and escort -- have already been trained to use the hands-free, clip-on device, which is about the size and shape of a portable digital voice recorder. As a result, staff are spending more time with patients and less time returning pages or telephone calls.

And it's not the only breakthrough technology the hospital is the first in the area to embrace. In December, it began implementing an Internet-based service that enables members of the Washington Physician Hospital Organization, a partnership of 220 primary care and specialist physicians from 100 practices, to immediately receive clinical information such as lab results, radiology reports and X-rays from the hospital, eliminating the need for paper-based communications.

MobileMD's Health Information Exchange and Enterprise Access solutions provide "real time" transmission, interfacing hospital data into the electronic medical record systems of the subscribing physicians. To date, 27 practices have signed on.

Records, which can be queried over the course of a year, are searchable by categories such as patient, type of document, abnormal test results and emergency room visits. They can also be accessed by a physician from home, allowing doctors to check up on patients without having to call a nurse or to get up to date after a vacation.

For example, if a patient is treated in the emergency room overnight, the primary care physician will have that information in the morning. In the past, the patient most likely would have had to call his or her doctor to alert him to the emergency treatment.

"It's not uncommon for a busy practice to have 100 messages a week, or even a thousand," said physician's organization executive director Charles Vargo. "This puts all that information [which would have been faxed or mailed] into a central clearinghouse."

An even bigger advantage, he said, is that the information is well organized.

"You can't always trust the mail or a patient to get records to his doctor," said Mr. Vargo. "With MobileMD, you get the right information at the right time right at your fingertips."

Simply put, you won't have to worry about forgetting to bring your X-rays to the doctor's office because he'll already have a copy in the system. It also helps avoid unnecessary tests.

The Vocera Communications System, which was first introduced in 2006, similarly has two components: a lightweight, voice-controlled "badge" that operates over a wireless system that links together electronic equipment to form a network and a software package that controls and manages call activity. Together, they allow authorized users to immediately communicate with others through a networked building.

Washington Hospital sought out the new technology, said Rodney Louk, the hospital's vice president of information systems, because communication delays were slowing patient care.

The system solves that problem and keeps track of a mobile staff by giving health care professionals immediate and efficient access to one another. Previously, a nurse would often have to leave a patient's bedside to seek help or medical equipment, or a doctor would have to go in search of a phone to return a page. Both can now make or answer a call on the spot.

Washington Hospital is the first hospital in Washington and Allegheny counties to use Vocera badges buildingwide, and not just in a certain department, said Mr. Louk.

The badges cost $300 each and the hospital bought 865 units, which are signed in and out for each shift.

With speech recognition, the badges allow users to contact other staff by saying the command "call," followed by the person's name; to receive a call, users simply say "yes" or "hello." If, on the other hand, the staff member is busy or in a location that would compromise a patient's confidentiality (i.e., near too many other pairs of ears), a "no" response gives the calling party the option of leaving a message.

The badge, which can also be worn on a lanyard, allows staff to page groups of people, broadcast messages, and talk to more than one person at a time via a conference call. Because it does not store data, there are no security issues.

"You just have to learn the commands and which buttons to use," said voice communications manager Dave Watson, adding that most people can be trained in less than five minutes. "It's very user friendly."

It's so user friendly, in fact, that the hospital is giving the badge to families of surgery patients to free them from having to sweat out a surgery in the waiting room. As long as they stay on hospital grounds, they will receive all updates via the badge as soon as they become available. To date, some 70 families have used the system. And as Martha Stewart might say, that's a good thing.

"They love it," said Barb Stoltz, manager of the outpatient surgery unit, adding that the hospital will probably extend the service to the radiology department soon.

Granted, it's not an exact copy of the V-shaped communicator pin Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard tapped on his chest anytime he needed a crew member to beam him aboard the starship Enterprise, but it's just as effective. According to a study by the University of Maryland, nurses had a 51 percent faster response time to patients requests with Vocera compared with a traditional phone system. That translates into more than 1,500 person hours over the course of a year.

It also makes for a quieter work place since it cuts down on the 4,000 overhead pages and 2,000 beepers Washington Hospital typically counts each month. And as anyone who's ever had to overnight in a ward can tell you, a quieter hospital makes for a more comfortable stay for patients.

Progress being made by European researchers on automatic speech-to-speech translation technology could help the EU tackle one of the biggest remaining boundaries to internal trade, mobility and the free exchange of information - language.

With 23 official languages, European institutions spend more than a billion euros a year translating documents and interpreting speeches. Companies trading across the EU’s internal borders spend millions more just to understand their business partners.

The situation, unparalleled anywhere else in the world, makes Europe a natural market for automatic translation technology, and, logically, a leader in the development of systems that can help speakers of different languages communicate.

“There is an evident need for this sort of technology in Europe and elsewhere in the world… it saves time and costs over human translation,” explains Marcello Federico, a researcher at FBK-irst in Trento, Italy.

But no one has been able to develop an automatic translation system that comes anywhere close to the capabilities of a human translator or interpreter. Internet translations are a case in point, littered with punctuation errors, misplaced words and grammatical mistakes that can make them almost unintelligible.

Other systems can only translate certain predefined words and phrases, so-called ‘constrained speech’ that suffices for a tourist booking a hotel or checking flight times but is next to useless if you want to understand a news bulletin.

Federico led a team that sought to achieve something far more ambitious. Working in the EU-funded TC-STAR project they tackled what is perhaps the biggest human language technology challenge of all: taking speech in one language and outputting spoken words in another.

First in speech-to-speech translation

“For humans, translation is difficult. We have to master both the source language and the target language, and machine translation is significantly more difficult than that,” Federico notes. “To our knowledge, TC-STAR has been the first project in the world addressing unrestricted speech-to-speech translation.”

For such a system to be able to translate any speech regardless of topic and context, three technologies are used, all of which are still far from perfect. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is used to transcribe spoken words to text. Spoken Language Translation (SLT) translates the source language to the target language. Text to Speech (TTS) synthesises the spoken output.

The TC-STAR research partners developed components to handle each of those tasks, creating a platform that has brought the state of the art of translation technology a step closer to matching the performance of human translators.

One of their key innovations was to combine the output of several ASR and SLT systems in order to make the transcription and translation phases considerably more accurate than comparable systems.

Based on the BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) method, a way of comparing machine and human translations, evaluations of the quality of translations improved by between 40% and 60% over the course of the project, while up to 70% of words were translated correctly, even if they were not placed in the right position in a sentence.

From speeches to Chinese news bulletins

The 11 partners - including big telecom and entertainment companies, such as Nokia, Siemens, IBM and Sony - worked with recordings of speeches from the European Parliament, which they translated between English and Spanish. They also worked with radio news broadcasts, which they translated from Chinese to English.

Though the system still cannot match the accuracy of a human translator or interpreter, Federico is convinced that, with further research a commercially viable automatic speech-to-speech translator will be feasible within a few years, at least for some simpler language pairs.

In the meantime, components developed in the TC-STAR project have been made available under an open source license. The project has also led to at least one spin-off company and a follow-up initiative.

Called PerVoice, the spin-off is offering remote-automated transcription services for companies and public bodies.

“It saves them time and money to have minutes of meetings or town council sessions transcribed automatically,” Federico notes.

The follow-up project, JUMAS, focuses on developing a similar transcription system to record court trial proceedings.

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Life Detector

A robotic rover called Zoe is the first robot to remotely detect the presence of life. On a NASA-sponsored mission in the harsh Atacama desert in Chile, Zoe was able to detect life by looking for natural fluorescence from lichens and bacteria. Life detection is all the rage now; the European Space Agency will be using the Urey Life Detector on an upcoming Mars mission (see photo). These devices mimic the function of the long range sensors from Star Trek, which could detect life from unreasonably long distances.

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