ALBERT

Description: An ultrasonic technique, invariant to temperature changes, for a density measurement of different liquids under in situ extreme conditions is presented. The influence of geometry and material parameters of the measurement system (transducer, waveguide, matching layer) on measurement accuracy and reliability is analyzed theoretically along with experimental results. The proposed method is based on measurement of the amplitude of the ultrasonic wave, reflected from the interface of the solid/liquid medium under investigation. In order to enhance sensitivity, the use of a quarter wavelength acoustic matching layer is proposed. Therefore, the sensitivity of the measurement system increases significantly. Density measurements quite often must be performed in extreme conditions at high temperature (up to 220 °C) and high pressure. In this case, metal waveguides between piezoelectric transducer and the measured liquid are used in order to protect the conventional transducer from the influence of high temperature and to avoid depolarization. The presented ultrasonic density measurement technique is suitable for density measurement in different materials, including liquids and polymer melts in extreme conditions. A new calibration algorithm was proposed. The metrological evaluation of the measurement method was performed. The expanded measurement uncertainty Uρ = 7.4 × 10−3 g/cm3 (1%).

Description: In recent years, IoT (Internet of Things) technologies have seen great advances, particularly, the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL), which provides a powerful and flexible routing framework that can be applied in a variety of application scenarios. In this context, as an important role of IoT, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can utilize RPL to design efficient routing protocols for a specific application to increase the ubiquity of networks with resource-constrained WSN nodes that are low-cost and easy to deploy. In this article, our work starts with the description of Agricultural Low-power and Lossy Networks (A-LLNs) complying with the LLN framework, and to clarify the requirements of this application-oriented routing solution. After a brief review of existing optimization techniques for RPL, our contribution is dedicated to a Scalable Context-Aware Objective Function (SCAOF) that can adapt RPL to the environmental monitoring of A-LLNs, through combining energy-aware, reliability-aware, robustness-aware and resource-aware contexts according to the composite routing metrics approach. The correct behavior of this enhanced RPL version (RPAL) was verified by performance evaluations on both simulation and field tests. The obtained experimental results confirm that SCAOF can deliver the desired advantages on network lifetime extension, and high reliability and efficiency in different simulation scenarios and hardware testbeds.

Description: The aim of this randomized clinical trial was to evaluate whether a recently described multi-sensor approach called BIONOTE® is accurate enough to verify the efficacy of treatment of patients with halitosis. A treatment with Lactobacillus brevis (CD2)–containing lozenges, compared with placebo was tested. The BIONOTE® was compared with traditional techniques used to detect halitosis: OralChroma™ and two calibrated odor judges enrolled for the organoleptic assessments. Twenty patients (10 treated and 10 placebo), suffering from active phase halitosis were included in the study. Treatment consisted of Lactobacillus brevis (CD2)—containing lozenges or placebo, 4 tablets/day for 14 days. t0 was before the beginning of the study; t1 was day 7 and t2 was day 14. The effectiveness of treatment was assessed through: (1) Rosenberg score; (2) Winkel tongue coating index (WTCI) anterior and posterior; (2) OralChroma™; (3) the new developed multi-sensor approach, called BIONOTE® (test technique). Only the WTCI anterior revealed statistically significant changes between t0 and t2 data (p = 0.014) in the treated group. Except for the WTCI anterior, all diagnostic methods revealed the lack of effectiveness for halitosis of a 14-days treatment with Lactobacillus brevis (CD2)–containing lozenges. The BIONOTE® multisensor system seems accurate in addition to OralChroma™ to assess the initial condition of halitosis and its mitigation during treatment.

Description: This paper presents a multipurpose and low cost sensor for the simultaneous monitoring of temperature and ullage of wine in barrels in two of the most important stages of winemaking, that being fermentation and maturation. The distributed sensor subsystem is imbedded within the bung of the barrel and runs on battery for a period of at least 12 months and costs around $27 AUD for all parts. In addition, software was designed which allows for the remote transmission and easy visual interpretation of the data for the winemaker. Early warning signals can be sent when the temperature or ullage deviates from a winemakers expectations so remedial action can be taken, such as when topping is required or the movement of the barrels to a cooler cellar location. Such knowledge of a wine’s properties or storage conditions allows for a more precise control of the final wine quality.

Description: All our best theories about the origins of life have one thing in common: it started on Earth. But maybe it didn't – maybe we were all aliens once

Description: Those hunting for ET think it's just a matter of time – a finding that would strike the final blow to the idea that we're the centre of the cosmos

Description: With many birds and butterflies under threat, good nature writing like that in and will inspire us to get involved

Description: Everyday cognitive and psychological traps catch us all out, and occasionally end in disaster. So what are we doing to protect ourselves?

Description: Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (DCS) is a well-established optical technique that has been used for non-invasive measurement of blood flow in tissues. Instrumentation for DCS includes a correlation device that computes the temporal intensity autocorrelation of a coherent laser source after it has undergone diffuse scattering through a turbid medium. Typically, the signal acquisition and its autocorrelation are performed by a correlation board. These boards have dedicated hardware to acquire and compute intensity autocorrelations of rapidly varying input signal and usually are quite expensive. Here we show that a Raspberry Pi minicomputer can acquire and store a rapidly varying time-signal with high fidelity. We show that this signal collected by a Raspberry Pi device can be processed numerically to yield intensity autocorrelations well suited for DCS applications. DCS measurements made using the Raspberry Pi device were compared to those acquired using a commercial hardware autocorrelation board to investigate the stability, performance, and accuracy of the data acquired in controlled experiments. This paper represents a first step toward lowering the instrumentation cost of a DCS system and may offer the potential to make DCS become more widely used in biomedical applications.

Description: Wind tunnels are a key experimental tool for the analysis of airflow parameters in many fields of application. Despite their great potential impact on agricultural research, few contributions have dealt with the development of automatic control systems for wind tunnels in the field of greenhouse technology. The objective of this paper is to present an automatic control system that provides precision and speed of measurement, as well as efficient data processing in low-speed wind tunnel experiments for greenhouse engineering applications. The system is based on an algorithm that identifies the system model and calculates the optimum PI controller. The validation of the system was performed on a cellulose evaporative cooling pad and on insect-proof screens to assess its response to perturbations. The control system provided an accuracy of 〈0.06 m·s‾1 for airflow speed and 〈0.50 Pa for pressure drop, thus permitting the reproducibility and standardization of the tests. The proposed control system also incorporates a fully-integrated software unit that manages the tests in terms of airflow speed and pressure drop set points.

Description: A new application of utilizing ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to sense wind turbine blade deflections is introduced in this paper for wind energy cost reduction. The lower UWB band of 3.1–5.3 GHz is applied. On each blade, there will be one UWB blade deflection sensing system, which consists of two UWB antennas at the blade root and one UWB antenna at the blade tip. The detailed topology and challenges of this deflection sensing system are addressed. Due to the complexity of the problem, this paper will first realize the on-blade UWB radio link in the simplest case, where the tip antenna is situated outside (and on the surface of) a blade tip. To investigate this case, full-blade time-domain measurements are designed and conducted under different deflections. The detailed measurement setups and results are provided. If the root and tip antenna locations are properly selected, the first pulse is always of sufficient quality for accurate estimations under different deflections. The measured results reveal that the blade tip-root distance and blade deflection can be accurately estimated in the complicated and lossy wireless channels around a wind turbine blade. Some future research topics on this application are listed finally.

Description: A method for measuring shaft diameters is presented using structured light vision measurement. After calibrating a model of the structured light measurement, a virtual plane is established perpendicular to the measured shaft axis and the image of the light stripe on the shaft is projected to the virtual plane. On the virtual plane, the center of the measured shaft is determined by fitting the projected image under the geometrical constraints of the light stripe, and the shaft diameter is measured by the determined center and the projected image. Experiments evaluated the measuring accuracy of the method and the effects of some factors on the measurement are analyzed.

Description: Reliable data transmission over lossy communication link is expensive due to overheads for error protection. For signals that have inherent sparse structures, compressive sensing (CS) is applied to facilitate efficient sparse signal transmissions over lossy communication links without data compression or error protection. The natural packet loss in the lossy link is modeled as a random sampling process of the transmitted data, and the original signal will be reconstructed from the lossy transmission results using the CS-based reconstruction method at the receiving end. The impacts of packet lengths on transmission efficiency under different channel conditions have been discussed, and interleaving is incorporated to mitigate the impact of burst data loss. Extensive simulations and experiments have been conducted and compared to the traditional automatic repeat request (ARQ) interpolation technique, and very favorable results have been observed in terms of both accuracy of the reconstructed signals and the transmission energy consumption. Furthermore, the packet length effect provides useful insights for using compressed sensing for efficient sparse signal transmission via lossy links.

Description: The presidential candidate chides climate-denying rivals as she launches her plan to combat global warming by embracing renewables

Description: The alien planet is a rocky world circling a sun-like star at a distance that should allow it to carry liquid water

Description: The next generation of bionic devices will be connected to their human users in a seamless and profound way, says prosthetics pioneer Hugh Herr

Description: This paper proposes a resonant electric cradle design with infant cries recognition, employing an Arduino UNO as the core processor. For most commercially available electric cradles, the drive motor is closely combined with the bearing on the top, resulting in a lot of energy consumption. In this proposal, a ball bearing design was adopted and the driving force is under the cradle to increase the distance from the object to fulcrum and torque. The sensors are designed to detect the oscillation state, and then the force is driven at the critical time to achieve the maximum output response while saving energy according to the principle of resonance. As for the driving forces, the winding power and motors are carefully placed under the cradle. The sensors, including the three-axis accelerometer and infrared sensor, are tested and applied under swinging amplitude control. In addition, infant cry recognition technology was incorporated in the design to further develop its functionality, which is a rare feature in this kind of hardware. The proposed nonlinear operator of fundamental frequency ( ) analysis is able to identify different types of infant cries. In conclusion, this paper proposes an energy-saving electric cradle with infant cries recognition and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Description: Many people find that their sleep is restricted or disturbed by social obligations, including work. Sleep phase delays can affect an individual’s circadian rhythms on the following day and cause daytime sleepiness and/or poor performance. In this study, to examine weekly variations in sleep patterns, we analyzed sleep data for seven-day periods (from Sunday to Saturday) that had been collected from 2914 subjects (aged 20–79 years) over a total of 24,899 subject-weeks using contactless biomotion sensors. On the weekend, the subjects’ mean sleep midpoint, bedtime, and wake-up time were delayed by 40, 26 and 53 min, respectively, compared with those seen on weekdays. In addition, on weekdays, the mean difference between the maximum and median sleep midpoint ranged from 35 to 47 min among the subjects in their 20 s–70 s. The weekend delay and weekday variation in the subjects’ sleep patterns tended to decrease with age. This study detected sleep pattern disturbances on both weekdays and weekends. The serial changes in weekday bedtimes detected in this study suggest that sleep habits are influenced by changes in the temporal patterns of social activities/duties. We need further study the advantages of getting extra sleep and the disadvantages of sleep pattern disturbances in daily lifestyle.

Description: Atomic force microscope with applicable types of operation in a liquid environment is widely used to scan the contours of biological specimens. The contact mode of operation allows a tip to touch a specimen directly but sometimes it damages the specimen; thus, a tapping mode of operation may replace the contact mode. The tapping mode triggers the cantilever of the microscope approximately at resonance frequencies, and so the tip periodically knocks the specimen. It is well known that the cantilever induces extra liquid pressure that leads to drift in the resonance frequency. Studies have noted that the heights of protein surfaces measured via the tapping mode of an atomic force microscope are ~25% smaller than those measured by other methods. This discrepancy may be attributable to the induced superficial hydrodynamic pressure, which is worth investigating. In this paper, we introduce a semi-analytical method to analyze the pressure distribution of various tip geometries. According to our analysis, the maximum hydrodynamic pressure on the specimen caused by a cone-shaped tip is ~0.5 Pa, which can, for example, pre-deform a cell by several nanometers in compression before the tip taps it. Moreover, the pressure calculated on the surface of the specimen is 20 times larger than the pressure without considering the tip effect; these results have not been motioned in other papers. Dominating factors, such as surface heights of protein surface, mechanical stiffness of protein increasing with loading velocity, and radius of tip affecting the local pressure of specimen, are also addressed in this study.

Description: This study explores the potential of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to aid Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation when Inertial Navigation System (INS) measurements are not accurate enough to eliminate drifts from a planned trajectory. This problem can affect medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) UAV class, which permits heavy and wide payloads (as required by SAR) and flights for thousands of kilometres accumulating large drifts. The basic idea is to infer position and attitude of an aerial platform by inspecting both amplitude and phase of SAR images acquired onboard. For the amplitude-based approach, the system navigation corrections are obtained by matching the actual coordinates of ground landmarks with those automatically extracted from the SAR image. When the use of SAR amplitude is unfeasible, the phase content can be exploited through SAR interferometry by using a reference Digital Terrain Model (DTM). A feasibility analysis was carried out to derive system requirements by exploring both radiometric and geometric parameters of the acquisition setting. We showed that MALE UAV, specific commercial navigation sensors and SAR systems, typical landmark position accuracy and classes, and available DTMs lead to estimated UAV coordinates with errors bounded within ±12 m, thus making feasible the proposed SAR-based backup system.

Description: This paper demonstrates an automated computer vision system for outdoor tree crop enumeration in a seedling nursery. The complete system incorporates both hardware components (including an embedded microcontroller, an odometry encoder, and an uncalibrated digital color camera) and software algorithms (including microcontroller algorithms and the proposed algorithm for tree crop enumeration) required to obtain robust performance in a natural outdoor environment. The enumeration system uses a three-step image analysis process based upon: (1) an orthographic plant projection method integrating a perspective transform with automatic parameter estimation; (2) a plant counting method based on projection histograms; and (3) a double-counting avoidance method based on a homography transform. Experimental results demonstrate the ability to count large numbers of plants automatically with no human effort. Results show that, for tree seedlings having a height up to 40 cm and a within-row tree spacing of approximately 10 cm, the algorithms successfully estimated the number of plants with an average accuracy of 95.2% for trees within a single image and 98% for counting of the whole plant population in a large sequence of images.

Description: The combination of optical trapping with Raman spectroscopy provides a powerful method for the study, characterization, and identification of biological micro-particles. In essence, optical trapping helps to overcome the limitation imposed by the relative inefficiency of the Raman scattering process. This allows Raman spectroscopy to be applied to individual biological particles in air and in liquid, providing the potential for particle identification with high specificity, longitudinal studies of changes in particle composition, and characterization of the heterogeneity of individual particles in a population. In this review, we introduce the techniques used to integrate Raman spectroscopy with optical trapping in order to study individual biological particles in liquid and air. We then provide an overview of some of the most promising applications of this technique, highlighting the unique types of measurements enabled by the combination of Raman spectroscopy with optical trapping. Finally, we present a brief discussion of future research directions in the field.

Description: In this paper, we propose a novel extrinsic calibration method for camera networks using a sphere as the calibration object. First of all, we propose an easy and accurate method to estimate the 3D positions of the sphere center w.r.t. the local camera coordinate system. Then, we propose to use orthogonal procrustes analysis to pairwise estimate the initial camera relative extrinsic parameters based on the aforementioned estimation of 3D positions. Finally, an optimization routine is applied to jointly refine the extrinsic parameters for all cameras. Compared to existing sphere-based 3D position estimators which need to trace and analyse the outline of the sphere projection in the image, the proposed method requires only very simple image processing: estimating the area and the center of mass of the sphere projection. Our results demonstrate that we can get a more accurate estimate of the extrinsic parameters compared to other sphere-based methods. While existing state-of-the-art calibration methods use point like features and epipolar geometry, the proposed method uses the sphere-based 3D position estimate. This results in simpler computations and a more flexible and accurate calibration method. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is accurate, robust, flexible and easy to use.

Description: The salty aquifers beneath deserts may be storing more carbon than all living plants put together, according to new data from arid regions of China

Description: It took just one year to prove the new vaccine works. Now, how soon can those who need it get jabs?

Description: Despite what you see on TV, gun triggers are some of the most difficult places to find fingerprints – but a team in Italy has done it, thanks to superglue spray

Description: Spiders on the rail of malaria, the return of Google Glass, the revival of Galapagos penguins, and more

Description: This paper presents preliminary polarization measurements and systematic-error characterization of the Thirty Gigahertz Instrument receiver developed for the QUIJOTE experiment. The instrument has been designed to measure the polarization of Cosmic Microwave Background radiation from the sky, obtaining the Q, U, and I Stokes parameters of the incoming signal simultaneously. Two kinds of linearly polarized input signals have been used as excitations in the polarimeter measurement tests in the laboratory; these show consistent results in terms of the Stokes parameters obtained. A measurement-based systematic-error characterization technique has been used in order to determine the possible sources of instrumental errors and to assist in the polarimeter calibration process.

Description: In this paper, we propose a distributed data-gathering scheme using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) working as a mobile sink to gather data from a randomly distributed underwater sensor network where sensor nodes are clustered around several cluster headers. Unlike conventional data-gathering schemes where the AUV visits either every node or every cluster header, the proposed scheme allows the AUV to visit some selected nodes named path-nodes in a way that reduces the overall transmission power of the sensor nodes. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to investigate the performance of the proposed scheme compared with several preexisting techniques employing the AUV in terms of total amount of energy consumption, standard deviation of each node’s energy consumption, latency to gather data at a sink, and controlling overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme not only reduces the total energy consumption but also distributes the energy consumption more uniformly over the network, thereby increasing the lifetime of the network.

Description: The mind-boggling experiences of some ancient mystics may have important lessons for modern neuroscience, argues a book about ecstatic Kabbalah

Description: Scientific revolutions make for good stories, but it's the everyday eureka moments we should really celebrate

Description: Capacitive-type transduction is now widely used in MEMS microphones. However, its sensitivity decreases with reducing size, due to decreasing air gap capacitance. In the present study, we proposed and developed the Electret Gate of Field Effect Transistor (ElGoFET) transduction based on an electret and FET (field-effect-transistor) as a novel mechanism of MEMS microphone transduction. The ElGoFET transduction has the advantage that the sensitivity is dependent on the ratio of capacitance components in the transduction structure. Hence, ElGoFET transduction has high sensitivity even with a smaller air gap capacitance, due to a miniaturization of the transducer. A FET with a floating-gate electrode embedded on a membrane was designed and fabricated and an electret was fabricated by ion implantation with Ga+ ions. During the assembly process between the FET and the electret, the operating point of the FET was characterized using the static response of the FET induced by the electric field due to the trapped positive charge at the electret. Additionally, we evaluated the microphone performance of the ElGoFET by measuring the acoustic response in air using a semi-anechoic room. The results confirmed that the proposed transduction mechanism has potential for microphone applications.

Description: The need to hop fast in open habitats seems to have driven the evolution of unusual habit of using their tail as a fifth leg in some of Australia's iconic marsupials

Description: They have 40 eyes, change sex as they grow and flash constantly. Now we're starting to figure out why these flamboyant molluscs put on their light show

Description: Variations in gene activity seem to indicate when someone is considering suicide. A test for it could save lives – and shake up psychiatry

Description: A neural network called DeepEar listens to the world around you and guesses what you're doing – all using only the power of your smartphone

Description: Storing carbon underground where it quickly solidifies could be a simple way to prevent toxic chemicals used in fracking contaminating groundwater

Description: The giant silken cities built by spiders collapse more rapidly if the colony's inhabitants are not aggressive enough

Description: Whether you need to focus for an exam, tap into your creativity, or curb cravings, there's a type of exercise that could help

Description: Context aware applications, which can adapt their behaviors to changing environments, are attracting more and more attention. To simplify the complexity of developing applications, context aware middleware, which introduces context awareness into the traditional middleware, is highlighted to provide a homogeneous interface involving generic context management solutions. This paper provides a survey of state-of-the-art context aware middleware architectures proposed during the period from 2009 through 2015. First, a preliminary background, such as the principles of context, context awareness, context modelling, and context reasoning, is provided for a comprehensive understanding of context aware middleware. On this basis, an overview of eleven carefully selected middleware architectures is presented and their main features explained. Then, thorough comparisons and analysis of the presented middleware architectures are performed based on technical parameters including architectural style, context abstraction, context reasoning, scalability, fault tolerance, interoperability, service discovery, storage, security & privacy, context awareness level, and cloud-based big data analytics. The analysis shows that there is actually no context aware middleware architecture that complies with all requirements. Finally, challenges are pointed out as open issues for future work.

Description: A book that takes you on a "sociological safari" of zoos and aquatic parks leaves you wanting to embrace the uneasy feelings these places inspire

Description: Few techniques for guaranteeing a network lifetime have been proposed despite its great impact on network management. Moreover, since the existing schemes are mostly dependent on the combination of disparate parameters, they do not provide additional services, such as real-time communications and balanced energy consumption among sensor nodes; thus, the adaptability problems remain unresolved among nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). To solve these problems, we propose a novel fuzzy logic model to provide real-time communication in a guaranteed WSN lifetime. The proposed fuzzy logic controller accepts the input descriptors energy, time and velocity to determine each node’s role for the next duration and the next hop relay node for real-time packets. Through the simulation results, we verified that both the guaranteed network’s lifetime and real-time delivery are efficiently ensured by the new fuzzy logic model. In more detail, the above-mentioned two performance metrics are improved up to 8%, as compared to our previous work, and 14% compared to existing schemes, respectively.

Description: We propose an autonomous self-aware and adaptive fault-tolerant routing technique (ASAART) for wireless sensor networks. We address the limitations of self-healing routing (SHR) and self-selective routing (SSR) techniques for routing sensor data. We also examine the integration of autonomic self-aware and adaptive fault detection and resiliency techniques for route formation and route repair to provide resilience to errors and failures. We achieved this by using a combined continuous and slotted prioritized transmission back-off delay to obtain local and global network state information, as well as multiple random functions for attaining faster routing convergence and reliable route repair despite transient and permanent node failure rates and efficient adaptation to instantaneous network topology changes. The results of simulations based on a comparison of the ASAART with the SHR and SSR protocols for five different simulated scenarios in the presence of transient and permanent node failure rates exhibit a greater resiliency to errors and failure and better routing performance in terms of the number of successfully delivered network packets, end-to-end delay, delivered MAC layer packets, packet error rate, as well as efficient energy conservation in a highly congested, faulty, and scalable sensor network.

Description: The development of public transit systems that are accessible and safe for everyone, including people with special needs, is an objective that is justified from the civic and economic points of view. Unfortunately, public transit services are conceived for people who do not have reduced physical or cognitive abilities. In this paper, we present an intelligent public transit system by highway with the goal of facilitating access and improving the safety of public transit for persons with special needs. The system is deployed using components that are commonly available in transport infrastructure, e.g., sensors, mobile communications systems, and positioning systems. In addition, the system can operate in non-urban transport contexts, e.g., isolated rural areas, where the availability of basic infrastructure, such as electricity and communications infrastructures, is not always guaranteed. To construct the system, the principles and techniques of Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence have been employed. To illustrate the utility of the system, two cases of services rendered by the system are described: the first case involves a surveillance system to guarantee accessibility at bus stops; the second case involves a route assistant for blind people.

Description: An accurate performance analysis on the MDL criterion for source enumeration in array processing is presented in this paper. The enumeration results of MDL can be predicted precisely by the proposed procedure via the statistical analysis of the sample eigenvalues, whose distributive properties are investigated with the consideration of their interactions. A novel approach is also developed for the performance evaluation when the source number is underestimated by a number greater than one, which is denoted as “multiple-missed detection”, and the probability of a specific underestimated source number can be estimated by ratio distribution analysis. Simulation results are included to demonstrate the superiority of the presented method over available results and confirm the ability of the proposed approach to perform multiple-missed detection analysis.

Description: As society has developed, the number of vehicles has increased and road conditions have become complicated, increasing the risk of crashes. Therefore, a service that provides safe vehicle control and various types of information to the driver is urgently needed. In this study, we designed and implemented a real-time traffic information system and a smart camera device for smart driver assistance systems. We selected a commercial device for the smart driver assistance systems, and applied a computer vision algorithm to perform image recognition. For application to the dynamic region of interest, dynamic frame skip methods were implemented to perform parallel processing in order to enable real-time operation. In addition, we designed and implemented a model to estimate congestion by analyzing traffic information. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using images of a real road environment. We found that the processing time improved by 15.4 times when all the proposed methods were applied in the application. Further, we found experimentally that there was little or no change in the recognition accuracy when the proposed method was applied. Using the traffic congestion estimation model, we also found that the average error rate of the proposed model was 5.3%.

Description: Foot pathologies can negatively influence foot function, consequently impairing gait during daily activity, and severely impacting an individual’s quality of life. These pathologies are often painful and correspond with high or abnormal plantar pressure, which can result in asymmetry in the pressure distribution between the two feet. There is currently no general consensus on the presence of asymmetry in able-bodied gait, and plantar pressure analysis during gait is in dire need of a standardized method to quantify asymmetry. This paper investigates the use of plantar pressure asymmetry for pathological gait diagnosis. The results of this study involving plantar pressure analysis in fifty one participants (31 healthy and 20 with foot pathologies) support the presence of plantar pressure asymmetry in normal gait. A higher level of asymmetry was detected at the majority of the regions in the feet of the pathological population, including statistically significant differences in the plantar pressure asymmetry in two regions of the foot, metatarsophalangeal joint 3 (MPJ3) and the lateral heel. Quantification of plantar pressure asymmetry may prove to be useful for the identification and diagnosis of various foot pathologies.

Description: In this paper, we present the development of an infrastructure-less indoor location system (ILS), which relies on the use of a microphone, a magnetometer and a light sensor of a smartphone, all three of which are essentially passive sensors, relying on signals available practically in any building in the world, no matter how developed the region is. In our work, we merge the information from those sensors to estimate the user’s location in an indoor environment. A multivariate model is applied to find the user’s location, and we evaluate the quality of the resulting model in terms of sensitivity and specificity. Our experiments were carried out in an office environment during summer and winter, to take into account changes in light patterns, as well as changes in the Earth’s magnetic field irregularities. The experimental results clearly show the benefits of using the information fusion of multiple sensors when contrasted with the use of a single source of information.

Description: GPs in the UK are being told to push back against people who demand antibiotics, in a move to cut prescriptions by a quarter

Description: Grim find of 26 mutilated bodies in Germany is earliest evidence of mass torture, challenging the view of rural harmony among early Europeans

Description: The realization of the Internet of Things greatly depends on the information communication among physical terminal devices and informationalized platforms, such as smart sensors, embedded systems and intelligent networks. Playing an important role in information acquisition, sensors for stereo capture have gained extensive attention in various fields. In this paper, we concentrate on promoting such sensors in an intelligent system with self-assessment capability to deal with the distortion and impairment in long-distance shooting applications. The core design is the establishment of the objective evaluation criteria that can reliably predict shooting quality with different camera configurations. Two types of stereo capture systems—toed-in camera configuration and parallel camera configuration—are taken into consideration respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed evaluation criteria can effectively predict the visual perception of stereo capture quality for long-distance shooting.

Description: Autonomous vehicles require highly reliable navigation capabilities. For example, a lane-following method cannot be applied in an intersection without lanes, and since typical lane detection is performed using a straight-line model, errors can occur when the lateral distance is estimated in curved sections due to a model mismatch. Therefore, this paper proposes a localization method that uses GPS/DR error estimation based on a lane detection method with curved lane models, stop line detection, and curve matching in order to improve the performance during waypoint following procedures. The advantage of using the proposed method is that position information can be provided for autonomous driving through intersections, in sections with sharp curves, and in curved sections following a straight section. The proposed method was applied in autonomous vehicles at an experimental site to evaluate its performance, and the results indicate that the positioning achieved accuracy at the sub-meter level.

Description: A novel sensing device for fire detection in domestic environments is presented. The fire detector uses a combination of several sensors that not only detect smoke, but discriminate between different types of smoke. This feature avoids false alarms and warns of different situations. Power consumption is optimized both in terms of hardware and software, providing a high degree of autonomy of almost five years. Data gathered from the device are transmitted through a wireless communication to a base station. The low cost and compact design provides wide application prospects.

Description: Lipid multilayer gratings are recently invented nanomechanical sensor elements that are capable of transducing molecular binding to fluid lipid multilayers into optical signals in a label free manner due to shape changes in the lipid nanostructures. Here, we show that nanointaglio is suitable for the integration of chemically different lipid multilayer gratings into a sensor array capable of distinguishing vapors by means of an optical nose. Sensor arrays composed of six different lipid formulations are integrated onto a surface and their optical response to three different vapors (water, ethanol and acetone) in air as well as pH under water is monitored as a function of time. Principal component analysis of the array response results in distinct clustering indicating the suitability of the arrays for distinguishing these analytes. Importantly, the nanointaglio process used here is capable of producing lipid gratings out of different materials with sufficiently uniform heights for the fabrication of an optical nose.

Description: Broadband Power Line Communications (PLC) have taken advantage of the research advances in multi-carrier modulations to mitigate frequency selective fading, and their adoption opens up a myriad of applications in the field of sensory and automation systems, multimedia connectivity or smart spaces. Nonetheless, the use of these multi-carrier modulations, such as Wavelet-OFDM, requires a highly accurate symbol timing estimation for reliably recovering of transmitted data. Furthermore, the PLC channel presents some particularities that prevent the direct use of previous synchronization algorithms proposed in wireless communication systems. Therefore more research effort should be involved in the design and implementation of novel and robust synchronization algorithms for PLC, thus enabling real-time synchronization. This paper proposes a symbol timing estimator for broadband PLC based on cross-correlation with multilevel complementary sequences or Zadoff-Chu sequences and its efficient implementation in a FPGA; the obtained results show a 90% of success rate in symbol timing estimation for a certain PLC channel model and a reduced resource consumption for its implementation in a Xilinx Kyntex FPGA.

Description: In the smart grid, measurement devices may be compromised by adversaries, and their operations could be disrupted by attacks. A number of schemes to efficiently and accurately detect these compromised devices remotely have been proposed. Nonetheless, most of the existing schemes detecting compromised devices depend on the incremental response time in the attestation process, which are sensitive to data transmission delay and lead to high computation and network overhead. To address the issue, in this paper, we propose a low-cost remote memory attestation scheme (LRMA), which can efficiently and accurately detect compromised smart meters considering real-time network delay and achieve low computation and network overhead. In LRMA, the impact of real-time network delay on detecting compromised nodes can be eliminated via investigating the time differences reported from relay nodes. Furthermore, the attestation frequency in LRMA is dynamically adjusted with the compromised probability of each node, and then, the total number of attestations could be reduced while low computation and network overhead can be achieved. Through a combination of extensive theoretical analysis and evaluations, our data demonstrate that our proposed scheme can achieve better detection capacity and lower computation and network overhead in comparison to existing schemes.

Description: It is known that cardiac and respiratory rhythms in electrocardiograms (ECGs) are highly nonlinear and non-stationary. As a result, most traditional time-domain algorithms are inadequate for characterizing the complex dynamics of the ECG. This paper proposes a new ECG sensor card and a statistical-based ECG algorithm, with the aid of a reduced binary pattern (RBP), with the aim of achieving faster ECG human identity recognition with high accuracy. The proposed algorithm has one advantage that previous ECG algorithms lack—the waveform complex information and de-noising preprocessing can be bypassed; therefore, it is more suitable for non-stationary ECG signals. Experimental results tested on two public ECG databases (MIT-BIH) from MIT University confirm that the proposed scheme is feasible with excellent accuracy, low complexity, and speedy processing. To be more specific, the advanced RBP algorithm achieves high accuracy in human identity recognition and is executed at least nine times faster than previous algorithms. Moreover, based on the test results from a long-term ECG database, the evolving RBP algorithm also demonstrates superior capability in handling long-term and non-stationary ECG signals.

Description: There's too much talk of Terminators and too little about the good stuff that artificial intelligence can do for us, says computer scientist

Description: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used to monitor the environment, and sensors in WSNs are usually power constrained. Because inner-node communication consumes most of the power, efficient data compression schemes are needed to reduce the data transmission to prolong the lifetime of WSNs. In this paper, we propose an efficient data compression model to aggregate data, which is based on spatial clustering and principal component analysis (PCA). First, sensors with a strong temporal-spatial correlation are grouped into one cluster for further processing with a novel similarity measure metric. Next, sensor data in one cluster are aggregated in the cluster head sensor node, and an efficient adaptive strategy is proposed for the selection of the cluster head to conserve energy. Finally, the proposed model applies principal component analysis with an error bound guarantee to compress the data and retain the definite variance at the same time. Computer simulations show that the proposed model can greatly reduce communication and obtain a lower mean square error than other PCA-based algorithms.

Description: Monitoring ocean waves plays a crucial role in, for example, coastal environmental and protection studies. Traditional methods for measuring ocean waves are based on ultrasonic sensors and accelerometers. However, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has been introduced recently and has the advantage of being smaller, less expensive, and not requiring calibration in comparison with the traditional methods. Therefore, for accurately measuring ocean waves using GPS, further research on the separation of the wave signals from the vertical GPS-mounted carrier displacements is still necessary. In order to contribute to this topic, we present a novel method that combines complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD) with a wavelet threshold denoising model (i.e., CEEMD-Wavelet). This method seeks to extract wave signals with less residual noise and without losing useful information. Compared with the wave parameters derived from the moving average skill, high pass filter and wave gauge, the results show that the accuracy of the wave parameters for the proposed method was improved with errors of about 2 cm and 0.2 s for mean wave height and mean period, respectively, verifying the validity of the proposed method.

Description: Here, we provide an overview of the content of the Special Issue on “Human-computer interaction in smart environments”. The aim of this Special Issue is to highlight technologies and solutions encompassing the use of mass-market sensors in current and emerging applications for interacting with Smart Environments. Selected papers address this topic by analyzing different interaction modalities, including hand/body gestures, face recognition, gaze/eye tracking, biosignal analysis, speech and activity recognition, and related issues.

Description: The adsorption of the proteins CD13, mucin and bovine serum albumin on VLGXE-Au and YNGRT-Au interfaces was monitored by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy in the presence of [Fe(CN)6]3−/4−. The hydrophobicity of the Au surface was tailored using specific peptides, blocking agents and diluents. The combination of blocking agents (ethanolamine or n-butylamine) and diluents (hexanethiol or 2-mercaptoethanol) was used to prepare various peptide-modified Au surfaces. Protein adsorption onto the peptide-Au surfaces modified with the combination of n-butylamine and hexanethiol produced a dramatic decrease in the charge transfer resistance, Rct, for all three proteins. In contrast, polar peptide-surfaces induced a minimal change in Rct for all three proteins. Furthermore, an increase in Rct was observed with CD13 (an aminopeptidase overexpressed in certain cancers) in comparison to the other proteins when the VLGXE-Au surface was modified with n-butylamine as a blocking agent. The electrochemical data indicated that protein adsorption may be modulated by tailoring the peptide sequence on Au surfaces and that blocking agents and diluents play a key role in promoting or preventing protein adsorption. The peptide-Au platform may also be used for targeting cancer biomarkers with designer peptides.

Description: Securing communications in wireless sensor networks is increasingly important as the diversity of applications increases. However, even today, it is equally important for the measures employed to be energy efficient. For this reason, this publication analyzes the suitability of various cryptographic primitives for use in WSNs according to various criteria and, finally, describes a modular, PKI-based framework for confidential, authenticated, secure communications in which most suitable primitives can be employed. Due to the limited capabilities of common WSN motes, criteria for the selection of primitives are security, power efficiency and memory requirements. The implementation of the framework and the singular components have been tested and benchmarked in our testbed of IRISmotes.

Description: Recently, the cross-layer design for the wireless sensor network communication protocol has become more and more important and popular. Considering the disadvantages of the traditional cross-layer routing algorithms, in this paper we propose a new fuzzy logic-based routing algorithm, named the Balanced Cross-layer Fuzzy Logic (BCFL) routing algorithm. In BCFL, we use the cross-layer parameters’ dispersion as the fuzzy logic inference system inputs. Moreover, we give each cross-layer parameter a dynamic weight according the value of the dispersion. For getting a balanced solution, the parameter whose dispersion is large will have small weight, and vice versa. In order to compare it with the traditional cross-layer routing algorithms, BCFL is evaluated through extensive simulations. The simulation results show that the new routing algorithm can handle the multiple constraints without increasing the complexity of the algorithm and can achieve the most balanced performance on selecting the next hop relay node. Moreover, the Balanced Cross-layer Fuzzy Logic routing algorithm can adapt to the dynamic changing of the network conditions and topology effectively.

Description: A supercomputer fed with enough information about the universe might be able to predict what's in store for us – for better and worse

Description: A landmark for orbiting travellers, the Eye of the Sahara is a strange, 40-kilometre-wide bullseye in the otherwise featureless desert

Description: Our sense of justice assumes we are free to choose our actions. If that turns out to be an illusion, society could suffer

Description: To solve the problem of coverage performance assessment, this study proposes an evaluation method based on the trajectory of the target, which is applicable to universal sensor networks, including both heterogeneous and homogeneous sensor networks. Different from the traditional Voronoi algorithm, the proposed Improved Coverage Force Division (ICFD) plans a coverage force division map whichscales the qualitative coverage performancebasedon both covering intensities andlocations of the nodes. Furthermore, the Trajectory-based Evaluating Schedule (TES) is responsible for solving the quantitative coverage evaluationproblem by measuringthe resulting trajectories’ Balance Values (BVs). A model of weak-point ranking conjoined in consideration of coverage force and distance can guide future deployment to compensate coverage. Comparative trials using the greedy algorithm, Voronoi algorithm, and the proposed TES verify that TES achieves the approximate results for two-stage and multistage heterogeneous sensor networks with acceptable difference and lower complexity, and it is superior to the Voronoi algorithm in homogeneous sensor networks interms of breaking the four-point circle block.

Description: Pyroelectric harvesters convert time-dependent temperature variations into electric current. The appropriate geometry of the pyroelectric cells, coupled with the optimal period of temperature fluctuations, is key to driving the optimal load resistance, which enhances the performance of pyroelectric harvesters. The induced charge increases when the thickness of the pyroelectric cells decreases. Moreover, the induced charge is extremely reduced for the thinner pyroelectric cell when not used for the optimal period. The maximum harvested power is achieved when a 100 μm-thick PZT (Lead zirconate titanate) cell is used to drive the optimal load resistance of about 40 MΩ. Moreover, the harvested power is greatly reduced when the working resistance diverges even slightly from the optimal load resistance. The stored voltage generated from the 75 μm-thick PZT cell is less than that from the 400 μm-thick PZT cell for a period longer than 64 s. Although the thinner PZT cell is advantageous in that it enhances the efficiency of the pyroelectric harvester, the much thinner 75 μm-thick PZT cell and the divergence from the optimal period further diminish the performance of the pyroelectric cell. Therefore, the designers of pyroelectric harvesters need to consider the coupling effect between the geometry of the pyroelectric cells and the optimal period of temperature fluctuations to drive the optimal load resistance.

Description: Continuous respiratory monitoring is an important tool for clinical monitoring. Associated with the development of biomedical technology, it has become more and more important, especially in the measuring of gas flow and CO2 concentration, which can reflect the status of the patient. In this paper, a new type of biomedical device is presented, which uses low-power sensors with a piezoresistive silicon differential pressure sensor to measure gas flow and with a pyroelectric sensor to measure CO2 concentration simultaneously. For the portability of the biomedical device, the sensors and low-power measurement circuits are integrated together, and the airway tube also needs to be miniaturized. Circuits are designed to ensure the stability of the power source and to filter out the existing noise. Modulation technology is used to eliminate the fluctuations at the trough of the waveform of the CO2 concentration signal. Statistical analysis with the coefficient of variation was performed to find out the optimal driving voltage of the pressure transducer. Through targeted experiments, the biomedical device showed a high accuracy, with a measuring precision of 0.23 mmHg, and it worked continuously and stably, thus realizing the real-time monitoring of the status of patients.

Description: The Scottish government plans to prohibit the growing of genetically modified crops, making use of recent EU rules on opting out

Description: An analysis of pregnant women has suggested that children's IQ would rise if mothers-to-be took iodine supplements, but others question the benefits

Description: When your eyes move during sleep, are they "seeing" anything? Research suggests these movements could be looking at objects in our mind's eye

Description: Fly me to the moon, sat-nav. Repurposing GPS satellites to direct lunar-bound spacecraft could make getting there cheaper and also improve navigation on Earth

Description: Young people with early signs of schizophrenia may benefit from taking fish oils, which were found to reduce the risk of psychosis developing by 75 per cent

Description: Alien worlds, like Earth, are shielded from cosmic rays by magnetic bubbles around their sun – trouble is, stars have a tendency to drop their guard

Description: The parasitic disease Leishmaniasis puzzles doctors as many people relapse after treatment – a virus lurking inside the parasite might be to blame

Description: It's getting ever easier to pin the blame for every accident on somebody, somewhere. We should resist that urge

Description: The future is tech-shaped. But are the creators embedding our systems into their designs? Two new books look at why we need to act

Description: A recent rise in wildfires in the Arctic is fuelling fears that vast amounts of carbon stored in permafrost will be released from the burnt areas

Description: Humans are great at picking up on important information in images – but can be swamped in data. Time to team up with computers

Description: Plus mad, bad and dangerous science: THISPs, laboratory crimes and fieldwork fails

Description: In this work, we report a new design for an electrostatically actuated microgripper with a post-assembly self-locking mechanism. The microgripper arms are driven by rotary comb actuators, enabling the microgripper to grip objects of any size from 0 to 100 μm. The post-assembly mechanism is driven by elastic deformation energy and static electricity to produce self-locking and releasing actions. The mechanism enables the microgripper arms to grip for long periods without continuously applying the external driving signal, which significantly reduces the effects and damage to the gripped objects caused by these external driving signals. The microgripper was fabricated using a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) wafer with a 30 μm structural layer. Test results show that this gripper achieves a displacement of 100 μm with a driving voltage of 33 V, and a metal wire with a diameter of about 1.6 mil is successfully gripped to demonstrate the feasibility of this post-assembly self-locking mechanism.

Description: Ag-modified In2O3/ZnO bundles with micro/nano porous structures have been designed and synthesized with by hydrothermal method continuing with dehydration process. Each bundle consists of nanoparticles, where nanogaps of 10–30 nm are present between the nanoparticles, leading to a porous structure. This porous structure brings high surface area and fast gas diffusion, enhancing the gas sensitivity. Consequently, the HCHO gas-sensing performance of the Ag-modified In2O3/ZnO bundles have been tested, with the formaldehyde-detection limit of 100 ppb (parts per billion) and the response and recover times as short as 6 s and 3 s, respectively, at 300 °C and the detection limit of 100 ppb, response time of 12 s and recover times of 6 s at 100 °C. The HCHO sensing detect limitation matches the health standard limitation on the concentration of formaldehyde for indoor air. Moreover, the strategy to synthesize the nanobundles is just two-step heating and easy to scale up. Therefore, the Ag-modified In2O3/ZnO bundles are ready for industrialization and practical applications.

Description: Control of oxygen over cell cultures in vitro is a topic of considerable interest, as chronic and cyclic hypoxia can alter cell behaviour. Both static and transient hypoxic levels have been found to affect tumour cell behaviour; it is potentially valuable to include these effects in early, in vitro stages of drug screening. A barrier to their inclusion is that rates of transient hypoxia can be a few cycles/hour, which is difficult to reproduce in traditional in vitro cell culture environments due to long diffusion distances from control gases to the cells. We use a gas-permeable three-layer microfluidic device to achieve spatial and temporal oxygen control with biologically-relevant switching times. We measure the oxygen profiles with integrated, ratiometric optical oxygen sensors, demonstrate sensor and system stability over multi-day experiments, and characterize a pre-bleaching process to improve sensor stability. We show, with both finite-element modelling and experimental data, excellent control over the oxygen levels by the device, independent of fluid flow rate and oxygenation for the operating flow regime. We measure equilibration times of approximately 10 min, generate complex, time-varying oxygen profiles, and study the effects of oxygenated media flow rates on the measured oxygen levels. This device could form a useful tool for future long-term studies of cell behaviour under hypoxia.

Description: With the increasing climatic extremes, the frequency and severity of urban flood events have intensified worldwide. In this study, image-based automated monitoring of flood formation and analyses of water level fluctuation were proposed as value-added intelligent sensing applications to turn a passive monitoring camera into a visual sensor. Combined with the proposed visual sensing method, traditional hydrological monitoring cameras have the ability to sense and analyze the local situation of flood events. This can solve the current problem that image-based flood monitoring heavily relies on continuous manned monitoring. Conventional sensing networks can only offer one-dimensional physical parameters measured by gauge sensors, whereas visual sensors can acquire dynamic image information of monitored sites and provide disaster prevention agencies with actual field information for decision-making to relieve flood hazards. The visual sensing method established in this study provides spatiotemporal information that can be used for automated remote analysis for monitoring urban floods. This paper focuses on the determination of flood formation based on image-processing techniques. The experimental results suggest that the visual sensing approach may be a reliable way for determining the water fluctuation and measuring its elevation and flood intrusion with respect to real-world coordinates. The performance of the proposed method has been confirmed; it has the capability to monitor and analyze the flood status, and therefore, it can serve as an active flood warning system.

Description: Internet of Things (IoT) is driving innovation in an ever-growing set of application domains such as intelligent processing for autonomous robots. For an autonomous robot, one grand challenge is how to sense its surrounding environment effectively. The Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with RGB-D Kinect camera sensor on robot, called RGB-D SLAM, has been developed for this purpose but some technical challenges must be addressed. Firstly, the efficiency of the algorithm cannot satisfy real-time requirements; secondly, the accuracy of the algorithm is unacceptable. In order to address these challenges, this paper proposes a set of novel improvement methods as follows. Firstly, the ORiented Brief (ORB) method is used in feature detection and descriptor extraction. Secondly, a bidirectional Fast Library for Approximate Nearest Neighbors (FLANN) k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm is applied to feature match. Then, the improved RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) estimation method is adopted in the motion transformation. In the meantime, high precision General Iterative Closest Points (GICP) is utilized to register a point cloud in the motion transformation optimization. To improve the accuracy of SLAM, the reduced dynamic covariance scaling (DCS) algorithm is formulated as a global optimization problem under the G2O framework. The effectiveness of the improved algorithm has been verified by testing on standard data and comparing with the ground truth obtained on Freiburg University’s datasets. The Dr Robot X80 equipped with a Kinect camera is also applied in a building corridor to verify the correctness of the improved RGB-D SLAM algorithm. With the above experiments, it can be seen that the proposed algorithm achieves higher processing speed and better accuracy.

Description: Standard upper-limb motor function impairment assessments, such as the Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA), are a critical aspect of rehabilitation after neurological disorders. These assessments typically take a long time (about 30 min for the FMA) for a clinician to perform on a patient, which is a severe burden in a clinical environment. In this paper, we propose a framework for automating upper-limb motor assessments that uses low-cost sensors to collect movement data. The sensor data is then processed through a machine learning algorithm to determine a score for a patient’s upper-limb functionality. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we implemented a system based on the proposed framework that can automate most of the FMA. Our experiment shows that the system provides similar FMA scores to clinician scores, and reduces the time spent evaluating each patient by 82%. Moreover, the proposed framework can be used to implement customized tests or tests specified in other existing standard assessment methods.

Description: Cupric oxide (CuO) thin films are promising materials in gas sensor applications. The CuO-based gas sensors behaved as p-type semiconductors and can be used as part of an e-nose or smart sensor array for breath analysis. The authors present the investigation results on M-doped CuO-based (M = Ag, Au, Cr, Pd, Pt, Sb, Si) sensors working at various temperatures upon exposure to a low concentration of C3H8, which can be found in exhaled human breath, and it can be considered as a one of the biomarkers of several diseases. The films have been deposited in magnetron sputtering technology on low temperature cofired ceramics substrates. The results of the gas sensors’ response are also presented and discussed. The Cr:CuO-based structure, annealed at 400 °C for 4 h in air, showed the highest sensor response, of the order of 2.7 at an operation temperature of 250 °C. The response and recovery time(s) were 10 s and 24 s, respectively. The results show that the addition of M-dopants in the cupric oxide films effectively act as catalysts in propane sensors and improve the gas sensing properties. The films’ phase composition, microstructure and surface topography have been assessed by the X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) methods.

Description: We present a short review of recent progress in the field of optical gas sensors based on porous silicon (PSi) and PSi composites, which are separate from PSi optochemical and biological sensors for a liquid medium. Different periodical and nonperiodical PSi photonic structures (bares, modified by functional groups or infiltrated with sensory polymers) are described for gas sensing with an emphasis on the device specificity, sensitivity and stability to the environment. Special attention is paid to multiparametric sensing and sensor array platforms as effective trends for the improvement of analyte classification and quantification. Mechanisms of gas physical and chemical sorption inside PSi mesopores and pores of PSi functional composites are discussed.

Description: The damage detection of a wind turbine blade enables better operation of the turbines, and provides an early alert to the destroyed events of the blade in order to avoid catastrophic losses. A new non-baseline damage detection method based on the Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) in a wind turbine blade is developed in this paper. Firstly, the Chi-square distribution is proven to be an effective damage-sensitive feature which is adopted as the individual information source for the local decision. In order to obtain the global and optimal decision for the damage detection, the feature information fusion (FIF) method is proposed to fuse and optimize information in above individual information sources, and the damage is detected accurately through of the global decision. Then a 13.2 m wind turbine blade with the distributed strain sensor system is adopted to describe the feasibility of the proposed method, and the strain energy method (SEM) is used to describe the advantage of the proposed method. Finally results show that the proposed method can deliver encouraging results of the damage detection in the wind turbine blade.

Description: Tackle the big questions in this season's hottest reads in science fiction and science writing, says critic and sci-fi writer Adam Roberts

Description: The World Health Organisation is doing its final checks and could declare Nigeria officially free of polio by September. Somalia could be next

Description: Fiat Chrysler issued a recall of 1.4 million vehicles after hackers showed they could take control of them via the internet-connected entertainment system

Description: No dopers in gaming and drone misuse

Description: Most comets that brush past the sun end with a whimper, but if a big one plunges into the sun it could go out with a bang

Description: Individual cells can be made to act like tiny lasers, offering a more accurate way to tag and monitor tumour cells, among other uses

Description: When bacteria acquire antibiotic-resistance genes they become better at surviving in the body, challenging the dogma that resistance comes with a cost

Description: From safeguarding cubs to combating corruption, ecologist Chris Packer lays out the benefits of trophy hunting to lion conservation in his latest book

Description: The brain balances between stable and unstable states to maintain consciousness - a pattern that could help prevent people waking up on the operating table