For over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled the world's weird and wonderful patent applications each week, digging out the most exciting, intriguing and even terrifying new ideas. His column, Invention, is available exclusively online. Scroll to the bottom for a round-up of previous Invention articles.
The traditional way the army delivers orders to soldiers is by shouting at them. But researchers at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles think the US Army Research Office should consider an alternative – coded smells.
These can be delivered silently, in the dark and when loud noise is drowning out speech. Furthermore, says the USC patent, the immediate reaction to a smell is emotional, rather than rational, so an odour trigger may encourage people to carry out orders without question.
Pictures filed with the patent show how the researchers used a collar, like a gun belt, which hangs round a soldier’s neck. The collar has a dozen cartridges, each containing a wick soaked in smelly liquid, a valve and a small propeller fan. Remote radio signals open selected valves and kick fans into life.
A soldier could be trained to associate specific actions with unmistakable odours. This would allow the smells to be used to jog memory – if you smell this, do that.
The system could also make training more realistic, with soldiers getting whiffs of desert dust, sea water or mud that are synchronised with audio and visual cues. The collar is close to the wearer's nose, so the effect is immediate, and rapidly fades when the valve is closed.
The same technology can be used to enhance audio-visual entertainment, the patent suggests. Smellivision, anyone?
Read about odours giving orders here.
A controlled dose of ultrasound can temporarily stun a nerve, killing pain without the need for drug injections. The technique is being developed for the US army by the University of Washington in Seattle.
Low power ultrasound is routinely used for imaging the insides of patients, instead of X-rays. Much more highly powered beams can even destroy tumours, delivering 10,000 watts per square centimetre.
The new treatment uses a weak but focussed beam of sound at 3 megahertz to image a nerve. A short burst at slightly higher power is then used trigger a nerve twitch that confirms the beam is in the correct position. Finally, the sound beam power is increased to around 1000 watts per square centimetre for a few seconds. This stops the nerve conducting pain to the brain for a few hours, or even days.
Treating a sciatic nerve in this way could relieve body pain, while using the technique on a spastic patient could suppress involuntary muscle actions. Hitting nerves in the face – the forehead, for example – will cause temporary paralysis, reducing wrinkles and making the patient look younger for a while without the need to inject a toxin, such as Botox.
Read about local anaesthesia without drugs, here.
Biotech workers need to grab individual bacteria or cells, while nanotech engineers have to move tiny particles around. In both cases, mechanical tweezers are nowhere near fine enough.
Optical tweezers, which use a laser beam like a pool cue made of light to push small objects, are an alternative. But the beam must be very strong and complex calculations are needed to keep it tightly focussed on the particle it is moving.
So the University of California in Oakland has been developing optoelectronic tweezers which use a low-power light beam to create a local electric charge that moves a nearby particle, without the need to focus tightly on the particle.
First, the particles to be manipulated are scattered on a glass sheet that is coated with light-sensitive silicon of the type used in photoelectric cells. Electrodes near the sheet are fed a few volts of electricity to give all the particles on it a small electric charge.
When a light spot shines on the glass, the photoelectric silicon coating produces a local charge and repels the nearest charged particle. Moving the light beam moves the desired particle across the glass without the need to use an intense beam that is continually re-focused to a fine point directly on the target particle.
The system was able to move live E. coli bacteria and 20-micrometre-wide particles, using an optical power output of less than 10 microwatts. This is one-hundred-thousandth of the power needed for optical tweezers, because the local electric field is doing the pushing – the light beam simply acts as a shepherd.
Read more about optoelectronic tweezers, here.
Read previous Invention round-ups:
Coffee beer, wall-beating bugging, Eyeball electronics, phone jolts, Personal crash alarm, Talking tooth, Shark shocker, Midnight call-foiler, Burning bullets, A music lover's dream, Magic wand for gamers, The phantom car, Phone-bomb hijacking, Shocking airport scans, Old tyres to printer ink and Eye-tracking displays.
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