Brainicane

Buildings or commercial jetliners could soon get a protective coating of shatter-resistant armor similar to the material lining abalone shells. Finnish researchers have developed the lightweight reinforcement so that people can simply paint it on whatever structure, reports Technology Review.

The nacre material that protects abalone shells uses interconnected plates of very hard material that is prone to shattering, but combines that with softer yet durable material to create the shatterproof finish. Researchers have long sought to mimic that enviable combo with synthetic materials.

Researchers at the Helsinki University of Science and Technology mixed disc-shaped clay platelets with a soft polymer, polyvinyl alcohol, and water, which created a slurry that could either become paper or paint. The resulting lightweight armor resembles nacre with a structure consisting of nanoclay discs stacked in rows similar to plates in a cupboard, Technology Review notes.

Such material acts as a superb reinforcing armor that adds very little extra weight, but cannot yet replace steel as the main structural support for building beams or engine turbines. But there’s an additional plus from the current version, because it shrugs off the heat and fire from flamethrowers with ease.

Other denizens of the deep have also served as inspiration for modern armor — a deep-sea snail’s three-layer shell could be adapted for flak jackets, helmets and Arctic pipelines.

[via Technology Review]

After cardiac arrest, lowering someone’s body temperature can prevent life-threatening brain damage. It’s so critical that New York City requires ambulances to take some patients up to 20 minutes out of the way to hospitals with cooling equipment. EMTs could improve patients’ chances further using RhinoChill, a new portable nose spray that cools the brain on the scene.

In the past decade, doctors learned to safely induce hypothermia to slow brain cells’ metabolism, preventing the buildup of toxic molecules that can cause lasting damage. Many hospitals insert a refrigerated tube into a major vein, a technique too dangerous to attempt in the field.

To take the treatment on the road, medical company BeneChill left the refrigerator behind. The key is a fast-evaporating liquid that, squirted up the nose, cools the brain.

Last November, a study of 200 patients showed that those who received RhinoChill were 15 percent likelier to live, and those survivors were 15 percent likelier to avoid brain damage. The San Diego company expects to sell the device in Europe by July and hopes for FDA approval within two years. The inspiration for the nasal route? A secondary job of the nose is sucking in cool air to keep the brain comfortable, says BeneChill COO Allan Rozenberg. “RhinoChill just accelerates the process.”

How to Chill a Brain

1. HOOK IT UP A paramedic slides the RhinoChill tubes up the nostrils and into the nasal cavity.

2. SPRAY A gas propellant drives perfluorocarbon coolant through the tube, which turns it into a fine mist.

3. COLD RUSH The mist settles on nasal-cavity and upper-throat membranes and evaporates instantly, cooling the blood running to the brain to lower its temperature to 93.2ºF in 90 minutes.

The technology blows away the competition by scanning 200 pages a minute

A new super-fast book-scanning technology could make publishers cringe even more than when they heard about Google Book Search. A University of Tokyo researcher has developed a “book flipping scanning” method that does exactly what it sounds like, digitizing 200 pages per minute, according to IEEE Spectrum. The Japanese researchers hope to enable a digital library for Japanese manga comics.

The scanner’s camera runs at 500 frames per second, and captures rapidly flipping book pages in two modes. First, a regular line shines on the page to capture text and images. The second mode then manages neat the trick of reconstructing the curved, distorted pages in their original form. A laser device projects lines onto each page that the system can use to recreate the 3-D page model and correct the deformed lines.

Google’s own proprietary book-scanning technology seems to use some sort of infrared camera to capture the 3-D shape of book pages, but the book lies flat and the page-turning mechanism is unclear. Other book scanners boast of capturing about 50 pages per minute, which is four times slower than the new method.

Masatoshi Ishikawa — the University of Tokyo researcher behind the book-scanning marvel — previously developed the fastest robot hands in the East, so he’s probably not too worried about tiring out human hands by flipping book pages.

Miniaturized versions of this technology could eventually find their way into our smartphones for completely legal digitizing delights. Or it might combine with the robot hands to bring Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 to life.

[via IEEE Spectrum]