UPDATED 16:10 EST / AUGUST 15 2013

IBM’s New Take on Renewable Energy, and a Surgical Knife that Sniffs Out Cancer Cells

In this week’s SmartDevice roundup, we’ll be featuring IBM’s new take on renewable energy, a cancer-sniffing knife, and smart street lamps that lights up when needed.

IBM’ HyRef

 

IBM has announced a new solution that would enable utilities to rely more on renewable energy resources in the hopes of reducing carbon emissions while significantly improving clean energy output for consumers and businesses.

Dubbed the Hybrid Renewable Energy Forecasting or HyRef, the system is part of IBM’s Smart Energy component in its Smarter Planet initiative.  It uses cloud-imaging technology and cameras to track cloud movements and combine that data with information from sensors on wind turbines that tracks wind direction, temperature, and speed.  With the use of analytics technology, “the data-assimilation based solution can produce accurate local weather forecasts within a wind farm as far as one month in advance, or in 15-minute increments.”

Applying analytics and harnessing big data will allow utilities to tackle the intermittent nature of renewable energy and forecast power production from solar and wind, in a way that has never been done before,” said Brad Gammons, General Manager IBM’s Global Energy and Utilities Industry. “We have developed an intelligent system that combines weather and power forecasting to increase system availability and optimize power grid performance.”

This would allow utilities to be able to rely more on renewable energy sources, as it can predict when it will be sunny, cloudy or extremely windy, thus they can predict when they would need to rely more on coal or fuel for their operations or if they could maximize the use of renewable energy sources which in turn would lessen carbon emission.

Cancer-sniffing knife

 

Removing a tumor is tricky.  It’s not as easy as deboning a chicken or slicing meat.  If you cut too big, you risk cutting normal tissue.  If you cut too small, you risk leaving cancer cells to grow back.

But the days of guessing whether surgeons made a perfect cut may soon be over, as researchers have developed a surgical knife capable of sniffing out cancer cells.

Lipids, the fatty molecules that comprises much of the cell membrane, are used to identify whether a cell or tissue is healthy or not.  In order for that to happen, the sample goes through a process wherein smoke is created and the smoke is what is needed for mass spectometry.  The procedure takes about 30 minutes to determine if the cell is healthy or not.

Hungarian chemist Zoltán Takáts wondered if there was a way to make the whole process simpler and faster.  He, along with his Imperial College London team, together with Jeremy Nicholson, a biochemist who heads Imperial College’s department of surgery and cancer, have come up with iKnife an intelligent knife that can accurately differentiate cells from normal and tumor tissues from different organs such as the breast, liver, and brain, and can even determine if the origin of the tumor if the sample was a metastasis or it originated from another organ.

It takes about 1-3 seconds to determine if the tissue is healthy or not which will make it easier for surgeons remove tumors and even determine the origin of the tumor.

The only problem here is whether or not surgeons would actually use the knife, especially when they do not go in blind on surgeries.  Before surgeons cut a patient, they already know how big the tumor is and how far they will be cutting.  I guess it could come in handy when surgeons want to make sure that they won’t be leaving anything behind.

Tvilight

 

What started as an entry for a school competition, Tvilight has since garnered plenty attention and is now hugely in demand.

While flying overseas, Dutch designer Chintan Shah, noticed all the streetlights turned on and wondered how many of those streets were empty, and then wondered if that was a problem.  He developed technology able to distinguish people from smaller animals and used that with his lighting solution.  That technology prevented the lights from illuminating unnecessarily, and his professors were quite impressed, encouraging him to enter a campus competition.  He won and the Delft University of Technology provided him with the facility and financial backing to demonstrate his work in campus.

From there, Tvilight has been implemented in four municipalities in Holland and one in Ireland, and it has now received inquiries from Israel, Turkey, the United States, Australia, India and Japan.

Tvilight offers smart lighting solutions for cities that not only offers proper illumination but as well as a way for cities to cut back on electric consumption.

Tvilight works with existing and even new lamp posts.  It has sensors that tells the lamps when light is needed or not.  If there’s no one around, the light is dimmed and automatically brightens to a specified brightness when people or vehicles are in the vicinity.


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