PASS THE JPEGS PLEASE
Digital photos and text files projected onto the surface of Mitsubishi鈥檚 bizarre digital table can be passed around, grabbed and even scribbled on. Engineers at the firm鈥檚 lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, think its 鈥淯biTable鈥� could revolutionise business meetings (). To look at the same document, colleagues will no longer have to crowd around one screen or send files between laptops. Instead, they can download documents to the table鈥檚 surface, tap them to make copies, and slide these across to their colleagues. They can then annotate them by hand or by using a keyboard.
An antenna mesh beneath the table鈥檚 plastic surface is wired to each user鈥檚 seat and ensures that a unique signal is detected when a user touches the table or keyboard. A projector suspended from the ceiling responds by manipulating the images or the documents according to the user鈥檚 hand movements, automatically swiveling them to face their 鈥渙wner鈥�. The UbiTable will be demonstrated at the Ubiquitous Computing Conference in Seattle, Washington, on 15 October.
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AN OPTICAL DRUG BLENDER
Why use atoms if photons can do the job? Minuscule quantities of drugs can now be mixed cleanly and efficiently using optical tweezers and an optical scalpel.
Researchers from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, took giant 鈥渓iposomes鈥� 鈥� hollow cell-like structures about 10 micrometres wide made of phosphorus-rich fatty acids called phospholipids 鈥� and filled them with chemicals dissolved in water.
They then pushed two such cells together using a pair of infrared lasers (optical tweezers). Finally, the cells were fused using a single pulse of ultraviolet laser light (an optical scalpel). The laser fused the cell membranes at their point of contact and created a hole through which the chemicals in each could mix and react.
Pulsed electric fields are often used to fuse cells, but the researchers say the optical method resulted in cleaner fusion and less leakage of the cell contents. They say the technique may be useful for performing small-scale reactions in the search for new drugs.
