Superhuman Senses

Testing Our Defenses?

False alarms sometimes lull people into a false sense of security. When it comes to defending our nation against bioterrorism, they heighten my sense of concern.

Last night about 200 people were evacuated from the Russell Senate Office Building after a sensor in the attic indicated a nerve agent was present. About a dozen senators were part of this group.

After the group was quarantined for three hours, at least two tests proved negative. Officials classified the event as a false alarm, and the group was allowed to go.

Last September, sensors detected the presence of tularemia while about a hundred thousand people were on the Mall for anti war protests.

After five days, that alert was also labelled a false alarm. In that case, the alarm was kept quiet for many days; no one at the protests knew they were in potential danger, partially because the BioWatch sensors require 36 hours to produce readings.

In the weeks following 9/11, seven letters containing highly refined anthrax were mailed to media outlets and two senators. The attacks clearly were no designed to maximize damage, but more likely to call attention to the presence of anthrax. After months of news coverage, the incidents have faded into the background. But the person or people who did this are still at large, and we know they have anthrax.

One obvious possibility is that our defenses and reactions are being tested. What happens when our sensors detect a biohazard? How does Homeland Security react? Someone could be methodically testing our defenses in advance of true attacks.

Then again, these could be false alarms.

It seems to me, though, that we need more sensors, and a better process for validating results faster. In the Washington Mall incident, Homeland Security officials took three days to notify the Center for Disease Control of their sensor readings. That's not good enough.

Our culture is quite impatient. We have short attention spans. But the people who wish to do us harm have proven they can be extremely patient. "False" alarms deserve vigilance.

Accidentally Counting Fish

Nicholas Makris didn't set out to count fish. His original goal was to locate ancient riverbeds under the ocean floor.

But the team on which this MIT professor worked soon realized that the new sonar technique they were using allowed them to see enormous schools of fish. In fact, by using low frequency sound waves - which travel great distances - this method can study fish over an area a million times larger than previous techniques allowed.

Makris is the lead author of a new article in the journal Science. The article reports that researchers can now gain an accurate picture of fish over a 4,000 square mile area. Previous methods relied on snapshots of 120 square yard areas.

"It would be like watching 'Casablanca' and you're seeing one pixel moving across the screen, and that's all you get," explained Makris. "You can't figure out what's going on, it's way too slow."

The MIT team was surprised to discover one shoal of fish that was six to nine miles long.

This new method is important because it allows researchers to better understand fish populations, so that nations can balance the need to guard fish stocks while enabling commercial fleets to operate in a sustainable manner.

"The world's fish stocks are being depleted at a horrible rate," said Makris, "One of the reasons (for the inaccurate counts) is the darkness in the ocean. You don't know what's going on."

Co-authors on the paper are Purnima Ratilal (Ph.D. 2002) of Northeastern University; Deanelle Symonds, Srinivasan Jagannathan and Sunwoong Lee of MIT's Center for Ocean Engineering; and Redwood Nero of the Naval Research Laboratory.

No Escape from Helicopter Swarms

Shots ring out, and seconds later two gun-wielding men crash through the doors of a convenience store in downtown Los Angeles. A police helicopter is in the area, but what are the odds it can be alerted and arrive in time to track the fleeing criminals?

Fortunately, smart cameras with gunshot detection systems populate this high-risk neighborhood. Two cameras recognize the gunshot and instantly swivel to follow the fugitives. They simultaneously trigger an alert, which tells the helicopter precisely where the suspects are and in what direction they are heading.

Here is where the scene takes a fork in the road you have seldom seen, even in a Hollywood movie.

The helicopter, all eleven inches of it, alerts all the other helicopters in the area. There are about 200. True to their name, they swarm towards the fugitives.

From the ground, it looks like a swarm of bees is descending from the heavens above to sting the evil pair. But the copters do not attack, they merely pursue, hovering ten to 100 feet above their targets and following their every movement.

Panicked, the men fire wildly at the swarm. They hit one copter, destroying it, but that does not impact the swarm. If one copter goes down, the others adjust. The swarm is still a functioning network.

The men duck into an abandoned warehouse, and the swarm splits. Some follow into the building, others surround it from all sides and above. All the while, they communicate with each other. Unless they have 200 bullets, perfect aim, and all the time in the world, they have no hope of escaping.

The copters serve as a homing beacon, and armed police soon surround the building. The men surrender quickly, spooked by their inhuman pursuers.

The copter swarm I describe is based on work being done at the University of Essex in England, where researchers have a concept known as Ultraswarms. They have constructed miniature helicopters, designed to fly indoors, that communicate with each other via Bluetooth and use Linux to perform parallel processing operations. This scenario is some ways off, but it is beginning to appear plausible.

The picture here shows their early prototype helicopter. The file shown on the screen is being sent to the screen from the helicopter via a Bluetooth link. The researchers say this helicopter is the smallest flying web server in the world.

Five Days Ago You Were in Real Danger

On September 24, 2005 six biodefense sensors - part of the nation's BioWatch system - detected the presence of tularemia while about a hundred thousand peoplewere on the Mall for anti war protests.

Tularemia causes flu-like symptoms and can be treated by antibiotics, but it can be fatal if left untreated. It is one of the major biohazards the Department of Homeland Security watches for, along with plague, anthrax and smallpox.

Since this detection, however, there have been no public reports of illness, and some question as to the validity of these readings.

The BioWatch system is deployed in dozens of cities nationwide, with many details remaining classified. A previous alert in Hoston in 2003 turned out to be a false alarm caused by naturally occuring bacteria.

The system is not designed to sound an immediate alarm, since analysis of sensor readings takes 36 hours. So the system is mostly useful for alerting officials to be on the watch for reports of illness. In other words, you could be exposed to a deadly substance and not told for two, three or more days.

In the recent Washington incident, the Department for Homeland Security took three days to inform the Center for Disease Control about the sensor readings. Local officials were not informed for five days, supposedly because subsequent tests called into doubt the original readings. But still, you can see that the tendency is on the side of not alerting the public.

Ghost Ship Sails with No Crew

Imagine the sight of a handsome 28-foot sailboat, adrift at sea. Her sails are down, her crew nowhere onboard, and with every minute the current is pushing her closer to dangerous rocks.

Suddenly, she hoists her own sails. As the wind fills her sails, the Ghost Ship takes control of her own rudder and starts on her course from Fair Isle, north of Scotland, to Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

No, your eyes are not fooling you. This is a boat built to sail without a crew. According to Sail Magazine:

Remote-controlled hydraulics operate the furling gear and trim the sheets. The navigation system features a set of sensors that link key data - including the boat's position, wind speed and direction, boatspeed, and depth - to a laptop running navigation software.

The project is a collaboration between the School of Engineering Sciences at the University of Southampton and performance artist Chris Burden.

The next step, says Dr. David Labbe, project manager, is to "completely automate the sail-control system." He continues, "Imagine being able to sail without actually knowing about sails? It only takes a little Ghost Ship to dream up a world of possibilities."

Tracking Grandma

Here's a growing business based entirely on a new use for sensors. The firm behind it, Living Independently, just raised an additional $10 million in venture capital, bringing the total raised to $22 million.

QuietCare places wireless sensors throughout a senior's home or apartment. According to the firm, QuietCare "functions as a 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week early detection and early warning system that lets caregivers and family members know that a loved one is safe."

In practice, the system learns the "normal" behavior of each senior. Using just sensors - no video images whatsoever - it monitors when the person eats, sleeps, takes medicine, and even uses the restroom.

Then, when the senior varies from his or her normal pattern, the system can issue an alert.

Information and alerts are passed to caregivers through a trained call center, through email, text messages, beepers, and through a password-protected web site. The reports are quite comprehensive and it's not hard to imagine how valuable they could be.

Many years ago, my mother was very ill and lived alone over a hundred miles away from me. I wish QuietCare was available then; it would have given us both peace of mind.

Headquartered in New York, Living Independently developed QuietCare following 12 years of research and development that was funded in part by grants from the National Institute of Health and Aging.

Motes Sleep More Than Dogs

If you thought nothing on earth sleeps more than your dog, it turns out you're wrong.

Motes sleep 99% of the time.

David E. Culler and Hans Mulder, writing in Scientific American, explain that motes are thumb-size computers that combine microprocessors and memory with radio transceivers, onboard power supplies and a variety of sensors.

These very basic and simple systems automatically join up with their neighbors, and hundreds of motes working together can do some amazing things.

Motes can be used to monitor the health and movements of an elderly person who lives alone. Sensors in furniture, walls, appliances, plates and even on the person's body can report on their status. Test programs at elder care facilities in Portland, OR and Las Vegas use motion, pressure and infrared sensors.

Other tests are underway to track the movement of animals in the wild and the complex ecosystems surrounding a single large tree. As you might imagine, the military has many potential uses in mind for motes, such as tracking enemy movements and triangulating the sound of a gunshot to identify its precise location.

The reason they sleep so much is to save power. These are systems that have the greatest potential if they can operate for long periods - or better yet indefinitely - without maintenance or batteries.

In fact, numerous researchers are trying to make motes so efficient that they can generate sufficient power to operate from vibrations, temperature differences, the sun or wind.

Find One Container in 10,000

Marine terminals are huge, sprawling yards filled with thousands of containers. Until now, tracking containers has often been a pen and paper process prone to errors and delays.

"Solving a Rubik's Cube seems simple compared to keeping track of the stacks and stacks of containers moving through marine terminal yards today," says Ed DeNike, chief operating officer of SSA Terminals.

"This puzzle is getting more and more difficult to solve. With imports expected to double by 2010, marine terminal operators have no choice but to invest in technology to try to keep up."

Now WhereNet provides constant visibility and status information about every container, no matter where it moves across these often-congested marine terminals.

The firm's Marine Terminal Solution (MTS) delivers automated, up-to-the-minute status and location data about every container and mobile asset in a marine terminal.

SSA Marine, the largest privately held container terminal operator and cargo handling company in the world, is deploying the WhereNet wireless infrastructure and marine terminal solution at four West Coast ports.

The system uses active RFID WhereTag™ devices and a local infrastructure of wireless WhereLAN™ locating access points. It provides real-time location and status information for tens of thousands of containers, often stacked five high and six "lanes" wide across hundreds of acres in marine terminals.

Rather than tagging every container, which is logistically challenging, the WhereNet system enables "virtual tagging" of containers by continuously monitoring every piece of container handling equipment in the yard to keep track of when and where containers are moved.

Turn Down Your Jacket - It's Too Loud

Fabric can now conduct electricity.

During the 2005 holiday season, Macy's, Dillard's and CompUSA sold jackets whose sleeves contained switches to control iPods.

Kenpo's Jacket for iPod features a .5 millimeter thick sensor made completely out of fabric; the sensor has no wires or transitors.

The jacket features a unique touch sensitive fabric called ElekTex. Unlike previous efforts to incorporate hard switches into fabric, ElekTex is soft and actually feels like fabric.

Buttons in the jacket's sleeve lets the wearer control their iPod.

The sensor comes from Eleksen Ltd., which says it produced 80,000 such sensors last year for a variety of uses.

Eleksen also makes a wireless fabric keyboard that can be used with portable devices such as PDA's. When you don't need the keyboard, you just roll it up.

In addition to consumer products, the firm wants to support industrial uses of its conductive fabric such as switches and controls in uniforms and protective gear.

Power from the Click of a Finger

If you want a new light installed in a room, here's what happens. The electricians come with a drill and lots of wire. They drill holes in your walls and ceiling, then fish wires behind the walls until the wall switch is connected to the light.

The whole process is time-consuming and messy, and sometimes you can't put a switch where you want it, because it is not practical to run wires to a switch there.

But now EnOcean has introduced Easyfit radio frequency (RF) light switch and receiver set. There are no wires needed between the switch and the light(s) it controls.

What's most exciting is that this is one of the first mainstream uses for EnOcean's self-powered technology. The firm is at the forefront of efforts to develop sensors that require so little energy they can generate their own power.

In this case, all the power the switch needs to transmit a signal is generated by your finger when you click the light switch.

"For new construction, builders save considerable time and cost by eliminating down-wall wiring for light switches. Homeowners gain flexibility to locate or relocate switches anywhere they want, not only where the electrician thought they should be," said Jim O'Callaghan, vice president of EnOcean's U.S. branch.

"For remodeling," says O'Callghan, "Now there's no need to fish wires behind walls, or to plaster and paint over retrofits. Users simply connect the receiver to the fixture, and the control system is ready."