Design Library Lets Researchers Print their Own Syringe Pumps

Furnishing a research lab can be pretty expensive. Now a team led by an engineer at Michigan Technological University has published an open-source library of designs that will let scientists slash the cost of one commonly used piece of equipment: the syringe pump.

Syringe pumps are used to dispatch precise amounts of liquid, as for drug delivery or mixing chemicals in a reaction. They can also cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Joshua Pearce and his team of Michigan Tech students published the library of free syringe-pump designs, which anyone can make on a RepRap 3D printer just for the cost of the plastic filament. Better yet, the designs are perfectly customizable.

“Not only have we designed a single syringe pump, we’ve designed all future syringe pumps,” said Pearce.  “Scientists can customize the design of a pump for exactly what they are doing, just by changing a couple of numbers in the software.”

The library includes recipes for most parts of a syringe pump. You’ll have to buy the small electric stepper motor that drives the liquid, some simple hardware and the syringe itself, which is inexpensive.

The team also went a little further, incorporating a low-cost, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer as a wireless controller. “That way, you can link the syringe pump to the network, sit on a beach in Hawaii and control your lab,” Pearce said. “Plenty of people can have access, and you can run multiple experiments at the same time. Our entire single-pump system costs only $50 and can replace pumps that run between $250 and $2,500.”

It costs more to make a double-pump system, about $120, but it replaces a commercial system that costs $5,000.

That said, Pearce believes someone will figure out how to make them better. “The international scientific open-source lab community is growing rapidly. From UC Berkeley’s Tekla Lab to Sensorica in Montréal and OpenLabTools at the University of Cambridge, we are all working together to make science cheaper, faster and better. I’m sure someone will improve our designs and share their results with us and the rest of the community. That’s the beauty and power of open source,” he said.

Megan Frost, a biomedical engineer at Michigan Tech, uses syringe pumps from Pearce’s library to introduce agents into cell cultures.

“What’s beautiful about what Joshua is doing is that it lets us run three or four experiments in parallel, because we can get the equipment for so much less,” she said. “We’d always wanted to run experiments concurrently, but we couldn’t because the syringe pumps cost so much. This has really opened doors for us.”

The work is described in the paper “Open-source Syringe Pump Library,” published in PLoS One and coauthored by Pearce, graduate student Bas Wijnen, research scientist Gerald Anzalone and undergraduate Emily Hunt. The hardware plans, designs, and source code for the pumps is available for free at http://www.appropedia.org/Open-source_syringe_pump.

Pearce is an associate professor with appointments in both the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan Tech.

Michigan Technological University (www.mtu.edu) is a leading public research university developing new technologies and preparing students to create the future for a prosperous and sustainable world. Michigan Tech offers more than 130 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in engineering; forest resources; computing; technology; business; economics; natural, physical and environmental sciences; arts; humanities; and social sciences.

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Source: MICHIGAN TECH NEWS

Vsenn is a modular smartphone with triple layer encryption

Image via TechSpot

Google’s Project Ara hopes to free users from the yearly upgrade cycle that exists in the smartphone world. With the ability to swap out or upgrade various components of your smartphone, the goal is to reduce waste while also reducing the cost of always having the latest mobile hardware in your pocket. Now, Ara has some competition in the form of security conscious Vsenn, which wants to do something similar along with three layers of encryption.

Engadget points to the Vsenn website, which states that the company was co-founded by an unnamed former Nokia Android X program manager. The site promises modular hardware when it comes to your phone’s camera, battery, processor, and RAM as well as guaranteed Android updates for four years and customization via swappable back covers. The real clincher is that all of your data is protected with triple layer encryption and users have free access to a VPN network and secure cloud service.

For a lot of people, their smartphone is a key to their digital life. With access to everything from email and banking information to hundreds or thousands of photos, the prospect of losing that device or it falling into the wrong hands can be a scary thought. That’s why devices like Vsenn or the BlackPhone (which was shown off at MWC earlier this year and encrypts calls, emails texts, and browsing) garner so much attention.

No word on when consumers can get their hands on a Vsenn phone, but the company has already confirmed that the first of its devices will have a 4.7-inch 468.7 PPI display and will measure 124 x 63 x 8.9 mm. So just a little shorter and narrower and slimmer than the 2013 Moto G.

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Source: mobilesyrup

Sophisticated malware has been spying on computers since 2008 (updated)

Highly sophisticated malware isn’t limited to relatively high-profile sabotage code like Stuxnet — sometimes, it’s designed to fly well under the radar. Symantec has discovered Regin, a very complex trojan that has been spying on everyone from governments to individuals since at least 2008. The malware is highly modular, letting its users customize their attacks depending on whether they need to remote control a system, get screenshots or watch network traffic. More importantly, it’s uncannily good at covering its tracks. Regin is encrypted in multiple stages, making it hard to know what’s happening unless you capture every stage; it even has tools to fight forensics, and it can use alternative encryption in a pinch. Researchers at Symantec suspect that the trojan is a government-created surveillance tool, since it likely took “months, if not years” to create.

If it is meant for spying, though, it’s not clear just who wrote the malware or why. Unlike Dragonfly and other instances of professionally-made malware, Regin’s origin hasn’t been narrowed down to a particular country or region. About half of the infections have taken place in Russia and Saudi Arabia, but you can also find victims across India, Iran and multiple European nations. Also, it’s definitely not limited to telecoms or other high-value targets — 48 percent of known victims are people and small businesses. While Regin could easily be part of an online espionage campaign, it’s hard to rule anything out at this point.

Update: Kaspersky Labs did some extra sleuthing and found that Regin can attack cellular’ networks GSM base stations, mapping their infrastructure. Also, sources tell The Intercept that Belgian carrier Belgacom found the trojan on its internal networks. That’s potentially worrisome — while there’s no hard evidence of a connection so far, it suggests that Britain’s GCHQ may have used Regin to infiltrate Belgacom and spy on its users.

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Source: Engadget

Harvard Researchers Build $10 Robot That Can Teach Kids to Code

Mike Rubenstein wants to put robots in the classroom.

Working with two other researchers at Harvard University, Rubenstein recently created what they call AERobot, a bot that can help teach programming and artificial intelligence to middle school kids and high schoolers. That may seem like a rather expensive luxury for most schools, but it’s not. It costs just $10.70. The hope is that it can help push more kids into STEM, studies involving science, technology, engineering, and math.

The tool is part of a widespread effort to teach programming and other computer skills to more children, at earlier stages. It’s called the code literacy movement, and it includes everything from new and simpler programming languages to children’s books that teach coding concepts.

Rubenstein’s project grew out of the 2014 AFRON Challenge, held back in January, which called for researchers to design low-cost robotic systems for education in the developing world. Part of Harvard’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group, Rubstein has long studied swarm robotics, which aims to create herds of tiny robots that can behave as whole, and he ended up adapting one of his swarm systems in order to build AERobot. It’s a single machine—not a swarm bot—but it’s built from many of the same inexpensive materials.

Source: Wired

What does URL stand for?

According to Pew Research 69% of internet users know what URL stands for. Do you know what it stands for?

Source: Pew Research