Inhabitat’s Week in Green: 3D-printed villas and Earth-like planets

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

NASA dropped a bombshell this past week: The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered the most Earth-like planet to date. The rocky planet is slightly larger and warmer than our world, but it orbits a star and has the right conditions for liquid water. Meanwhile, the search for alien life goes on — and Stephen Hawking gave his support to a $100 million project seeking to find out if we’re alone in the universe. Exploring distant worlds is a challenging endeavor — last week NASA proposed a novel robotic spacecraft that could harvest wind energy while surveying gas giants like Jupiter. And the Smithsonian Institution launched a Kickstarter to save Neil Armstrong’s moon landing space suit, which is starting to fall apart after years of storage.

What if you could point a gadget at an apple and instantly know how much sugar it contained? That’s the promise of SCiO, a tiny hand-held device that can measure the molecular footprint of virtually any object. In other tech news, designer Kristof Retezár created an amazing gadget that harvests water from the air while you ride your bike so you don’t have to stop for fill-ups. MIT researchers demonstrated a water filter made from a tree branch that can remove 99 percent of E.coli bacteria. And researchers developed a 3D-printed bottle cap that can tell you if the milk’s gone bad before you take a sip.

3D printing is also progressing on the macro scale — last week a Chinese company showed just how far 3D-printed architecture has come by assembling an entire villa in less than three hours. If you’re looking for something even more futuristic, we present you with the Skysphere — a solar-powered home in the clouds that responds to the sound of your voice. City dwellers will swoon at this tiny apartment that packs an entire two-bedroom house into a single space. The secret? A hidden bed that drops down from the ceiling. And just for fun, we showcased the work of Nathan Sawaya, who makes incredible large-scale Lego sculptures of comic heroes and villains.

Filed under: Misc, Handhelds, Household, Peripherals, Science

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Tiny surgical robot can bend and operate on hard-to-reach areas

The coin above wasn’t enlarged to make the pincer-like device look extremely small — it’s really that tiny. That “pincer” is a two-millimeter-thin instrument designed and built by a group of researchers from Vanderbilt University for incredibly precise minimally invasive surgery. It’s pretty comparable to the da Vinci surgical robot, though that one has bigger needles and requires five to eight millimeter incisions. According to the Vanderbilt team’s lead researcher, Robert Webster, the da Vinci works great for abdominal surgery, but it’s not ideal for smaller parts of the body. Unfortunately, “the da Vinci uses a wire-and-pulley system that is extremely difficult to miniaturize any further,” he said.

A perfectly straight probe has limited capabilities, though, so the team spent six years designing one that has a bendable tip that surgeons can steer. Since their attempts to put together several minuscule pieces ended in disappointment, the team decided to change tactics and cut slots out of the tip of a nickel titanium tube to make it flexible. Surgeons can then pull a wire that runs through the tube and is attached to the tip to bend the instrument up to 90 degrees.

The project’s consultant, Professor S. Duke Herrell, believes that bendable wrist makes all the difference in the world:

Adding the wrists to the steerable needles greatly expands the system’s usefulness. There are a myriad of potential applications in some really exciting areas such as endoscopic neurosurgery, operating within small lumens such as the ear, bronchus, urethra, etc. This would allow us to do surgeries that at present require much larger incisions and may even enable us to perform operations that are not feasible at present.

The researchers want to test their creation by using it for a transnasal procedure to remove tumors in the base of the skull and the pituitary gland. That process usually involves opening up the face, but by passing this instrument through the nasal cavity, the patient can recover more quickly and prevent scarring where it will be perfectly visible. Afterward, they aim to find a commercial partner that can help them pass through the FDA, perform clinical trials and get the device to the hands of capable surgeons.

Filed under: Science

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Source: Vandebilt University