2015年7月31日 星期五

Howard W. Jones Jr., a Pioneer of Reproductive Medicine, Dies at 104



Howard W. Jones Jr., a Pioneer of Reproductive Medicine, Dies at 104


By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEINJULY 31, 2015
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Dr. Howard W. Jones Jr. in 2010 at the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Va., which he founded with his wife, Georgeanna. CreditBill Tiernan/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated Press


Howard W. Jones Jr., a physician who pushed the boundaries of gynecologic surgery, opened the first sex-change clinic in an American hospital and helped achieve the first birth through in vitro fertilization in the United States, died on Friday in Norfolk, Va. He was 104.

His family confirmed his death, of respiratory failure. Dr. Jones, who remained productive into his centenarian years, publishing his final book last fall, died at Sentara Heart Hospital, on the same medical grounds as the hospital in which the historic birth had occurred.

His success in fertilizing a woman’s egg outside the womb, after 41 tries, was achieved alongside his wife, Dr. Georgeanna Jones, one of the nation’s first reproductive endocrinologists. Working together at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, they accomplished the feat when Judith Carr gave birth to Elizabeth Carr, America’s first “test-tube baby,” by cesarean section at 7:46 a.m. on Dec. 28, 1981, at what is now Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. 

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Dr. Jones was productive into his centenarian years, and published his final book, about the in vitro birth of Elizabeth Carr, in October.

The birth came two days before Dr. Jones’s 71st birthday and three years after Dr. Robert G. Edwards and a colleague had opened a new era in medicine with the birth, in England, of the world’s first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization, Louise Brown. That achievement, for which Dr. Edwards was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2010, enabled millions of infertile couples to bring children into the world and women to have babies even in menopause.

In the United States, baby Elizabeth’s birth helped launch the fertility business. Infertile couples from all over the world flocked to get treatment at a facility the Joneses founded at Eastern Virginia in 1979, the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine. Doctors came to train there. The couple had a long professional partnership that was so close, they shared a desk. They were the only American gynecologists invited to the Vatican in 1984 to advise Pope John Paul II about reproductive technology.

Dr. Jones and his wife had joined Eastern Virginia together, accepting positions soon after he retired from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore at 65, its mandatory retirement age.

Dr. Alan DeCherney, director of reproductive and adult endocrinology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Md., said that after retiring, Dr. Jones had “reinvented himself” to become “a world leader in in vitro fertilization and fertility problems, almost equivalent to Edwards.”

At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Jones pioneered gynecologic surgery, particularly in operating on babies with ambiguous genitalia — without the typical appearance of either a boy or girl. In 1965 he helped found the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, the first sex-change clinic in an American hospital. While at Johns Hopkins one of his most notable patients was Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose extracted cancer cells contributed to medical breakthroughs but who contended that they had been removed from her, by other doctors, without her permission.

He continued to write almost until his death. At 102, he self-published the book “Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technologies, Bioethics, Religion and the Law,” an exploration of the legal and ethical implications of fertility treatments and a critique of legislative efforts to define the union of a sperm and egg as a person — a formulation he did not accept. Dr. Jones would have shopped for a publisher, he said, but he feared that at his age he might have run out of time. He had said the same thing when he was 94, when he self-published “War and Love: A Surgeon’s Memoir of Battlefield Medicine With Letters to and From Home.” The book is a collection of love letters exchanged by him and his wife when he served overseas as chief of an Army mobile surgical team.

His last book, “In Vitro Fertilization Comes to America: Memoir of a Medical Breakthrough,” was published in October by Jamestowne Bookworks.

Dr. Jones met Georgeanna Seegar when they were students. But he had encountered her father, Dr. J. King Seegar, much earlier, on Dec. 30, 1910, at the Jones’s family home in Baltimore. Dr. Seegar had been called there to deliver Howard Wilbur Jones into the world.


Howard Sr. was also physician, and as a child Howard Jr. would go on house calls with him in their horse and buggy.

His father died when Howard was 13, and his mother’s identical twin sister moved in to help raise him. (His mother’s name was Ethyl Ruth; her twin, Ruth Ethyl.) Howard Jr. attended the Friends School in Baltimore and Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he took an English course with the poet Robert Frost before graduating cum laude in 1931.

He was a first-year medical student at Johns Hopkins when he met his future wife at a lecture in 1932. She was a senior nearby at Goucher College.

After she also went on to Johns Hopkins Medical School, to focus on endocrinology, then a new specialty, Dr. Jones, who was in his residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital, sought her out and began studying with her. They were married on June 22, 1940.

Dr. Jones started his career at Johns Hopkins, initially working part-time while also working in the private clinic of the gynecologist Dr. Howard Kelly, who had pioneered radium therapy for cancer patients. Dr. Kelly was one of the so-called Big Four who had founded Johns Hopkins Hospital. In the 1950s, Dr. Jones collaborated on landmark studies with Dr. Richard Wesley TeLinde, proving that cervical cancer in situ — in which tumors have not invaded the cervix’s surface — was more dangerous than previously thought. They found that the tumors become deadly invasive cancers if left untreated.

Dr. Jones encountered Henrietta Lacks in 1951. The 30-year-old wife of a Baltimore steelworker, she showed up at Johns Hopkins Hospital — the only one near her that would treat blacks — complaining of a “knot” in her abdomen. Dr. Jones discovered a lump in her cervix and performed a biopsy, which led to a cancer diagnosis. Cancerous cervix cells that were subsequently removed from Ms. Lacks were the first to grow in culture.




The continued use of Ms. Lacks’ “immortal” cancer cell line, as biologists call it, led to breakthroughs in research on the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. She died later, in 1951.

In her best-selling 2010 book,“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot contended that the cancerous cells had been removed from Ms. Lacks without the patient’s knowledge. (Oprah Winfrey’s production company has said it is adapting the book for an HBO film.) Dr. Jones, who did not perform the biopsy that yielded the immortal cells, maintained that Ms. Lacks had signed the permit “that all patients signed that was inclusive of doing everything we did.”

“There was no controversy,” he said. “That was something that was created later on.”


Dr. Jones began studying genital anomalies in the 1950s and became an authority in the field, collaborating with Dr. William Wallace Scott in writing the textbook “Hermaphroditism, Genital Anomalies and Related Endocrine Disorders,” published in 1958. He then moved away from that area of study as he became immersed in cancer research and did not return to it until the 1970s, when he began focusing on intersex teenagers, whose sexual anatomy does not fit typical definitions of female or male.

He began studying the chromosomes involved in the phenomenon at a lab he had started at Johns Hopkins. His clinical team of surgeons, endocrinologists and psychologists began treating patients with genital abnormalities from around the world.


The thinking at the time was that before the age of 18 months, children who underwent sex-change surgery would adapt psychologically to the sex in which they were reared. In other words, a baby could be switched from a boy to a girl or vice versa as long as the surgery was done early enough and the parents raised the child with, for example, gender-appropriate clothes and toys.

Among Dr. Jones’s patients was David Reimer, a newborn who was badly maimed during a botched circumcision. Following the parents’ wishes, Dr. Jones removed the remnants of the boy’s genitals and created a vagina. David was later given estrogen during puberty to promote secondary female sex changes. (David’s story was told in John Colapinto’s best-selling book “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl,” which portrayed the child as always feeling like a boy despite having a girl’s name, clothes, and toys.)

Today, some doctors in the field — now called disorders of sexual development, or D.S.D. — and many advocates for intersexual individuals oppose sex-change surgery on infants as well as surgery to correct ambiguous genitalia, in which the parents choose one sex or the other. The opponents believe that the patient should be given the choice at a later age.

Dr. Jones bridled at being criticized, long after the fact, for performing such surgery. “You are doing what the conventional wisdom around that time said to do,” he said. “Which doesn’t mean if the situation arose today you would necessarily do the same thing.”







After learning about Christine Jorgensen, an American who became widely known for having a male-to-female sex change operation in Denmark in 1951, Dr. Jones said that if the Europeans can do it, he could, too. He helped found the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965, the first sex-change clinic in an American hospital.

“There was a lot of discussion of the appropriateness of doing it — if it would really solve the problem” of a person’s feeling uncomfortable as a man or woman and wanting to change, he said. But the questions about sex-change surgery were not moral or psychological ones, he said — “not what reaction it would have with the general public but, from a medical point of view, if it would really be helpful.”

“We said we had to find out,” he said.

Dr. Jones, who lived in Portsmouth, Va., across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk, is survived by his two sons, Howard III, who is chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and Lawrence, a Denver financial adviser; a daughter, Georgeanna Jones Klingensmith, a professor of pediatrics and a former director of the Barbara Davis Diabetes Center for Childhood Diabetes at the University of Colorado, Denver; seven grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

Dr. Georgeanna Jones died in 2005.

Well into his last years Dr. Jones continued to go to his office at the Jones Institute to read and write and to attend lectures, though he stopped working with patients in the early 1990s, when his wife contracted Alzheimer’s disease.

“When she stopped seeing patients, I decided to stop, too,” he said. “Without her, it wasn’t fun anymore.”

Pacific Research Platform, Research Scientists to Use Network Much Faster Than Internet


Research Scientists to Use Network Much Faster Than Internet

By JOHN MARKOFFJULY 31, 2015


SAN FRANCISCO — A series of ultra-high-speed fiber-optic cables will weave a cluster of West Coast university laboratories and supercomputer centers into a network called the Pacific Research Platform as part of a five-year $5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.

The network is meant to keep pace with the vast acceleration of data collection in fields such as physics, astronomy and genetics. It will not be directly connected to the Internet, but will make it possible to move data at speeds of 10 gigabits to 100 gigabits among 10 University of California campuses and 10 other universities and research institutions in several states, tens or hundreds of times faster than is typical now.

The challenge in moving large amounts of scientific data is that the open Internet is designed for transferring small amounts of data, like web pages, said Thomas A. DeFanti, a specialist in scientific visualization at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, at the University of California, San Diego. While a conventional network connection might be rated at 10 gigabits per second, in practice scientists trying to transfer large amounts of data often find that the real rate is only a fraction of that capacity.

The new network will also serve as a model for future computer networks in the same way the original NSFnet, created in 1985 to link research institutions, eventually became part of the backbone for the Internet, said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is director of Calit2 and the principal investigator for the new project.

NSFnet connected five supercomputer centers with 56-kilobit modems. In the three decades since, network speeds have increased dramatically, but not nearly enough to handle a coming generation of computers capable of a quintillion operations per second. This week the Obama administration announced that the United States is committed to creating what is known as the “exascale” supercomputing era, with machines roughly 30 times faster than today’s fastest computer, on what is called the “petascale.”

“I believe that this infrastructure will be for decades to come the kind of architecture by which you use petascale and exascale computers,” Dr. Smarr said. Increasingly digital science is generating torrents of data. For example, an astronomy effort called the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory, at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, continuously scans the dark sky looking for new phenomena. Over all, the Palomar observational system captures roughly 30 terabytes of data per night. By contrast, a Library of Congress project that archives the entire World Wide Web collects about 5 terabytes per month.

In addition to moving data between laboratories, the high-speed network will make new kinds of distributed computing for scientific applications possible. For example, physicists working with data collected by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland initially kept duplicate copies of files at many different computer clusters around the world, said Frank Wuerthwein, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. More recently, he said, as high-speed links have become more widely available, experimental data is often kept in a single location and used for experiments by scientists running programs from remote locations, at a significant cost savings.

Further, the new network has been designed with hardware security features to protect it from the attacks that routinely bedevil computers connected to the Internet. Recently, one server at the University of California, San Diego, that was connected to the open Internet counted 35,000 false login attempts in one day, said Dr. Smarr.

The new network is an extension of an existing intra-campus effort by the National Science Foundation to create islands of high-speed connectivity for campus researchers. In recent years the agency has invested more than $500,000 dollars on each of roughly 100 campuses nationwide.

2015年7月29日 星期三

BBC:殺人機器人?科學家擔憂人工智能軍備競賽


殺人機器人?科學家擔憂人工智能軍備競賽


2013年在倫敦舉辦的「停止製造殺人機器人」活動。

超過1000名科技專家、科學家、研究員共同撰寫一封信,警告自動化武器可能帶來的危險。

科學家在信中警告:「人工智能軍備競賽是個可怕的想法」。讓人聯想到熱門電影「終結者」中的「殺人機器人」。

這封信的簽署有科學巨擘史蒂芬·霍金(Stephen Hawking),企業家埃倫·穆斯克 (Elon Musk),以及蘋果公司共同創辦人斯蒂芬·沃茲尼亞克(Stephen Wozniak)。

這封信將在今天的國際人工智能聯合會議中被呈現。

「殺人機器人」 近期在聯合國委員會上成為辯論的主題之一,討論是否要禁止某些有潛在威脅的自動化武器。

現在專家們呼籲要特別禁止那些使用人工智能來操控的武器,認為它們可能會「超越人類控制」。

專家們表示:「就像大部分科學家和生物學家不會對打造生化武器有興趣一樣,絕大多數的人工智能研究員不會對打造人工智能武器有興趣,而且也不想弄髒自己的手去插足這個領域」。

美國麻省理工學院(MIT)教授喬姆斯基(Noam Chomsky)和谷歌人工智能首席Demis Hassabis,以及意識學專家Daniel Dennett都認可了這封信。

信件內容由未來生命研究院(Future of Life Institute)在網絡上發佈,而紙本將在布宜諾斯艾利斯舉行的國際人工智能聯合會議(International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)上提交。
人工智能?

身為信件簽署人之一的霍金,最近參加美國熱門社交論壇Reddit「向我提問」活動,向網民收集關於「如何讓未來科技更人性」的問題。

他在本周會挑出要回答的問題,但現在還沒開始回答。在去年11月BBC科技新聞記者凱蘭—瓊斯(Rory Cellan-Jones)獨家專訪霍金,在訪談中,霍金提出了人工智能可能終結人類文明的擔憂。

霍金說:「人類受限於緩慢的生物學進化過程,無法(與人工智能)較勁,而且將會被人工智能取代。」

然而,另一位簽署這封信的微軟研究首席Eric Horvitz也上傳了一段為人工智能辯護的影片。

他說:「看看電腦計算已經為我們帶來多少難以置信的改變,在社會經濟面、醫療應用面等等。人工智能改變了許多事。」

「這將帶來許多希望,許多可能的好處,當然也有其隱憂。我覺得有很多問題需要被解決,但我期待經由人類的引導,人工智能將帶來更多正面效應。」
人為控制

英國國防部最近在一項聲明中說到,所有英國軍隊的運作都必須「依照國際人道主義法」。

國防部表示:「英國的交戰規則(ROE)很明確的是依照人道主義法為基礎制定的,所以在此系統中永遠會有『人為控制』。英國軍方人員在目前以及未來,總會有人員下達控制武器的指令。」

(編譯:劉子維 責編:葉靖斯)

E O Wilson, "The world's most evolved biologist."


http://hcbooks.blogspot.tw/2015/07/naturalist-by-e-o-wilson.html


"The world's most evolved biologist."
 28分鐘

E O Wilson has been described as the "world's most evolved biologist" and even as "the heir to Darwin". He's a passionate naturalist and an absolute world authority on ants. Over his long career he's described 450 new species of ants.

Known to many as the founding father of socio-biology, E O Wilson is a big hitter in the world of evolutionary theory. But, recently he's criticised what's popularly known as The Selfish Gene theory of evolution that he once worked so hard to promote (and that now underpins the mainstream view on evolution).

A twice Pulitzer prize winning author of more than 20 books, he's also an extremely active campaigner for the preservation of the planet's bio-diversity: he says, "destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal".
Ants, altruism and evolution
BBC.IN

Professor Charles H. Townes

UC Berkeley 分享了影片
We fondly remember Professor Charles H. Townes and his legacy today, the 100th anniversary of his birth. ‪#‎BerkeleyNobel‬ ‪#‎Townes100‬

46,908 次觀看
Charles Hard Townes, a professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser and subsequently pioneered the use of lasers in astronomy, died at the age of 99 on January 27, 2015. This video was produced on the occasion of his 99th birthday on July 28, 2014.
Townes' career highlights include a 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the laser, ground-breaking astronomical research, wide-ranging admiration for his efforts to reconcile science and religion, 31 honorary degrees and 38 awards.

2015年7月27日 星期一

折紙 Origami 工程學

誕生於「Origami」的世界技術革新
[2015.07.28]其它語言:ENGLISH | 日本語 | 简体字 | FRANÇAIS | ESPAÑOL | العربية | Русский |
「Origami(折紙)」已成為一個世界通用詞彙。現在,日本在國內外展開一系列嘗試,欲將這一傳統手工藝技術應用到產業中去。折紙的構思和技法正逐步被廣泛應用於宇宙開發、時尚、甚至是人造血管的製造。


折紙的啟發:「蜂窩板」帶來數兆日圓的市場

提起「折紙」,人們就會聯想到日本傳統文化,用一張和紙折出仙鶴、恐龍等形狀;而另一方面,「Origami」如今已經成為世界折紙愛好者的通用語言。明治大學研究與智慧財產權戰略機構的荻原一郎教授指出,折紙技術有著高達數兆日圓的市場,說它是金山也不為過。Origami已經不單純是一種藝術,它掌握著革新產業的命運。
受到七夕折紙裝飾(左)啟發,蜂窩結構芯材問世。右圖為瓦楞紙製蜂窩結構紙板(圖片提供:荻原特聘教授)
有一種說法認為,第二次世界大戰結束後不久,一位英國工程師從折紙做的七夕裝飾品中受到啟發,開發出了蜂窩結構芯材(Honeycomb Core)。它是將六角形筒整面排列呈蜂窩形而成的。這種材料在我們身邊比比皆是,最常見的有瓦楞紙做的緩衝材料。新幹線的地板使用了鋁製的蜂窩結構芯材來減少震動,搭載衛星的火箭上,為了防止空轉時的轟鳴震動對衛星音響造成破壞,在壁面上貼有蜂窩狀芯材。
今天的蜂窩狀芯材技術市場,規模高達數兆日圓,而它居然是受到日本折紙的啟發而由英國開發出來的,聽上去多少有些諷刺意味。

難以擺脫「傳統工藝」意識的日本

「折紙雖然是日本的拿手好戲,卻長期不能有效地在工業技術上得到應用,這對日本的技術人員來說是件很慚愧的事情」——這種強烈的想法鞭策著荻原教授。
荻原教授曾經作為衝擊工程學專家在日產汽車公司從事衝擊研究。後來他就任東京工業大學教授,開始研究「協調工程學」(研究乘坐汽車時的舒適感等,將用戶的感受融進商品開發之中),2002年接觸到京都大學野島武敏博士(現任明治大學尖端數理科學研究科客座研究員)倡導的「折紙工程學」。野島認為,如果折紙輕而堅牢、可伸展收縮的功能得到有效發揮,那麼就能應用於工業領域。荻原教授對這種折紙的潛力產生共鳴,成立了「折紙工程學研究會」。
「協調工程學最重要的是感受性。例如當人們看到(呈螺旋狀排列的)向日葵的果實時會覺得很美。那麼,如果使用美的東西,人的大腦是不是也會變得更具活力呢?2002年,在我聽了京都大學野島教授為提倡折紙工程學而發表的演講時,腦中隨即閃現出『就是它!』的想法。」
荻原教授的研究室裏,聚集了來自日本、俄羅斯、中國和越南的12位研究人員(攝影:山田慎二)

備受矚目的「折疊式機器人」

荻原教授認為,雖然折紙在日本仍被看做是一項傳統工藝,然而最近世界對折紙技術卻給予了莫大的關注。2014年8月在東京召開的「第6屆折紙科學數學教育國際學會」,吸引了世界30個國家的近300人參加。
折紙技術之所以如此受矚目,與1990年以後出現的折紙相關軟體不無關係,它們當中有支持折紙設計的軟體和模擬折疊變形狀況的軟體等,促進了「計算折紙」研究的發展。2012年,美國國家科學基金會(National Science Foundation,NSF)還為折紙技術研究項目提供了1,600萬美元的研究開發經費。
同是在美國,還展開了一系列全新的研究,其中,麻省理工學院的計算機科學家德曼(Eric Demaine)教授發表了用形狀記憶高分子膜製作「折疊式機器人」的論文,受到了有關方面的矚目。

「折疊連衣裙」——與三宅一生的合作

三宅一生設計的連衣裙,應用了折紙的纏卷模型(下圖提供:荻原教授,上圖攝影:山田慎二)
當然,日本也進行了各種各樣的研究與技術應用。例如,世界級時裝設計師三宅一生便和野島武敏合作,設計了「折疊連衣裙」。
設計作品中應用了野島教授發明的「纏卷模型」和「圓錐折疊模型」。這類模型是從牽牛花的蓓蕾呈螺旋狀開花的機制中獲得啟示而發明的。
事實上,對航空宇宙工程學和機械工程學的研究者們而言,貝、昆蟲翅膀以及向日葵果實的排列方式等自然界存在的折疊構造中,潛藏著許多意味深長的研究主題。2014年11月,《美國國家科學院院刊(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,PNAS)》刊登了東京大學助教齊藤一哉的論文《昆蟲界「最難」的折疊,揭開隱翅蟲後翅藏匿法之謎》。這項研究如果能夠繼續深化,有望廣泛影響到工業產品的製造,大到人造衛星太陽能電池翼的展開結構,小到雨傘、扇子等日常用品。

從水果調酒罐到人工血管

「三浦折疊」(左)是日本宇宙航空研究開發機構(JAXA)的三浦公亮名譽教授發明的折疊方法。將長方形順著對角線方向拉伸或擠壓就能瞬間實現關閉開合。應用在水果調酒上的鋁製「鑽石切割飲料罐」(右),也源於三浦教授的宇宙工程學研究
被應用於人造衛星太陽能電池翼的「三浦折疊」非常有名,而在我們日常生活中也不乏應用實例。比如,將被稱為吉村型(鑽石型)的折疊構造應用在水果調酒飲料罐表面。在打開飲料罐的那一瞬間,罐子表面會突然顯現出凹凸不平的鑽石圖案。想必很多人對此都很熟悉。
此外,像是輕而易舉就可壓扁的寶特瓶、輕便牢固的車身、家具,以及安全氣囊的折疊技術等等,我們的日常生活中隨處可以見到折紙技術的應用。
在建築領域,人們研究如何用木材和鋼板作為折疊材料建造立體建築物;在醫療領域,研究人員利用「海參折疊」來製造新型人工血管(支架),利用肺泡管折紙模型來幫助檢查肺部疾病等等,各種各樣的應用技術研究正在進行。
美國國家航空暨太空總署(NASA)噴氣推進實驗室(JPL)與楊百翰大學(Brigham Young University)的研究者們正在進行了一項共同研究,應用折紙技術研發一種能夠伸展至折疊狀態10倍面積的太陽能電池板(圖片為試製品,提供:楊百翰大學/NASA)
東京大學助教舘知宏正在研究如何將折紙技術應用在建築上。圖為折疊式建築的設計案例(圖片提供:舘知宏)

致力於可大量生產的技術開發

如前所述,日本的折紙技術正在醫療、運輸、建築、太空產業等廣泛領域取得越來越多的關注,但據說得到實際應用並實現了大量生產的,還只有蜂窩狀芯材一種。
2014年11月,東京大學助教齊藤一哉成功地證實了新型蜂窩狀芯材的製造方法。以前的蜂窩狀芯材都是通過堆積重疊來擴展的,而這一次,齊藤僅用1張紙板,按照折紙的方式刻入划痕,製作出立體形狀。這項技術使得高強度、高剛性蜂窩狀芯材的製造變得不再困難,不僅降低了成本,一直被視為難題的曲面板的製造也成為可能。
「桁架夾芯板」上排列著許多三棱錐形狀的突起。它容易彎曲,能夠用模具沖壓成形,因此價格低廉且防火性能好(圖片提供:荻原教授)
而明治大學荻原教授的研究小組,則正在研發一種「桁架夾心板(Truss core panel)」(亦稱「鑽石夾芯板」)。這種板材也很容易彎曲,且防火性強。形狀相同的板材的凹凸面用夾心三明治的方式搭配組合後,其剛度大約是平板的7到8倍,而且成本僅為普通蜂窩構造板材的三分之一。目前正在研究其在太陽能板定日鏡、鋰電池充電器、列車地板構造等方面的應用。
荻原研究小組還致力於「折紙式3D印表機」的開發。這種印表機與普通的層積成型3D印表機的構思正好相反,是根據3D數據印出折紙展開圖。使用這種數據,那麼將來沒有昂貴的鑄模也能從事生產製造了。研究小組正在推進焊接機器人、折疊機器人這類工業機器人的開發。
折紙雖然根植於傳統,但是折紙工程學還是一個全新的研究領域。今後,包括日本在內的世界各國,將會採取哪些嶄新的嘗試,把折紙的構思和技術實際應用於工業生產領域呢?讓我們拭目以待。
(Nippon Communications Foundation編輯部根據2015年1月在明治大學研究與智慧財產權戰略機構尖端數理科學研究科的採訪整理編輯而成。標題圖片:明治大學荻原一郎教授,攝影:山田慎二)

科學論文中錯誤多多

Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think http://econ.st/1JLlKU5

In the nascent “internet of things”, security is the last thing on people’s minds

Modern cars are becoming like computers with wheels. Diabetics wear computerised insulin pumps that can instantly relay their vital signs to their doctors. Smart thermostats learn their owners’ habits, and warm and chill houses accordingly. And all are connected to the internet, to the benefit of humanity. But sceptics now worry that an insecure internet of things might bring dystopia http://econ.st/1CUQvZX

In the nascent “internet of things”, security is the last thing on people’s minds
ECON.ST

2015年7月23日 星期四

Pneumatic Tube System

19世紀歐美的系統 (銀行或辦公室之鈔票。文件氣壓管道傳輸系統)

 Pneumatic Tube System

    Pneumatic tube - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube
    In the United States, drive-up banks often use pneumatic tubes to transport cash ...Most hospitals have a computer-controlled pneumatic tube system to deliver  ...

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  1. Pneumatic Tube System Basics - YouTube

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAlzYLcqsTU
    Dec 6, 2010 - Uploaded by UMHealthSystem
    Video about the Pneumatic Tube System at the UMHS.