Tiny innovations that pack a punch

In recent decades, advancements in design and engineering have made robots our greatest ally when it comes to minimally invasive surgery. Their control and dexterity often mean they can truly go where no one else can.

We’ve all seen at least one film or cartoon where the scientist shrinks himself down, jumps into his spacecraft and enters the patient to cure them from inside. Now, a team of researchers might have just developed the next best thing.

In experiments involving a simulation of the human oesophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, have designed the tiny Ingestible Origami Robot.

Once swallowed, the robot can unfold itself and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to perform simple tasks. Such as removing a swallowed foreign object, deliver medicine or to patching a wound.

The two-centimetre-long design is made from a folded sheet of dried pig intestine, which is digested just like any other food, and a small magnet to control the robot’s movement.

Bringing new drugs to market is an incredibly slow process with one of the biggest challenges being effective testing. Pharmaceutical companies generally rely on animal testing, which aside from the ethical quandaries, generally produces unreliable results.

In 2010, a group of researchers unveiled a device that offers an entirely new approach to drug testing. The aptly titled: 'Lung on a Chip' mimics the functions of the human lung, allowing for testing just as if it were inside the body.

The Chip, about the size of a memory stick, is made using human lung and blood vessel cells. During testing, the translucent device provides a clear picture as it recapitulates human lung responses to infection, inflammation and airborne toxins.

With hope, the tool will at least help accelerate pharmaceutical development by reducing the reliance on current models, in which testing a single substance can cost more than $2 million, according to Harvard’s Wyss Institute.

It not only has the potential to replace animal testing but can also be used to monitor potentially dangerous environments and the absorption of inhaled treatments, according to Donald Ingber, senior author on the study and founding director of Harvard’s Wyss Institute.

With jobs of the future moving toward technology and engineering fields, schools are eager to teach tech literacy and basic programming skills. But, we all know laptops and tablets are expensive and it’s not uncommon for a school to have 2000 students using one computer lab.

Launched in 2012, Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer designed specifically to teach computer programming to students. The device is the brainchild of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a British charity that working to put the fun back into learning computer science

Raspberry Pi runs on open source software and comes packed with outlets for digital and audio video, two USB ports, an ethernet port to get students online, and a slot for an SD memory card.

Students can plug the device into a TV, smartphone, or tablet, and get to hacking. Because the base is open-source, students can change the code in infinite ways and design their own apps.

Best of all, these compact computers are extremely hard-wearing. Unlike an iPad or laptop, students can tinker with the operating system without worrying. The device can also run existing programs—everything from educational games to robotics software.

Raspberry Pi also provide free resources to help people learn about computing and how to make things with computers, and train educators who can guide other people to learn.

Everybody knows what it’s like to quarrel over the thermostat. Particularly in office spaces, where there might even be heaters running in one room and cooling units working in another. It’s an expensive problem – both to bank accounts and the environment.

This sleek wearable aims to solve this problem in a very simple way: by giving you a way to influence your own temperature, keeping you comfortable in almost all environments.

The Embr Wave, formerly called the Wristify, works by sending cooling or warming waves to the thermoreceptors on the surface of the skin.

It’s comparable to the effect of dipping your toes into a cool swimming pool or placing a warm washcloth on your forehead, the body responds to the contact by gently adjusting its own temperature.

According to Embr Labs Co-founder Sam Shames, the wearable draws on 30 years of thermal research to “maximise comfort in a discreet and energy-efficient way”.

Not only does this solve the argument over how to set the thermostat, but it also saves a significant amount of energy. Could this clever wearable eventually make air-conditioning obsolete?

Imagine being able to go anywhere the world and to be able to understand everyone. Never getting lost in translation, avoiding those embarrassing moments, and really experiencing cultures, almost, like a local.

The Pilot Translating Earpieces are straight out of a sci-fi film and enable wearers to talk with each other, in different languages, and instantly hear what’s being said in their own language.

The wireless earpieces use the latest technologies in speech recognition and machine translation. They’re controlled via an app where users can access French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish along with English.

The app can also be used in conference mode, where several people, speaking in multiple languages, can join in the conversation.

Waverly Labs, creators of Pilot, is also working to add in Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, German, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

While the product has been delivered to its initial 25,000 backers from the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, Waverly Labs are continuing to improve the product. They plan to further improve the translation, making it faster, more accurate and to include more slang and jargon.