Robots for hospital emergency room
Engineers at Vanderbilt University are working on a system of cognitive robots that gather medical information and take basic diagnostic measurements and ultimately provide tentative diagnoses to the human staff in order to address the critical concerns facing emergency departments in major hospitals: shortening the time that patients must wait, relieving the strain on overburdened emergency room staff and reducing the number of mistakes that are made. Advances in humanoid robotic design, in sensor technology and in cognitive control architectures now make such a system feasible. Vanderbilt News
LG muscles into wastewater
Consumer electronics giant LG just unveiled its first wastewater treatment solution, the Green Membrane Bioreactor process. Two months earlier, LG admitted to having no previous experience with water treatment technology, but it intends to invest US$400 million in this new business in the next decade and generate US$7 billion in revenue by 2020. Reuters
Transform waste to energy
It’s the perfect form of recycling: taking our trash and using it to create electricity and there are companies working on smarter ways to recycle our trash. Costaka has pioneered technology that can turn biomass waste such as grass or woodchips into gas and eventually into ethanol. Enerkem has a similar process, but the firm has gone further, able to build standardised, easy-to-install plants that allow any municipality to begin turning garbage into cleaner biofuel. TIME
Device cleans frac water on site
A US chemical company has a device that natural gas drilling companies may want to get their hands on. Chemstream has built “the Frackinator” from two patented devices. It’s a portable machine for the clean up of frac water. Currently frac water from drilling sites must be hauled away to meet Department of Environmental standards. The new system could treat water right on site. Daily American