Amazing Engineering

Bug-Eyed Bio-Poets

Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, has successfully created a synthetic bug-eye. Along with a research team he calls the Bio-Poets, Lee has fashioned microscopic versions of insect’s compound eyes in the laboratory. These devices, made of complex plastic materials, can “see” in all directions simultaneously, making their scope of usage range from medicine, to 3-D cameras, to even espionage.

The Bio-Poets hope their single fly-eye is only the beginning of many new bioengineering creations. The team plans to create microscopic syringes for medical use that mimic mosquitoes and other insects that can stab and suck up blood or inject poisons, and they even hope to create bioengineered retinas so the blind can see.

So far, the compound eyes made by the Bio-Poets can detect light signals coming from virtually all directions. According the Lee, this is better than the best fish-eye lenses of today’s cameras. The eyes can also swiftly detect moving lights as they pass from one lens to another across the smallest distances — an extremely useful ability, he suggested, for covert surveillance devices.

Enzyme Computer

Itamar Willner has built a computer that may one day live inside you. Willner, who constructed the molecular calculator with colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, believes enzyme-powered computers could eventually be implanted into the human body and used to, for example, modify the release of drugs to match a specific person’s metabolism.

Enzymes are already widely used to assist calculations using specially encoded DNA. These DNA computers have the potential to surpass the speed and power of existing silicon computers because they can perform many calculations in parallel and pack a vast number of components into a tiny space.

But for Willner, speed is not a priority. His enzyme computer can take several minutes to perform a calculation. Instead, he pictures it eventually being incorporated into bio-sensing equipment and used, for example, to monitor and react to a patient’s response to particular dosages of a drug.

Revolutionary approach

This article is taken from the Sept. 2004 issue of PRISM, ASEE’s award-winning magazine.

Vehicles that guide themselves without human control are a staple of futuristic visions. More recently, they have been the subject of some serious, if still modest, experiments: keeping traffic moving safely on “smart” highways, for one; or the Mars Rovers for another, which were equipped with a limited autonomous capability to plan their own routes across the Martian landscape and use their own onboard cameras to avoid obstacles.

But a team of hundreds of engineers at Boeing and Northrop Grumman are now working under a high-pressure deadline to turn what’s been mostly a dream up until now into a system that in a few years will be able to perform this feat for real-and in one of the most dangerous environments that exists anywhere. The goal of the Joint Unmanned Combat Aerial System (”J-UCAS”) program is to field a whole network of unmanned fighter planes that will be able to destroy enemy air defenses, attack deep targets, and conduct high-risk reconnaissance missions. And to do that, the planes will need to be able to make split-second decisions without any help from ground controllers. “The Mars Rover, it moves inches at a time,” says Kevin Wooley, mission software manager for Boeing’s X-45, one of two unmanned combat airplanes being built under the J-UCAS program. “We’re traveling at jet aircraft speeds and dropping weapons and trying to react to pop-up targets that arise.”