But women may not have to endure the medical costs, stress and potential complications that accompany such invasive biopsies forever. A University of Florida biomedical engineering researcher is making progress on an “optical biopsy” that has the potential to determine whether growths are cancerous without ever puncturing the skin.

“At this stage, it is just too early for optical tomography to be a screening tool,” said Huabei Jiang, the J. Crayton Pruitt Family professor of biomedical engineering, who has spent more than a decade developing the technique at UF and Clemson University. “But you can pretty much say that it is highly likely it can become a diagnostic tool, an adjunct to X-ray mammography.”

Surgical biopsies have long been the gold standard for determining whether growths are cancerous. But at least three out of four biopsies following mammograms conclude that observed abnormalities are benign and that no intervention was needed, Jiang said. Depending on if the biopsies are performed with needles or surgery, that can mean added cost, recuperation and potential scarring or other complications — all ultimately unnecessary.

Jiang has devoted much of his career to an alternative: “phase-contrast diffuse optical tomography,” a screening technology that roots out breast cancer not with cutting tools and laboratory tests but with light and computing power.

He recently completed the third generation of his apparatus — a bed with an array of fiber optic laser lights and detectors mounted within a hole where the patient places her breast.

Light from the harmless lasers enters the breast and scatters. Most gets absorbed in the tissue, but some reaches the detectors. With enough light hitting the detectors from enough different directions, there is sufficient data for Jiang’s computer algorithms to create an image of the breast’s interior. This image suggests either benign conditions or some of the telltale signs of cancer that are completely invisible to standard X-ray mammograms — for example, a high density of blood vessels snaking around a likely tumor.

But the image is just one indicator. In Jiang’s newest apparatus, undergoing tests at the Tampa-based Moffitt Cancer Center, fiber optic lights span 10 different wavelengths, or colors. Light with these colors changes in predictable ways when they strike certain compounds, such as oxygenated hemoglobin, water or lipids. Just as light collected from distant planets can reveal the composition of their atmospheres to astronomers, so light collected from these collisions can indicate chemical evidence of cancer.

A third technique, known as index refraction or phase contrast, provides information on cellular size and density — both factors that play into determination of cancer in laboratory biopsies.

“What he’s done is introduce a whole new optical property that is pretty clever,” said Steve Ponder, of the phase contrast element of Jiang’s research. “It’s another tool, and he’s reported good success, and it did increase sensitivity.”

Ponder is director of advanced development for the Fort Lauderdale-based Imaging Diagnostic Systems Inc., which makes breast imaging devices that rely on similar technologies to those Jiang is developing.

Over the past 10 years, Jiang and his graduate students have tested their evolving device on a total of about 200 patients, he said. In a 2008 paper in Academic Radiology, his most recently published clinical paper, he obtained 35 images from 33 patients and compared his findings with the results of the women’s traditional biopsies.

His main conclusion: His technique correctly identified biopsy confirmed malignancies nearly 75 percent of the time, with the most accurate results from older patients, whose softer breasts make abnormalities more prominent. Jiang said he has since boosted the accuracy rate to 91 percent in a study involving 144 women, but he is still readying that study for publication. More research and more patients are needed, he said.

“It’s still not enough for us to say, ‘O.K.’,” he said. “But we have some confidence.”

The National Cancer Institute has provided the bulk of about $2 million in research support for Jiang’s efforts. His current collaborators include Moffitt Cancer Center, a UF partner institution.

But those and other multiplying “apps” for smart phones are only the crest of a wave of smart clothing, toys and tools that will reshape everyday life, just as portable wireless technology has reshaped human interactions and business through social networking, Twitter and online shopping.

A preview of upcoming new devices, applications and their impact is set for next week in Orlando, when nearly 300 scientists, thinkers and computer engineers from around the world will present and discuss their work and ideas in the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. The University of Florida and the University of Central Florida join Microsoft Research, Nokia and Intel among the sponsors for the conference, set for Sept. 30 through Oct. 3 at Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resort Conference Center.

“Computing was about information in the past, but we’re moving beyond that,” said Sumi Helal, a UF professor of computer science and engineering and the general chair of the conference. “The next wave will be computers tied to sensors that are a constant, often invisible part of our daily lives.”

Members of the news media are invited to attend the conference, which will include presentations and demonstrations. Reporters and camera crews are asked to pick up press passes and materials at the conference registration desk. (For location, schedule and speaker information visit: www.ubicomp.org/ubicomp2009/.)

Scientists and engineers from UF, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, the Georgia Institute of Technology and more than 130 other institutions from 26 countries are expected to attend. Speakers include Henry Tirri, senior vice president of Nokia and head of the Nokia Research Center and MIT Media Lab Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland.

Thirty-six planned full-conference presentations include:
• A device that turns the iTouch into an air quality monitor.
• Clothes that coach children on correct posture.
• A swimsuit that informs swimmers of their speed, strokes and time per lane.
• A system that encourages water conservation by tracking how much water is being consumed by each tap, toilet or shower in a home.

At least 20 demonstrations include:
• A way to use hardware in existing computers to “sense” the presence of people.
• A “dining presenter” that adds appeal to dinner table food
• A toy that monitors and encourages daily exercise.

At least 65 workshop presentations include:
• An iPhone app that estimates how users’ activities impact the environment.
• A system that transforms toys into monitors of a childhood development.
• A system that tailors amusement park rides to riders’ experiences in real time.

Helal said computers have moved from mainframe to PC to smart phone and are now at a new phase — where computers act in concert with sensors in many different devices.

Current sensors — GPS, cameras and RFID tags — are already changing traditional practices. GPS-enhanced smart phones, for example, are making paper maps obsolete.

Many more changes are just around the corner. Eric Paulos, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, designed the iTouch air quality monitor with student Sunyoung Kim. He says the monitor is just one of many applications that could expand smart phones from communication devices into measurement devices able to collect data on everything from jet airplane noise to pollen counts to drinking water quality.

This could prompt personal changes in behavior — one of the participants in a study of the iTouch air quality monitor quit smoking because he could see how much the smoke lowered air quality, Paulos said. But smart phone environmental monitors could also empower “citizen scientists” to gather and share data about the world around them, noting changes to air quality, for example, as traffic or growth patterns changed.

Yelp and other sites now help people find night spots. “In the same way you could influence someone to go to a hit bar,” Paulos said, “you could help influence people to become more aware of environmental issues.”

As next week’s conference will make clear, these applications are bound to have a sweeping impact on society, challenging traditional notions about everything from exercising to healing, raising children to aging, eating to worshipping.

“The NRC Faculty Development Grant is very valuable to our department and comes at a time when it can really make a difference in the number of students graduating in this area,” said David Hintenlang, interim chairman of UF’s nuclear and radiological engineering department. “The grant will be used over the next several years to jump-start the careers of two young faculty members who have just started at the University of Florida. These faculty will in turn mentor students into the nuclear engineering profession, which directly benefits the state of Florida where nuclear power generates a significant portion of our electricity and we expect a new nuclear power plant to be built within the next decade.”

UF is one of 70 institutions to receive funding from a total of nearly $20 million designed to boost nuclear education and expand the work force in nuclear and nuclear-related disciplines, the NRC announced.

The faculty development grant can either be used to pay for an existing faculty member who has been in a tenure-track position in the fields of nuclear engineering, health physics or radio chemistry for less than six years or to recruit someone to the faculty from outside the university, said John Gutteridge, an NRC spokesman.

“The grant is very important because there is a work force shortage in the fields of nuclear engineering, health physics, radio chemistry and other related fields,” Gutteridge said. “To attract students, NRC provides scholarships and fellowships, and obviously to educate those students, we need to attract faculty as well.”

The grants provide research money to faculty, who in turn can use part of it toward stipends for the graduate students assisting them on projects, he said.

“There is a shortage of faculty at the nuclear engineering schools around the country, whose numbers have grown in the last seven or eight years, and educated and trained people are needed to work at nuclear power plants and all sectors of the nuclear industry,” Gutteridge said.

At least four more nuclear power plants are likely to be built in the United States in the next decade and more are possible, he said.

“We have over 20 applications for new power plants and while not all of them are going to be built, quite a few will be, and since it appears that all of the 104 existing plants will have their licenses renewed for another 20 years, obviously those plants will need to be staffed with trained personnel,” he said.

The need to replace an aging work force over the next five years will create additional demand for skilled professionals in the field, he said.

Congress provided the NRC funding for a $5 million Educational Curriculum program and an additional $15 million toward NRC’s grant program for scholarships and fellowships, faculty development, trade schools and community colleges.

The NRC awarded 102 grants for scholarships ($2.9 million), fellowships ($5.4 million), faculty development ($4.8 million), trade and community college scholarships ($1.8 million) and nuclear education and curriculum development ($4.7 million). The grants were distributed in 29 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

The faculty development program is one of five grant programs the NRC offers. Eleven awards were made from the 37 applications received for these grants.

Novo-G gets the first part of its name from the Latin term for “make anew, change, alter,” and the second from “G” for “genesis.” A “reconfigurable” computer, it can rearrange its internal circuitry to suit the task at hand. Applications range from space satellites to research supercomputers — anywhere size, energy and high speed are important, said Alan George, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of UF’s National Science Foundation Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing.

Traditional computers use so-called “fixed logic devices” to perform a large variety of tasks. But this jack-of-all-trades approach requires a substantial amount of overhead in space and energy, no matter what work needs to be done. On the other hand, special-purpose computers can be built to perform certain tasks very well but are not flexible.

Reconfigurable computers make the best of both worlds, George said. That is because they can rearrange their internal circuitry like Lego blocks, creating the most appropriate architecture for each assignment. As a result, a reconfigurable computer can be from 10 to 100 times faster than other computers its size while using five to 10 times less energy.

Although the concept has been proven, reconfigurable computers remain at the research stage and are not easy to use. One of the main goals of the NSF Center is to pioneer techniques to make reconfigurable computers more accessible.

“It is very powerful technology, but it is also very complicated technology,” George said. “We don’t want this important technology to be accessible only to experts.”

UF has three partner universities in its reconfigurable computing center — Brigham Young University, George Washington University and Virginia Tech — as well as about 30 industry and government partners. The center was founded in 2007.

David Arnold, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Jacob Jones, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, have received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, or PECASE, award.

Each award comes with a five-year, $1 million research grant.

“I am thrilled that Dr. Arnold and Dr. Jones have been selected to receive PECASE awards. Their selection says a lot about the quality of their research and anticipated contributions to their fields,” said Cammy Abernathy, whose tenure as dean of the College of Engineering begins on Friday.

Outgoing engineering Dean Pramod Khargonekar said, “These awards also reflect well on the quality of our junior faculty hires over the last few years and are a further confirmation of the strength, vitality, and relevance of research programs in the College of Engineering.”

The White House describes the award as the highest honor young researchers can receive in the early part of their careers.

“These extraordinarily gifted young scientists and engineers represent the best in our country,” President Obama said in a White House press release. “With their talent, creativity and dedication, I am confident that they will lead their fields in new breakthroughs and discoveries and help us use science and technology to lift up our nation and our world.”

Nine federal departments and agencies support the awards, each of which comes with a five-year $1 million research grant.

Arnold came to UF in 2005 from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was a postdoctoral fellow in the school of electrical and computer engineering. He earned his doctorate from Georgia Tech in 2004.

His project, nominated by the Department of Defense’s Army Research Office, is titled “Development of Fully Integrated Micromagnetic Actuator Technologies.”

The goal is find new and better ways to easily make and use “magnetic microsystems” – tiny devices that can act as switches, pumps, valves or perform other functions – for industrial, medical, military and consumer products. Applications, for example, may include small surveillance airplanes known as micro air vehicles, tiny robots for medical or surgical applications, and electronic devices for mobile phones.

“Our newfound ability for making tiny magnets opens a new world of opportunities. We hope to build ‘mechanized microchips’ to support emerging high-tech concepts in a variety of scientific disciplines,” Arnold said.

Jones came to UF in 2006 from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, where he had been serving as a National Science Foundation International Research Fellow. He received his doctorate in 2004 from Purdue University.

Also nominated by the Army Research Office, Jones’ project is titled “Domain Wall Evolution in Phase Transforming Oxides.”

Jones said his project focuses on smart materials. In this case, that refers to materials that can convert energy from one form into another form – for example, sound into electricity, or vice versa. Such materials are key for advanced military applications in reconnaissance, navigation, surveillance and in guidance systems, he said.

He said his work addresses a fundamental feature of smart materials known as the domain wall, which refers to a break in the atomic periodicity of the material, with the goal of improving overall smart material systems.

“We are looking at how these domain walls influence the macroscopic properties of these materials and investigating how we can put them into unique positions and states that can enhance the properties of smart materials.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — “What brings you in to see me today?”

“Part of my left breast has been painful for awhile.”

“Can you lie down so that I can examine you?”

It sounds like a snippet of conversation between doctor and patient. But the doctor, in this recent exchange at the University of Florida campus, was actually an engineering doctoral student — and the patient a “mixed reality human” composed of a life-sized computer avatar on a flat screen and a mannequin with a prosthetic breast.

Intimate procedures such as breast exams, while a routine and critical part of medical care, are notoriously tough to teach. Medical students practice on disembodied prosthetics but have limited opportunities to practice exams on real people — especially patients who have an abnormality. In a collaboration with the Augusta, Ga.-based Medical College of Georgia and three other universities, UF engineers have crafted a solution: a hybrid computer/mannequin that helps train students not only how to correctly perform a breast exam — but also how to talk to, and glean information from, the patient during the procedure.

The project is important because correct examinations and good doctor-patient communication are critical to successful medical treatment, said Benjamin Lok, a UF assistant professor of computer and information sciences and engineering who heads the effort.

“Studies have shown that communication skills are actually a better predictor of outcome than medical skills,” Lok said. With the virtual patient, “all of a sudden, students have to not only practice their technique, but they also have to work on their empathy.”

The mixed reality human, named Amanda Jones, “talks” to students, and they respond via a computer speech and voice recognition system tailored by doctoral student Aaron Kotranza, Lok and others on the team. Her physical form — a mannequin — is immobile, but her virtual representation, created by the engineers, moves and speaks from a large flat screen above her physical body. Students can also view Jones through a head-mounted display.

The interaction is unscripted, but it follows a typical pattern for a woman’s visit and examination — with both verbal and tactile challenges for the medical students.

The student must tease out Jones’ medical history, listen to her concerns and respond to her questions. Just as in a real exam, this interaction occurs simultaneously with the physical examination. For that, the student must use the correct palpitating technique and apply the proper pressure. Sensors within the prosthetic breast — developed by Dr. Carla Pugh at Northwestern University — provide pressure information depicted by colors on the virtual breast, guiding students in the exams. The engineers can program the system to include or exclude an abnormality — and the attendant conversation.

It sounds awkward, and to be sure, the speech recognition element has its hiccups.

But especially for students reared in an era of sophisticated three-dimensional video games, the system turns out to be surprisingly convincing. The researchers have tested it on about 100 medical students so far, all from the Medical College of Georgia, where co-principal investigator Dr. D. Scott Lind is based. One of their most consistent and prominent findings: Students do not hesitate to express empathy to Jones.

“We have found that they will try to comfort the virtual human,” Kotranza said. “They’ll often touch the mannequin in order to comfort her.”

A pilot study has concluded that students who practiced with a mixed realty human improved their communication skills and their technical abilities, but more trials are needed to determine whether those skills persist once the students examine real patients.

That said, it seems obvious that more practice students get, the better off they will be. Lok said the mixed reality patient is not intended to replace real volunteers - far from it. But students typically have only a handful of opportunities with those volunteers before graduating. The mixed reality patient can add to their training while making it easier for teachers to help students with both their conversational and medical techniques.

“What happens if you find something in a woman’s breast? How do you talk to the patient?” Lok asked. “Students have to somehow build their database of experience.”

While the breast exam research continues, the team also intends to explore other intimate exams. Next in line: prostate exams. Lok and the students already have prosthetics they intend to couple with a virtual male patient similar to the breast exam patient.

The other institutions participating in the project are the University of Central Florida, the University of Georgia and Northwestern University. The research, part of a larger effort involving a number of different virtual patient projects, is supported by grants of about $2.8 million primarily from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

A team of scientists and engineers from Stanford University, the University of Florida and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the first to create one of two basic types of semiconductors using an exotic, new, one-atom-thick material called graphene. The findings could help open the door to computer chips that are not only smaller and hold more memory — but are also more adept at uploading large files, downloading movies, and other data- and communication-intensive tasks.

A paper about the findings, co-authored by eight researchers, is set to be published Friday in the journal Science.

“There are still enormous challenges to really put it into products, but I think this really could play an important role,” said Jing Guo, a UF assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of two UF authors who contributed.

The team made, modeled and tested what is known in the industry as an “n-type” transistor out of graphene nanoribbon. Graphene is a form of carbon that has been called “atomic chicken wire,” thanks to its honeycomb-like structure of interconnected hexagons. A graphene nanoribbon is a nanometer-wide strip cut from a graphene layer.

The team’s feat is significant because basic transistors come in only two forms — “p-type” and “n-type” — referring to the presence of holes and electrons, respectively. “P-type” graphene semiconductors had already been achieved, so the manufacture of an “n-type” graphene semiconductor completes the fundamental building blocks.

“This work is essentially finding a new way to modify a graphene nanoribbon to make it able to conduct electrons,” Guo said. “This addresses a very fundamental requirement for graphene to be useful in the production of electronics.”

First isolated in 2004, graphene has spurred a great excitement in the chip research community because of its promising electrical properties and bare-minimum atomic size.

Scientists and engineers believe that after decades of development, silicon is fast reaching the upper limits of its physical performance. If the rapid evolution of ever-shrinking, ever-more-powerful, ever-cheaper semiconductors is to continue, they say, new materials must be found to complement or even replace silicon. Graphene is among the leading candidates for these nanoelectronics of the future.

Researchers at a number of institutions have reported using graphene to create a variety of simple transistor devices recently, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reporting in March the successful test of a graphene chip that can multiply electrical signals.

Guo said the team built and modeled the first-ever graphene nanoribbon n-type “field-effect transistor” using a new and novel method that involves affixing nitrogen atoms to the edge of the nanoribbon. The method also has the potential to make the edges of the nanometer-wide ribbon smoother, which is a key factor to make the transistor faster.

“This uses chemistry to really address the major challenges of electrical engineering when you get into such these small nanoscale dimensionalities,” he said. “It is very unusual for electrical engineers, who are used to dealing with bulk structures of at least millions of atoms.”

As exciting as the findings are, researchers must overcome many challenges before graphene semiconductors could be manufactured in bulk for use in consumer products, Guo said. For one thing, graphene is extremely expensive, so its cost would have to be reduced substantially. Also, to mimic or exceed silicon, engineers would have to figure out how to build not just one, but billions of transistors, on a tiny graphene fleck.

Five Stanford researchers led by Hongjie Dai, J.G. Jackson-C.J. Wood Professor of Chemistry, did the experimental work behind the findings. Guo and fellow author Youngki Yoon, who earned his doctoral degree from UF last December and is now at the University of California, Berkeley, did the computer modeling and simulation. The team also included Peter Webber of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Said Dai, “This work is just a beginning. It suggests that graphene chemistry and chemistry at the edges are rich areas to explore for both fundamental and practical reasons for this material.”

The UF portion of the research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. The Stanford portion was funded by MARCO MSD, Intel and the Office of Naval Research.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Trainers have used it for decades to help athletes build muscle. Late-night TV commercials hawk it as an effortless flab buster.

But a University of Florida engineering researcher says electrical stimulation — a simple, decades-old technique to prompt muscles to contract — can be combined with sophisticated computer learning technology to help people regain more precise, more life-like control of paralyzed limbs.

Although his research is still exploring the fundamentals, his progress so far suggests computer-adapted electrical stimulation could one day help the estimated 700,000 Americans who suffer from strokes and the 11,000 who suffer from cord injuries annually.

“It’s an adaptive scheme to do electrical stimulation more efficiently, with less fatigue and more accuracy,” said Warren Dixon, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, explaining that existing techniques do little more than apply a set current to a designated muscle.

Stroke victims may be among the first to benefit. Dixon said stroke sufferers who work at regaining the ability to walk often unconsciously drag their toes, causing them to stumble. He said his goal is to develop techniques for a wearable, pacemaker-sized device. The device would deliver just the right stimulation to the calf at just the right moment in a person’s gait, lifting the toe just enough to avoid a stumble and walk naturally.

The device would adapt to individuals, adjusting itself to weight, activity and diet, he said. It might even act as a kind of robotic therapist to the patient, guiding him or her in the proper action while very slowly backing off its own electrical input.

Dixon, who has published several papers on his research since receiving a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Development Career Development Program award in 2006, recently authored a paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. Publication is anticipated for this summer.

At its most basic level, electrical stimulation is a simple and well-understood process.

Electrical pads are placed on the skin, and when a small current is applied, the muscle contracts involuntarily.

Trainers have long used the technique, which may cause a slight tingling sensation but is not painful, to build or tone athletes’ muscles. Electrical stimulation is also at the heart of products touted, for example, to help people build “six-pack abs” without working out.

But the most promising application may be in physical rehabilitation, Dixon said. Specialists already use electrical stimulation to prevent unused muscle from atrophying – in effect, “exercising” the muscle even though the patient has lost the ability to move it herself.

Physical therapists and some products also use electrical stimulation for purposeful movement. One commercially available walker, for example, taps preprogrammed stimulation patterns to help paralyzed people stand for brief periods of time.

Dixon said that while the current state-of-the-art shows the potential, it only applies a predetermined and relatively high voltage to a designated muscle.

That means that while the muscle may move, it can easily fatigue, becoming less responsive and sore. Also, electrically stimulated movements tend to be rough, without the degree of control and variation — the subtle bends or twists that make all the difference in so much common movement — that people with functioning limbs take for granted.

Dixon and his graduate students are developing methods aimed at improving that model using techniques of “adaptive learning,” or giving a computer the ability to learn from a patient’s actions and reactions and adjust its muscular stimulation accordingly.

One of their main tools: a standard leg lift, or leg extension, exercise machine modified with electrical pads and sensors, and networked with a computer. The system measures and compares electrical stimulation and subsequent leg movement and direction — the “patient” is actually a healthy graduate student — to steadily determine pathways to become more sensitive and responsive to the user.

“We start with a desired trajectory, we do the leg extension, encode that in a computer and measure the motion,” Dixon said. “Then we develop control methods to intelligently stimulate the muscle to make it behave the way it should.”

The other authors of the IEEE paper are Nitin Sharma and Keith Stegath, both graduate students in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Chris Michael Gregory, a research assistant professor in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions.

The FDA late last week gave permission for Quick-Med Technologies Inc. to begin selling its “NIMBUS” barrier gauze wound care dressings after reviewing the dressing in a rare clearance process used only for medical devices for which there is no equivalent FDA-cleared wound dressing.

The dressing is unique in its ability to retain its antimicrobial properties without allowing any bacteria to migrate back into the wound, where they interfere with healing and can worsen infection, said Chris Batich, a professor of materials science and engineering and one of three UF inventors of the technology.

The fact that the antimicrobial agents remain permanently bonded to the gauze means that the technology is effective for longer periods, allowing longer intervals between changing the dressing, which speeds up the healing process. Neither blood, urine nor sweat dull its capacity to kill microbes — including such well-known pathogens as MRSA, VRE and Escherichia coli — drawn from the wound into the absorbent dressing or arriving from the air in the room. Not only that, but the dressing is less costly than similar treatments, and can cope with wounds that leak larger amounts of pus and other fluids, Batich said.

“You could potentially leave it on a longer period of time,” Batich said. “And even if it’s on a shorter period of time, all this toxic material from the bacteria doesn’t get back into the wound where it can worsen the infection. It makes a very effective barrier.”

The FDA cleared the NIMBUS gauze in its De Novo process, designed for medical devices that are unlike any currently on the market. It is one of about three dozen medical devices cleared as part of the accelerated process in the last decade. By comparison, the traditional process, for devices “substantially equivalent to existing devices,” is used about 3,000 times per year.

The other inventors of the technology are Greg Schultz, director of the UF Institute for Wound Research, and Bruce Mast, a plastic surgeon formerly at UF now in private practice in Gainesville.

Quick-Med Technologies is a small, publicly traded company in Gainesville that develops technologies and licenses them to partner companies for commercialization. It has licensed the NIMBUS barrier gauze to Derma Sciences, which plans to market it starting this June under its trade name, BIOGUARD.

The FDA clearance “is an important milestone for Quick-Med and will be a predicate for other medical devices incorporating the NIMBUS technology,” said J. Ladd Greeno, chief executive officer of Quick-Med, in a Quick-Med press release.

So says a new FEMA-commissioned report from the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council. Peter Sheng, a University of Florida professor of coastal engineering, was one of the chief scientific contributors to the report published late last week.

“We’re calling for new maps, and we’re also calling for FEMA to update their technology,” Sheng said. “Their current methodology is getting very old.”

FEMA uses flood maps to set flood insurance rates, regulate development and inform those who live in the “100-year” floodplain of potential hazards. FEMA’s Map Modernization Program of 2003 to 2008 resulted in digital flood maps for 92 percent of the continental U.S. population. Most live in areas that had outdated or no maps.

However, after a $1 billion investment, only 21 percent of the population has maps that meet all of FEMA’s data quality standards, the National Research Council said

For this reason, FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked the research council to examine the factors that affect flood map accuracy. FEMA also sought to assess the costs and benefits of producing more accurate maps and find ways to improve mapping and management of flood-related data.

In response, the research council committee, the NAS Committee on FEMA Flood Mapping Accuracy, collected and analyzed information on selected streams in test states of Florida and North Carolina and on the economic costs and benefits of creating new digital flood maps in North Carolina.

The committee’s report concludes that the costs for improving flood maps — including analyzing flood-related data and updating regulations — would be outweighed by benefits.

These include not only more accurate flood maps, which would help reduce loss of life, property, and businesses, but also more efficient planning and response for emergency services and preservation of natural functions of floodplains.

Sheng said the 13 committee members spent two years researching the material that went into the report’s conclusions. His responsibility, he said, was to produce the section on coastal flood mapping. He concluded that FEMA, which continues to use flood modeling methods rooted in 1970s-era research, needs to modernize.

“Academics have developed new models and new technologies that lead to more accurate predictions,” he said, adding that the agency currently uses a simple, one-dimensional model to forecast wave action combined with storm surge. “We are recommending that they start doing a two-dimensional surge-wave model,” he said.

He said the updated models will not necessarily cause flood zones to grow or shrink, but rather that predictions will be more accurate.

“The uncertainty comes from the topological data and the way you do modeling, and we are trying to remove the uncertainties,” he said. “In some places, the projected flood levels could go higher, while in other places, they might go lower.”

Sheng is a veteran researcher in the field of flood and storm surge research and modeling. Among other efforts, he heads a Florida Sea Grant-sponsored project to test a new storm surge modeling system in Florida. He is leading experiments on storm surge and inundation models for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and co-developing a regional storm surge forecasting system for NOAA and the Office of Naval Research.

Kurt Gurley, a UF associate professor of civil and coastal engineering who conducts research on home vulnerability during hurricanes, said homeowners should take advantage of the six months before hurricane season to evaluate their homes, especially if the houses are at least 15 or 20 years old.

“Essentially, the rule of thumb, which is not always exact, is the older the home that you live in, the more likely it is that you’re going to want to have some kind of evaluation performed,” Gurley said.

Florida residents may have even more reason than usual to be concerned after hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University predicted 14 named storms in the 2009 season, including seven hurricanes — three of them major.

Hurricane season starts June 1 and continues until Nov. 30.

The 2008 season saw above-average activity, with 16 named storms and eight hurricanes.

Gurley said Florida homeowners should consider redoing their roofs if their homes have old shingles. They should also check the braces on the garage door and the connections between the roof and walls, he said.

If the roof needs new shingles, consider asking the contractor to also install a secondary water barrier on the seams below the shingles, Gurley added. That way, even if the shingles do come off in a hurricane, the extra barrier will help keep water from seeping into the home, he said.

He suggested visiting the Web sites of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, a nonprofit organization, and the Institute for Business and Home Safety for more tips on evaluating a house.

In the long term, Gurley said, he and other researchers are looking into how Florida’s building codes could be changed to ensure that newer homes are as safe as possible for hurricane season.

He said research teams at UF are working with the home-building industry and the Florida Building Commission, which recommends changes to the state’s building code, to determine the most cost-effective improvements to home building in Florida.

“It’s pretty easy on paper to design a hurricane-proof home, but it’s going to cost a lot of money if the sky’s the limit,” he said.

University of Florida materials science and engineers have achieved a new record in efficiency of blue organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Because blue is essential to white light, the advance helps overcome a hurdle to lighting that is much more efficient than compact fluorescents — but can produce high-quality light similar to standard incandescent bulbs.

“The quality of the light is really the advantage,” said Franky So, a UF associate professor of materials science and engineering and the lead investigator on the project.

So collaborated with UF materials science engineering professor Paul Holloway and UF assistant professor Jiangeng Xue on the research.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which funded the research, reported the results on its Web site. Papers about it appeared earlier this year in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

OLEDs are similar to inorganic light emitting devices, or LEDs, but are built with organic semiconductors on large area glass substrates rather than inorganic semiconductor wafers. When used in display screens computer monitors, they have higher efficiency, better color saturation and a larger viewing angle. OLED displays are also used in cell phones, cameras and personal digital assistants. OLED flat panel TVs were introduced by Sony recently.

So and his team’s blue OLED achieved a peak efficiency of 50 lumens — a lumen is a measure of brightness perceived by human eyes — per watt. That’s a significant step toward the goal of his project: to achieve white light with efficiency higher than 100 lumens per watt.

So said the fact that OLEDs are highly “tunable” — each OLED is an individual light, which means differently colored OLEDs can be combined to produced different shades of light — puts warm, rich light easily within reach. “The quality of the light generated can easily be tuned by using different color emitters” he said. “You can make it red, green, blue or white.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Radar — the technology that tracks enemy bombers and hurricanes — is now being employed to detect another danger: when babies stop breathing.

In a high-tech twist on the remote devices that allow parents to listen to or watch their baby from afar, University of Florida engineering researchers have built a prototype baby monitor that focuses on a baby’s breathing. If his or her chest stops moving, the crib-mounted monitor detects the problem and sends an alarm to a portable unit kept by the parents.

“It’s a step beyond just watching the baby through a video link or hearing it cry,” said Jenshan Lin, a UF professor of electrical and computer engineering and the principal investigator of the Doppler radar technology used in the monitor.

A paper on the system, which works by using Doppler radar to remotely scan the in-and-out movement of the baby’s chest due to respiration, will appear in the February issue of IEEE Microwave Magazine.

Parents buy millions of baby monitors each year in the U.S., but most transmit only sounds or video images of the baby — both useful, but only if a parent is listening or watching. Some recently available monitors also monitor babies’ movements and breathing, but Lin said he is not aware of any on the market that use wireless technology.

UF engineering students Changzhi Li, Julie Cummings, Jeffrey Lam, Eric Graves and Stephanie Jimenez designed the monitor.

The students did the work as part of the College of Engineering’s Integrated Product and Process Design Program, which allows senior-level undergraduates to participate in yearlong design projects of new products or processes. The student team’s goal: to use Lin’s radar technology, first developed three years ago and under continuous refinement since, in a useful product with the potential to be licensed to a company.

The students produced a small-book-sized device that attaches to the crib just like a standard monitor. They also designed a remote station with red, blue, green and yellow lights, variously indicating the status of the baby’s vital signs, the battery life of the station and confirming the station’s wireless connection to the crib monitor. The station emits a loud alarm and flashes a red light when the monitor detects that the baby’s breathing activity has fallen below a preset threshold, or that he or she has stopped breathing.

Future versions could also detect heartbeat, using a higher frequency signal, Lin said.

“It’s the same Doppler radar that police use to catch speeders, but in our case, we don’t measure constant speed, but rather back-and-forth motion — sort of like vibration,” Lin said. “That’s the fundamental principle of this technology.”

The crib monitor’s signals are very low power and not harmful to the baby or parents, Lin added. While a standard cell phone emits about one watt of power, the Doppler radar emits just one ten-thousandth of a watt of power, he said.

Tom Weller, associate dean for research at the University of South Florida College of Engineering, said the baby monitor is a good example of how research and education can come together in a useful product.

“This miniaturized monitor is an example of solid microwave engineering coupled with great innovation, and something with the potential for a very broad societal impact,” Weller said in an e-mail. “It is especially noteworthy that Dr. Lin transferred his research output into the very capable hands of creative undergraduate students.”

Lin is also pursuing other applications for his technology. His best-realized idea so far: a search-and-rescue robot equipped with the Doppler system to determine the presence of living people in structures damaged by earthquakes or explosions. Lin said the system, so far tested in a small working prototype robot, could complement robotic video systems because it requires less power to operate and has greater range. The robot was developed by student Gabriel Reyes as his research project in the University Scholars Program.

“Or the military could use it to find enemy soldiers,” Lin said, noting that the Doppler radar easily penetrates walls or other structural components.

Lin has also reduced the size of the electronics in his system so that they fit on a fruit fly-sized microchip, potentially enabling the remote monitor to be used in cell phones. That could turn the phones into portable life-sign detectors useful, for example, for friends and family who wish to keep tabs on elderly relatives living alone, he said.

Li, who based his dissertation on the research, was awarded a graduate fellowship from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society for his work.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — It’s not much bigger than a softball and weighs just 2 pounds.

But the “pico satellite” being designed and built in a University of Florida aerospace engineering laboratory may hold a key to a future of easy access to outer space — one where sending satellites into orbit is as routine and inexpensive as shipping goods around the world.

“Right now, the way satellites are built, they’re all large, one-of-a-kind and very expensive,” says Norman Fitz-Coy, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the lead investigator on the project. “Our idea is that you could mass produce these small satellites and launch 10 or 20 from a single launch vehicle.”

The satellite is the first ever built at UF and may be the first orbiting spacecraft to be built in Florida, said Peggy Evanich, director of space research programs at UF.

Fifty-one years ago, the former Soviet Union inaugurated the space race with the launch of Sputnik. Since then, satellites have transformed communications, navigation and climatology, as well as science and the military. But satellites remain large, ranging in size from basketball to school bus proportions; expensive, with costs typically in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars; and slowly hand-built as one-of-a-kind devices, rather than speedily mass produced, Fitz-Coy said.

Scientists and engineers now hope to change that legacy.

“There is a national push to make satellites smaller so that you can provide cheaper and more frequent access to space,” he said.

As part of that push, the National Science Foundation this fall created the Advanced Space Technologies Research and Engineering Center at the UF College of Engineering. Headed by Fitz-Coy, the center will seek to develop “pico- and nano-class small satellites” that can be built and launched for as little as $100,000 to $500,000, according to the NSF. The UF center will receive NSF funding for five years for the research.

Fitz-Coy said small satellites are not anticipated to totally replace larger ones, but rather to complement them by adding new capabilities. For example, he said, “swarms” of small satellites could take multiple, distributed measurements or observations of weather phenomena, or the Earth’s magnetic fields, providing a more comprehensive assessment than is possible with a single satellite.

“People are looking toward these to not totally replace the big satellites but to supplement what the big satellites are doing,” he said.

He said the main impediment to designing small satellites is control: The smaller the satellite, the harder it is to manage its flight path and attitude, or orientation in space – for example, which directions its instruments point, a critical parameter in spacecraft design.

“It’s similar to you driving an SUV down the road or a sub-compact,” Fitz-Coy said, explaining that while inertia helps large satellites, it is not enough to keep small satellites on track and properly oriented. “The SUV is a lot more stable than the sub-compact.”

The goal of the UF satellite, nicknamed SwampSAT, is to test a new system designed to improve small satellites’ attitude control. Having precise control is particularly important for such satellites because they have to fly relatively close to Earth so that their weak communications signals can reach their targets, he said. Because of their proximity to Earth, their instruments must be precisely aimed.

“They need to be able to control their orientation and re-orient rapidly,” he said.

Fitz-Coy and about 12 undergraduate and graduate students began the project last year and hope to complete SwampSAT late this year or early next year, he said.

The cost is anticipated to be about $100,000, with a launch in 2009 – likely aboard an unmanned NASA rocket carrying other payloads as well. The satellite will fly at an altitude of between 600 and 650 kilometers, or from 373 to 404 miles, and will remain in orbit for several years, Fitz-Coy said.

A container that could be standardized for use in transporting the small satellites aboard the rocket also is being developed. As with the satellites themselves, the goal is mass production – to be able to transport satellites to outer space much the same way that ships and trucks transport goods around the terrestrial world now, Fitz-Coy said.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Diplomats or military envoys making their first trip to China may soon have a chance to visit a Chinese office building, stop in at a traditional teahouse or hop a cab — all before they board a plane.

A team of University of Florida computer engineers and scholars has used the popular online world Second Life to create a virtual Chinese city, one that hands a key to users who want to familiarize themselves with the sights and experiences they will encounter as first-time visitors. The goal of the federally funded research project: To educate and prepare foreign service or other government professionals to arrive in the country prepared and ready to work.

“I think what we hope is that this kind of environment can provide a bridge between knowledge alone and actually being in the real-life environment,” said Julie Henderson, an international program specialist at the UF College of Pharmacy and co-principal investigator and project designer for the effort.

People have long prepared for international travel with language and cultural instruction, role-playing and, in recent years, distance-learning experiences. The “Second China Project” seeks to add another element: Simulated experiences aimed at introducing users not only to typical sights and the Chinese language, but also to expectations of politeness, accepted business practices and cultural norms.

It may not be the real thing, but it’s a lot easier to get there.

As with all Second Life worlds, users’ avatars simply “teleport” in to Second China, a city with both old and new buildings that looks surprisingly similar to some of China’s fastest growing metropolises. There, they can try a number of different activities — including, for example, visiting an office building for a conference.

“We’ve built an environment around learning objectives,” said Paul Fishwick, lead investigator and a professor of computer and information science and engineering.

In the office simulation, the user’s avatar chooses appropriate business attire and a gift, greets a receptionist, and is guided to a conference room to be seated, among other activities. With each scenario, the user gains understanding or awareness: the Chinese formal greeting language and procedure, that it’s traditional to bring a gift to a first meeting, that guests typically are seated facing the door in a Chinese meeting room, and so on.

Supplementing the visual experience: A Web-based tutorial that the user can click on as he or she navigates Second China. The tutorial has much more detail about every experience. For example, it lists appropriate as well as inappropriate gifts — such as clocks, which in China are considered bad luck when presented as gifts.

In the teahouse simulation, a greeter shows the visitor photos of well-known personalities who have visited as patrons, a typical practice in many establishments in China. However, in the simulation the photos include, for example, a photo of Hu Jintao, the president of China. The accompanying Web tutorial provides biographical background on Hu and the other well-known Chinese personalities in the photos.

“It’s important to be able to go to China already familiar with the important historic and political figures,” said Henderson.

In Second Life, users typically control avatars. But in Second China, the teahouse greeter and other avatars in the various scenarios are controlled by computer software. This allows users to enter Second China anytime they wish, while also ensuring that all users have similar experiences, an important trait for an educational tool.

None of the information in Second China is exclusive to the Second Life simulation — it could also be presented in books or other traditional media.

But Fishwick and Henderson think that allowing users to place themselves within Second China’s virtual world may make the information more memorable and pique users’ curiosity and urge to explore. They’ll know more soon: After spending a year developing the project, they’ll spend the next year testing it on users to gauge its effectiveness.

“In terms of knowledge and empathy toward the culture, we don’t yet know the answer to the question of where one medium succeeds and another one fails,” Fishwick said.

The Second China project has been funded with a $1.25 million federal grant. Other co-principal investigators at UF are Elinore Fresh, a senior lecturer in Chinese and Franz Futterknecht, a professor of Germanic and Slavic studies. Amy Jo Coffey and Rasha Kamhawi, both assistant professors of journalism and communications in the department of telecommunication, will participate in the assessment phase.