23 May 2009 | NewScientist | 17

For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology

A MICROCHIP-sized digital camera patented by the California Institute of Technology could provide vision for the US military’s insect-sized aircraft. It is light enough to be carried by these tiny surveillance drones and also uses very little power.

In today’s minicams, the image sensors and support circuitry are on separate microchips, and most of the power goes on communication between the chips. Now with Pentagon and NASA funding, Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena has squeezed all the components of a camera onto one low-power chip, revealed in a US patent filed last week (www.tinyurl.com/ojwmdq).

The gadget can be radio-controlled via a secure frequency-hopping link from up to a kilometre away, say its inventors.

Warned off by a sea sirenTRAFFIC accidents are taking a heavy

toll on marine mammals. At least

one-third of the north Atlantic right

whales that died in the past decade

were killed by ship strikes. Now

whales and manatees could be saved

by an underwater siren that drives

them out of harm’s way.

Many collisions occur because

marine mammals in the path of a ship

cannot hear its propellers, according

to researchers at Florida Atlantic

University in Boca Raton. “The sound

of the propellers is deflected to the

sides,” says Edmund Gerstein, who

presents his team’s findings this week

at a meeting of the Acoustical Society

of America in Portland, Oregon.

The animals do not seem able to

learn from painful experience, either.

Some manatees in Florida have been

hit 50 times, Gerstein says. “They

seem to seek out the quieter zone

JEF

F F

OO

TT

/GE

TT

Y

TECHNOLOGY

Robot insect spies to get their eyes

in front of the ship as a refuge.”

His team’s solution is a small

device fitted on the bow of a ship

below the waterline that emits a

narrow beam of sound. Gerstein

says that when the siren was tested,

manatees always got out of the way.

But the device has not yet been

tested on whales, and a whale siren

tested in 2003 failed to work . “There

is a very long way to go before

this can be proclaimed as a way to

prevent ship strikes in right whales,”

says Scott Kraus of the New England

Aquarium in Boston. Gerstein says

that sea tests of a larger whale-

warning system will start next year.

COME 2030, electronic gadgets will gobble three times as much electricity as they do today, requiring 280 gigawatts of new generating capacity, unless we do something about it.

A new study by the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that devices from cellphones to personal computers consume 15 per cent of all household power, and that figure is climbing rapidly.

Energy consumption could, however, be reined in using existing technologies. “If we were to use the most efficient technology available, instead

Greedy gadgets must learn to diet

of doubling or tripling energy consumption we could hold it almost flat,” says Paul Waide of the IEA.

The efficiency of cellphones could be improved by updating the way that chargers convert power from AC to DC, for instance. But such devices cost slightly more to make, so government regulation or incentives will be required to bring them onto the market, the IEA says.

One suggestion is that the law should limit standby power to 1 watt for all electronic devices. A 2007 study by the IEA found that 20 per cent of US televisions used more than 2 watts and one model drew 50 watts while on standby.

–Didn’t hear it coming–

The number of pirate radio transmitters seized by UK regulator Ofcom in 2008. Many were on the air again within weeks

489

Michael Lynton, chief executive of Sony Pictures, tells an audience at Syracuse University

in New York that the internet has had a consistently negative impact on the film business.

Stronger copyright protection is the answer, he says ( The Hollywood Reporter , 16 May)

“I haven’t seen any good come out of the internet”

“Marine mammals in the path of a ship cannot hear its propellers. The sound is deflected to the sides”