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Wireless electric trams at Seoul Amusement Park begin full operations.
Photo by Hyung-Joon Jun
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wireless electric trams at Seoul Amusement Park begin full operations.
KAIST’s On-Line Electric Vehicle (OLEV) becomes an icon of green technology, particularly for young students who aspire to transform their nation into the “vanguard of sustainability.”
Seoul, South Korea, July 19, 2011—As young students wrap up their school work before summer vacation in late July, Seoul Grand Park, an amusement park located south of Seoul, is busily preparing to accommodate throngs of summer visitors. Among the park’s routine preparations, however, there is something new to introduce to guests this summer: three wireless electric trams have replaced the old diesel-powered carts used by passengers for transportation within the park.
The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the city of Seoul held a ceremony this morning, July 19, 2011, to celebrate their joint efforts to adopt a green public transportation system and presented park visitors with the three On-Line Electric Vehicles (OLEVs), which will be operated immediately thereafter. Approximately one hundred people, including science high school students across the nation, attended the ceremony and had a chance to ride the trams.
KAIST unveiled the prototype of an electric tram to the public in March 2010, and since then it has developed three commercial trams. The Korean government and the institute have worked on legal issues to embark on the full-scale commercialization of OLEV, and the long awaited approval from the government on such issues as standardization of the OLEV technology and road infrastructure, regulation of electromagnetic fields and electricity safety, and license and permits for vehicle eligibility, finally came through.
The On-Line Electric Vehicle (OLEV) is no ordinary electric car in that it is remotely charged via electromagnetic fields created by electric cables buried beneath the road. Unlike other currently available electric cars, OLEV can travel unlimited distances without having to stop to recharge. OLEV also has a small battery onboard, which enables the vehicle to travel on roads that are not equipped with underground power cables. This battery, however, is only one-fifth of the size of a conventional electric vehicle battery, resulting in considerable savings in the cost, size, and weight of the vehicle.
The OLEV project was initiated in 2009 as a method of resolving the battery problems of electric cars in a creative and disruptive way. KAIST came up with the idea of supplying electricity directly to the cars instead of depending solely on the onboard battery for power. Since then, the university has developed core technologies related to OLEV such as the “Shaped Magnetic Field in Resonance (SMFIR),” which enables an electric car to collect the magnetic fields and convert them into electricity, and the “Segment Technology,” which controls the flow of electromagnetic waves through an automatic power-on/shut-down system, thereby eliminating accidental exposure of the electromagnetic waves to pedestrians or non-OLEV cars.
According to KAIST, three types of OLEV have been developed thus far: electric buses, trams, and sport utility vehicles (SUVs). The technical specifications of the most recently developed OLEV (an electric bus), the OLEV research team at the university said, are as follows:
· Power cables are buried 15cm beneath the road surface.
· On average, over 80% power transmission efficiency is achieved.
· The distance gap between the road surface and the underbody of the vehicle is 20cm.
· The OLEV bus has a maximum electricity pickup capacity of 100kW.
· The OLEV bus complies with international standards for electromagnetic fields (below 24.1 mG).
The eco-friendly electric trams at Seoul Grand Park consume no fossil fuels and do not require any overhead wires or cables. Out of the total circular driving route (2.2km), only 16% of the road, 372.5m, has the embedded power lines, indicating that OLEV does not require extensive reconstruction of the road infrastructure. The city government of Seoul signed a memorandum of understanding with KAIST in 2009 as part of its initiatives to curtail emissions from public transportation and provide cleaner air to its citizens. Both parties plan to expand such collaboration to other transportation systems including buses in the future.
KAIST expects the OLEV technology to be applied in industries ranging from transportation to electronics, aviation, maritime transportation, robotics, and leisure. There are several ongoing international collaborative projects to utilize the OLEV technology for a variety of transportation needs, such as inner city commute systems (bus and trolley) and airport shuttle buses, in nations including Malaysia, US, Germany, and Denmark.
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More information about KAIST’s On-Line Electric Vehicle can be found at http://olev.co.kr/en/index.php. For any inquiries, please contact Lan Yoon at 82-42-350-2295 (cell: 82-10-2539-4303) or by email at hlyoon@kaist.ac.kr.
2011.07.22 View 15891 -
Scientists develop highly efficient industrial catalyst
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/business/2011/07/14/48/0501000000AEN20110714009600320F.HTML
SEOUL, July 15 (Yonhap) -- South Korean scientists said Friday that they have developed a highly efficient nanoporous industrial catalyst that can have a considerable impact on chemical and oil-refining sectors.
The team of scientists led by Ryoo Ryong, a chemistry professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), said the solid zeolite compound developed in the laboratory has a reaction speed five to 10 times faster than that of conventional materials.
Zeolite, which is made from silica and aluminium, is frequently used as an absorbent, water purifier and in nuclear reprocessing, although it is mainly employed in the chemical industry.
The annual size of the zeolite market is estimated at US$2.5 billion with output using the material topping $30 billion. At present, 41 percent of all catalysts used in the chemical sector are nano-scale zeolite materials.
The KAIST team said that because the new zeolite is made up of different sized pores, the material can be used as a catalyst when existing materials are unable to act as a changing agent.
"Existing zeolites only have pores under 1 nanometer in diameter, but the new material has holes that range from 1 nanometer to 3.5 nanometers, which are all arranged in a regular honeycomb arrangement," Ryoo said. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.
He said the ability to have both micro- and meso-sized pores is key to the faster reaction speed that is an integral part of raising efficiency. The South Korean researchers used a so-called surfactant process to make the different sizes of pores.
The development is a breakthrough because researchers and companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. have been trying to build zeolite with different sizes of pores for the past two decades without making serious headway. There are more than 200 different types of zeolites in the world.
Ryoo, who received funding from the government, has requested intellectual property rights for the discovery, which has been published in the latest issue of Science magazine. He also developed another zeolite in the past that can transform methanol to gasoline up to 10 times more efficiently than existing catalysts.
Exxon Mobil has expressed interest in the two zeolites made by Ryoo"s team. Undisclosed South Korean petrochemical companies have also made inquiries that may lead to commercial development in the future.
"There are some technical issues to resolve, mainly related with mass production and stability," the scientist said.
He said full-fledge production will be determined by how much companies are willing to spend on research to speed up development that can bring down overall production costs.
The KAIST team said it took two years to make the new zeolite, which can be custom made to meet specific needs.
(END)
2011.07.15 View 12771 -
Using Light to Deliver Drugs to the Brain
The cerebral blood vessels have a unique blood-brain barrier. Using this unique structure, Professor Choi Chul Hee (Department of Bio-Brain Engineering) developed a technique to deliver drugs safely to the brain using lasers to alter the diffusivity of the blood-brain barrier.
The blood-brain barrier allows the entry of only those drugs related to metabolic functions which made the entry of other drugs difficult.
Due to this property it was difficult to administer the drug to a patient and have it affect the patient. Therefore the question was is it possible to maintain the effectiveness of the drug and allow it to pass through the barrier?
The conventional method was to actually alter the structure of the drug or drill of small hole in the head and administering the drug directly, but these methods proved to be high risk and expensive.
Professor Choi’s team used an ultra-short frequency laser beam on the barrier for 1/1000th of a second on the barrier to temporarily inhibit its function thereby allowing the drug to enter the brain safely.
2011.06.20 View 9722
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Biomimetic Carbon Nanotube Fiber Synthesis Technology Developed
The byssus of the mussel allows it to live in harsh conditions where it is constantly battered by crashing waves by allowing the mussel to latch onto the seaside rocks. This particular characteristic of the mussel is due to the unique structure and high adhesiveness of the mussel’s byssus.
KAIST’s Professor Hong Soon Hyung (Department of Material Science and Engineering) and Professor Lee Hae Shin (Department of Chemistry) and the late Professor Park Tae Kwan (Department of Bio Engineering) were able to reproduce the mussel’s byssus using carbon nanotubes.
The carbon nanotube, since its discovery in 1991, was regarded as the next generation material due to its electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties. However due to its short length of several nanometers, its industrial use was limited.
The KAIST research team referred to the structure of the byssus of the mussel to solve this problem.
The byssus is composed of collagen fibers and Mefp-1 protein which are in a cross-linking structure. The Mefp-1 protein has catecholamine that allows it to bind strongly with the collagen fiber.
In the artificial structure, the carbon nanotube took on the role of the collagen fibers and the macromolecular adhesive took on the role of the catecholamine. The result was a fiber that was ultra-light and ultra-strong.
The results of the experiment were published in the Advanced Materials magazine and is patent registered both domestically and internationally.
2011.06.20 View 13422
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New Scientist: Wind power harnesses the energy of galloping, June 2, 2011
Researchers from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, KAIST, released their research results in Smart Materials and Structures on ways to “harness strange properties of turbulent airs.” They built a prototype that produces energy using a specific type of unstable airflow called “wake galloping.” New Scientist wrote an article about the paper, which appeared on June 2, 2011. For the article, please follow the link below.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028145.700-wind-power-harnesses-the-energy-of-galloping.html?full=true&print=true
2011.06.04 View 9378
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From Pencil Lead to Batteries: the Unlimited Transformation of Carbon
Those materials, like lead or diamond, made completely up of Carbon are being used in numerous ways as materials or parts. Especially with the discovery of carbon nanotubes, graphemes, and other carbon based materials in nanoscale, the carbon based materials are receiving a lot of interest in both fields of research and industry.
The carbon nanotubes and graphemes are considered as the ‘dream material’ and have a structure of a cross section of a bee hive. Such structure allows the material to have strength higher than that of a diamond and still be able to bend, be transparent and also conduct electricity. However the problem up till now was that these carbon structures appeared in layers and in bunches and were therefore hard to separate to individual layers or tubes.
Professor Kim Sang Wook’s research team developed the technology that can assemble the grapheme and carbon nanotubes in a three dimensional manner.
The team was able to assemble the grapheme ad carbon nanotubes in an entirely new three dimensional structure. In addition, the team was able to efficiently extract single layered grapheme from cheap pencil lead.
Professor Kim is scheduled to give a guest lecture in the “Materials Research Society” in San Francisco and the paper was published in ‘Advanced Functional Materials’ magazine as an ‘Invited Feature Article’.
2011.05.11 View 11831
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New Diagnosis System for Cardiovascular Disease Developed
Professor Park Hyun Kyu of the department of Biological-Chemical Engineering developed a new diagnosis system for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases using E.coli to test the homocysteine concentration in the blood.
The research team used the genetic recombination process to produce two different biologically illuminant nutrition cultures and compared the growth rate of the homocysteine between the two cultures by comparing the degree of luminescence.
The technology can allow the simultaneous analysis of blood samples en masse and is also economical and thus is being regarded as a major step forward in the field of homocysteine concentration analysis which is a rapidly growing field.
The conventional method used high performance liquid chromatography which took a long time to complete and was costly to run.
The advantage of the newly developed system is that it gets rid of costly steps as it only needs to grow E.coli and measure the luminescence of the naturally occurring illuminant.
The research was published as the cover paper of the April edition of ‘Analytical Chemistry’.
2011.05.11 View 8985
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Artificial Photosynthesis Technology Developed using Solar Cell Material
Humanity is facing global warming and the exhaustion of fossil fuel. In order to remedy these problems, efforts to produce fuel without the production of carbon dioxide using solar energy continues constantly.
KAIST’s Professor Park Chan Beom and Professor Ryu Jeong Ki’s research teams of the department of Material Science and Engineering has developed an artificial photosynthesis system that mimics the photosynthesis in nature using solar cell technology.
The development of the technology is sure to pave the way to ‘Eco-Friendly Green Biological Process’.
Photosynthesis is the process by which a biological entity produces chemical products like carbohydrates using physical and chemical reactions using solar energy as its energy source.
Professor Park’s team was able to develop the artificial photosynthesis technology with a biological catalyst as its basis.
The result of the experiment was published in ‘Advanced Materials’ magazine on the 26th of April edition and has been patented.
2011.05.11 View 11445
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Genetic Cause of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) Found
The cooperative research team consisting research teams under Professor Kim Eun Joon and Professor Kang Chang Won of the department of Biological Sciences discovered that ADHD arises from the deficiency of GIT1 protein in the brain’s neural synapses.
ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is found in around 5% of children around the world and is a disorder where the child becomes unable to concentrate, show over the top responses, and display impulsive behavior.
The research team found that the difference between children with ADHD and those without it is one base in the GIT1 gene. The difference of a single base causes the underproduction of this protein, and those children with low levels of the protein had a higher probability to develop ADHD.
In addition, further evidence was provided when the research team conducted mice experiments. Those mice with low levels of GIT1 exhibited impulsive and exaggerated reactions like humans with ADHD, had learning disabilities, and produced abnormal brain waves. And upon injecting these mice with cure for ADHD, the symptoms of ADHD disappeared.
The impulsive behavior of ADHD children disappears as the child enters adulthood and a similar pattern was found in mice. A mice with low levels of GIT1 showed impulsive behaviors when 2 months old, but these behaviors disappeared as it got older to around 7 months old (equivalent to 20~30 years old for humans).
Professor Kim Eun Joon commented that there has to be equilibrium between mechanisms that excite the neurons and mechanisms that calm the neurons, but the lack of GIT1 leads to the decrease in the mechanisms that calm the neurons which causes the impulsive behavior of ADHD patients.
In addition, Professor Kang Chang Won commented that the results of the experiment has been receiving rave reviews and is being seen as the new method in the production of the cure for ADHD.
The result of the experiment was published in the online edition of Nature Medicine magazine.
2011.04.30 View 11484
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Low Cost and Simple Gene Analysis Technology Developed
Professor Park Hyun Kyu of the Department of Biology and Chemical Engineering has developed a ‘real time CPR’ using Methylene Blue (nucleic acid bonding molecule with Electro-Chemical property).
The current gene analysis being used in the field is the real time PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) which takes advantage of the luminescent property of the gene and therefore requires expensive machines and chemicals to run.
By contrast, the electro-chemical method is easy to use and low cost and, most importantly, it allows the machine to become small and portable.
Professor Park’s research team used the decrease in the electro-chemical signal when the Methylene Blue reacts with nucleic acid and applied this to PCR which allowed for the real time analysis of the nucleic acid amplification process.
With the result of the experiment as the basis, the team was able to perform a trial with Chlamydia trachomatis, a pathogen that causes sexually transmitted disease.
The result showed that the electro-chemical method showed the same performance level as the real time PCR, which proved that the technology can be applied to diagnosing various diseases and gene research.
2011.04.30 View 10322
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The Irish Times: Gene link identified in ADHD, April 18, 2011
The Irish Times wrote an article on the recent research breakthrough made by a KAIST research team to identify a gene that triggers the syndrome of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) among children. Given the heightened attention to the syndrome across the world, the research result has received a great deal of attention not only from the academia but also from the media and public.
For the article, please visit http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0418/1224294910305.html. The research paper was appeared online April 17, 2011 in Nature Medicine, which will be printed in its May 2011 issue. For the paper, please click the link of http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.2330.html.
2011.04.18 View 10381
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Businessweek: How Twitter Could Unleash World Peace, April 11, 2011
A KAIST graduate scholar, Meeyoung Cha, conducted a joint study with international researchers and released a paper on the aspect of twitter as an emerging cyber arena for political and social debates and discussions. An article on the paper from Businessweek follows:
Businessweek
April 11, 2011, 9:08PM EST text size: TT
How Twitter Could Unleash World Peace
Researchers from Britain, Korea, and Germany have determined that the amount of fresh information you get on Twitter is less a matter of what you follow than whom—and who follows you
By Bobbie Johnson
On certain days, Twitter can feel like the world"s biggest, fastest echo chamber. Since we tend to follow people who are similar to us, we often see our own views reflected back—meaning a gloomy cloud of irritation can rapidly swirl into a cyclone of outrage as we hear from other people who feel as we do. A group of computer scientists have discovered that the opposite may also be true. Can Twitter be part of the solution, not merely part of the problem?
In a study to be presented at a conference in July, a team of researchers from the U.K."s University of Cambridge, Korea"s Graduate School of cultural Technology-KAIST, and Germany"s Max Planck Institute for Software Systems show how Twitter can provide users greater access to more varied political viewpoints and media sources than they might otherwise get.
The paper, called "The Media Landscape in Twitter(http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/out/twitter-diverse.pdf)," explains how the team made surprising discoveries when they looked into the site"s usage patterns. First they looked at who follows whom and discovered that Twitter is a highly politicized space. Then they examined patterns of tweeting and retweeting to try to understand how people receive information on Twitter—and what they might see. Their conclusion: Although Twitter is a pretty partisan space, it can offer unprecedented opportunities to break down the barriers that plague local, national, and international politics.
How? Through retweets and interaction—what the authors call "indirect media exposure." As they put it, this "expands the political diversity of news to which users are exposed to a surprising extent, increasing the range by between 60 percent and 98 percent. These results are valuable because they have not been readily available to traditional media and they can help predict how we will read news and how publishers will interact with us in the future."
If you"re interested in the way Twitter works, I recommend reading the paper, which isn"t very long. Meanwhile, let"s boil it down to a few key pieces of data and see what lessons they can teach.
Most Twitter users are political. Just over half (50.8 percent) of all Twitter users studied showed a distinct political bias in the media outlets and individuals they followed. Most of those lean to the left of the political spectrum, accounting for 62 percent of users who demonstrated some bias. Thirty-seven percent were doggedly centrist. Just 1 percent of Twitter users who showed a political preference were right-wing.
Here are a couple of caveats about reading too much into the sharp divide the authors found. Given that Twitter"s user base is younger and more metropolitan than the societal norm, it"s not surprising that it"s weighted to the left. It"s worth noting that this study was undertaken more than a year ago; since then, Twitter has grown dramatically, while global politics have largely skewed back toward the right. Twitter"s user base today might reflect a more-balanced political picture. Either way, there"s a big split.
Twitter has secondary and tertiary benefits. Most organizations comprehend Twitter in simple terms: More followers means more exposure. But the study shows that it"s not just about those you follow, but those your followers follow—essentially the people in your extended network. The network offers a number of routes for information from fresh sources to get to you. According to the study, some 80 percent of users choose to follow at least 10 media sources, but they are exposed to between 6 and 10 times as many media sources through their friends.
People outweigh brands. Many of the biggest Twitter accounts are big media brands such as CNN (TWX) and Time, but the study suggests that Twitter"s active users tend to prefer individuals over outlets. So while the average follower of @NYTimes (NYT) has six followers apiece, individual journalists have followers who boast a median following count of around 100. That gives individual journalists—who are, the study says, more likely to link to a multiplicity of sources—a much wider, more influential network of connections.
The inference is that the personal touch of a journalist is more important than the lofty, impersonal tone of publications that largely act as promotion channels for their content. It"s a discovery that reminded me of Twitter"s recent blog post on the science of the hashtag, which found that hashtags explode in usage when they are picked up by individuals with the most dedicated—not necessarily the largest—followings.
Active users access a wider range of views. The researchers say that indirect exposure expands political diversity by a "significant amount," despite other studies showing a tendency for social networks to do the opposite. "Other studies have found a stronger tendency of homophily; blogs of different political views rarely linked to each other," they point out. "One possible reason is that a Twitter network encompasses several different relationships—from shared interest, to familial ties, friends, and acquaintances—so political similarity doesn"t necessarily exist in all such ties."
This is not to say that Twitter"s creators should be preparing a Nobel Prize-winning speech. Far from it: The influence of its diversity is unknown. It could be that many people who see messages they disagree with simply change their behavior to screen out such material in future. But it shows that there is a potential to do something positive at Twitter. It"s clear there"s much work to be done. The researchers say they want to investigate a number of areas they"ve uncovered, having provided important insights at a time when politics seem more fractious and divided than ever.
2011.04.12 View 12361