MICROSCOPES
Space-age fashions still down to earth
What will clothing be like 50 years from now? "It will be very much like it is today," says Doris Kincade of the apparel program at Virginia Tech. Some 1950's clothing predictions for 2000 were "space suits" and metallic fabrics - probably influenced by the just-started space race, she says. "But today, instead of people on Earth dressing like astronauts, we see the space shuttle crews working in polo shirts, running shorts, and athletic shoes. Advances in the apparel industry will not be in the look, but in manufacture, distribution, and merchandising."
Clothing of the future will
continue to have the look and feel of natural fibers, but will be made
of new synthetic fibers, according to Kincade. These fibers will wick (move
moisture away from the body), breathe, and insulate like the natural fibers,
but will be easier to care for, have better shape retention, be more comfortable,
and wear better. Clothing and textiles faculty and students' research includes
protective clothing, fit, manufacturing, and marketing.
People who need protective
clothing do not always wear it or wear it correctly because it is uncomfortable,
researchers found. Graduate students Ann Hennessy and Angkhana Tultrairat
are examining methods to test protective garments for comfort. "Fibers
are needed that have one-way wicking and provide temperature control while
protecting health care workers, firefighters, and agricultural workers
from air- and moisture-borne pathogens and pollutants,"Kincade says.
Master's student Michele
Jones is researching body types. In a study of tall women, she found that
there are two body types: women with a long torso and women with long legs.
However,manufacturers make tall-size garments proportionately tall - somewhat
longer in body and leg - thus missing half or more of the tall-women's
market, leaving tall women to "make do" with the sizes available.
Kincade is working with the
faculty in industrial systems engineering at Virginia Tech to develop a
system to completely design and construct a garment on a computer. This
allows everyone involved in the process to know all the properties of a
garment before the first sample is even sewn. "However, textiles are not
like a car," Kincade notes. "There are many differences in fabrics. You
have to consider color, fuzziness, thickness, weave, fiber, texture, feel,
the way it cuts the light. We need improved graphics capabilities,including
better color compatibility from computerto computer."
Kincade is working to improve
ways ofpresenting merchandise by computer. "The average customer does not
yet have the computer capabilities to know how a garment will feel, how
it will fit, and what they will look like wearing it. What we need is a
virtual reality technology that is not only capable of showing us an object,
but one that will let us feel it, put it on, and look at ourselves," she
says. In the future, successful companies will be virtual companies, designing,
manufacturing, and marketing by computers linked around the world, says
Kinkade. "Such companies will be able to design and manufacture better
and cheaper. Smaller and more flexible companies will be the ones that
thrive."
Satellite-assisted farming on the horizon
A satellite-based system may help farmers become more efficient in an increasingly competitive industry. With just 10 farmers experimenting with the high-tech system in the state, the reality of that vision may seem far off, concedes Dan Brann, Virginia Tech professor of crop and soil environmental
science.
"I'm convinced, though, that it will become the standard
method of doing business in the next 10 years," he says. "We are in a
precision management era. This is going to determine the success of a
lot of people."
Called "precision farming,"
the concept uses global positioning system equipment to identify a specific
spot on the earth. Equipment mounted on a combine receives positional information
from 24 Department of Defense satellites and is able to determine its location
to within a few feet. A computer on the combine integrates the precise
location with equally precise yield data determined each second as the
combine goes across a field.
Knowing how yields vary across
a field can be the first step toward reducing crop-limiting factors. Next,
intensive soil sampling by global position gives a farmer the information
needed to determine if major yield changes are related to nutrients. "With
this information we can vary inputs (such as fertilizer) on multiple areas
in a field," Brann says. He says the system is complex and "it currently
takes a commitment on the part of the farmer to get accurate yield information."
The computer software used to process the data is still being refined and
must be made more user-friendly.
Saied Mostaghimi, professor of biological
systems engineering, says the return on the investment farmers make
in the equipment depends on the value of the crop and the variability within
fields. For example, a farmer with fields with fairly uniform characteristics
may not find the increase in yield produced by precision techniques enough
to justify the investment in equipment. Nevertheless, precision farming
has the potential to increase yields, provide savings due to efficiencies,
improve crop quality, and improve water quality. "The total inputs into
a field will not necessarily be less," he says. "But they will be applied
more efficiently."
The signals from the DOD
satellites are often degraded for security reasons, making the position
information accurate to within 300 to 400 feet. However, in much of the
state, farmers can pinpoint their position within three feet using a differential
correction signal from U.S. Coast Guard facilities or a private service,
according to Philip W. McClellan, an agricultural engineer with Virginia Tech. Getting an accurate position
is only the first hurdle. "One of the real challenges is managing and interpreting the data," McClellan says. "You need a computer. There's so much information, you can't do it any other way. And you have to relate yield variation to the correct cause." While precision farming is still in the trial and error stage, much is being learned to make the technology a practical tool for farmers.
– Stewart MacInnis, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Estrogen/immune dysfunction connection studied
Estrogens and estrogen-like
compounds have been implicated in the development of a host of immune-mediated
disorders such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid disorders, diabetes,
and others that seem to affect women more frequently than men. "Estrogens
have been shown to be powerful modulators of the immune system," says Ansar
Ahmed, an immunologist in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine who specializes in the new
field of immunoendocrinology.
"What remains unknown is
the immunological consequences of long-term exposure to estrogen." Researchers
began focusing on a connection between estrogen and autoimmune disorders
when they observed that male hormones seemed to do a much better job of
suppressing the development of autoimmune disorders than female hormones,
which tend to increase their incidence.
With a $562,506 grant from
the National Institutes of Health, Ahmed and his colleagues hope to learn
more about the long-term consequences of estrogen overexposure. Specifically,
the researchers will determine whether laboratory animals exposed prenatally
to hyper-estrogenous environments have abnormal immune systems. Ahmed believes
this altered immune system makes these animals more susceptible to immune-mediated
disorders and less resistant to infections later in life.
One long-term goal of the
research is to learn how to employ estrogen antagonists (or anti-estrogen
or modified hormones) as immunotherapeutic agents, he says.
– Jeff Douglas, Virginia-Maryland
Regional College of Veterinary Medicine
Wireless
communications 50 years from now
You will be able to buy disposable
wireless phones at the grocery store much like you can buy a disposable
camera today. You will use it a few times and throw it away. The price
of wireless communication service will be comparable to land-line communications.
In 2047, there will be more
bits per second transmitted in Virginia than in whole world in 1997. Wireless
communications will allow "enhanced reality" to be feasible. As technology
becomes more complicated it will be necessary to make the use of technology
more simple. Computers are a prime example of how technology develops in
this way. The computing hardware is vastly more complex than it was 10
years ago, yet computers are much easier to use than they were 10 years
ago.
Enhanced reality with wireless
communications might provide a means of simplifying the operation of highly
complex systems. An enhanced reality system with a wireless link would
allow wearers of enhanced-reality glasses to see still-pictures or video
projected in the field of view to describe their surroundings. Objects
in a field of view would transmit information about themselves to the users
glasses.
For instance, if you wanted
to fix a jam in a copy machine you could wear enhanced reality glasses
and when you opened the cover, directions would seem to appear on the copy
machine explaining how to fix the machine. You might even see a "virtual
hand" showing you how to pull out the necessary part to fix the paper jam.
With this capability a person with very little training could perform very
complicated tasks.
Obviously, such technology
would require extremely high data rates between the object and the user's
glasses. A typical room might have billions of bits per second being transmitted
within a very confined area. The Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group
at Virginia Tech has a grant with the Defense Advanced Research Agency
(DARPA) to develop the fundamental technology that would allow vast amounts
of data to be transmitted in confined regions with limited radio channels.
Proto-type hardware is currently being developed in the lab to demonstrate
this capability.
– Jeffrey H. Reed, Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group and Center for Wireless Telecommunications
Safer wireless antennas receive patent
Antennas for hand-held radios
and cellular phones can be safer and perform better, Virginia Tech electrical
engineers Warren Stutzman and J. Randall Nealy have demonstrated.
Stutzman and Nealy received
a patent (July 30, 1996 #5,541,609) for a high-performance, low radiation-hazard
antenna for hand-held devices operating at 1900 megahertz (MHz) and above.
These frequencies are now being pioneered to provide more communications
to supplement the crowded cellular telephone bands that operate at 800
MHz.
With conventional antennas,
the signal is transmitted in all directions and part of it is lost due
to absorption by the user's head. "Safetenna" eliminates transmission in
the direction where the signal would be blocked by the user's head, thereby
avoiding potentially harmful absorption of power by the user's body.
Tests of Safetenna demonstrate
that total radiated power is unchanged by the presence of the operator
and there are no gaps in the directional properties of Safetenna as there
are with conventional antennas.
"The goal of improved performance
for communication is in harmony with safety; there is no trade-off," explains
Stutzman, a faculty member in the Antenna
Group
Safetenna is available for
licensing from Virginia Tech Intellectual
Properties, Inc.
