World's first battery-free cell phone developed

July 9, 2017

Washington, Jul 9: Scientists, including those of Indian origin, have invented the first battery-less cell phone that consumes almost zero power and runs by harvesting energy from ambient radio signals or light.batteryfree

The team also made Skype calls using its battery-free phone, demonstrating that the prototype made of commercial, off-the-shelf components can receive and transmit speech and communicate with a base station.

"We have built what we believe is the first functioning cell phone that consumes almost zero power," said Shyam Gollakota, associate professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the US.

Researchers eliminated a power-hungry step in most modern cellular transmissions - converting analogue signals that convey sound into digital data that a phone can understand.

This process consumes so much energy that it has been impossible to design a phone that can rely on ambient power sources, researchers said.

Instead, the battery-free cell phone takes advantage of tiny vibrations in a phone's microphone or speaker that occur when a person is talking into a phone or listening to a call.

To transmit speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device's microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that are picked up by the phone's speaker.

In the prototype device, the user presses a button to switch between these two 'transmitting' and 'listening' modes, researchers said.

The prototype was able to perform basic phone functions - transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons.

Using Skype, researchers were able to receive incoming calls, dial out and place callers on hold with the battery- free phone.

The team designed a custom base station to transmit and receive the radio signals. That technology conceivably could be integrated into standard cellular network infrastructure or Wi-Fi routers now commonly used to make calls.

"You could imagine in the future that all cell towers or Wi-Fi routers could come with our base station technology embedded in it, and if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cell phone coverage everywhere," said Vamsi Talla, a research associate at UW.

The battery-free phone does still require a small amount of energy to perform some operations. The prototype has a power budget of 3.5 micro-watts.

Researchers demonstrated how to harvest this small amount of energy from two different sources. The battery-free phone prototype can operate on power gathered from ambient radio signals transmitted by a base station up to 31 feet away.

Using power harvested from ambient light with a tiny solar cell - roughly the size of a grain of rice - the device was able to communicate with a base station that was 50 feet away, they said.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

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Agencies
June 12,2020

New Delhi, Jun 12: The Supreme Court on Friday asked Solicitor General Tushar Mehta to convene a meeting of the Finance Ministry and RBI officials over the weekend to decide whether interest incurred on EMIs during the moratorium period can be charged by banks.

A bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M.R. Shah queried Mehta as the court was concerned since the Centre has deferred loan for three months.

"Then how can interest of these 3 months be added?" the apex bench asked. Mehta replied: "I need to sit down with the RBI officials and have a meeting."

SBI's counsel, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, intervened during the proceedings and said "all banks are of the view that interest cannot be waived for a six month EMI moratorium period".

"We need to discuss it with the RBI," insisted Rohatgi.

Justice Bhushan then asked Mehta to convene a meeting of the RBI and Finance Ministry officials over the weekend, and listed the matter for further hearing on June 17.

The top court, during the hearing, indicated that it was not considering a complete waiver of interest but was only concerned that postponement of interest shouldn't accrue further interest on it.

After the RBI said the waiver of interest charges on EMIs during moratorium will lead to loss of 1 per cent of the nation's GDP, the top court had earlier asked the Finance Ministry to reply, whether the interest could be waived or it would continue during the moratorium period.

The top court said these are not normal times, and it is a serious issue, as on one hand moratorium is granted and then, the interest is charged on loans during this period.

"There are two issues in this (matter). No interest during the moratorium period and no interest on interest," said Justice Bhushan. The observation from the bench came on a petition by Gajendra Sharma, in which he sought a direction to declare portion of the RBI's March 27 notification as ultra vires to the extent it charged interest on the loan amount during the moratorium period.

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Agencies
February 26,2020

Unnao, Feb 26: Ever heard of someone wishing a 'bright future' for the dead? In a bizarre incident in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district, a village head issued a death certificate with the wish for an elderly man who had died last month.

The incident took place in the Sirwariya village in Asoha block where an elderly person Laxmi Shankar died after a prolonged illness on January 22.

His son went to the village head Babulal and requested him to issue a death certificate that he needed for some financial transactions.

Babulal not only issued the death certificate, but also 'wished' 'a bright future for the deceased' on the document.

The village head wrote in the death certificate -- "Main inke ujjwal bhavishya ki kaamna karta hoon (I wish him a bright future)."

The letter went viral on the social media on Monday after which the village head apologised for the error and issued a new death certificate.

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Agencies
July 2,2020

Paris, Jul 2: Several interacting exoplanets have already been spotted by satellites. But a new breakthrough has been achieved with, for the first time, the detection directly from the ground of an extrasolar system of this type.

An international collaboration including CNRS researchers has discovered an unusual planetary system, dubbed WASP-148, using the French instrument SOPHIE at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Universite).

The scientists analysed the star's motion and concluded that it hosted two planets, WASP-148b and WASP-148c. The observations showed that the two planets were strongly interacting, which was confirmed from other data.

Whereas the first planet, WASP-148b, orbits its star in nearly nine days, the second one, WASP-148c, takes four times longer. This ratio between the orbital periods implies that the WASP-148 system is close to resonance, meaning that there is enhanced gravitational interaction between the two planets. And it turns out that the astronomers did indeed detect variations in the orbital periods of the planets.

While a single planet, uninfluenced by a second one, would move with a constant period, WASP-148b and WASP-148c undergo acceleration and deceleration that provides evidence of their interaction.

The study will shortly be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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