Nano Cushion - Collision Impact reduction

Have you ever thought what is the simplest logic behind seat belts and safety crash bags that are installed in your cars? The logic behind them is that they will "elongate" the time of collision by a fraction of seconds, there by reducing the impact, the time taken to transform the kinetic energy to potential energy.

Imagine someone falling down from a 3 rd storied building - if he has directly hit the ground after coming down whole of 35 ft, he is likely to die. What if he hits a tree branch at around 24 ft from ground, then hits the balcony at 12 ft, a moving trolley 4 ft from ground before he hits the floor - he is much more likely survive but ofcourse with crushed bones. What happened to him was that the difference of potential energies at 35ft to floor has been distributed in series of impacts instead of one big thud. In world of finite element analysis, they multiply these impacts by an order of million and there by giving a smooth ride instead of a fall to the guy who jumped out of the window.

Coming back to air bags, this is achieved through incremental increase in volume of air (if the bag is taut, then it serves no purpose of a cushion) there by reducing the impact. Instead of this singular and linear non-dynamic way of securing crashes, there gotta be a dynamic way of designing car safety. My design would resemble something like a chain saw, where the teeth can close and open and that can be controlled using a timing device.

1. When all teeth are closed, then the surface is flat
2. When all teeth are open, the surface is rugged, like a saw.

This device is fixed underneath the car seat - the seat is firmly coupled to a plank that is edged on the bottom. Essentially, when the saw beneath is in "open" state, the teeth of the seat and teeth of the saw clasp hard and holds the seat tight from bottom. When the saw is in "close" state, the seat can slide back and forth. During headlong crash, the car seat would move forward, so the objective is to make sure that the seat stays "dynamically" stable while the crash is happening.

It can be achieved in following manner. The saw should be motor powered (think electronically controlled motor) to rotate in direction opposite to motion of the seat. If the seat is moving forward at a speed of 10 mph, then the saw goes in open state and moves it back at 12 mph and goes into "close" state. By a series of "open"-"close"-"open"- "close", the seat is let to move forward and backward. If this is done a million times within a second, it would makes the seat to be essentially stable all through crash - there by creating a nano mechanical cushion engine.

Nanomedicine - Targetted medicine delivery

With all due respects paid to the medical advancements happened in past few centuries, we as human-kind are lagging in germ-warfare by atleast a millennium, by modest standards. The reason I say this is that, we still need to go see a doctor and he need to prescribe us medicine, which we induce into our body either by various means - oral being the most predominant. There are alternate medical treatments, which in some cases are proving to be effective, but nevertheless very archiac.

Medicine is not archiac, the way we are practising is. When there is pain in shoulder, the medicine which is calibrated based on ppm calibration is induced into the body, which not only delivers the medicine to the troubled parts of the body but also to the healther parts , which is not required. In some cases, the duration of the medicine has to be made longer (time scale wise), so that the medicine wont become poison the rest of the body. To elucidate further, let us assume that the shoulder cramp needs 10 units of medicine - but with today's medicine delivery capability (which is oral or syrenge), giving 10 units to shoulder means giving 10 units to EVERY part of the body. So doctors and pharmacists go into the bargaining room and optimize so that they give "rations" of medicine (say 1 unit a day) to make sure the rest of body is not treating the medicine as poison.

The other tradeoff in today's method is that one need to take more medicine than necessary, which in terms of economics is pure waste of money.

So how does nanotech help us? By providing us such small scale particles, that can identify the body part with trouble, carry the medicine with them in small backpacks, deliver it to the nano-patient and come out (maybe via urine or maybe by limo, who cares).

The link that I provided above gives us a great understanding medical vision that is propelled by small science. Lets hope that we live long enough to see this vision gets realized.