Monthly Archives: December 2014

New Product Could Revolutionize Musculoskeletal Tissue Repair

Treating patients with their own blood, modified to increase the concentration of heal-inducing platelets, has been touted as the “cure-all” for bone, muscle, and tissue repair for athletes, weekend warriors or those with traumatic injuries.

But the outcomes of this therapy, called platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, have been unpredictable. So researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Allegheny General Hospital (AGH) have devised what they believe is a better way to deliver the therapy—as a putty—and the initial results have been encouraging.

CMU Lunar Rover Wins GLXP Milestone Prize

The Google Lunar XPRIZE has awarded Andy, a four-wheeled lunar rover designed and built by Carnegie Mellon University, with a Milestone Prize for mobility. It is one of three Milestone Prizes awarded to CMU and Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology, which have partnered in pursuit of the XPrize.

Milestone Prizes were awarded in three categories: mobility, lander and imaging, with Astrobotic winning for its Griffin lander and its imaging technology. A total of nine Milestone Prizes were awarded in the three categories; the Astrobotic/CMU teams was the only one to win prizes in each category.

“Andy has proven to be a tough, smart, sure-footed machine,” said William “Red” Whittaker, professor of robotics, who led a team of about 50 students, faculty and staff members from across the CMU campus to create the rover. “We’ve shaken it to simulate launch forces, driven it through moon dirt and exposed it to the extremes of lunar temperatures among many, many tests. Our team and our machine faced a rigorous evaluation by world-class judges and came out on top.”

CMU’s mobility prize included a $500,000 cash award. Astrobotic received $1 million for its lander win and $250,000 for the imaging category, for a total of $1.75 million in winnings.

Breathe Cam Provides People With Tool To Study The Air We Breathe

A system of four cameras, called Breathe Cam, now keeps a constant watch on air quality over Pittsburgh, providing citizens with a new interactive tool for monitoring and documenting visual pollution in the air they breathe and even tracing it back to its sources.

Funded by The Heinz Endowments as part of its Breathe Project, the camera system was developed and deployed by the CREATE Lab in Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Anyone can access the cameras online at http://breatheproject.org/learn/breathe-cam, where images of the Downtown, East End and Mon Valley skylines are updated around the clock.

Using the interactive controls, people can zoom in on items of interest, whether it’s a hovering brown cloud or individual smokestacks or coke plants. They can scan back in time to observe changes in visibility or to try to find the sources of dirty air. They also can skip back to particular dates and times that have been catalogued since the cameras were installed.

The researchers also have developed a computer vision tool to help people identify and quantify events of interest, such as releases from a smokestack. Users can correlate the visual conditions with hourly reports of fine particulate matter, ozone and other pollutant levels recorded by Allegheny County Health Department air monitoring stations.