Sensors

A $400,000 overhaul for a portion of Riva Road in Parole is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. July 25, but the county is hoping that the nighttime work will minimize the impact on traffic and business along the thoroughfare.The area affected is between West Street and Admiral Cochrane Drive. The job includes milling and paving, along with repairs to curbs, gutters and sidewalks, adjustment and renovation of 23 manholes, and relocation of traffic sensors at lighted intersections.The contractor, Reliable Contracting Co., will be doing the work from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday through Friday, and is expected to complete the project by the end of August.

When homeowners face life-threatening emergencies in the next century, the first response may not be from an ambulance crew. If current research continues to develop, the house itself could provide the initial medical assistance.Researchers say they are working on designing home safety sensors that identify and react to a medical emergency and, thanks to a new federal housing initiative, are getting the chance to put those and other ideas into action.The National Science Foundation announced a $1.5 million grant program last month to pay for engineering research to help create basic technologies needed to build the next generation of housing.

Tiny machines no bigger than a fingernail, a grain of rice or a red blood cell have been twirling, buzzing and slithering across the pages of science fiction and laboratory benches for years.Now these Lilliputian gadgets are beginning to enter the real world. With the success of crash sensors in automobile air bags, new micromachines are being developed to sniff anthrax or nerve gas, protect nuclear weapons and resuscitate laboratory mice.Enthusiasts call them the advance wave of a technological revolution comparable to the introduction of microchips.

In the papillary loops and whorls on the human fingertip, one of nature's lovelier and more mystical truths kept itself hidden for eons. Only a century ago did scientists discover that no two fingerprints are alike.In recent decades, science has learned that the rest of the human body is equally unique - the scattered specks of color in the eye, the timbre and tenor of a voice, the gradations of heat rising from a face.For years, though, devices designed to recognize such minute anatomical signatures - from facial thermographs to body-odor sensors - were found mostly in Defense Department laboratories, spy novels and movies.

ARINC Inc. of Annapolis has won a contract worth a potential $73.9 million to provide technical support to the Naval Air Warfare Center at Patuxent River.The one-year, $8 million contract has four years of options that greatly increase its potential value.ARINC, which designs and operates communications and information processing systems, will lead a team of smaller companies in the work.The job involves supporting aircraft testing activities consolidated at Patuxent River by the federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission.

A joint venture between Northrop Grumman's Electronic Sensors and Systems Division in Linthicum and ITT Avionics of New Jersey has won a $100 million contract to put radar jammers on South Korean fighter planes, the companies said yesterday.The Airborne Self-Protection Jammer will protect South Korean F-16s from enemy radar threats during combat.Similar systems are being installed in F-18 Hornets operated by air forces in Finland and Switzerland, and the jammer is in use on American F-18s and F-14s in Bosnia and the Middle East.

LOS ANGELES -- Rescue workers amid the rubble of the bomb-ravaged federal office building in Oklahoma City last year expressed their anguish at not knowing where to dig for victims.Only an army of crawling insects could have quickly searched the rubble without risking further death or injury. And what could insects do to help?Plenty, if they could be commanded by people, said Kristofer S. J. Pister, an electrical engineer at the University of California at Los Angeles. What those rescuers needed was a swarm of mechanical "crickets" capable of penetrating the wreckage until they sensed the warmth, the cries or the movements of the victims.

The Air Force has awarded a Columbia technology and manufacturing company a five-year, $62.5 million contract to develop sensors that will be used to help monitor nuclear testing throughout the world, Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski's office announced yesterday.AlliedSignal Technical Services, off Route 108 near Oakland Mills village, will design and produce the sensors, called seismic arrays, as part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The company is a division of Allied Signal Corp.

Snow panic has come to this in Baltimore: They're spying on the pavement.The city plans to bury sensors in the pavement of key roads to determine when enough snowflakes have fallen to make it icy.In addition, three cameras have been aimed at major thoroughfares to determine whether more salt is needed to keep cars from slipping and sliding.It's a little high-tech help for the traditional army of salt trucks and plows.For most of the century, city crews have relied on the same weather forecasts everyone else did. They turned on the radio or just glanced upward.

OK, NOW WE'RE getting mad. We've tried to stay calm. But no more. A nerve has been struck.We're talking about eastbound traffic on Argonne Drive in Northeast Baltimore and many of those wonderful drivers who refuse to obey the left-turn-only sign at Loch Raven Boulevard.There are two lanes, folks, and one is for left turn only, as the sign clearly states and an arrow clearly indicates. Beyond the intersection, the two lanes narrow into one for traffic going straight.Granted, the sign was installed only about two months ago, and it takes time to adjust to the new traffic pattern.

The next time you're in a really nasty Baltimore traffic jam, glance at the driver in the car next to you. Note the grimace, the furrowed brow, the resigned stare. With its start-stop traffic and stomach-churning delays, rush-hour driving in and around Charm City has become a daily test of endurance that tries even the hardiest souls. According to a recent study from the Texas Transportation Institute, Baltimore drivers spent an average of 44 hours in traffic each year - time that could be better spent with family and friends, relaxing, even working.

They started counting the gunshots near the Johns Hopkins University on Nov. 20. So far, 93 sound sensors have detected two noises loud enough to register on a new computer system designed to pinpoint gunfire by the explosion that forces a bullet from the barrel of a gun: * Dec. 2 at 2600 N. Calvert St., at 12:34:05 in the morning. * Dec. 3 at 4 W. University Parkway, at 8:38:32 in the morning. Only two? That's great news for residents of Charles Village and parts of Homewood, Abell and Harwood - residential neighborhoods east of the Hopkins campus in North Baltimore.

FRESNO, Calif. -- Participants at last month's World Ag Expo in Tulare, Calif., were already familiar with debates over the relative merits of Ford versus Chevy trucks, or John Deere versus Kubota tractors. But a new debate emerged at the world's premiere farm show: Which is better, Macintosh or PC? In an industry that's increasingly turning to high-tech tools to assist in the ancient art of growing crops and tending livestock, the growing debate over computer operating systems is just another sign of the changing times, said Craig Buxton, chief executive of PureSense Environmental Resource Management.

Many people will offhandedly say: "I have no sense of direction." But I, and the more than 7.5 Americans who suffer from Major Absence of Plotting Sensors (MAPS), will never joke about it. Except this once. This is because MAPS is a socially embarrassing disorder. People with MAPS have no idea what it means to travel in a northeast direction; we prefer instructions that say "turn left at the Wendy's." If we exit a building using a different door from which we entered, we will have trouble finding the parking lot unless we retrace our steps to the original door.

WASHINGTON -- Deterrence, the tactic of choice against drunken drivers for two decades, is no longer working in the struggle to reduce the death toll, say private and government experts, and today they will propose moving toward alcohol detection in every vehicle. In the first phase, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, backed by a national association of state highway officials and car manufacturers, plans to campaign to change drunken driving laws in 49 states to require that even first offenders be required to install a device that tests drivers and shuts down the car if it detects alcohol.

CHICAGO -- The most surreal gadget in Mitra Hartmann's robotics lab, the one that prompts an instinctive double-take from visitors, is a jumble of metal sensors and wires attached to a single, wispy rat whisker. It looks like part of a freakish rodent cyborg, but that's not the goal for Hartmann and her team at Northwestern University. They're after something more practical - robotic whiskers that can pick out the shapes of objects by touch, just as rats do. NASA researchers say rovers bristling with metal whiskers may one day aid the exploration of Mars or other worlds.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA will get one more chance this morning to launch space shuttle Atlantis before the mission is delayed for at least three weeks. The latest in a series of launch scrubs happened yesterday because of a faulty sensor in the shuttle's external fuel tank. The problem occurred as the tank was being fueled. NASA will make another launch attempt at 11:14 a.m. today using guidelines developed when the same issue cropped up during a 2005 launch. The decision to scrub came after a lengthy debate among mission managers.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA has postponed the next space shuttle flight from May until July so engineers can change out suspect sensors in the ship's external fuel tank. The critical fuel sensors are designed to make sure the shuttle's three main engines shut down before the 15-story tank runs out of propellant during launch. An early cutoff could prevent the shuttle from reaching orbit. A late shutdown with a dry tank could seriously damage the spacecraft. One of four liquid hydrogen sensors in the tank that shuttle Discovery will use for the next launch gave a reading that was slightly abnormal during recent electrical testing at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

An electronic leak detection system apparently was not working when a service station in the Jacksonville area of Baltimore County lost 25,000 gallons of gasoline, according to a state official investigating the incident. The system of sensors installed in and around the underground fuel tanks and lines at the Jacksonville Exxon station on Jarrettsville Pike failed to react when tested about the time the leak was reported, said Herbert Meade, chief of the oil control program for the Maryland Department of the Environment.

DALLAS -- Texas Instruments Inc., seeking to focus on mobile-phone chips, reached a $3 billion agreement with Bain Capital LLC yesterday to sell a unit that makes sensors used in cars, air conditioners and industrial equipment. The sale frees Texas Instruments of a business that is growing at half the rate of the rest of the company, Robert W. Baird analyst Tristan Gerra said. Chief Executive Officer Richard K. Templeton is emphasizing processors for handsets that play videos and surf the Web. "Wireless is the hottest segment for them, and everyone's zeroing in on the semiconductor group," said Daniel Morgan, who helps manage $5.45 billion, including Texas Instruments shares, at Synovus Investment Advisors in St. Petersburg, Fla. "They're looking for the areas with the most growth."