Undated photo of Reza Fotouhi, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, at the University of Saskatchewan, with PowerBot, which he says could some day do jobs too dangerous for people and help fill shortages in the workforce.

In two years, a robot nurse could be trolling hospital hallways, handing out pills or visiting quarantined patients.
At least that according to its Iran-born creator, Reza Fotouhi, who says his robot could well be the answer to worker shortages in the health-care, mining and agriculture fields, Canada.com said.
“They can work in the day or night, all they need is a battery. It’s like any other technology--it would help humans,“ said Fotouhi, who’s been working on the project for two years.
The assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Saskatchewan put his creation on display on Thursday.
The robot, which is about the size of a small coffee table and weighs around 45 kilograms, navigated the halls of the engineering building at the university. It can map out and memorize its surroundings.
After that, it can navigate the area on its own, finding the quickest way or be controlled by a user.
A flexible robotic arm is located on top of the robot and can hold up to two kilograms.
From a laboratory, Fotouhi could view the robot’s location on his laptop and control it if needed. With a video camera on the front end, he could see what was ahead of the machine.
The robot still goes by the brand name of the base the technology sits on, PowerBot.
Fotouhi and his assistants are focusing on improving the robotic arm’s effectiveness and improving its energy consumption.
The $215,000 project is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the government of Saskatchewan.
As well as doing routine hospital duties, the robot could go into mines and observe dangerous or radioactive areas and conduct simple tasks.
It could do back-breaking work in farmers’ fields, picking and spraying weeds.
“I don’t think the technology is going to put people out of work. It’s the politicians or the economy--they do that. Technology is for the wellbeing of human life,“ Fotouhi said.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the EPFL in Switzerland have developed a novel method for producing dark-field X-ray images at wavelengths used in typical medical and industrial imaging equipment.
Dark-field images provide more detail than ordinary X-ray radiographs and could be used to diagnose the onset of osteoporosis, breast cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, to identify explosives in hand luggage, or to pinpoint hairline cracks or corrosion in functional structures, according to Physorg.com.
Up until this point, dark-field X-ray imaging required sophisticated optics and could only be produced at facilities like the PSI’s 300m-diameter, $200 million synchrotron. With the new nanostructured gratings described in this research, published online January 20 in Nature Materials, dark-field images could soon be produced using ordinary X-ray equipment already in place in hospitals and airports around the world.
Unlike traditional X-ray images, which show a simple absorption contrast, dark-field images capture the scattering of the radiation within the material itself, exposing subtle inner changes in bone, soft tissue, or alloys. The overall clarity of the images is striking.
The improved sensitivity in measuring bone density and hairline fractures could help diagnose the onset of osteoporosis. Because cancer or plaque cells scatter radiation slightly differently than normal cells, dark-field X-ray images can also be used to explore soft tissue, providing safer early diagnosis of breast cancer or the plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Security screening equipment equipped with dark-field image capability could better identify explosives, whose micro-crystalline structures strongly scatter X-ray radiation. And because X-rays penetrate a material without damaging it, dark-field images could help reveal scattering-producing micro-cracks and corrosion in structures such as airplane wings or the hulls of boats.
“Researchers have been working on dark-field X-ray images for many years,“ explains Franz Pfeiffer, a professor at EPFL and researcher at the PSI. “Up until now these images have only been possible using sophisticated crystal optical elements.“
Crystal optics, however, only work for a single X-ray wavelength and thus are highly inefficient. “Our new technique uses novel X-ray optical components, in the form of nanostructured gratings, that permit the use of a broad energy spectrum, including the standard range of energies in traditional X-ray equipment used in hospitals or airports,“ adds Christian David, Pfeiffer’s colleague at PSI.
“This opens up the possibility for adapting current imaging equipment to include dark-field imaging.“

Pregnant women who drink two or more cups of coffee a day have twice the risk of having a miscarriage as those who avoid caffeine, US researchers said.
They said the study provides strong evidence that high doses of caffeine during pregnancy--200 milligrams or more per day or the equivalent of two cups of coffee--significantly increase the risk of miscarriage, Reuters reported.
And they said the research may finally put to rest conflicting reports about the link between caffeine consumption and miscarriage.
“Women who are pregnant or are actively seeking to become pregnant should stop drinking coffee for three months or hopefully throughout pregnancy,“ said Dr. De-Kun Li of Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, whose study appears in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
“There has been a lot of uncertainty about this,“ Li said in a telephone interview. “There was no firm advice from professional societies to say what a pregnant woman should do about caffeine intake.“
He said anywhere from 15 to 18 studies have found a link between caffeine use during pregnancy and miscarriage.
But that association has been clouded by the fact that many pregnant women avoid caffeine because it makes them nauseated, which could skew the results.
Li and colleagues took pains to control for that possibility. Their study involved 1,063 pregnant women who were members of the Kaiser Permanente health plan in San Francisco from October 1996 through October 1998. Women in the group never changed their caffeine consumption during pregnancy.
What they found was women who consumed the equivalent of two or more cups of regular coffee or five 12-ounce cans of caffeinated soda--were twice as likely to miscarry as pregnant women who avoided caffeine.
This risk appeared to be related to the caffeine, rather than other chemicals in coffee, because they also saw an increased risk when the caffeine was consumed in soda, tea, and hot chocolate.
Li said many researchers think caffeine is harmful because it stresses the fetus’ immature metabolism. It may also decrease blood flow in the placenta, which could harm the fetus.
“To me, the safe dose is zero,“ Li said. “If you really have to drink coffee, try to limit it to one cup or at the most two cups.“ Or better yet, switch to decaffeinated beverages, he added.
Based on the findings, Dr. Tracy Flanagan, director of women’s health at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, said pregnant women should think about limiting coffee to one cup a day, and they might want to cut it out entirely.
“So many causes of miscarriage are not controllable,“ she said in a telephone interview. “This is an opportunity to do something active.“

The average tusk size of African elephants has halved since the mid-19th century. A similar effect has been spotted in the Asian elephant population in India.
Researchers say it is an example of Darwinism in action, caused by the mass slaughter of dominant male elephants--but whereas evolution normally takes place over thousands of years, these changes have occurred within 150 years, Telegraph.co.uk wrote.
Zoologists at Oxford University fear that hunting of the largest male elephants, which also have the largest tusks, has changed the natural breeding behavior of these animals.
Their research has shown that the hunting of these large males for their ivory allows smaller males with shorter tusks to produce more calves. Over time the average tusk size decreases.
Iain Douglas Hamilton, from the conservation charity Save the Elephants and who was one of the authors of the study, said, “What appears to be the case is that average tusk sizes have decreased greatly since the mid-19th century.“
The data comes from the trade statistics and from records of hunters around Africa who find that large trophies are very much harder to find.
But the ivory of large African elephants is particularly prized by hunters and traders for its quality and this has seen hundreds of thousands of animals killed. It is estimated that there were 1.2 million African elephants in the late 1970s, but there are now fewer than 500,000.