Space navigator

Sure, your fancy in-car navigation system will find the quickest way from point A to point B, but will it find you an open parking space once you get there? Maybe not today, but the next generation of smart vehicles could help drivers avoid the frustration of searching for a parking space.

Ford Motor Company, in partnership with Georgia Tech, is focusing on improving the parking experience by leveraging in-vehicle parking systems and a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country. The project, called “Parking Spotter”—part of a larger program at Ford called “Smart Mobility”—is an effort to find novel ways of reducing vehicle carbon emissions.

Ford’s own data show that searching for parking spaces in cities can account for between 20 and 30 percent of a vehicle’s emissions. “Nothing’s really changed in more than 80 years,” said Ford’s Mike Tinskey to the tech website Ars Technica, pointing out that the problem feeds on itself as drivers hunting for a parking space cause congestion. “They’re going slow, and they’re distracted,” he said, “so people behind them have to go slower too.”

Parking Spotter uses the existing technology found in vehicles equipped with Ford’s Parking Assist package, which allows a car to parallel park itself through the use of ultrasonic sensors. As vehicles equipped with these or other sensors, such as cameras or radar, drive through urban areas, their sensors can be employed to detect open parking spaces. That information, along with the GPS coordinates of the parking space, is sent to a cloud data center, where it updates in real time a crowdsourced map of parking spaces.

“What we’ve done is purchased a database of all the known parking spaces in the U.S. and geomapped it, so we know if a vehicle crosses the right GPS coordinates we know it’s moving into a parking lot or a parking space,” Tinskey said. Drivers searching for parking spaces can then use the cloud database app to find available parking spaces in the area of their request.

Tinskey said the company plans to equip a small fleet of test cars with the technology this year to determine whether there is a real business case for the idea.

Clear coat

Tattoos for many people can become a regrettably visible and permanent reminder of an often impulsive act. While it is possible to remove some tattoos using lasers, the process is painful, expensive, and potentially damaging to surrounding skin.

Now, an easier and pain-free method of tattoo removal may be on the horizon. Alec Falkenham, a Ph.D. student at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, is working on a cream he believes will remove unwanted tattoos.

Falkenham’s process, called bisphosphonate liposomal tattoo removal (BLRT), uses a topically applied drug that kills macrophages, giant white blood cells generated as part of the immune response to the ink. Tattoos are visible because not all the macrophages are able to get rid of the ink—some remain trapped just under the epidermis. Just as the macrophages originally consumed the ink particles, they will absorb the chemicals that then kill them off. —M.C.