Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Jul 20, 2009 4:05 pm Post subject:
Interesting bob. But then I can just see it now "Houston, we have a problem. Some joker was messing around and by accident push rm -rf on the keyboard and then pushed enter. How do we reprogram the shuttle for re-entry?"
Anyway, on with today's new news.
What a load of old crap
Quote:
The livestock industry is responsible for around 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, due largely in part to emission of methane from the animals. But researchers in Japan may have a solution - that may be a little difficult to stomach.
What he calls "sh*t burger", scientist Mitsuyuki Ikeda Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama was part of the development team that first found a way to turn human excrement into a meat substitute back in 1993.
The process involves extracting proteins from the solids in sewage and then mixing it with soya and flavouring it with steak sauce derivative. The final product is high in protein with a similar texture, consistency and taste to beef.
"The sewage department wants to show citizens that sewage isn't really such a dangerous and dirty thing, that it can be recycled into something useful," Ikeda had told reporters. Due to expensive research costs, the meat substitute is priced around 10 to 20 times higher than regular meat, and the project had no commercial aims.
New York animal trainer Lyssa Rosenberg has taught her terrier to obey simple written commands.
Willow plays dead when she sees the word 'bang', stretches a paw in the air when she sees 'wave' and gets up on her back feet to beg when she sees the words 'sit up'.
"She's an unbelievably quick learner," said Ms Rosenberg, who has trained other dogs to appear in TV adverts and pose on photo shoots.
"She can do 250 different things and I used to joke that I would teach her how to pour me a martini. Then for a bet I told a friend I would teach her to read. He promised me a free trip to Mexico if I could do it.
"It took her just six weeks to recognise words and respond to them. And it isn't just my handwriting she understands. My friend printed the words Willow learned off the computer and she reacted to them.
"Well I won the bet and Willow came with me to Mexico."
Willow has her own pet passport and regularly flies transatlantic to visit Ms Rosenberg's husband Gareth Howells, in Guildford, Surrey.
Willow was also the second witness at the couple's wedding at New York City Hall in March - signing the marriage certificate with an inky paw print.
Ms Rosenberg even takes the 10lb English terrier mix on business trips because Willow is more than happy to share her carrying case with other animals.
"I once had to fly from California back to New York with a rabbit and two guinea pigs. Going through airport security was hilarious because first I pulled out the rabbit from the bag, followed by the guinea pigs and then the dog."
Onions make you cry, add flavor to food and are touted for their medicinal benefits. Now the vegetable has another use -- powering up green energy.
A new system debuts on Friday that converts onion juice into electricity at Gills Onions, the largest fresh onion processor in the United States.
The Oxnard, California-based company expects its new onion-fuelled power to reduce its electric bill by $700,000 (429,000 pounds) a year and cut its annual greenhouse gas emissions by up to 30,000 tons.
The happy ending to this green energy tale, however, started with another question: how to get rid of onion waste.
"When we peel an onion, 35 to 40 percent of the onion comes off before we have a usable onion. That's the top, tail and skin around the onion before you get to the meat," said Steven Gill, co-owner of the 25-year-old company.
They used to haul the waste to the fields for composting, but that became a problem. Ten years ago, Gill started looking at technology for a solution, including microturbines.
"We ended up shredding the skins as they come out of the plant and extracting all the juice, which is very high in sugars, and bacteria love that stuff," Gill said.
In the new system, bacteria produce methane gas from the juice. The gas then goes to two 300 kilowatt fuel cells, creating enough power for 460 homes. The company expects to get 35 to 40 percent of its electricity from the on-site generator.
The company invested $9.5 million in the project and will receive $2.7 million from Southern California Gas Co., a regulated subsidiary of Sempra Energy, as part of a state program to encourage self-contained generation by businesses. In addition to cutting its electric bill, the company will save $400,000 in hauling costs and expects pay-back in six years.
The onion grower now has new goal: to be a zero-waste facility by 2011.
"We wanted to follow it all the way through and make the full circle," Gill said.
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Jul 27, 2009 2:24 pm Post subject:
Wireless electricity
Quote:
A system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires has been shown off at a hi-tech conference.
The technique exploits simple physics and can be used to charge a range of electronic devices over many metres.
Eric Giler, chief executive of US firm Witricity, showed mobile phones and televisions charging wirelessly at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
He said the system could replace the miles of expensive power cables and billions of disposable batteries.
"There is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or feet of where there is very inexpensive power," he said.
Trillions of dollars, he said, had also been invested building an infrastructure of wires "to get power from where it is created to where it is used."
"We love this stuff [electricity] so much," he said.
Mr Giler showed off a Google G1 phone and an Apple iPhone that could be charged using the system.
Witricity, he said, had managed to pack all the necessary components into the body of the G1 phone, but Apple had made that process slightly harder.
"They don't make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones so we put a little sleeve on the back," he said.
He also showed off a commercially available television using the system.
"Imagine you get one of these things and you want to hang it on the wall," he said. "Think about it, you don't want those ugly cords hanging down."
The system is based on work by physicist Marin Soljacic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
It exploits "resonance", whereby energy transfer is markedly more efficient when a certain frequency is applied.
When two objects have the same resonant frequency, they exchange energy strongly without having an effect on other, surrounding objects.
For example, it is resonance that can cause a wine glass to explode when a singer hits exactly the right tone.
But instead of using acoustic resonance, Witricity's approach exploits the resonance of low frequency electromagnetic waves.
Self destructing data. I can see this being used in porn downloads a lot.
Quote:
Worried that the college binge drinking photos posted on the internet will reappear to haunt during a job interview? Cheer up. Researchers have found a method that makes electronic data self destruct itself.
University of Washington researchers has developed a way to make electronic communications such as e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages automatically self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers.
The prototype system called 'Vanish' places a time limit on text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser. After a set time text written will self-destruct.
Even the sender could not be able to retrieve them.
"If you care about privacy, the Internet today is a very scary place," said Tadayoshi Kohno, a UW assistant professor of computer science. "If people understood the implications of where and how their e-mail is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often."
Computers have made it virtually impossible to leave the past behind with people inadvertently uploading data they find embarrassing later, he said.
The paper about the project will be presented at the Usenix Security Symposium August 10-14 in Montreal.
Money can't buy you happiness, but it sure can relieve pain.
Quote:
Money dulls physical pain and eases the sting of social rejection, new research shows.
Through six experiments, psychologists and a marketing professor probed the power of money as a proxy for social acceptance. Among their results, they found that merely touching bills or thinking about expenses paid affected the participants both physically and emotionally.
Because it affects pain, money may be a clue to how the brain evolved to process social interactions, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the June edition of the journal Psychological Science.
In one experiment, 84 undergraduate student volunteers were divided into two groups and asked to take a "finger-dexterity test." One group counted 80 $100 bills from a stack, the other group counted paper. Afterward, the volunteers played Cyberball, a computer game in which four players passed a ball to each other. They were told that they were playing with three real people, but in fact a computer simulated the other players. In half of the games, all the players received the ball an equal number of times, but the other half was rigged against the human players, excluding them after 10 passes.
Those who played the rigged version of Cyberball reported that they felt snubbed. But, on average, those who had counted money before playing rated their level of social distress lower than those who had counted paper.
To test money’s effect on physical pain, 96 recruits were split into two groups and counted either money or paper. Then an assistant strapped down their left hands and dipped their fingers in hot water with a temperature of 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius). On average, those who counted money rated their pain lower than those who counted paper.
The scientists wondered if money may have just been a distraction that took the volunteers' minds off their pain, so they repeated the experiments, but this time without the bills. Instead, they asked half of the participants to write about their expenses in the past month and the other half wrote about the weather. Then they either played Cyberball or dipped their fingers in hot water. Simply writing about spent money caused social distress, the participants reported. And it intensified the pain of the hot water and the social snub of rigged Cyberball.
"These effects speak to the power of money, even as a symbol, to change perceptions of very real feelings," like pain, said Kathleen Vohs, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the study.
The results prop up earlier studies showing that money's effect on our emotions stems from its symbolic power in social interactions, the researchers wrote. It stands in for acceptance and popularity, and allows those who have it to get what they want from the vast social network on which we depend — regardless of whether they are well liked or not.
Its physical effects may be tied up in the early evolution of those social interactions. Earlier research by psychologists Geoff MacDonald at the University of Toronto and Mark Leary at Duke University has showed a link between psychological pain and physical pain. The emerging hypothesis is that early in the evolution of social interactions, our brains took a shortcut to handle the new system: instead of laying down new biological hardware to process things like relationships and culture, human brains hacked their older hardware that deals with physical pain and gave it the double duty of handling social interactions.
Two final experiments in the study suggested that people who feel rejected or physically hurt have a higher desire for money than those who don't. The results dovetail with work by University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci, he said. Deci has written about well-being and the pursuit of different kinds of goals.
"People want money more and are soothed by it when they are not experiencing deeper need satisfaction, but the satisfaction of money is superficial and is not enduring," Deci said.
These results could help explain some puzzles about money, said the study’s lead author, Xinyue Zhou, a psychologist at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. He said it could lead to a clearer picture of how people become addicted to making money. And his work justifies court-ordered financial compensation to victims of battery, he said. If money is linked to physical pain, then making attackers pay their victims is a punishment that suits the crime, he said.
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Sep 25, 2009 11:02 am Post subject:
Good vibrations
Quote:
The American Physical Society (APS), in the latest podcast of 'Life Lines', has explained how elephant vocalizations travel through the ground for great distances, and how other elephants can understand them, just as they understand acoustic sound, which travels through the air.
Research that led to the development of the content of the podcast was done by Dr Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, who is the author of 'The Elephant's Secret Sense'.
Early in her research, Dr. O'Connell-Rodwell noticed behavior that indicates elephants are listening to acoustic (airborne) sounds by putting their ears out and orienting toward the sound's source.
At other times, she also noticed a more puzzling behavior: Several elephants would freeze simultaneously, sometimes in mid-stride, and would press their front feet into the ground.
They might also roll a foot forward so that only their toes touched the ground. At other times, they would lift a front leg.
The behavior reminded the researcher of the behavior she saw in insects that communicate seismically.
She began a series of experiments that eventually found that:
Low-frequency elephant vocalizations, which are below the threshold of human hearing, travel through the ground in the same waveform as they do in the air.
The ground vocalization can travel faster or more slowly than acoustic sound, depending on soil conditions, but has the potential of travelling further as there is no outer limit to how far sounds can travel through the earth.
When she played a recorded elephant vocalization through the ground only, other elephants detected the vocalization.
Elephants understood the ground-borne vocalizations.
For example, they responded appropriately to an alarm call from another elephant by assuming their defensive posture of bunching and freezing.
They also responded only to alarm calls of elephants living in the area rather than those made from elephants elsewhere.
Elephants also have anatomical adaptations to help them 'hear' these ground-borne vocalizations.
They have an enlarged malleus, a middle ear bone that plays an important role in hearing.
Animals that communicate seismically often have an enlarged malleus as it also facilitates bone conducted detection of vibrations.
Elephants can close their middle ear canal, forming a closed acoustic tube which enhances bone conduction and blocks out acoustic sound, helping the elephant focus on the vibration pathway.
They have an acoustically designed foot, with a thick fat pad that perhaps helps in the transmission or conduction of vibrations.
So elephants only respond to calls from neighbouring elephants. Does that make them racist? Or elephantist at least? _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 2809 Location: Probably looking at the sky.
Posted: Sep 27, 2009 4:52 am Post subject:
Carbon nanotubes are and have been an extremely slow process. We've been working on them for years and can only get about 7 to 8 cm nowadays.
The space elevator is at least 50 years away.
Shuttle cargo is about 10,000-15,000 USD per pound to orbit. _________________ The message above is likely another way of me proving that the 1st amendment was a bad idea.
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Nov 04, 2009 11:14 am Post subject:
Grow your own glacier
Quote:
Chewang Norphel, 76, has "built" 12 new glaciers already and is racing to create five more before he dies.
By then he hopes he will have trained enough new "icemen" to continue his work and save the world's "third icecap" from being transformed into rivers.
His race against time is shared by Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister who called on the region's Himalayan nations, including China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan, to form a united front to tackle glacial melting.
The great Himalayan glaciers, including Kashmir's Siachen glacier, feed the region's most important rivers, which irrigate farm land in Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh and throughout the Indian sub-continent. The apparent acceleration in glacial melting has been blamed for the increase in floods which have destroyed homes and crops.
Chewang Norphel, the "Iceman of Ladakh", however believes he has an answer.
By diverting meltwater through a network of pipes into artificial lakes in the shaded side of mountain valleys, he says he has created new glaciers.
A dam or embankment is built to keep in the water, which freezes at night and remains frozen in the absence of direct sunlight. The water remains frozen until March, when the start of summer melts the new glacier and releases the water into the rivers below.
So far, Mr Norphel's glaciers have been able to each store up to one million cubic feet of ice, which in turn can irrigate 200 hectares of farm land. For farmers, that can make the difference between crop failure and a bumper crop of more than 1,000 tons of wheat.
The "iceman" says he has seen the effects of global warming on farmland as snows have become thinner on the ground and ice rivers have melted away never to return.
His own work has now been recognised by the Indian government, which has given him £16,000 to build five new glaciers. But time is his enemy, he told The Hindustan Times. "I'm planning to train villagers with instruction CDs that I have made, so that I can pass on the knowledge before I die," he said.
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Dec 09, 2009 2:41 pm Post subject:
Bionic digits
Quote:
What are billed as the world's first bionic fingers have been unveiled by British scientists.
Bosses at Touch Bionics, the company behind the motor-powered ProDigits, say they will transform the lives of people with missing fingers.
Those fitted with the device will be able to bend, touch, pick up and point, simple actions which can be difficult with absent fingers and thumbs.
The firm - which also invented the bionic i-Limb hand - says its new invention can help people with up to five missing digits on a hand, whether from birth or because of an injury or medical condition.
The number of disabled people who could benefit is estimated at more than 50,000 in the EU alone, and at around 1.2 million worldwide.
Phil Newman, marketing director of Livingston-based Touch Bionics in West Lothian, said: "The ProDigits provide a powered device with a grip and it has returned these people to a level of functionality and independence."
The custom-made ProDigits are fitted onto what remains of the hand, and can be controlled by sensors which register muscle signals from the residual finger or palm.
Alternatively they can be controlled by a pressure sensitive touch pad, which relies on the remnant digit or tissue surrounding the metacarpal bone to provide the necessary pressure to activate the finger.
A special stall feature allows the device to detect when it has closed around an object so that it does not crush it.
Patients can choose from a range of coverings, from hi-tech clear and black robotic skins to a more natural-looking "livingskin" option.
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Feb 05, 2010 12:45 pm Post subject:
Well Achilles, I will start making individual threads for ones that I think are interesting enough. But i'll still put some in here that I don't think are threadworthy by their own rights... Though if you see any that you think should have their own thread just shout and I'll move it.
I will soo be buying one of these next time I got to a hot wet country on holiday!
Quote:
Mangalore based startup has built Mozziquit, a mosquito trap to attract, trap and kill the female biting mosquitoes and the product claims 100% success (has been validated by ICMR).
If you ask what’s the difference between Mozziquit and several other branded products, well most of the other products are repellents and not ‘killers’. So even if you repel them for a short time, they will multiply (300 folds) at an external breading locations and will suck you more.
Moreover, there are drawback of repellent systems – like sharp light rays and dangerous fumes which are harmful.
Mozziquit is a light weight product and claims to be active within a hurdle free radius of 160 sq. ft and consumes only 12V power (works on battery as well). What’s interesting about the product is that it’s a lifetime investment (you don’t need to refill anything) by the individual/company and the operating cost per day is as low as 25 paise.
Currently, NID is working on improving the design of the product, which is expected to be available in the next few months (expected price ~1K +).
The company has acquired patent pending status in India and has already obtained Certificate of
Registration of Design as issued by the Controller General of Patents, Designs.
Grumpiness could be a sign of being more advanced... if thats the case then booze and the subsequent hangover must make you supersmart!
Quote:
Researchers now believe that being aggressive, intolerant and short-tempered could be a sign of a more advanced nature.
A more childlike attitude to behaviour such as tolerance and sharing, could, in contrast, be an indication of not being as developed, the new study suggests.
Researchers looked at two different kinds of monkey – the familiar chimpanzee and the less evolved but much more easy going bonobo, two of the closest living relatives to human beings.
Chimpanzees are accepted as more evolved than bonobos in terms of physical appearance, behaviour and social structure.
But chimps are also much more aggressive, particularly as they get older, when they become less tolerant of each other, share less and show more signs of violence to others.
Adult bonobos, on the other hand, are more Peter Pan-like. They retain the same levels of playfulness and behaviour they showed as juveniles, said the research by Harvard University for the online journal Current Biology.
The two types of ape are very close to each other, genetically, but the clear differences are believed to be down to simple evolution, said lead researcher Victoria Wobber.
Her team put both chimps and bonobos through a variety of skill tests with rewards for those who completed various tasks the quickest.
They included a sharing exercise and a begging exercise in which they had to work out which of their keepers was most generous. In all cases the chimps learnt the tasks fastest and to their better advantage.
She believes that the ability to "restrain" their sociability was one of the reasons they were more intelligent and more civilised.
She said: "Bonobos took longer to develop the same skill level shown even among the youngest of the chimpanzees that were tested.
"It seemed as if adult chimpanzees were able to exhibit more social restraint than adult bonobos."
She believes that humans being even more advanced are likely to exhibit even more adult like behaviour.
"If we can understand the evolutionary processes by which developmental changes occurred in bonobos, perhaps inferences can be made about our own species' evolution," he said.
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Feb 05, 2010 3:34 pm Post subject:
Already eat like a pig? Well why not breath like one too. Soon you will be able to.
Quote:
Scientists in Melbourne, Australia, used a ventilator and pump to keep the animal lungs alive and "breathing" while human blood flowed in them.
Experts estimated the work could lead to the first animal-human transplants within five years.
Dr Glenn Westall, who helped conduct the experiment, said: “The blood went into the lungs without oxygen and came out with oxygen, which is the exact function of the lungs.
"It showed that these lungs were working perfectly well and doing as we were expecting them to do.
“This is a significant advance compared to experiments that have been performed over the past 20 years."
The breakthrough came after scientists were able to remove a section of pig DNA, which had made the pig organs incompatible with human blood.
Previous attempts to combine unmodified pig lungs and human blood ended abruptly two years ago when blood clots began forming almost immediately, causing the organs to become so blocked no blood could pass through.
Human DNA is now added to the pigs as they are reared to reduce clotting and the number of lungs which are rejected.
The full results of the research are due to be announced in Vancouver in August.
The issue has prompted an ethical debate about the use of animals for human transplants.
Medical ethicist Professor Nicholas Tonti-Filippini said: “It is basically a human-pig, a hybrid, or whatever you want to call it.
“It is about whether the community is prepared to accept a part human, part animal."
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Feb 15, 2010 3:52 pm Post subject:
freezing hot water
Quote:
imagine water freezing solid even as it's heating up. Such are the bizarre tricks scientists now find water is capable of.
Popular belief contends that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Surprisingly, if water lies in a smooth bottle and is free of any dust, it can stay liquid down to minus 40 degrees F (minus 40 degrees C) in what's called "supercooled" form. The dust and rough surfaces that water is normally found in contact with in nature can serve as the kernels around which ice crystals form.
Now researcher Igor Lubomirsky at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues have discovered another way to control the freezing point of water — via what are called quasi-amorphous pyroelectric thin films. These surfaces change their electrical charge depending on their temperature.
When pyroelectic surfaces are positively charged, water becomes easier to freeze, and when they have a negative charge, it becomes harder to freeze.
The researchers saw that supercooled water could freeze as it's being heated, as long as the temperature changes the surface charge as well. For instance, when supercooled water is on a negatively charged lithium tantalate surface, it will freeze solid immediately when the surface is heated to 17.6 degrees F (minus 8 degrees C) and its charge switches to positive.
Curiously, positively charged surfaces inspire supercooled water to freeze from the bottom up, while negatively charged surfaces cause it to freeze from the top down. This likely has to do with how water molecules orient themselves — the negatively charged oxygen atoms in water molecules naturally point toward positively charged surfaces, while the reverse is true with hydrogen atoms.
"The difference between the positive and negative charge was unexpected," Lubomirsky said.
The ability to better control the freezing temperature of supercooled water could be critical for a variety of applications, including the survival of cold-blooded animals, the cryo-preservation of cells and tissues, the protection of crops from freezing, and the ability to understand and trigger cloud formation.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Feb. 5 issue of the journal Science.
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Mar 02, 2010 1:54 pm Post subject:
Do I hear future out of this world ski resorts?
Quote:
Scientists have detected more than 40 ice-filled craters in the Moon's North Pole using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-I.
NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 2 to 15 km in diameter.
The finding would give future missions a new target to further explore and exploit, a NASA statement said, adding it is estimated that there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice in the craters.
"The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the Moon," Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, said yesterday.
The new discoveries show that the Moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than previously thought, he said.
Aboard Chandrayaan-I, the Mini-SAR mapped the Moon's permanently-shadowed polar craters that are not visible from the earth. The radar uses the polarisation properties of reflected radio waves to characterise surface properties.
According to the findings which are being published in the latest issue of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, results from the mapping showed deposits having radar characteristics similar to ice.
"After analysing the data, our science team determined a strong indication of water ice, a finding which will give future missions a new target to further explore and exploit," Jason Crusan, program executive for the Mini-RF Program for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate, said.
The space agency said these results are consistent with recent findings of other NASA instruments and adds to growing scientific understanding of the multiple forms of water found on the Moon.
The agency's Moon Mineralogy Mapper discovered water molecules in the Moon's polar regions, while water vapour was detected by NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.
Mini-SAR and Moon Mineralogy Mapper are two of 11 instruments on India's first unmanned mission to the Moon -- Chandrayaan-I.
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 2809 Location: Probably looking at the sky.
Posted: Mar 03, 2010 11:31 pm Post subject:
NASA scientists have found more vast deposits of water in a new part of the Moon, they revealed this week. They reckon there is at least 600 million tons of ice in craters around the north pole. It comes just five months after the space agency sent a probe crashing into the Moon's south pole and revealed substantial reservoirs there too.
The latest discovery was made with a NASA radar instrument called Mini-SAR aboard an Indian probe, Chandrayaan-1, which was put in orbit around the Moon.
Its beam found more than 40 small craters, between one and nine miles across, contained water ice. Experts say it stays trapped in the shadows of craters which never see sunlight and so it does not evaporate into space.
Generally the Moon is still drier than any desert on Earth. Some scientists predicted water would be found around the poles, dumped by comets over billions of years, but the amount found is surprising. It is thought that water molecules are being produced from rock across the Moon's surface and naturally migrates towards the poles.
In October a two-ton Centaur rocket stage collided at 5,600mph with a 60-mile wide crater called Cabeus near the lunar south pole. Though the impact was not spectacular for hopeful observers back on Earth, scientists observed water in the plume of debris released.
The presence of abundant water would greatly aid the establishment of lunar colonies, as it could be turned into fuel as well as keep astronauts alive. However, last month President Obama cancelled plans for NASA to return men to the Moon.
Private companies might take up the challenge instead and China is also believed to be keen to land astronauts on the lunar surface.
Crater expert Dr Emily Baldwin, deputy editor of the UK's Astronomy Now magazine, told Skymania News: "The amount of water in these polar regions is amazing and we really need to get back to the Moon to find out more about it and how it got there."
The shitty part is that they just canceled "Constellation". not that I like constellation- more accurately the Ares rocket designs - but this just further adds to my disappointment in NASA. _________________ The message above is likely another way of me proving that the 1st amendment was a bad idea.
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: Mar 05, 2010 12:08 pm Post subject:
Indeed Squirrel. I guess it is going to be largely up to private investors to reach to the stars since the good old US of A decided it's not worth the effort.
But in other news. They have developed some new interesting stay dry materials.
Quote:
Scientists have created a flat surface patterned after the body hair of spiders that refuses to get wet.
The surface also has the added benefit of being self-cleaning, since water does a pretty good job of picking up and carrying off dirt as it is being repelled.
This makes the material ideal for some food packaging, windows, or solar cells that must stay clean to gather sunlight, scientists say. Boat designers might someday coat hulls with it, making boats faster and more efficient.
But what makes the new surface really unique is that unlike other similar products out there, such as shoe wax and car windshield treatments, the new material doesn’t rely on chemicals with water-repellent properties to stay dry. Instead, its surface blocks out water by mimicking the shape and patterns of a spider’s body hair. In other words, physics, not chemistry, is what keeps it dry.
Spiders "have short hairs and longer hairs, and they vary a lot. And that is what we mimic,” said Wolfgang Sigmund, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Florida.
It’s been long known that spiders use their water-repelling hairs to stay dry or avoid drowning. Water spiders use their hairs to capture air bubbles and tote them underwater to breathe. But it was only five years ago that Sigmund began experimenting with microscopic fibers, turning to spiders for inspiration.
At first, Sigmund's natural tendency was to make all his fibers the same size and distance apart. But he later learned that the pattern of hairs on a spider’s body consists of both long and short hairs that are both curved and straight. So he decided to mimic Nature and replicate this random pattern using plastic hairs varying in size but averaging about 600 microns, or millionths of a meter.
“Most people that publish in this field always go for these perfect structures, and we are the first to show that the bad ones are the better ones,” Sigmund said.
The technique, detailed in the science journal Langmuir, can be applied to keep even absorbent materials like sponges from getting wet. It may also be safer than other forms of water-proofing since the method doesn't involve the use of chemicals.
Sigmund says that he has even developed a variation of the surface that repels oil. However, he noted that the process is not reliable enough to continually create good working surfaces, and different techniques need to be developed to produce such surfaces in commercially available quantities and size.
“We are at the very beginning,” Sigmund said. “But there is a lot of interest from industry, because our surface is the first one that relies only on surface features and can repel hot water, cold water, and if we change the chemistry – both oil and water.”
An oft-hated slang word coined in Northern California has been proposed as a worthy entry into the field of scientific measurement when calculating enormous numbers.
Austin Sendek, a physics student at UC Davis, wants the number of 10 to the 27th power -- a trillion trillions -- to officially become "hella" big.
Along the lines of using the "kilo" prefix for kilometers or "giga" for gigabyte, Sendek is petitioning the International System of Units (SI) to use the term "hella" to describe really, really big measurements; such as the size of the universe.
"The diameter of the universe is 1.4 hellameters," Sendek said. "You know if someone says that's 'hella meters' you know exactly what they're talking about."
Under Sendek's proposed terminology, you would say the mass of the earth is six hellagrams, and the power of the sun is 0.3 hellawatts.
Physics professor Daniel Cox says he gets a kick out of the idea, but points out the number is so big, you can't use it to count the age of the universe, believed to be a measly five times 10 to the power of 17 seconds.
"Ten to the 27th [power] is about 10 billion times bigger," Cox said. "That's a hella lot of seconds."
Reactions on the UC Davis campus were mixed -- one physics student even told CBS13 she would switch majors if the proposal were accepted -- and Sendek admits that the odds of his idea gaining traction are "hella small," but he has his hopes.
"You can apply it everywhere, it's sort of a catch-all word," he added.
SI last added a prefix to the metric system in 1991, when they accepted "yotta" to describe 10 to the 24th power.
Original Link _________________ Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now
Joined: 28 Apr 2005 Posts: 7885 Location: Halfway between here and there
Posted: May 26, 2010 10:52 am Post subject:
Data centres are full of BS
Quote:
HP researchers think cow manure could help power data centres - and give farmers an income boost in the process.
Clever folks from HP Labs are set to present a paper at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Arizona today, which will detail their plans to use animal waste to power data centres.
The paper says a dairy farm of 10,000 cows would be enough to power a mid-sized data centre with power needs of about one megawatt (MW), while still leaving enough energy for the farm itself.
By using the heat already produced by the data centre, that manure can be encouraged to produce methane - don't think about it too much - which is then used to generate electricity. According to HP, each cow creates a whopping 120 pounds of manure a day, which in turn can create three kilowatt-hours of energy.
Researchers have shown off a transistor made from just seven atoms that could be used to create smaller, more powerful computers.
Transistors are tiny switches used as the building blocks of silicon chips.
If the new atomic transistor can be made in large numbers it could mean chips with components up to 100 times smaller than on existing processors.
The Australian creators of the transistor hope it is also a step towards a solid-state quantum computer.
The transistor is not the smallest ever created as two research groups have previously managed to produce working single-atom transistors.
However, the device is many times smaller than the components found in chips in contemporary computers. On chips where components are 22 nanometres in size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms across.
The working transistor was created by replacing seven atoms in a silicon crystal with phosphorus atoms.
"Now we have just demonstrated the world's first electronic device in silicon systematically created on the scale of individual atoms," said Professor Michelle Simmons, lead researcher on the project at the University of New South Wales.
Moore's Law predicts that the amount of memory that can fit on a given area of silicon, for a fixed cost doubles every 12-18 months. The limit of this prediction is being tested as components get ever smaller and their computationally useful properties become less reliable.
If an entire chip could be made with every one of its billions of transistors made from the silicon crystals, it could mean an "exponential" leap in processing power, said Professor Simmons.
The researchers are a long way from a commercial process because the tiny transistor they created was handmade. The team used a scanning tunnelling microscope to move the phosphorus atoms into place.
The work on the tiny transistor is being carried out as part of a larger project to create a quantum computer.
The research team revealed their results in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
For the romantics, love is as deep as the ocean. And now, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have actually tried to quantify the age-old query— How deep is the ocean?
They’re also tackling an even more intriguing—if less romantic—question— What is the volume of the Earth’s oceans?
And the answer is 1.332 billion cubic kilometres, says Matthew Charette, an associate scientist in WHOI’s Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry who is part of a research effort to audit all the water on the planet.
“A lot of water values are taken for granted. If you want to know the water volume on the planet, you Google it and you get five different numbers, most of them 30- or 40-year-old values,” he said.
Using satellite measurements, the researchers have come with up the new ocean volume figure.
The researchers report that the world’s total ocean volume is less than the most recent estimates by a volume equivalent to about five times the Gulf of Mexico, or 500 times the Great Lakes.
While that might seem a lot at first glance, it is only about 0.3 percent lower than the estimates of 30 years ago.
Most recently, researchers have pioneered the use of satellites to calculate ocean volume.
The trend toward a progressive lowering of volume estimates is not because the world’s oceans are losing water.
Instead, it reflects a greater ability to locate undersea mountain ranges and other formations, which take up space that would otherwise be occupied by water.
Satellite measurements reveal that ocean bottoms “are bumpier and more mountainous than had been imagined,” said co-investigator Walter H.F. Smith.
He noted that as measurements improve, ocean-volume values are lowering, emphasizing that this does not reflect an actual lessening of water but a more accurate accounting of undersea formations.
Satellite-based radar cannot “see” the ocean bottom, he explains. Rather, it measures the ocean surface, which reflects what lies beneath.
The satellite project has covered virtually all the world’s oceans, except for some areas of the Arctic that are covered with ice, he said.
The result is a “new world map” of the oceans, he added.
“Matt and I are seeing a better picture of the shape and volume of oceans,” said Smith
But satellite measurements have their shortcomings.
"There is a problem of spatial resolution, like an out-of-focus camera. We’re measuring the sea surface that is affected by mountains, but we’re seeing only really big mountains, and in a blurry way. The resolution is 15 times worse than our maps of Mars and the moon,” he said.
Consequently, the researchers say, more ship-based measurements are needed to augment and “fine tune” the satellite data.
And so far, ship-based sonar and other instrumentation have mapped only 10 percent of the Earth’s seafloor.
“We have gaps in echosounding measurements as wide as New Jersey,” said Smith.
The study’s calculation of the ocean’s mean depth is 3,682.2 meters—that’s 21-to-51 meters less than previous estimates.
The study is published in the current issue of the journal Oceanography.
Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.
The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell.
The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA.
The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.
Some also suggest that the potential benefits of the technology have been over-stated.
But the researchers hope eventually to design bacterial cells that will produce medicines and fuels and even absorb greenhouse gases.
The team was led by Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Maryland and California.
He and his colleagues had previously made a synthetic bacterial genome, and transplanted the genome of one bacterium into another.
Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a "synthetic cell", although only its genome is truly synthetic.
Dr Venter likened the advance to making new software for the cell.
The researchers copied an existing bacterial genome. They sequenced its genetic code and then used "synthesis machines" to chemically construct a copy.
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