Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
James Dyson has reinvented a machine we never knew needed reinventing; a fan with no visible blades that he calls the Air Multiplier. Its key component is a hollow plastic hoop with an aerofoil cross section – like an aircraft wing bent into a circle. Set vertically on a pedestal, it contains a motor-driven “impeller” which forces air into the hollow rim of the hoop.
From there, air emerges through a slot that directs it over the hoop’s aerofoil surface. This generates low pressure towards the centre of the hoop, which in turn creates a steady draught by drawing the surrounding air through it. The strength of the draught can be varied by adjusting the speed of the impeller.
Original article posted on NewScientist.
On the evening of March 31st, 2009, Tim Tevebaugh was driving home from work east of Craigmont in the southern Idaho Panhandle. Across the rolling hay fields, Tim saw a very usual phenonmena. The snow rollers that he took pictures of are extremely rare because of the unique combination of snow, wind, temperature and moisture needed to create them. They form with light but sticky snow and strong (but not too strong) winds. These snow rollers formed during the day as they weren’t present in the morning on Tim’s drive to work.
Based on estimations from Tim as well as the blades of grass in the picture, most of the snow rollers were about 18″ in height, while the largest rollers were about 2 feet tall.
Source: National Weather Service Forecast Office
Today seems to be the Day of Robots; here’s another article about the use of robots in war.
In this powerful talk at a TED conference, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat. He shows us scenarios straight out of science fiction — that now may not be so fictitious.
Despite becoming increasingly lifelike in appearance, robots still have terrible body language.
But Bilge Mutlu and colleague’s team at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, is changing that with robots that “leak” non-verbal information through eye movements when interacting with humans. The eyes of a robot may not provide a window into its soul, but they can help humans guess the machine’s intentions.
Humans constantly give off non-verbal cues and interpret the signals of others – but without realising it at a conscious level, says Mutlu. The trembling hands of a public speaker betray their nerves even before a word is uttered, while poker players leak subtle signs such as eye flickers or twitches that can be used to spot bluffers.
But when faced with a robot all our interpretive skills are irrelevant. Robots leak no information, so it is virtually impossible to read their intentions, which makes them hard to get along with.
Mutlu’s team tested strategies to improve robot body language using a guessing game played by a human and a humanoid robot. The robot is programmed to choose one object from around a dozen resting on a table, without making a move to actually pick it up.
Original article on NewScientist.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries.
Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer’s yeast.
Adam, which actually consists of a small roomful of lab equipment, has four personal computers that act as a brain, and possesses robot arms, cameras, liquid handlers, incubators and other equipment. The team gave the robot a freezer containing a library of thousands of mutant strains of yeast with individual genes deleted. It was also equipped with a database containing information about yeast genes, enzymes, and metabolism, and a supply of hundreds of metabolites.
To discover which genes coded for which enzymes, Adam cultured a mutant yeast with a certain gene knocked out, and monitored how well the mutant grew without a particular metabolite. If the strain grew poorly without the metabolite, Adam learned something about the function of the knocked out gene. The robot could carry out more than 1000 of these experiments a day.
In all, Adam formulated and tested 20 hypotheses about genes coding for 13 enzymes. Twelve hypotheses were confirmed. For instance, Adam correctly hypothesised that three genes it identified encode an enzyme important in producing the amino acid lysine. The researchers confirmed Adam’s work with their own experiments.
The team is now working on a new robot, called Eve, which will search for new drugs.
Read the entire article on NewScientist.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,Optical Brain Imaging Decodes Preference With 80 Percent Accuracy.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2009) — Researchers at Canada’s largest children’s rehabilitation hospital have developed a technique that uses infrared light brain imaging to decode preference – with the goal of ultimately opening the world of choice to children who can’t speak or move.
Proving once again that the best ideas are often the simplest, 21-year-old student/inventor/entrepreneur Emily Cummins has designed a brilliant portable solar-powered refrigerator that works based upon the principle of evaporation.
Not only is the fridge solar powered, it can also be built from household materials – making it ideal for the Third World. Employing a combination of conduction and convection, the refrigerator requires no electricity and can be made from commonly available materials like cardboard, sand, and recycled metal.
Emily Cummins, 21, came up with the idea while working on a school project in her grandfather’s potting shed. The fridge is now improving the lives of thousands of poverty-stricken Africans.
Miss Cummins hopes to patent a more sophisticated portable model for use in transporting medical supplies around hot countries.
From the age of four, when she was given a hammer as a gift, Miss Cummins has spent much of her spare time making things out of ordinary materials. She has won awards for a toothpaste squeezer for arthritis sufferers and for a water-carrying device, again for Third World use.
Simply place perishable foods or temperature-sensitive medications in the solar refrigerator’s interior metal chamber and seal it. In-between the inner and outer chamber, organic material like sand, wool or soil is then saturated with water. As the sun warms the organic material, water evaporates, reducing the temperature of the inner chamber to a cool, 6 ºC [43 ºF] for days at a time!
After winning £5,000 from York Merchant Adventurers for her idea, Emily delayed going to college for a year to take her refrigerator to Africa for further development. She made six versions during the initial phase of production and helped make more than 50 during the trip where locals in Namibia nicknamed her “The Fridge Lady“. The refrigerator has since rolled out in Zambia, Namibia and South Africa and Emily believes thousands more may be in use as the design passes from community to community through word-of-mouth.
Emily explained: “I set about looking at how I could make a sustainable version after asking people what luxury they couldn’t live without and one of the answers that kept coming up was ‘fridge’…I wanted to keep it really simple and so I set about researching how we cooled things years ago. The simplest method of cooling something could be seen when you look at how we cool biologically—through sweating or evaporation. That idea led me to the design and the fridge was born.”
Emily has been inventing from an early age – she received her first hammer at the tender age of four from her grandfather who was an engineer, and she soon set to work making toys and rabbit hutches. At 16 Emily won a regional Young Engineer for Britain Award for creating a toothpaste squeezer for people with arthritis, and the next year went on to win a Sustainable Design Award for a water-carrier made from wood and rubber tubing. In 2007 Emily was named the British Female Innovator of the Year, and last year was short-listed for Cosmopolitan’s 2008 Ultimate Women of the Year Competition.
“I do want to use my skills to make a difference,” Emily says. “I’m not interested in making a bigger TV or greater sound system. I want to create change for the better.” Well said. We know we’ll hear much more from Emily in the future.
See the original postings on inhabitat and Mail Online.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,New Scientist listed the top 7 alternative energy sources in an article saying that…
The US could replace all its cars and trucks with electric cars powered by wind turbines taking up less than 3 square kilometres – in theory, at least. That’s the conclusion of a detailed study ranking 11 types of non-fossil fuels according to their total ecological footprint and their benefit to human health.
The study, carried out by Mark Jacobson of the atmosphere and energy programme at Stanford University, found wind power to be by far the most desirable source of energy. Biofuels from corn and plant waste came right at the bottom of the list, along with nuclear power and “clean” coal.
Watch a video of Jacobson discussing his findings.
The energy sources that Jacobson found most promising were, in descending order:
- Wind
- Concentrated solar power (mirrors heating a tower of water)
- Geothermal energy
- Tidal energy
- Solar panels
- Wave energy
- Hydroelectric dams
Read the rest of this article which also addresses biofuel concerns and current focused efforts.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,A new study from the National Academy of Sciences outlines grim possibilities on Earth for a worst-case scenario solar storm.
Damage to power grids and other communications systems could be catastrophic, the scientists conclude, with effects leading to a potential loss of governmental control of the situation.
The prediction is based in part on major solar storm in 1859 caused telegraph wires to short out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires.
It was perhaps the worst in the past 200 years, according to the new study, and with the advent of modern power grids and satellites, much more is at risk.
“A contemporary repetition of the [1859] event would cause significantly more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruptions,” the researchers conclude.
Read the entire article on FOXNews.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,A new garage-engineered generator burns the waste oil from restaurants’ deep fryers to generate electricity and hot water. Put 80 gallons of grease into the Vegawatt each week, and its creators promise it will generate about 5 kilowatts of power.
That’s about 10 percent of the total energy needs of Finz, a seafood restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the first Vegawatt is being tested. At New England electricity rates, the system offsets about $2.50 worth of electricity with each gallon of waste oil poured into it.
Vegawatt’s founder and inventor, James Peret, estimates that restaurants purchasing the $22,000 machine will save about $1,000 per month in electricity costs, for a payback time of two years.
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