Red-Hot Research Could Lead To New Materials

Photo: Two versions of the aerogel -- the RF-only version (left) and the mixed version (right). (Credit: Image courtesy of Missouri University of Science and Technology)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2009) — Recent experiments to create a fast-reacting explosive by concocting it at the nanoscopic level could result in more spectacular firework displays. But more impressive to the Missouri University of Science and Technology professor who led the research, the method used to mix chemicals at that tiny scale could lead to new strong porous materials for high temperature applications, from thermal insulation in jet engines to industrial chemical reactors.

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Printed Supercapacitor Could Feed Power-Hungry Gadgets

From New Scientist:

A supercapacitor – a device that can unleash large amounts of charge very quickly – has been created using printing technology for the first time. The advance will pave the way for "printed" power supplies that could be useful as gadgets become thinner, lighter and even flexible.

Advances in electronics mean portable gadgets are shrinking in size but growing in their energy demands, and conventional batteries are struggling to cope.

Batteries are slow to recharge because they store energy chemically. By contrast, capacitors, which are common in electronics, are short-term stores of electrical energy that charge almost instantaneously but hold little energy.

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Disease In A Warming Climate

Photo: Climate change may lead diseases such as malaria to change their geographical ranges.WHO/TDR/S.Lindsay

From Nature News:

Climate change takes the blame for many dim future prospects: rising sea levels, more frequent droughts and disappearing glaciers, to name just a few. But perhaps the warming trend should be absolved of responsibility for a predicted bump in the global burden of infectious disease.

That's the bottom line of a paper in the April issue of the journal Ecology, which argues that the geographical ranges of infectious diseases are more likely to shift than to expand (K. D. Lafferty Ecology 90, 888–900; 2009). "You often see a list of the 12 terrible things that are going to happen with climate change, and increases in infectious diseases is often on that list," says Kevin Lafferty, an ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Santa Barbara, California. But data from diseases such as yellow fever and malaria, he says, provide "a different reality".

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Research Could Lead To New Non-antibiotic Drugs To Counter Hospital Infections

When worms (Caenorhabditis elegans) ate the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa that were raised on low levels of phosphates, unexpected large red spots appeared in their intestinal tracts. The worms then died, so researchers dubbed the condition "Red Death." They theorized that providing P. aeruginosa with phosphate would protect weakened or immunosuppressed hospital patients from this lethal pathogen. (Credit: John Alverdy, University of Chicago Medical Center)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2009) — Lack of an adequate amount of the mineral phosphate can turn a common bacterium into a killer, according to research to be published in the April 14, 2009, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. The findings could lead to new drugs that would disarm the increasingly antibiotic-resistant pathogen rather than attempting to kill it.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of the most serious hospital-acquired pathogens. A common cause of lung infections, it is also found in the intestinal tract of 20 percent of all Americans and 50 percent of hospitalized patients in the United States.

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Losing It: Why Self-Control Is Not Natural

From Live Science:

After dinner last night, I lost my usual self-control and ate half a box of cookies. No wonder. My self-control had been under pressure all day. I righteously refused a muffin at breakfast, didn’t scream at my kid to get out the door although we were late, made a conscious decision not to run over a pedestrian crossing against the light, kept my fist from pounding on the table during a faculty meeting, and resisted the urge to throw an annoying student out of my office.

But by 7 p.m., my self-control mechanism was worn out, and down those cookies went.

The empty box would have been no surprise to Yale University psychologist Joshua Ackerman and colleagues who have discovered that self-control not only wears us down, even thinking about other people's self-control is too much to handle.

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Standing Watch Over A Crowded Space

From The BBC:

On 10 February this year, a defunct Russian communications satellite crashed into an American commercial spacecraft, generating thousands of pieces of orbiting debris.

At the time, some observers put the odds of such an event occurring at millions, maybe billions, to one.

But experts had been warning for years that useable space was becoming crowded, boosting the possibility of a serious collision.

They have argued both for better monitoring of the space environment and for policies aimed at controlling the production of debris.

Over the past two years, a number of incidents have drawn attention to the problem of space debris.

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Six Mind-Blowing Ideas

From Cosmic Log/MSNBC:

Is "life as we don't know it" closer than we think? Are microbes behind the world's biggest extinctions? Is most of our morality bound up in hidden "dark morals"? Blow your mind with six flights of scientific fancy from the Origins Symposium, presented by Arizona State University.

The weekend forum, organized to inaugurate ASU's Origins Initiative, focused on the beginnings of life, the universe and everything - including consciousness and culture. Among the luminaries in attendance were biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscientist Steven Pinker, anthropologist Donald Johanson and a basketball team's worth of Nobel laureates. (On Saturday I almost got lost as I wandered around The Boulders resort with two of the nicest Nobelists you ever did meet, Frank Wilczek and John Mather.)

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7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs

From Wired Science:

You might think of nuclear weapons as just the most fearsome weapon ever invented by humans, but that would be seriously underplaying their versatility.

Nuclear weapons aren't only good for leveling cities, they've also been used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes like stimulating natural gas production — and all kinds of innovative proposals have been slapped on the table to harness the awesome power of the nuclear blast for economic benefit.

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The Top 10 Telescopes of All Time

From PopSci.com:

A look back at the 400-year-old art of assisted sky-gazing.

Humans have been looking to the heavens for as long as we have had stories to tell about them. But the way we look up has come quite far in the past 400 years, since Galileo Galilei first pointed a spyglass to the sky.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of the telescope, Popular Science looks back on the top 10 observatories on Earth and beyond.

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Edge of Space Found

Photo From Near Space Sciences

From Live Science:

Hold on to your hats, or in this case, your helmets: Scientists have finally pinpointed the so-called edge of space — the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

With data from a new instrument developed by scientists at the University of Calgary, scientists confirmed that space begins 73 miles (118 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

A lot remains very fuzzy, however, as the boundary is surrounded by a host of misconceptions and confusing, conflicting definitions.

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Twin Spacecraft To Explore Gravitational 'Parking Lots' That May Hold Secret Of Moon's Origin

Artist's concept of the STEREO spacecraft. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2009) — Two places on opposite sides of Earth may hold the secret to how the moon was born. NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft are about to enter these zones, known as the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, each centered about 93 million miles away along Earth's orbit.

As rare as free parking in New York City, L4 and L5 are among the special points in our solar system around which spacecraft and other objects can loiter. They are where the gravitational pull of a nearby planet or the sun balances the forces from the object's orbital motion. Such points closer to Earth are sometimes used as spaceship "parking lots", like the L1 point a million miles away in the direction of the sun. They are officially called Libration points or Lagrangian points after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an Italian-French mathematician who helped discover them.

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When Life As We Know It Became Possible On Earth

From The Independent:

The mystery of how our planet's atmosphere became rich in oxygen has finally been solved.

It was one of the most important changes to have happened to the Earth's atmosphere and it was the reason why today we can breathe life-giving oxygen. And yet the Great Oxidation Event has remained a mystery – until now.

Without oxygen, life on Earth would not exist as we know it. It has provided the supercharged air that has fuelled an explosion in the diversity and size of all living organisms, from the smallest shrimp to the biggest dinosaur.

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Time To Think Hydropower

Hoover Dam, also sometimes known as Boulder Dam, is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada. (Image from Wikimedia)

From The Scientific American:

Imagine what our economy would be like if almost half of our electricity came from renewable energy resources. No fuel price shocks, no foreign control, no worries about climate change—just clean, abundant, affordable electricity.

Before World War II, Americans actually lived that way, thanks to hydropower. The massive public works projects undertaken during the Great Depression built a fleet of huge facilities on some of the country’s biggest waterways. Job creation, electrification and inexpensive power modernized the rural South and helped to industrialize the West.

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Do Aliens Share Our Genetic Code?

Was Jabba the Hutt made from the same genetic building blocks as life on Earth?
(Image: Jonathan Hordle / Rex)

From New Scientist:

What similarities will alien life forms have to living things here on Earth? We won't know until we find some, but now there is evidence that at least the basic building blocks will be the same.

All terrestrial life forms share the same 20 amino acids. Biochemists have managed to synthesise 10 of them in experiments that simulate lifeless prebiotic environments, using proxies for lightning, ionising radiation from space, or hydrothermal vents to provide the necessary energy. Amino acids are also found inside meteorites formed before Earth was born.

Paul Higgs and Ralph Pudritz at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, point out that all these experiments produced a subset of the same 10 amino acids and calculate that these 10 require the least amount of energy to form.

This, they argue, suggests that if alien life exists it probably has the same 10 amino acids at its core.

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Science's Most Powerful Computer Tackles First Questions

Jaguar is the second most powerful computer ever built and the fastest dedicated to science (Image: National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

From New Scientist:

In cult sci-fi tale Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the most powerful computer in the universe was charged with finding the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

In the real world, a newly built supercomputer that is the most powerful ever dedicated to science will be tackling questions about climate change, supernovas, and the structure of water.

The projects were chosen in a peer-reviewed process designed to get the computer producing useful science even during the period when its performance is still being fine-tuned by engineers.

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New Link Between The Evolution Of Complex Life Forms On Earth And Nickel And Methane Gas

Image: Banded iron formations like this from northern Michigan contain evidence of a drop in dissolved nickel in ancient oceans. (Credit: Image courtesy of Carnegie Institution)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2009) — The Earth's original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically during what scientists call the "Great Oxidation Event." The cause of this event has puzzled scientists, but researchers writing in Nature have found indications in ancient sedimentary rocks that it may have been linked to a drop in the level of dissolved nickel in seawater.

"The Great Oxidation Event is what irreversibly changed surface environments on Earth and ultimately made advanced life possible," says research team member Dominic Papineau of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory. "It was a major turning point in the evolution of our planet, and we are getting closer to understanding how it occurred."

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10 Surprising Sex Statistics

From Live Science:

Whether it's penis size, papillomavirus risk, or profligate pregnancies, it's good to know the numbers. Check out these stats to see if you are well within the sexual mean -- or if you're off the charts.

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Microsoft Genius Who Became First Two-Time Space Tourist Returns To Earth

American billionaire Charles Simonyi landed safely back to earth today
after completing his second visit into space.

From The Daily Mail:

U.S. billionaire Charles Simonyi who became the first tourist to roar into space twice, touched back down in earth today.

Simonyi landed near Dzhezkazgan, in central Kazakhstan after paying a total of $60million to visit the International Space Station.

Simonyi's capsule also carried American astronaut Mike Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov.

The Microsoft genius was sent into space 13 days ago aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft and docked on the station 48 hours later.

The spacecraft blasted into the leaden skies from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to much fanfare.

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Efficient Power At Any Wind Speed

Vail Resorts said Tuesday that it would buy credits for wind power like that generated by the turbines at the Gray County Wind Farm in Kansas. Orlin Wagner/Associated Press

From Scientific American:

One of wind power’s drawbacks is its variability: sometimes the breeze is weak; other times it is strong. To convert the rotation of wind turbines into electricity efficiently, however, generators require a single turning speed. Faster or slower than this “sweet spot” and efficiency falls off fast. To compensate, engineers design turbine hardware to have adjustable blade angles to shed surplus wind energy or to capture more. Wind turbines often also employ a transmission to gear the shaft speed up or down to the sweet spot. But both mechanisms add weight, complexity and cost.

ExRo Technologies in Vancouver is commercializing what should be a better idea: a generator that operates efficiently over a wide speed range. Retrofitted wind turbines could produce as much as 50 percent more power over time, CEO John McDonald states.

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The Best Computer Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future

Microsoft’s Surface is an example of a multitouch screen. Photo by: Microsoft

From Technology Review:

Say goodbye to the mouse and hello to augmented reality, voice recognition, and geospatial tracking.

Computer scientists from around the world will gather in Boston this week at Computer-Human Interaction 2009 to discuss the latest developments in computer interfaces. To coincide with the event, we present a roundup of the coolest computer interfaces past, present, and future.

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