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Growing Better Rice for a Hungry World - Health - GOOD
The global demand for rice is booming. To keep up with this demand, rice production must increase by about 70 percent over the next two decades. At the same time, too much or too little water, extreme temperatures, and poor soils are threatening rice production.
In further proof that we never know just how much we don’t know, a paper published in Nature suggests that biologists in the UK have discovered an entirely new and unique branch in the tree of life. A group of mysterious microscopic organisms related to fungus are actually so different that they make up their own kind of fungal group. Another way to say that: there are so many of these distinctly different kinds of organisms living in so many diverse places, that the biodiversity among this new group might be as vast as the entire known fungal kingdom. In fact, they might not actually be fungi at all. The scientists who have discovered this new clade--a clade is like a branch on the tree of life that consists of an organism and all of its descendants--have named it cryptomycota, which loosely means “hidden from the kingdom Fungi” so we’re told.
Biologists Announce Discovery of an Entirely New Branch of Life | Popular Science
Quantum Entanglement, Visible to the Naked Eye Jule_Berlin via Flickr Physicists at the University of Geneva in Switzerland have devised a new kind of quantum experiment using humans as photon detectors, and in doing so have made the quantum phenomenon of entanglement visible to the naked eye for the first time. For those that need a primer, entanglement is that strange quantum phenomenon that links two particles across distances such that any any measurements carried out on one particle immediately changes the properties of the other--even if they are separated by the entire universe.
For the First Time, Humans See Quantum Entanglement With the Naked Eye | Popular Science
New Condensation Tech Captures Drinkable Water From Diesel Exhaust | Popular Science
Carrying the Water U.S. Army soldiers load water and supplies into an SH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter. U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons We’ve seen plenty of concepts designed to lessen the physical burden of being a member of the military — Marines using portable renewable power stations , clothing that charges radios and GPS devices .
SketchSET at the Atomic Scale Image courtesy of University of Pittsburgh University of Pittsburgh researchers have assembled a key piece of tech that will help enable a future generation of extremely powerful quantum computers as well as advanced electronic materials and better computer memories. Their single-electron transistor is the first of its kind made entirely from oxide-based materials, an important aspect that allows it to work as a solid-state memory. SketchSET--or sketch-based single-electron transistor--contains a tiny 1.5-nanometer-wide island at its core that operates with just one or two electrons at a time. The ability to work at such small scales makes it ideal for several advanced computing applications, like quantum processors that would be orders of magnitude more powerful than existing supercomputers.
Researchers Build a Transistor Out Of a Single Electron | Popular Science
Tapping Light's Magnetic Properties, Innovative Tech Harvests Solar Energy Without Solar Cells | Popular Science
Semiconductor-Based Solar Cells Andrej Šalov via Wikimedia One of the major barriers between solar energy and solar-derived electricity is solar cells themselves--commercial solar cells aren’t very efficient at converting sunlight to electricity, but they are the best thing we’ve got. Now, a team of University of Michigan researchers have potentially devised a better way to convert solar energy into electricity: get rid of the semiconductor-based solar cells altogether and tap into the magnetic effects of light . The researcher say the’ve essentially found a way to make an “optical battery” by extracting a very strong magnetic field from light, which generally exhibits weak magnetic effects. Those effects are generally so weak that until now scientists ignored them altogether.
NASA's Prometheus Nuclear-Powered, Ion-Propelled Spacecraft NASA's proposed Prometheus spacecraft would've had a nuclear engine in the nose that powered ion jets in the rear to propel the long-distance vehicle. NASA In the last century, Russia and the United States engaged competitively in both a space race and a nuclear technology race. In this century, it appears the two are considering collaborating in turning the fruits of those Cold War showdowns into workable technology that could expand spaceflight operations beyond Earth orbit.
Russia, NASA to Meet This Month to Discuss Collaboration on Nuclear-Powered Spacecraft | Popular Science
Five Clever and Creative New Design Ideas to Fight Bike Theft - Design - GOOD
The Design Council is a U.K. charity that promotes design for the public good. Under their Design Against Crime initiative, the group seeks design solutions for some of the most persistent urban crimes. Their most recent challenge looked for ways to prevent residential bike theft, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of bike theft in the U.K. In addition to ensuring bike safety, the ideas had to be simple and executable, making it easier and more convenient for cyclists to incorporate security at home, with minimal visual and space disruption. Here are the finalists: 1) The Lupin
Call it faux-tosynthesis. An MIT research team lead by Daniel Nocera revealed an "artificial leaf" that uses the sun's rays to produce energy. Developing an energy source modeled on photosynthesis like this has long been a goal of energy science. (We actually highlighted Nocera's project in the GOOD 100 way back in 2009.) The basic science sounds simple enough: The sun's rays split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be recombined in a fuel cell. When they are recombined, energy is created.
Faux-tosynthesis: The Artificial Leaf that Could Power Your Home - Environment - GOOD
Six Ways Bio-Inspired Design is Reshaping the Future | Popular Science
How exactly does one turn sunlight and water into usable energy? If it were possible to ask any living organism on Earth this question, you could do far better than asking a biologist or a chemist, or any other human being for that matter, and take the question directly to a leaf. That’s the goal of biomimicry: to take human problems and ask nature “how would you solve this?” And increasingly, such questions are changing everything, from energy to information technology to the way we build cities.This Star Is So Cold that You Can Actually Drink It
Le transport spatial, en orbite basse, est en rêve en passe d’être réalisé. Nombreux sont les projets prêts à voir le jour, certaines grosses fortunes ayant même déjà réservé leur précieux billet. SpaceX, Astrium, pour ne citer qu’eux, sont déjà dans la course, mais Alliant Techsystems, ATK, va rentrer dans la course… (Lire la suite…)Video: A Tour of a Homemade Scanning Electron Microscope | Popular Science
Krasnow and His DIY SEM Have a spare oscilloscope, an electron gun, and a handful of spare weekends? DIYer Ben Krasnow has spent the last few months building a homemade scanning electron microscope in his workshop, and yesterday he generated his first image. To celebrate, he’s shared his setup via this video explaining broadly how he did it. As DIY projects go, we’re going to rate this one “difficult.”How It Works: The Light-Driven Computer | Popular Science
IBM's Light-Driven Processor Courtesy IBM The speed of light is as fast as it gets, and IBM researchers are exploiting that fact to give supercomputers a boost. They’ve made the smallest-yet silicon chips that use light to transmit information. Most parts of the chip resemble those found on any other commercial chip. The parts that process or transform information—in other words, the parts that do the actual computing—still deploy electrons moving through semiconductor gates. But the interconnects, the lines that shuttle information between different areas within a chip, are drastically different.High Index Resolution Enhancement by Scattering (HIRES) Explained Allard Mosk, et. al. via arXiv Today in clever science tricks: a new kind of microscopy that can see down to resolutions smaller than the wavelength of the imaging light itself. On its face, this shouldn’t be possible; the smallest resolution you should be able to get in the visible spectrum is about 200 nanometers because of the lower limits of visible light’s wavelengths.
Visible-Light Lens Can See Objects Tinier Than The Light's Wavelength | Popular Science
Silicon Chips Wired With Nerve Cells Could Enable New Brain/Machine Interfaces | Popular Science
Nerve Cells (Illustrated) Benedict Campbell/Wellcome Images via Flickr It’s reminiscent of Cartman’s runaway Trapper Keeper notebook in that long-ago episode of South Park, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may be scratching the surface of a new kind of brain/machine interface by creating computer chips that are wired together with living nerve cells . A team there has found that mouse nerve cells will connect with each other across a network of tiny tubes threaded through a semiconductor material.Sci & Tech
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