Robot Skin Can Feel Touch, Sense Chemicals, and Soak Up Solar Power. When you meet your robot overlord, it may be wearing super-intelligent skin designed by a Stanford researcher--a solar-powered, super-sensitive, chemical-sampling covering that makes your meatbag covering look pathetic. Zhenan Bao is behind the advances, and the recent development centers on a stretchable solar cell system that can expand and shrink along two different axes, making it perfect for incorporation into artificial skin for robots, human prosthetic limbs, or even clothing.
Bao's earlier successes with artificial skin have resulted in a highly flexible and durable material, which is part of a flexible organic-chemistry transistor, built on a thin polymer layer. When the skin is subjected to pressure, the current flowing through the transistors is modified as tiny pyramid shapes molded into the polymer layer compress, resulting in a super-sensitive transducer that can apparently detect the pressure from a house-fly's feet. Snowflakes Up Close: A Small, Fragile World. If you’re one of those people who likes to ponder things while looking out a frosty window on a cold winter day, these pictures will clear up one of those long standing wonders: each snowflake really IS unique. Some look like roman columns, others circuit boards or spaceships. Taken under high magnification using a microscope, these images bring a fragile and beautiful world into view.
See Also HARMFUL VIRUSES MADE OF BEAUTIFUL GLASS They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? Source: akirathedon.com Known in some circles as the most amazing man in the universe, he once saved an entire family of muskrats from a sinking, fire engulfed steamboat while recovering from two broken arms relating to a botched no-chute wingsuit landing in North Korea. Line Block Cable by Junbeom So, Lee Ji Eun, Yi-Seo Hyeon, Heo-Hyeoksu & Jeong Minhui. Line Up The Tangles The problem addressed in the Line Block Cable is so true to home, it’s the one most of us face when we hook up too many gadgets in one area.
Not that we can help it, it’s ideal to have the TV, CD player and the music housed together. As a result, their cables leading up to the socket can get messy and unsightly. Line Block cables are constructed in such a way that they can tag 2 or more wires in a piggy-back fashion. Designers: Junbeom So, Lee Ji Eun, Yi-Seo Hyeon, Heo-Hyeoksu & Jeong Minhui. World Sunlight Map. SDO_Earth_scale-EDIT2.jpg (JPEG Image, 975x1000 pixels) - Scaled (64%)
11 cheap gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks. Science comes up with a lot of awesome stuff, and you don't need a Ph.D, a secret lab, or government funding to get your hands on some of the coolest discoveries. We've got a list of 11 mostly affordable gifts that are guaranteed to blow your mind, whether or not you're a science geek. Click on any image to see it enlarged. 1. Aerogel Also known as frozen smoke, Aerogel is the world's lowest density solid, clocking in at 96% air. Aerogel isn't just neat, it's useful. Price: $35 2. Inside these sealed glass balls live shrimp, algae, and bacteria, all swimming around in filtered seawater. EcoSpheres came out of research looking at ways to develop self-contained ecosystems for long duration space travel.
Price: $80 3. NASA has been trying to figure out how to get a sample of rock back from Mars for a while now. Every once in a while, a meteorite smashes into Mars hard enough to eject some rocks out into orbit around the sun. Price: $70+ 4. Price: $150 5. Price: $110 6. Price: $80 7. Price: $15 8. "How to make a solar power generator". The Scale of the Universe. View from Satellite.
NASA Science. Voyager 1 at edge of solar system - baltimoresun.com. January 17, 2011|By Frank D. Roylance, The Baltimore Sun You probably have more computing power in your pocket than what NASA's venerable Voyager spacecraft are carrying to the edge of the solar system. They have working memories a million times smaller than your home computer. They record their scientific data on 8-track tape machines. Even so, the twin explorers, now 33 years into their mission, continue to explore new territory as far as 11 billion miles from Earth. It's amazing even to Stamatios "Tom" Krimigis, of the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab near Laurel. "Needless to say, none of us expected it was going to be operating for so long," said Krimigis, now 72. In all that time, only one instrument, on Voyager 1, has broken down.
But five experiments on each Voyager are still funded and seven are still delivering data. "I suspect it's going to outlast me," said Krimigis. "Everybody is very excited about this," Krimigis said. Norman F. There was one big hitch. BuildItSolar: Solar energy projects for Do It Yourselfers to save money and reduce pollution.