Science and Engineering
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Posted by Alcyone Technology Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 ( NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY ) A new wonder material that can generate hydrogen, produce clean water and even create energy. Science fiction? Hardly, and there’s more – It can also desalinate water, be used as flexible water filtration membranes, help recover energy from desalination waste brine, be made into flexible solar cells and can also double the lifespan of lithium ion batteries. With its superior bacteria-killing capabilities, it can also be used to develop a new type of antibacterial bandage. Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), led by Associate Professor Darren Sun have succeeded in developing a single, revolutionary nanomaterial that can do all the above and at very low cost compared to existing technology.
Breakthrough Material Could Tackle Environmental Challenges
Biology
Frequencies
water
insects
ethics
Brain Control Systems
Fundamental Physics
Yarns woven from carbon nanotubes can contract like muscles at extremely high speeds to lift large weights. These carbon nanotube muscles can lift loads 200 times greater than natural muscles the same size. Videos made by researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas show the nanotube yarns lifting loads as much as 50,000 times greater than their own weight. Artificial muscles might be used as actuators in robotics and surgical tools, and drive tiny motors and flywheels. The nanotube muscles can be powered by electricity, but they also contract in response to light and certain chemicals.
Nanotube Muscles Bench 50,000 Times Their Own Weight | MIT Technology Review
Consciousness
chemtrails
Is our reality a projection of information, like the hologram image of Princess Leia projected by R2D2 in Star Wars ? (Credit: Lucasfilm) Whatever kind of reality you think you’re living in, you’re probably wrong. The universe is a computer, and everything that goes on in it can be explained in terms of information processing, speculates New Scientist in a special issue on What is reality? “Quantum physics is almost phrased in terms of information processing,” says Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford.
Reality is a computer projection: physicists
Strange Particles May Travel Faster Than Light, Breaking Law of Physics | Albert Einstein Theory of Special Relativity | Laws of Nature | Atom Smasher & Neutrinos
This story was updated at 6:20 p.m. EDT. Nothing goes faster than the speed of light. At least, we didn't think so.
Computer
Get a grip: Baxter demonstrates a simple manufacturing task at Rethink Robotics’ headquarters in Boston. About two months ago, a new employee arrived on the production line at Vanguard Plastics in Southington, Connecticut, a town that was once a hub of U.S. manufacturing but saw many of its factories disappear in the 1960s. The small manufacturer’s new worker, Baxter, is six feet tall, 300 pounds, and a robot. For a hulking machine, Baxter is remarkably expressive.
This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing
Meet the Other Robots Set to Invade Manufacturing
The robots really are coming. In today’s top story (see “ This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing ”), I write about a clever new industrial robot developed by robotics pioneer and the founder of iRobot, Rodney Brooks. Unlike a conventional factory machine this new robot, Baxter, is safe to work alongside, highly adaptive, and amazingly easy to program. Just show it how to do a task and it’ll get on with it. Baxter really has the potential to shake up manufacturing by bringing automation to completely new areas of work.
Space Exploration
water
Transportation
Biohybrid solar cells—Spinach power gets a big boost
This is a biohybrid solar cell that uses the photosynthetic protein from spinach made by Vanderbilt students based on a previous design. Credit: Amrutur Anilkumar, Vanderbilt University An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Vanderbilt University have developed a way to combine the photosynthetic protein that converts light into electrochemical energy in spinach with silicon, the material used in solar cells, in a fashion that produces substantially more electrical current than has been reported by previous "biohybrid" solar cells. The research was reported online on Sep. 4 in the journal Advanced Materials and Vanderbilt has applied for a patent on the combination.Energy
3D Printing
New blockbuster paper finds man-made CO2 is not the driver of global warming
An important new paper published today in Global and Planetary Change finds that changes in CO2 follow rather than lead global air surface temperature and that " CO 2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO 2 " The paper finds the " overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere," in other words, the opposite of claims by global warming alarmists that CO2 in the atmosphere drives land and ocean temperatures. Instead, just as in the ice cores, CO2 levels are found to be a lagging effect of ocean warming, not significantly related to man-made emissions, and not the driver of warming. Prior research has shown infrared radiation from greenhouse gases is incapable of warming the oceans , only shortwave radiation from the Sun is capable of penetrating and heating the oceans and thereby driving global surface temperatures.
Climatic Research Unit : Information sheets (this graph of HadCRUT4 is also available as Encapsulated PostScript and PDF suitable for publication and the data are available as Comma-Separated Values ) The time series shows the combined global land and marine surface temperature record from 1850 to 2012.
CRU Information Sheet no. 1: Global Temperature Record
Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab." Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition. A couple of years ago, at a TED conference, he described one goal as the creation of "inorganic life", and went on to detail his efforts to generate "evolutionary algorithms" in inert matter.
The 'chemputer' that could print out any drug | Science | The Observer
Although phase change materials have been utilized for decades, it has only been recently recognized that the benefits of these controlled temperature compounds demonstrate excellent results when used as personal body cooling or cool therapy devices and in stabilizing the surrounding temperature of inanimate objects (equipment). Overwhelming acceptance within the medical community has successfully proven that effective use of optimum temperature cooling (and warming) phase change formulations in anatomically designed products for acute and chronic injuries, post-operative recovery, and long-term maladies will significantly reduce rehabilitation time and return to function of the affected area. Cool Zone's constant temperature exotherm type technology utilizes non-toxic, non-carcinogenic blends of crystalline alkanes that possess attributes of low chemical reactivity with extremely high stability due to their molecular structures and bonding properties.
cooling cool vests, CoolZone Products The Tech behind the Cool
Loop quantum gravity ( LQG ) is a theory that attempts to describe the quantum properties of gravity . It is also a theory of quantum space and quantum time , because, as discovered with general relativity , the geometry of spacetime is a manifestation of gravity. LQG is an attempt to merge and adapt standard quantum mechanics and standard general relativity. The main output of the theory is a physical picture of space where space is granular. The granularity is a direct consequence of the quantization . It has the same nature of the granularity of the photons in the quantum theory of electromagnetism or the discrete levels of the energy of the atoms .
Loop quantum gravity
How to Make a Metamaterial that Expands Under Pressure and Contracts In Tension
Compress a material and it will deform in the direction of the applied force: in other words, it becomes squashed. Similarly, a material under tension will stretch. But what of the opposite idea, that a compressed material will stretch and substance under tension will become squashed?Lumina Foundation, the Seeker for this Challenge, has issued Goal 2025 – to increase the number of adults in the United States obtaining high-quality, documented, post-secondary education from roughly 44% to more than 60%. One motivation for this goal, and a key factor for encouraging action toward it, is its economic impact. In order to fully predict this, Solvers are requested to propose novel and unexpected correlations between post-secondary education attainment and outcomes with a clear economic impact (an expected example, for instance, is increased income).
Challenge Browser
A near-Earth asteroid swept safely past Earth on February 15, 2013, and astronomers in many parts of the world were ready with cameras and video equipment. At its closest to us, asteroid 2012 DA14 was within the orbit of the moon (which averages about a quarter million miles away), and closer than some high-orbiting communications satellites. Its closest point was about 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers) away. The asteroid was not visible to the eye as it sped harmlessly past, but earthly cameras captured it, and millions watched online in real time. The image below is from Bareket Observatory in Israel, which had a live webcast of the asteroid passage on February 15.