Solar Impulse had a test flight this week for a non-stop 26+ hours. The plane used solar cells instead of conventional petroleum fuel for energy. Isn’t it amazing? It looks as though we may be able to go green in the sky!
André Borschberg, CEO and co-founder of the Solar Impulse project, expertly piloted the aircraft with its 64 meter wingspan. The long wingspan enables improved aerodynamic efficiency and greater surface area on which to place solar cells.
The maximum speed reached was 68 knots (ground speed) with an average speed of 23 knots.
At present the plane's cockpit is very small and can only accommodate one pilot. Even if found commercially feasible, it may be a while before this might fly over American cities carrying passengers. Well, Wright brothers did not have more people in their maiden flight either.
Have you seen a paper fold itself into a plane or boat. That is what the scientists at Harvard and MIT invented - a programmable matter by folding.
It might remind you of Origami. In fact the program relied on the ancient art of origami. In the video below you will see how a single thin sheet composed of interconnected triangular sections could transform itself into a boat or plane-shape - all without the help of skilled fingers. The sheet, a thin composite of rigid tiles and elastomer joints, is studded with thin foil actuators (motorized switches) and flexible electronics.
The senior authors on the study were Robert J. Wood, associate professor of electrical engineering at the Harvard and Daniela Rus, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT. The fancy folding techniques were inspired in part by the work of co-author Erik Dermaine, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and one of the world's most recognized experts on computational origami. The recent was published in the most recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, also known as PNAS.
"Smart sheets are Origami Robots that will make any shape on demand for their user," says Rus. "A big achievement was discovering the theoretical foundations and universality of folding and fold planning, which provide the brain and the decision making system for the smart sheet."
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In Minnesota, minors can no longer get tattoos or pierced genitals, regardless of whether they have a parent's permission.
Florida outlaws personal ownership of Burmese pythons and other reptiles, and cracks down on horse thieves!
People with permits to carry concealed weapons can carry guns into restaurants that serve alcohol in Virginia and New Mexico.
Ohio will require insurance plans governed by state law to offer parents the chance to buy coverage for their children up to age 28, going beyond the federal law.
A group of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital used a gentle detergent on liver for 3 days to remove cells and leave a scaffold with the architecture of the original liver tissue. After this process they transferred good liver cells back into the matrix and found that this works quite well.
Multimillion dollar prize for winning idea! The X Prize Foundation announced today that it is developing a multimillion-dollar “oil spill cleanup X challenge” to come up with solutions to cleaning up shorelines and open water fouled by oil leaking from the BP Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. More of this news available at CNN
It might sound like a fiction, to put an organ on a chip! Harvard biologists recently developed a lung on chip tool. They speculate that this can be used to test the effect of drugs and other agents before going to clinical trial.
Biopharmaceutical companies spend millions in the discovery of drugs. This kind of tools can cut down the cost. This may also provide more valuable information on how human lungs responds, without testing on humans.
When we breathe oxygen enters blood through a three-layer interface of lung cells. The lung-on-a-chip microdevice takes a new approach to tissue engineering by placing two layers of living tissues-the lining of the lung's air sacs and the blood vessels that surround them-across a porous, flexible boundary. Air is delivered to the lung lining cells, a rich culture medium flows in the capillary channel to mimic blood and cyclic mechanical stretching mimics breathing. The device was created using a novel microfabrication strategy that uses clear rubbery materials.
More information on this news can be found at the science news website SciGuru.com
Well Pipe Below the Sea Floor Broken? Keith Olbermann show says the BP well is essentially unstoppable. Is this correct? He says the broken well tilting 10-12 degree may be due to this structural problem. See the video.
Keith's program of June 23, 2010 can be viewed on MSNBC website
Xenoblade has already made its way in Japan. Introduced this month, Xenoblade has already taken the top spot as a best seller in Japan. Xenoblade is a role-playing video game from Nintendo for the Wii console.
According to the siliconera.com one of the writers, Tetsyya Takahashi got the idea for Xenoblade on a train ride. Takahashi said: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if people lived on the bodies of something huge, like gods?”. Xenoblade is expected to continue its huge ride in North America, when it is released.
The following are two similar sinkholes formed in Guatemala City, one this weekend and the other one in 2007. You will be amazed to see the similarities.
CNN reports late last night that "115 people have died after a tropical storm battered Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador over the weekend". CNN adds: "In the northern part of Guatemala City, the downpour created a giant sinkhole that swallowed up a space larger than the area of a street intersection. Residents told CNN that a three-story building and a house fell into the hole". The following is a copied photo from the CNN website (For original high quality image visit CNN website).
The following is a Februaly 26, 2007 National Geographic report:
Giant Sinkhole swallows Guatemala Homes. "After fumbling for weeks, part of a poor Guatemala City neighborhood plummeted some 30 stories into the Earth on Friday"
The manifestation of the confluence of incompetency and greed 5000 feet below the surface of water spewing up from a plugless hole in the territory of the world’s super power, the seat of MIT, Caltech and Harvard. Every one stands still and pray the Lord to plug the hole. Where science was ignored, people in shock and the government in awe.
Tattoo with a carbon nanotube and a glucose measuring device as sensor. What does this mean? No more pricking to measure glucose multiple times a day. This is a great news for children with insulin dependent diabetes, also known as type I diabetes.
The technology behind the sensor, described in a December 2009 issue of ACS Nano, is fundamentally different from existing sensors, says Michael Strano, Associate Professor at MIT, who developed this technology. The sensor is based on carbon nanotubes wrapped in a polymer that is sensitive to glucose concentrations. When this sensor encounters glucose, the nanotubes fluoresce, which can be detected by shining near-infrared light on them. Measuring the amount of fluorescence reveals the concentration of glucose.
The researchers plan to create an “ink” of these nanoparticles suspended in a saline solution that could be injected under the skin like a tattoo. The “tattoo” would last for a specified length of time, probably six months, before needing to be refreshed.
It was not long ago that Bayer described a glucometer that can be connected to a gaming devise that would make glucose measurement incentive driven. A glucose measuring instrument is used by diabetics to monitor their blood glucose. Bayer's glucometer connects directly to Nintendo DS™ and DS Lite gaming systems to help kids manage a lifelong disease by rewarding them for building consistent testing habits and meeting personalized blood glucose target ranges.
Are we going to see a merger of nanotechnology and gaming in revolutionizing health care?
Source for tatto based glucose sensing: MIT news office
Next time when you buy a laptop, order a pair of colorful gloves too. This is not to keep 'viruses' away. Just wear the gloves and play your game on the laptop. You may need no mouse or joystick hereafter. Have you seen the movie Minority Report? This innovation is akin to the "Minority Report Interface" where a high speed gestural user interface helped communication with a computer by hand gestures!
MIT researchers have developed a system that could make gestural interfaces much more practical. Aside from a standard webcam, like those found in many new computers, the system uses only a single piece of hardware: a multicolored Lycra glove that could be manufactured for about a dollar.
The glove is covered with 20 irregularly shaped patches that use 10 different colors. The system is being developed by Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with his mentor Jovan Popovic, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
The most obvious application of the technology, Wang says, would be in video games: Gamers navigating a virtual world could pick up and wield objects simply by using hand gestures.Wang also imagines that engineers and designers could use the system to more easily and intuitively manipulate 3-D models of commercial products or large civic structures.
Wang's software crops out the glove background, reduces the resolution of the image to 40x40 pixels, searches through a database containing myriad 40-by-40 digital models of a hand clad in the distinctive glove, in a range of different positions. Once it's found a match, it simply looks up the corresponding hand position.
Since the system doesn't have to calculate the relative positions of the fingers, palm, and back of the hand on the fly, it's able to provide an answer in a fraction of a second.
Well, we are in 21st century. We can operate a rover in Mars, but we cannot plug an oil spewing pipe under water! In 1962 Kennedy said we will go to moon in 10 years, we went to moon in 1969. Our Apollo 13 was about to die in the space. But we avoided a disaster using our best brains. We can precisely hit targets across the globe by navigating a predator from our soil. Now a broken pipe is spewing millions of gallons of oil 5000 feet under the ocean. Those who put that pipe down do not know how to plug it. Where are our brains? Did we stop teaching science and technology in our schools? Do you know how to plug this stuff? If you know how it can be plugged, post it here.
The Story: A 21 inch pipe, 5000 feet below the sea level, is spewing thousands of gallons of oil beginning April 20. It so happened that BP knew how to siphon the oil, never knew how to fix a pipe if it were to break beneath the ocean floor. BP engineers are trying hard to plug the hole. First they lowered a 60-foot dome to contain and collect the leaking oil in a controlled manner. That failed. Next they lowered a 5-foot "top hat" dome in the hope that it would help them to draw up the leaking oil to the surface, but failed. As a third attempt they inserted a 6-inch pipe into the 21-inch leaking pipe and started collecting 2000 barrels a day. BP estimated around 5000 barrels being gushed out into the ocean every day, while a Purdue scientist put this figure at whopping 70,000 barrels. The news is that huge oil plumes that extend miles have been formed in the Gulf.
Where is our science and technology leadership? What surprised me was not the leak, why no one had a clue how to plug it. When I take my family out to the park in the summer I will have an extra bottle of water in the car, just in case! When we call four people home for dinner we cook for two more, just in case! If we dont have food or time to cook we simply do not call them home! When you write a grant application to granting agencies, you need to write a separate section called "Potential Problems and Alternate Strategies", because those who give money need to know that in case what you propose do not work, you have a plan B. When you draw out oil from 5000 feet below the water, lots of things can go wrong, so you expect to have redundant and fail-safe plans B, C and D which are mutually independent. If I do not carry enough water in my outing, only my family and I suffer. If you do not get the grant funded only your personnel and you will suffer. But if some one spills millions of gallons of oil in to the ocean, the society will suffer. Is it a social crime? I do not know. (There might be some one out there saying you can dump lot more in ocean, ocean can take it!) . The leak needs to be plugged ASAP, we do not want the Mayan's 2012 consume us sooner.
If you know of a method to plug this pipe, post it here. (Photos: Courtesy NASA; Video from Youtube)
According to NASA supported studies, 20 years from now, airplanes may transform to technological marvels.
The GE Aviation team conceptualizes a 20-passenger aircraft that could reduce congestion at major metropolitan hubs by using community airports for point-to-point travel. The aircraft has an oval-shaped fuselage that seats four across in full-sized seats.
As always, with its 180-passenger D8 "double bubble" configuration, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team strays farthest from the familiar, fusing two aircraft bodies together lengthwise and mounting three turbofan jet engines on the tail.
The Boeing Company's Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research, or SUGAR, team's preferred concept, the SUGAR Volt, is a twin-engine aircraft with hybrid propulsion technology, a tube-shaped body and a truss-braced wing mounted to the top.
Just beneath the skin of these concepts lie breakthrough airframe and propulsion technologies designed to help the commercial aircraft of tomorrow fly significantly quieter, cleaner, and more fuel-efficiently, with more passenger comfort, and to more of America's airports. You may see ultramodern shape memory alloys, ceramic or fiber composites, carbon nanotube or fiber optic cabling, self-healing skin, hybrid electric engines, folding wings, double fuselages and virtual reality windows. "Standing next to the airplane, you may not be able to tell the difference, but the improvements will be revolutionary," said Richard Wahls, project scientist for the Fundamental Aeronautics Program's Subsonic Fixed Wing Project at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. "Technological beauty is more than skin deep."
With the goals of a reduction of 71-decibel noise, 75 percent NO emission and 70 percent fuel burn for 2030 aircraft, industry and academia responded to the NASA request with these exotic models some of which may allow us a daily airplane commute to work.
RogerRoast blog is for current developments in science and technology and interesting stories on science and technology. If you find an interesting story, tweet me. Not all requests may be considered, but all requests will be carefully evaluated for interesting content. Rogers
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