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Futurology 148: Blind mice & sun music
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Ice cube ’scope: The world’s largest telescope, currently under construction more than a mile beneath the Antarctic ice, is on schedule to be completed next year, according to a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, the lead institution for a scientific project called IceCube.
Ninety-five percent of the IceCube telescope, consisting of thousands of digital optical modules developed for scientists working to understand the universe, is already installed and operating at the South Pole, said Albrecht Karle, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an interview with EE Times.
The IceCube telescope has a volume of one cubic kilometer, but the instrument is pointed downward towards the center of the Earth, buried beneath tons of ice in the coldest spot in the world. It will convey its findings through vast arrays of digital sensors in the search for neutrinos.
Comment — sounds like cold comfort.
Great, flexible hi-def aerial video on the cheap: What happens when you strap a US$1700 digital SLR camera doing full HD video to a $2k remote controlled helicopter? In another example of what you can do with a few grand's worth of equipment that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to do with a real helicopter (pic), check out this amazing aerial hi-def video (excuse the awful music on the clip).
Comment — expect lots of use in forthcoming movies.
Red wine can fight blindness: Too much wine can blur your vision in the short term, but could prevent long-term blindness too, thanks to resveratrol, an anti-aging compound found in red wine.
One of the main causes of blindness, particularly for older patients, is uncontrollable blood vessel growth in the eyes, a process called angiogenesis. (Angiogenesis can also cause certain cancers, heart attacks, and stroke.) In the eyes, angiogenesis is a key part of blindness-inducing diseases like diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, the latter of which is the most common cause of blindness for patients fifty years and older. Now studies show the use of red wine to fight this type of blindness, at least in mice ...
Comment — "Three blind mice, see how they, er, see ..."
New high-power battery may lead to bigger hybrid vehicles: A research paper published last week by a group of scientists at MIT covers a way to use carbon nanotubes to create a device that combines the strengths of batteries and capacitors, resulting in a battery than can both store a large amount of energy and put out a high rate of power.
The ability to provide a better combination of high power and rapid discharge may help engineers tailor the batteries to a broader range of vehicles.
Comment — and also useful for planet rovers ...
Bacteria rings crack chemical code: The visible concentric circles of a bacteria swarm as the colony starts and stops its progress has led Spanish researchers to discover a key component of infectious bacteria's battle plan – and how to stop it.
They identified a protein that tells bacteria in a colony to halt its forward march when antibiotics are present. They wait until the coast is clear, then resume the infection. The finding shows how bacteria outmaneuver antibiotics in the body to continue infecting an organ even after treatment, but it also pinpoints a vulnerability that researchers may be able to exploit to make antibiotics more effective.
Comment — I like the 'vulnerability' part.
Music of the Sun's magnetic fields: Scientists at the University of Sheffield have recorded the "music" produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun. They discovered that the huge magnetic loops that coil away from the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, the 'coronal loops', vibrate like strings on a musical instrument or behave like soundwaves traveling through a wind instrument.
Professor Robertus von Fáy-Siebenbürgen, head of the solar physics research group at Sheffield University, said, 'It was strangely beautiful and exciting to hear these noises for the first time from such a large and powerful source." He says it's a sort of music as it has harmonics. It is providing a new way to learn about the sun and giving a new insight into the physics that goes on at in the sun's outer layers where temperatures reach millions of degrees.
Comment — Yes, it sounds hot. "Here comes the sun ..."
Much more energy efficient air conditioning: The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory has announced it has developed a new method for air conditioning that reduces energy use by 50-90%. The DEVap system (Desiccant-Enhanced eVaporative air conditioner) cools air using evaporative cooling, which is not new, but combines the process with a liquid dessicant for pulling the water vapor out of the cooled air stream.
The liquid dessicant, a very strong aqueous solution of lithium chloride or sodium chloride, is separated from the air stream by a permeable hydrophobic membrane. Heat is later used to evaporate water vapor back out — heat that can come from a variety of sources such as solar or natural gas. The dessicants are, compared to typical refrigerants like HCFCs, relatively benign on the environment.
Comment — relatively benign? Haven't we heard that before?
Learning from our mistakes really crucial: Neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition. Humans use inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect. Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to form nearly instantaneous beliefs and take action accordingly.
Comment — This is not that new, surely? Sun Tzu, c2500 years ago: "Every defeat is a lesson ..."
