dotmpotter
Reminding myself that people are making a difference.
259 posts
Latest Posts by dotmpotter
Paint job transforms walls into sensors, interactive surfaces
Smart walls react to human touch, sense activity in room
Walls are what they are – big, dull dividers. With a few applications of conductive paint and some electronics, however, walls can become smart infrastructure that sense human touch, and detect things like gestures and when appliances are used.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research found that they could transform dumb walls into smart walls at relatively low cost – about $20 per square meter – using simple tools and techniques, such as a paint roller.
These new capabilities might enable users to place or move light switches or other controls anywhere on a wall that’s most convenient, or to control videogames by using gestures. By monitoring activity in the room, this system could adjust light levels when a TV is turned on or alert a user in another location when a laundry machine or electric kettle turns off.
“Walls are usually the largest surface area in a room, yet we don’t make much use of them other than to separate spaces, and perhaps hold up pictures and shelves,” said Chris Harrison, assistant professor in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). “As the internet of things and ubiquitous computing become reality, it is tempting to think that walls can become active parts of our living and work environments.”
Read more.
700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative
Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?
Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but researchers aren’t sure who made them.
The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino’s limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino’s ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.
But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. Read more.
HiPOD (2 May 2018): Clays in a Grouping of Small Craters
— 282 km above the surface. Black and white is 5 km across; enhanced color is less than 1 km.
NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Artificial optical materials could allow cheaper, flatter, more efficient detectors for night vision and other uses
A new way of taking images in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum, developed by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, could enable a wide variety of applications, including thermal imaging, biomedical sensing, and free-space communication.
The mid-infrared (mid-IR) band of electromagnetic radiation is a particularly useful part of the spectrum; it can provide imaging in the dark, trace heat signatures, and provide sensitive detection of many biomolecular and chemical signals. But optical systems for this band of frequencies have been hard to make, and devices using them are highly specialized and expensive. Now, the researchers say they have found a highly efficient and mass-manufacturable approach to controlling and detecting these waves.
The findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT researchers Tian Gu and Juejun Hu, University of Massachusetts at Lowell researcher Hualiang Zhang, and 13 others at MIT, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and the East China Normal University.
The new approach uses a flat, artificial material composed of nanostructured optical elements, instead of the usual thick, curved-glass lenses used in conventional optics. These elements provide on-demand electromagnetic responses and are made using techniques similar to those used for computer chips. “This kind of metasurface can be made using standard microfabrication techniques,” Gu says. “The manufacturing is scalable.”
Read more.
This terrifying eel-robot will perform maintenance on undersea equipment
Nope.
Energy conversion: Speeding up material discovery
Algorithm take months, not years, to find material for improved energy conversion
In even the most fuel-efficient cars, about 60 percent of the total energy of gasoline is lost through heat in the exhaust pipe and radiator. To combat this, researchers are developing new thermoelectic materials that can convert heat into electricity. These semiconducting materials could recirculate electricity back into the vehicle and improve fuel efficiency by up to 5 percent.
The challenge is, current thermoelectric materials for waste heat recovery are very expensive and time consuming to develop. One of the state of the art materials, made from a combination of hafnium and zirconium (elements most commonly used in nuclear reactors), took 15 years from its initial discovery to optimized performance.
Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an algorithm that can discover and optimize these materials in a matter of months, relying on solving quantum mechanical equations, without any experimental input.
“These thermoelectric systems are very complicated,” said Boris Kozinsky, a recently appointed Associate Professor of Computational Materials Science at SEAS and senior author of the paper. “Semiconducting materials need to have very specific properties to work in this system, including high electrical conductivity, high thermopower, and low thermal conductivity, so that all that heat gets converted into electricity. Our goal was to find a new material that satisfies all the important properties for thermoelectric conversion while at the same time being stable and cheap.”
Read more.
That’s one small hole for a probe, but one giant leap for NASA. This past weekend, the space agency jerry-rigged Curiosity’s malfunctioning drill, allowing the rover to bore into Martian rock for the first time in over a year.
Continue Reading.
Hunting for Organic Molecules on Mars
Did Mars once have life? To help answer that question, an international team of scientists created an incredibly powerful miniature chemistry laboratory, set to ride on the next Mars rover.
The instrument, called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer Mass Spectrometer (MOMA-MS), will form a key part of the ExoMars Rover, a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos. A mass spectrometer is crucial to send to Mars because it reveals the elements that can be found there. A Martian mass spectrometer takes a sample, typically of powdered rock, and distinguishes the different elements in the sample based on their mass.
After 8 years of designing, building, and testing, NASA scientists and engineers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said goodbye to their tiny chemistry lab and shipped it to Italy in a big pink box. Building a tiny instrument capable of conducting chemical analysis is difficult in any setting, but designing one that has to launch on a huge rocket, fly through the vacuum of space, and then operate on a planet with entirely different pressure and temperature systems? That’s herculean. And once on Mars, MOMA has a very important job to do. NASA Goddard Center Director Chris Scolese said, “This is the first intended life-detecting instrument that we have sent to Mars since Viking.”
The MOMA instrument will be capable of detecting a wide variety of organic molecules. Organic compounds are commonly associated with life, although they can be created by non-biological processes as well. Organic molecules contain carbon and hydrogen, and can include oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements.
To find these molecules on Mars, the MOMA team had to take instruments that would normally occupy a couple of workbenches in a chemistry lab and shrink them down to roughly the size of a toaster oven so they would be practical to install on a rover.
MOMA-MS, the mass spectrometer on the ExoMars rover, will build on the accomplishments from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), an instrument suite on the Curiosity rover that includes a mass spectrometer. SAM collects and analyzes samples from just below the surface of Mars while ExoMars will be the first to explore deep beneath the surface, with a drill capable of taking samples from as deep as two meters (over six feet). This is important because Mars’s thin atmosphere and spotty magnetic field offer little protection from space radiation, which can gradually destroy organic molecules exposed on the surface. However, Martian sediment is an effective shield, and the team expects to find greater abundances of organic molecules in samples from beneath the surface.
On completion of the instrument, MOMA Project Scientist Will Brinckerhoff praised his colleagues, telling them, “You have had the right balance of skepticism, optimism, and ambition. Seeing this come together has made me want to do my best.”
In addition to the launch of the ESA and Roscosmos ExoMars Rover, in 2020, NASA plans to launch the Mars 2020 Rover, to search for signs of past microbial life. We are all looking forward to seeing what these two missions will find when they arrive on our neighboring planet.
Learn more about MOMA HERE.
Learn more about ExoMars HERE.
Follow @NASASolarSystem on Twitter for more about our missions to other planets.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
It wrinkles my brain that Jupiter’s moon Europa has oceans that are sixty miles deep, while Earth’s oceans only reach seven miles deep at most. I’m willing to bet good money that there’s life in Europa’s oceans. Like five bucks. You hear me, NASA? I bet you five bucks that there’s life on Europa… Now that there’s money and reputation on the line, I bet they send a mission there real quick.
Dust, stars, and cosmic rays swirling around Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, captured by the Rosetta probe. (Source)
Mesmerized 😃
New Virtual Dive Gallery Puts National Marine Sanctuaries at the Tip of Your Fingers
Can’t get to your national marine sanctuaries? Thanks to the wonders of 360-degree photography and virtual reality, these underwater treasures now are as close as the tips of your fingers. NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has launched a virtual dive gallery, complete with immersive 360-degree views of five national marine sanctuaries: American Samoa, Florida Keys, Flower Garden Banks, Gray’s Reef, and Thunder Bay.
On our new virtual dive gallery, you can explore images like this one of schooling fish in Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary. Photo: Steve Lonhart/NOAA in collaboration with the Ocean Agency
In earlier days of ocean exploration, adventurer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau amazed the world with his stunning video footage of the underwater places he visited. His film The Silent World opened up an undersea realm that few would otherwise have had the opportunity to see. Now, we’re taking Cousteau’s vision a step further by creating a library of virtual dive experiences that you can experience and interact with from your smartphone, tablet, or personal computer.
The virtual dives take users underwater for a scuba diver’s view of your national marine sanctuaries, allowing you to navigate through the dive sites as if you were there in person. In addition to the striking imagery, the virtual experience helps highlight NOAA’s efforts to monitor issues such as marine debris, ocean noise, invasive species, and changes in habitat and animal health.
The diverse coral reef protected within Fagatele Bay in the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa can be seen in this image. Image courtesy of XL Catlin Seaview Survey / The Ocean Agency.
No longer out of sight and out of mind
The Sanctuary Virtual Dive Gallery is totally web-based and readily viewable on any computer or mobile device, provided you have access to the internet. So you don’t need to download a special app to your smartphone or use specific software on your computer. While you do not need a need a VR headset to experience the imagery, the virtual reality experience on your mobile device is certainly enhanced with the addition of a headset viewer.
By sharing these underwater experiences, we’re bringing the public up close and personal with the incredible resources the National Marine Sanctuary System protects. These special places might be out of sight and mind most of the time, but beneath the ocean’s waves exist vibrant marine habitats, amazing sea creatures, and relics of our nation’s maritime history.
Seeing tangible examples of the issues affecting sanctuary resources puts viewers behind the “diver’s mask,” so to speak, where they can be inspired to act in support of stewardship and conservation goals. “Because such a small percentage of people in the U.S. are able to scuba dive, we constantly face the challenge of showcasing the underwater beauty and wonders of national marine sanctuaries,” says Mitchell Tartt, chief of the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries’ Conservation Science Division. “These virtual dives are incredibly engaging and truly provide unique experiences that anyone with internet access can enjoy. They are game changers in helping the public and our partners better understand these places.”
Keep reading
Traditional secrets to keeping cool—investigating Okinawan textiles
When Yoko Nomura moved from warm, dry California to the subtropical island of Okinawa, she was struck by the stifling heat and humidity. Searching for ways to survive the Okinawan summer months, Nomura, from the Science and Technology Group at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), discovered a traditional secret to keeping cool: a material called Basho-fu.
Basho-fu is an Okinawan textile fabric made from banana plant fibers. Originating from the 13th or 14th century, Basho-fu was used to make traditional Okinawan kimonos. Basho-fu kimonos were popular among all classes of people in the Ryukyu Kingdom, which ruled Okinawa from 1429 to 1879. Basho-fu textiles were highly durable for hard labor such as farming and fishing, and were comfortable to wear in the hot and humid subtropical climate of Okinawa.
The expertise required to make Basho-fu textiles has been passed down through generations of craftspeople in Okinawa. However, the traditional craft is now under threat from a shortage of banana plant materials and an infiltration of modern methods.
In an effort to rescue and document this important part of Okinawan folk culture, researchers from OIST, in collaboration with the University of the Ryukyus and the Kijoka Basho-fu Association, used scientific techniques to characterize Basho-fu materials and to compare traditional and laboratory Basho-fu production processes.
Read more.
From the air, the coast of Greenland appears vast and tranquil. Hundreds of fjords, their surfaces a mirror of blue sky and cloud bottoms, divide the territory. In the gaps between them, the terrain folds over itself, hill over hill, descending into obsidian lakes. The turf is covered in the waxy pastels of alpine dwarf willows and the dull white of age-bleached lichen.
Though an immense ice sheet sits in its interior, Greenland’s ice-free coast encompasses almost 159,000 square miles and and houses 57,000 people. In other words, it is larger than Germany with a population half the size of Topeka, Peoria, or New Haven. It is possible to stand on a hill outside the coastal town of Ilulissat and hear only the grass quaking, the harbor ice dully grinding against itself.
I visited Greenland because, lately, the land here has gone soft, and disquieting things threaten to wake in it.
Continue Reading.
my man went for it
NASA is training space robots using virtual reality
NASA and Sony have teamed up to use Playstation VR to train humanoids, or robot like humans, which would work in space. The project called Mighty Morphenaut sees a VR app allow a human to see through the eyes of the robot and control the robots movements using the Playstation VR system.
Keep reading
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the myriad of options in the haircare section of your local store, but it turns out that of all those products, the formula within most shampoo and conditioner doesn’t vary much across brands.
A new Y Combinator company, Function of Beauty, is looking to change all that.
The company lets the user choose a scent and describe their own hair type, with options from straight to curly, dry to oily, and thin to coarse hair. From there, users can choose different hair goals, combining things like strengthening to heat protection to anti-frizz.
Function of Beauty currently offers 450 million different combinations based on hair type and goals.
(via Function Of Beauty, Backed By Y Combinator, Offers Customized Shampoo And Conditioner | TechCrunch)
Ever wonder how coal formed?
Planetary Resources reveals first object 3D printed from alien metal Space and 3D Printing are connected… http://ift.tt/1Zf3uQr
Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for harnessing energy generated by very small bending motions, which could be capable of harvesting power from a broader range of natural human activities such as walking and exercising.
Yale Environment 360: New Device Harvests Energy From Walking and Exercising, Researchers Say
Welcome to a three part series of kitchen appliance design using unconventional and sustainable materials.
Part one of the series is a toaster designed using steam-bent bamboo plywood, glass toasting trays, a 2″x1″ touchscreen and quick-cooling coils embedded within the glass toasting trays. Gone is the bizarre popup mechanisms of toaster’s past – the toaster features wide, easy access slots. The heating coils feature quick-cooling technology and the UI tells the user when its safe to grab their toasty treats. Bamboo and glass are both sustainable and renewable and the design uses no plastic and minimal metal.
(via Bamboo and Glass Toaster Design)
Best known as the digital ledger at the core of bitcoin, blockchain is “a great way for making and preserving truths.” Just as blockchain tracks the movement of bitcoins, it could be used as an open way to follow any other good or product, bringing “concrete trustable facts to the retail environment”, she said. For example, Provenance is working on a blockchain project to track fish, noting when and where and how the animal is caught, checking its status with certifiers (such as whether it qualifies as organic) and tracking it as it changes hands, so that data can be shown to the final buyer. That could help brands prove to their customers that products are as promised, helping build trust.
WIRED Retail 2015: Blockchain could track your fish supper from boat to plate (Wired UK)
Baby Tortoises Show Up In The Galapagos For The First Time In Over A Century
There hadn’t been one single baby tortoise sighting in more than a century on the Galapagos Island of Pinzon, until a small group of the tiny, shelled youngsters were spotted this year.
The recent births are helping to pull the critically endangered animals back from the brink of extinction after they were nearly laid to waste as a result of human activity.
This is huge news for a species that has been struggling to survive for a century, relying on humans raising young tortoises bred in captivity until they are large enough to not fall prey to rats and predators.
Africa, still covered in large swathes of pristine wilderness, is likely to lose much of its biological wealth if dozens of new massive development projects—from highways to railroads to pipelines—get the green light, according to a new study. Most of the projects are designed to increase agricultural production and ease the transport of minerals such as iron and coal. Yet if all are built, they’ll create a spider web of some 53,000 kilometers of corridors through deserts, forests, and savannas—and a host of environmental disasters, scientists say. Even worse, they contend, most won’t help the continent feed its people, even though this is the primary justification behind many of the projects.
“Africa is undergoing the most dramatic era of development it’s ever experienced,” says William Laurance, an ecologist at James Cook University, Cairns, in Australia, and the study’s lead author. “No one disputes its need for food and economic development. But these corridors need to be built without creating environmental crises.”
The scientists’ study is a follow-up to aprevious one they published last year inNature warning about the unprecedented number of road and transportation projects being planned globally.
In the Common Sense department: from the Where In Oslo website.
AIDS-drug-gouging hedge-douche reneges on promise to cut prices for Daraprim
Martin Shkreli, the hedge-fund douche-bro who hiked the price of an off-patent drug used by AIDS and cancer patients from $13.50 to $750, then promised to lower the prices after becoming the Most Hated Man on the Internet did no such thing, because he is a liar.
http://boingboing.net/2015/11/25/aids-drug-gouging-hedge-douche.html
The Most Metal Mass Extinction Events, Ranked
in the style of The Toast
That One Unnamed Extinction Event That Happened When Blue-Green Algae Discovered Photosynthesis and Started Pumping the Environment Full of Oxygen, Which Was Toxic to All Other Life on Earth at That Point in Time
This extinction event did result in the extinction of more living organisms than any other, whether you rank by number of individuals, number of orders/genera/species, % of life, or amount of biomass, but they were all single-celled organisms, so they don’t even register on the metal scale.
The Current Slow Slide Due to Anthropogenic Environmental Modification
Habitat destruction isn’t very metal.
Late Devonian
Some super-weird shit died out, which is totally metal, but we have no idea why, which isn’t. It might not even have been an extinction event, just a decrease in the speciation rate. Jawed vertebrates totally unaffected.
End Ordovician
Second-largest extinction event after the End Permian (not counting those blue-green algae fuckers). Caused by tectonic plate shifting (kinda metal) and resulting glaciation (mildly metal).
Deep Impact
Pros: Giant asteroid hitting the earth.
Cons: Fictional.
End Triassic
Probably caused by massive volcanic eruptions, which is pretty metal, but mostly just wiped out some weird looking amphibians, which is only mildly metal.
End Permian
Greatest extinction event of all time (with the exception of that blue-green algae fiasco mentioned above), wiping out ~95% of all species: metal. Only known mass extinction of insects: metal. Probably caused by the biggest volcanic eruptions since life began (metal) which ignited massive coal beds (metal) and caused the release of methane from the ocean floor (metal) resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect that raised the average ocean temperature to 40C for several million years, essentially boiling the earth alive (super metal). Paved the way for dinosaurs to take over the earth: metal. Known as the ‘Great Dying’: totally metal.
However, most of the extinctions occurred in sessile marine organisms, which are way too boring to be metal, and for the first ~20 million years after the extinction event, land was dominated by Lystrosaurus, which is the most un-metal looking reptile you can think of.
End Cretaceous, aka the K-T Event
A GIANT FLAMING BALL OF ROCK HIT THE EARTH AND KILLED ALL THE (non-avian) DINOSAURS. ENOUGH SAID.
The Crown Estate has launched a unique interactive map that shows the estimated percentage of UK electricity demand being met by offshore wind on an hourly basis. For the first time, the map draws together a range of publically available data to demonstrate the contribution offshore wind is making to the UK’s low carbon energy mix. The UK now has 27 operational wind farms, with nearly 1500 turbines grown from the first two offshore demonstration turbines deployed in 2000. Although there is variation in output on a daily basis, over the course of 2015 offshore wind is expected to meet an average of around 5% per cent of UK electricity demand.
(via Crown Estate launches interactive offshore wind electricity map - Blue and Green Tomorrow)