I am a mad scientist. Because I am successful at it, "they" call me an entrepreneur. I turn science fiction into science fact. I have many facets. I am fascinated with intelligence, tattoos and beautiful women. I build companies and am a leader of men. I have a dark side that I explore in a controlled manner. I enjoy participating in combat sports and other rough distractions. I produce and promote the use of green technology. I both love and hate humanity. I think we are in a failing system because it produces leaders that are the most popular of the average; who wants that?
If you have stumbled upon this blog and are under 18 years, leave now and wash your eyes out with soap.
Peter Schmitt, an MIT doctoral student, printed a clock in 2009. He didn’t print an image of a clock on a piece of paper. He printed a three-dimensional clock — an eight-inch diameter plastic timekeeping device with moving gears, hands and counterweights.
When he put it up on a wall and pushed the counterweight, it went ticktock.
“It wasn’t very accurate, but it was a functioning clock,” Schmitt said.
MIT scientists also would like you to be able to print your own robot. Their vision: Decide what you want it to do, download the design from the Internet, use software to make whatever changes you want and hit “print.”
Scientists around the world are working on a technology that could go well beyond robots and clocks and turn the world’s economy upside-down. It goes by the name of 3-D printing, and some proclaim that it will trigger a new Industrial Revolution. The Atlantic Council, an industry consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., says the technology is “transformational.”
Those working in the field call it “additive manufacturing.”
Much of modern manufacturing is by reduction. Manufacturers take blocks of plastic, wood, or metal, and grind and machine away until they get the item they want. All the plastic, wood, or metal that doesn’t make it into the item is thrown away, maybe as much as 90 percent wasted.
3-D printing puts down layers of metal powders or plastics as directed by software, just as ink is laid down on paper directed by printer drivers. After each layer is completed, the tray holding the item is lowered a fraction of a millimeter and the next layer is added. Printing continues until the piece is complete.
Molten metal is allowed to cool and harden; plastics or metal powders are hardened by heat or ultraviolet light. The ingredients aren’t limited to those substances; almost anything that flows can be accommodated, even chocolate.
There is little waste, and it is possible to change the object by simply working with the software that drives the printer the way text is changed in a word processor.
The end products may be better or possibly more beautiful than current products, the council wrote in a research report. 3-D printing allows designs impossible to make with conventional manufacturing techniques.
The first 3-D printer was invented by the American Charles Hull in 1984. The first machines were huge, slow, very expensive, and had limited use.
In 2004, Adrian Bowyer, a lecturer at Bath University in England, invented a machine that manufactured 50 percent of its own parts and in 2008, the machine printed itself. There was no real profit to be made in a self-replicating machine so Bowyer put the RepRap in the public domain, “open source” in the lexicon. Anyone could buy this desktop printer for under $400 and adapt it at will to print more copies of itself, or other items.
The design keeps improving as people think of better ways to do things, a form of crowd-sourcing, and users share designs online, often for free.
Additive manufacturing, meanwhile, became a huge and growing industry. According to Wohler Associates, a Colorado consulting firm, the industry has sustained an annual growth rate of 26.2 percent for more than 20 years and revenues will reach $3 billion by 2016.
Every year the technique turns out more complex artifacts, faster and cheaper. The technology is now used to print aircraft landing gears, dresses, car parts, individualized tooth crowns, artificial hips and knees, and more.
Scientists are experimenting with human cells to print organs. An Airbus contractor is working on printing an entire aircraft wing using titanium powder. Parts of the fuselage of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner were printed.
Printing a robot is far more complicated than building a clock, but researchers at MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard think the result will “transform manufacturing and … democratize access to robots,” according to MIT’s Daniela Rus, leader of the project.
You could identify a need — say cleaning up the kitchen floor after a kid spilled lunch — and design a robot specifically for tasks like that. You would download a design from the Internet, adjust to customize it for your kitchen, and print out exactly the robot you designed, moving parts and all.
The researchers already have printed two robots, including one designed to go into contaminated areas and one with a gripper that would help people with disabilities.
The technology introduces serious issues for the world economy.
Most finished products now are the result of many parts manufactured in various places around the world, coming together for assembling into one product. They are then shipped to customers around the world. With 3-D printing, in theory, the entire product would be made at one site, at one time, in one machine, anywhere. Economies of scale would be irrelevant.
“Printing a few thousand iPhones on demand (and with instant updates or different versions for each phone) at a local facility that can manufacture many other products may be far more cost-effective than manufacturing ten million identical iPhones in China and shipping them to 180 countries around the world,” the Atlantic Council wrote in a report.
Clearly, not everyone would share the advantages. Manufacturing centers like China could lose millions of jobs in that sector, and their economies could be destabilized. The industries that transport the supply line and distribute the finished product would also be hit, the council wrote. Warehouses full of parts and products could be replaced by machines that print on demand.
The council predicts a renaissance in American manufacturing. But that concept has issues too: most of the machines require no human assistance once the printing starts. You turn it on before you leave the factory and when you come back in the morning, your widget is there.
An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or oxymora) (from Greek ὀξύμωρον, “sharp dull”) is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Oxymorons appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as ground pilot and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.
The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective-noun combination of two words. For example, the following line from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King contains two oxymora:
or Science Degree from a Creationist University. Critical thinking skill are required for science, them must be absent or impaired to believe in a fairy sky wizard
Is there no end to the lengths that Texas lawmakers will go to push their religiously motivated, anti-evolution agenda on science education? This time it isn’t Don McLeroy who is in my sights, it is Republican Leo Berman who is a member of the House Higher Education Committee of Texas.
Berman is the sole sponsor of House Bill 2800 that was introduced on March 9, 2009 in the Texas House of Representatives. It seems that Berman is motivated by his religion to flex his political power to help the Institute for Creation Research to have the authority to award master’s degrees in science.
According to a report by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Berman has not yet made a statement concerning the bill. NCSE did contact a staffer who said that “…he believed that the bill’s objective was to aid institutions that want to teach creation science or intelligent design.”
According to NCSE’s Glenn Branch, “[w]hen the Institute for Creation Research moved its headquarters from Santee, California, to Dallas, Texas, in June 2007, it expected to be able to continue offering a master’s degree in science education from its graduate school. … But the state’s scientific and educational leaders voiced their opposition, and at its April 24, 2008, meeting, the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board unanimously voted to deny the ICR’s request for a state certificate of authority to offer the degree.”
If House Bill 2800 is enacted, it will make ICR exempt from state regulations thereby allowing them to grant science degrees. As put by NCSE, the bill will “exempt institutions such as the Institute for Creation Research’s graduate school from Texas’s regulations governing degree-granting institutions.”
According to ICR’s Web site, they “[equip] believers with evidence of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.” To that end, it seems, they take discoveries and force them into current biblical understandings of… things. For example, they discussed the recent discovery of the fossilized brain. They said:
“Since the Bible’s historical data is usually ignored in most scientific investigations, it comes as no surprise that this recent discovery ‘all happened by chance.’ The researchers would not expect to find fossilized soft brain tissues if today’s slow processes were all that was at work in the past. However, given the catastrophic formation indicated by most of earth’s geologic structures and the massive extermination of life represented in the fossil record—as well as the preservation of soft tissue from creatures supposedly millions of years old—the biblical Flood is a valid and relevant interpretive key to earth’s past. It can be expected that more soft tissue fossils, including brains and perhaps visceral organs, will be found.”
How does one logically go from finding a fossilized brain to deeming the biblical flood valid and relevant? This is obviously one of those “schools” that will only accept scientific discoveries that they can “make fit” into scriptural accounts of… things. I hate to break this to them, but that is not science. It is intellectual dishonesty. And a school like this has no business whatever granting degrees in science. After all, what they teach is not science.
And, it is downright disgusting to know that there is yet another lawmaker in place in Texas that doesn’t care about what he is supposed to care about… in Berman’s case - higher education. His is too concerned with his own religious agenda to see that this school is an offense to the realm of science. Further, I would say that ICR is an insult to the concept “school.”
Snails have joined the growing ranks of animals whose own metabolism can be used to generate electricity.
JACS
The dozen or so brown garden snails crawling around the plastic, moss-filled terrarium in Evgeny Katz’s laboratory look normal, but they have a hidden superpower: they produce electricity.
Into each mollusc, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the glucose and oxygen in the snail’s blood. Munching mainly on carrots, the cyborg snails live for around half a year and generate electricity whenever their implanted electrodes are hooked up to an external circuit. “The animals are quite fit — they eat, drink and crawl. We take care to keep them alive and happy,” Katz says.
Self-powered cyborgs
Snails are just one of several living creatures to have been ‘electrified’ like this. Katz’s research, reported last week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society1, comes hot on the heels of a January paper in the same journal from researchers led by Daniel Scherson at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who have implanted biofuel cells into live cockroaches2. And in work yet to be published, Sameer Singhal, who directs a team working on biomedical and energy technology at CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, together with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, reports implanting biofuel cells into beetles. The insects survived the process and generated power for more than two weeks, the scientists say.
All of these efforts are aimed at helping to create insect (or snail) cyborgs, a concept that has attracted funding from the US Department of Defense. For at least a decade, researchers have been creating battery-powered microcircuits with sensors and radio antennae and implanting them into various bugs and creepy-crawlies so that the creatures could gather information about their surroundings for environmental monitoring or military purposes3.
But batteries might be too bulky and short-lived to power prolonged missions — which is where the idea of tapping into the creatures’ own metabolism comes in. Katz has shown that in snails, biofuel cells could provide a steady dribble of power for months. “The truly impressive portion of [Katz’s] work is that the implantation provides such stable potential for such a long period of time,” says Shelley Minteer, who works on biofuel cells at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Although very large biofuel cells can power mobile phones and other devices, it’s doubtful that the tiny, few-centimetre-sized cells in living creatures could self-power complicated actions — such as, for example, remote-controlled flight — points out Plamen Atanassov, a fuel cell expert who directs the Center for Emerging Energy Technologies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
In living creatures, the rate at which biofuel cells can extract energy — and, therefore, the amount of power they can provide — is limited by their electrodes’ size, and also by how quickly sugar and oxygen can be taken from the creatures’ blood (or in the snails’ case, not blood, but a related fluid known as haemolymph).
Katz’s snails, for example, produced up to 7.45 microwatts, but after 45 minutes, that power had decreased by 80%. To draw continuous power, Katz’s team had to ramp down the power they extracted to 0.16 microwatts.
Scherson says that he thinks he will be able to get a few hundred microwatts out of cockroaches (his biofuel cells feed on trehalose, a different sugar from glucose). Singhal reports similar results for beetles. Scherson, who is working with a large company to build microelectronics circuits for his cockroaches, points out that power need not be drawn continuously, but could be stored up in capacitors and released in pulses; he has already been able to produce and detect a radio signal from the cockroaches this way, he says.
Human implants?
Philippe Cinquin at the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, and his colleagues are taking biofuel cells in a different direction — implanting them into rats. Their work4, published in 2010, marked the first steps towards using biocompatible fuel cells in humans so that our own blood supply could run low-power medical devices such as pacemakers.
In these cases, the fuel cells must come with biocompatible membranes that ensure the implants aren’t rejected by the body, points out Cinquin. His team has already launched a company to develop artificial urinary sphincters, which require 300–500 microwatts of power and so could draw on glucose fuel from the body. Of course, batteries already exist for such applications — but smaller biofuel cells might, in theory, provide a more convenient, long-lasting way of powering such devices.
Adam Heller, a chemical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, whose 2003 work kick-started much of the enthusiasm by showing how biofuel cells could generate power from a grape5, says that implantable biofuel cells might be useful for low-power, low-energy applications such as stimulating single nerves. But, he cautions, these applications may be a generation away.
Meanwhile, Katz says that he aims to move on to animals larger than snails, as their metabolism will provide more power. Next up for him: cyborg lobsters.
Sato, H., Cohen, D. & Maharbiz, M. M. in CMOS Biomicrosystems: Where Electrons Meet Biology (ed. K. Iniewski) http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118016497.ch12 (John Wiley and Sons, 2011).
What would it look like to travel across the known universe?
To help humanity visualize this, the American Museum of Natural History has produced a modern movie featuring many visual highlights of such a trip.
The video starts in Earth’s Himalayan Mountains and then dramatically zooms out, showing the orbits of Earth’s satellites, the Sun, the Solar System, the extent of humanities first radio signals, the Milky Way Galaxy, galaxies nearby, distant galaxies, and quasars.
Kepler announces 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 planets
The artist’s rendering depicts the multiple planet systems discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission. Out of hundreds of candidate planetary systems, scientists had previously verified six systems with multiple transiting planets (denoted here in red). Now, Kepler observations have verified planets (shown here in green) in 11 new planetary systems. Many of these systems contain additional planet candidates that are yet to be verified (shown here in dark purple). For reference, the eight planets of the solar system are shown in blue. Credit: NASA Ames/Jason Steffen, Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics
The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter. Fifteen of them are between Earth and Neptune in size, and further observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun.
“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”
Kepler identifies planet candidates by repeatedly measuring the change in brightness of more than 150,000 stars to detect when a planet passes in front of the star. That passage casts a small shadow toward Earth and the Kepler spacecraft.
“Confirming that the small decrease in the star’s brightness is due to a planet requires additional observations and time-consuming analysis,” said Eric Ford, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Florida and lead author of the paper confirming Kepler-23 and Kepler-24. “We verified these planets using new techniques that dramatically accelerated their discovery.”
The image shows an overhead view of orbital positions of the planets in systems with multiple transiting planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission. Credit: NASA Ames/Dan Fabrycky, UC Santa Cruz
Each of the new confirmed planetary systems contains two to five closely spaced transiting planets. In tightly packed planetary systems, the gravitational pull of the planets among themselves causes one planet to accelerate and another planet to decelerate along its orbit. The acceleration causes the orbital period of each planet to change. Kepler detects this effect by measuring the changes, or so-called Transit Timing Variations (TTVs).
Planetary systems with TTVs can be verified without requiring extensive ground-based observations, accelerating confirmation of planet candidates. The TTV detection technique also increases Kepler’s ability to confirm planetary systems around fainter and more distant stars.
“By precisely timing when each planet transits its star, Kepler detected the gravitational tug of the planets on each other, clinching the case for ten of the newly announced planetary systems,” said Dan Fabrycky, Hubble Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz and lead author for a paper confirming Kepler-29, 30, 31 and 32.”
Five of the systems (Kepler-25, Kepler-27, Kepler-30, Kepler-31 and Kepler-33) contain a pair of planets where the inner planet orbits the star twice during each orbit of the outer planet. Four of the systems (Kepler-23, Kepler-24, Kepler-28 and Kepler-32) contain a pairing where the outer planet circles the star twice for every three times the inner planet orbits its star.
“These configurations help to amplify the gravitational interactions between the planets, similar to how my sons kick their legs on a swing at the right time to go higher,” said Jason Steffen, the Brinson postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill., and lead author of a paper confirming Kepler-25, 26, 27 and 28.
The system with the most planets among these discoveries is Kepler-33, a star that is older and more massive than our sun. Kepler-33 hosts five planets, ranging in size from 1.5 to 5 times that of Earth and all located closer to their star than any planet is to the sun.
The properties of a star provide clues for planet detection. The decrease in the star’s brightness and duration of a planet transit combined with the properties of its host star present a recognizable signature. When astronomers detect planet candidates that exhibit similar signatures around the same star the likelihood of any of these planet candidates being a false positive is very low.
“The approach that was used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows that the overall reliability of Kepler’s candidate multiple transiting systems is quite high,” said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper confirming Kepler-33. “This is a validation by multiplicity.”
Cambridge University Library is pleased to present the first items in its Foundations of Science collection: a selection from the Papers of Sir Isaac Newton. The Library holds the most important and substantial collection of Newton’s scientific and mathematical manuscripts and over the next few months we intend to make most of our Newton papers available on this site.
This first release features some of Newton’s most important work from the 1660s, including his college notebooks and ‘Waste Book’.
A groundbreaking new study shows that laws legalizing medical marijuana have resulted in a nearly nine percent drop in traffic deaths and a five percent reduction in beer sales.
“Our research suggests that the legalization of medical marijuana reduces traffic fatalities through reducing alcohol consumption by young adults,” said Daniel Rees, professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver who coauthored the study with D. Mark Anderson, assistant professor of economics at Montana State University.
The researchers collected data from a variety of sources, including the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
The study is the first to examine the relationship between the legalization of medical marijuana and traffic deaths.
“We were astounded by how little is known about the effects of legalizing medical marijuana,” Rees said. “We looked into traffic fatalities because there is good data, and the data allow us to test whether alcohol was a factor.”
Anderson noted that traffic deaths are significant from a policy standpoint.
“Traffic fatalities are an important outcome from a policy perspective because they represent the leading cause of death among Americans ages five to 34,” he said.
The economists analyzed traffic fatalities nationwide, including in the 13 states that legalized medical marijuana between 1990 and 2009. In those states, they found evidence that alcohol consumption by those between 20 and 29 years old went down — resulting in fewer deaths on the road.
The researchers noted that simulator studies conducted by previous researchers suggest that drivers under the influence of alcohol tend to underestimate how badly their skills are impaired. They drive faster and take more risks.
In contrast, these studies show that drivers under the influence of marijuana tend to avoid risks.
However, Rees and Anderson cautioned that legalization of medical marijuana may result in fewer traffic deaths because it’s typically used in private, where alcohol is often consumed in bars and restaurants.
“I think this is a very timely study given all the medical marijuana laws being passed or under consideration,” Anderson said. “These policies have not been research-based thus far and our research shows some of the social effects of these laws.
“Our results suggest a direct link between marijuana and alcohol consumption,” Anderson said.
The study also looked at cannabis use in three states that legalized medical marijuana in the mid-2000s: Montana, Rhode Island and Vermont. Marijuana use by adults increased after medical legalization in Montana and Rhode Island, but not in Vermont.
There was no evidence that marijuana use by minors increased after medical legalization. Opponents of medicinal cannabis often claim that legalization leads to increased use of marijuana by minors.
According to Rees and Anderson, the majority of registered medical marijuana patients in Arizona and Colorado are male. In Arizona, 75 percent of registered patients are male; in Colorado, 68 percent are male. Many are under the age of 40. For instance, 48 percent of registered medicinal cannabis patients in Montana are under 40.
“Although we make no policy recommendations, it certainly appears as though medical marijuana laws are making our highways safer,” Rees said.
To read the 43-page study in its entirety, click on the title below:
Earlier this year, Maggie went to a cocktail party that was also going to serve fresh sorbet made from liquid nitrogen.
Being prone to Mayhem, Maggie decided to show the other guests a few other tricks of liquid nitrogen by stripping down and requesting that it be poured on her body. Inspired by her antics a few others joined in as well.
