The Aurora Borealis. This is what the solar wind looks like when it gets sucked into the Earth’s magnetic field.
This is what the sky should look like at night (though I’m pretty sure your eyes aren’t as sensitive as a CCD with a long exposure time).
Noise pollution depresses me. Once upon a time our forefathers were awestruck by simply looking up at night. Most of us see nothing but an amber glow. </rant>
I’ve been pretty busy at work. Writing a lot of technical jargon saps my motivation to write for fun. So here, look at some space dust from the orion nebula.
Fusion Power
tl;dr We’re a tiny step closer to harnessing fusion power, which is the holy grail of energy.
A while back I wrote a post about how we are all star dust. It described the process by which stars make big atoms by smashing small atoms together. That’s fusion; two atoms are fusing together. Contrast with fission wherein one atom is split (fissured).
Fission power is what drives our current nuclear reactions. Uranium decays and releases heat, then we use that heat to make electricity. But fission power requires really nasty, radioactive stuff, and its waste is really nasty, radioactive stuff. We want something better.
That something better is fusion. It uses non-radioactive fuel and produces (mostly) non-radioactive waste. It’s theoretically SAFER and MUCH MORE EFFICIENT than fission power. If we could get it off the ground, it could solve all of the world’s energy problems (not a hyperbole). But it is REALLY hard to harness. Imagine trying to create a star and keeping it confined so that we can use it to make electricity. Tough stuff.
There was a lot of excitement about fusion power after we made a fusion bomb. It seemed so easy to make a reactor since we understood all the physics. But the engineering turned out to be SUPER difficult. It’s a lot harder to control something than to blow it up.
The main strategy has been to make a hot plasma inside of a donut shaped magnetic field. We’ve done this, but it doesn’t last very long and it doesn’t make more energy than we use to light the fire. One problem has been little electromagnetic bubbles in the plasma that pop and spread, making the whole thing unstable.
Well some guys in Europe (where all of the good fusion research takes place) solved the bubble problem. They put antennas on the donut so that they could pop the electro-bubbles before they get big enough to extinguish the plasma.
It’s not the sexiest result, and I don’t know if I’d call it a “break through”. But it brings us one step closer to harnessing the best power source known to man.
Cyborgory via DNA programming
tl;dr Biological engineers at UC Santa Barbara have designed and programmed bacteria that glow blue and blink in unison.
This one is seriously mad science. Well, mad engineering.
Jeff Hasty at UC Santa Barbara has been working for five years to make a biological LED screen, and he recently succeeded. To do this, he (/cough his grad students /cough) had to make a bacteria that glows, then control when it glows, then get all the cells to talk to each other and blink together. Check out this video.
They actually had to PROGRAM the bacteria like a computer by changing its DNA. They designed feedback loops, switches, etc coded in DNA, then inserted these into the bacteria (E. Coli).
The goal of this research is to create biological circuits for “medicine”. Seems more like cyborgory to me, of which I totally approve.
Fake leaves make rocket sauce
tl;dr: This device, needing no connections to any circuit, will make hydrogen and oxygen when put in a water and sunlight.
That little sheet is made from inexpensive materials. When you put it in water and shine it with light, it splits the bonds in the water. One side makes hydrogen, the other side makes oxygen. It doesn’t need any fancy computers to do this. It just does it on its own.
Why would anybody want to do it? Hydrogen and oxygen are the fuel for hydrogen fuel cells, which are pretty interesting for a new green technology. Also, they’re rocket fuel. Which is cool in itself. What’s more, these water splitters are usually made out of platinum, making them prohibitively expensive.
If they can get it to work in salt water, we could turn the oceans into fresh water AND make fuel for our cars at the same time. The future is now.
Thanks again, MIT.
Self-Healing Electronics
tl;dr Researchers have developed a circuit that can fix itself if it gets cracked, kinda.
You drop your phone on the ground. It looks fine. No big cracks. But the damn thing doesn’t turn on. You take it into the tech guys and they tell you they can’t do anything about it because the board is cracked. You have to buy a new phone. Lame.
Consider an alternate scenario. You drop your phone and the board cracks. But it still turns on and works perfectly. Why? Because it fixed itself before you even noticed it was broken. Researchers at the University of Illinois are working on just that.
On your board are little lines of metal. They’re only a few microns deep. If one gets a hairline fracture, the WHOLE BOARD is broken and cannot be fixed. Not even by a man with the tiniest of hands.
The image below illustrates how one of these fractures could fix itself. Tiny capsules of liquid metal are put on top of the wire lines. Liquid metal, terminator style. If one of them gets fractured, it leeks its conductive gooey goodness onto the circuit, shorting the break. This restores 99% of the conductivity within a microsecond. A microsecond motherfuckers.
This is an evolution of work in self-healing polymers. If you put similar capsules inside of plastic, it can heal itself too. Pie in the sky: a transparent circuit printed on plastic that heals itself structurally and electrically.
tl;dr Plastic robots powered by air are squishy like squid and can fit into tight places.
This is some seriously space age shit guys. The Whitesides Group from Harvard created these robots that are made of pneumatic and made of plastic. The robot has a bunch of little air pockets inside of it. If you’re clever about the way you inflate and deflate those pockets, the robots will move (like in the video above) or pick things up (like in the video below).
What’s REALLY cool about these robots is how they are made. They drew the design on a computer in something like google sketchup. Then they had a 3D printer make a mold from their drawing and filled this mold with plastic. Boom, done. In the world of robotics, that is fantastically easy.
No motors. No nuts and bolts. No metal at all. Just plastic.
The researchers envision these softbots going into disaster wreckage or holding body parts very softly while surgeons are doing their thing.
The robots are pretty much ready for production to work as soft grippers. In order to do something more useful, like search for survivors in a plane crash, they’ll need a camera installed. That’s not too difficult.
The catch? They still need to be tethered to an air supply and a computer controlling that air supply. That’s not a big deal for larger bots, but it’s a big hurdle for smaller bots like the ones in the videos.
Now imagine, if you will, a swarm of these little squiddies coming at you. Creepy.
