February 2012
3 posts
January 2012
3 posts
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...
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...
December 2011
13 posts
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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...
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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...
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Synthesis of the Elements in Stars →
tl;dr All of the atoms in your body, except the hydrogen, were made inside a star.
The above paper, by E. Margaret Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle is a fantastically thorough (and thus pretty boring) free read from 1957. The authors detail a process through which our sun makes atoms. The solar wind then carries these atoms out into the universe where they land on planets...
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Higgs Ahoy! - The Economist →
This is an extremely well written article about CERN’s promising results regarding the Higgs boson, put in layman’s terms by our friends at The Economist.
tl;dr Two of CERNs big machines are reporting a signal that could be the Higgs boson, the particle that gives us all our mass. Since two machines are reporting the same data, it’s almost certainly the Higgs. However,...
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Introduction
The purpose of this blog is to translate technical scientific news for the so-called “lay reader”. The intended audience is the average person with an interest in the cutting edge of research in applied physics.
Topics will include nanotechnology, robotics, space travel, superconductivity, solar power, and fusion. This list is not comprehensive.
This blog will not address politics,...
“All of man’s scientific and engineering efforts will be in vain unless...”
– Wernher von Braun