October 17th, 2008
How would you like to fly a plane made of paper?
For that matter, how would you like to fly a car made of paper? The projected toughness and low weight of buckypaper would conceivably solve the major issues with “road planes”; basically, to pass highway crash tests, planes have to be too heavy to fly.
Check out the article here:
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
October 13th, 2008
Shapeways is a really cool service that allows you to print out your 3D models for a fee. 
I figure this gets really attractive for most people and for small businesses at about half the current price - this model goes for $237.86. That’s when it goes from feasible to use for making a first run model to making production versions. Look for this industry to grow the way T-shirts did.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
October 12th, 2008
A new material called Black Silicon, produced by shining very brief pulses of an ultrapowerful laser on a silicon wafer bathed in sulfur hexafluoride gas, is between 100 and 500 times more light sensitive than traditional silicon wafers. Viewed under a microscope, the surface of the new material is covered with tiny spikes.
The article suggests that this might be good for low light CCD’s down the road, thought the issue there preventing better fidelity is more about cancelling out thermal noise than pure sensitivity. I’ve been wondering if it might be possible to deal with some of the those issues by using a prism to split the image across multiple imagers? As I understand it, the noise is being produced by the temperature fluctuations on the surface of the chip when the signal being monitored (the light hitting the surface of the chip) is very weak.
The tiny needles are even small enough to absorb infrared light, and may be the perfect thing to enable optical switching using silicon.
The article at the Harvard Gazette details a range of other uses, from drug delivery using the tiny spikes, to using the needles as pixels in super sharp displays(they can be made to luminesce, though it’s not clear just how one might get them to do so in color:).
The technology patent has been licensed by Harvard to Sionyx, website here: http://www.sionyxinc.com/
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
October 2nd, 2008
Some good stuff today about Toshiba unveiling a new version of its SCiB battery designed for laptops. SCiB is a “lithium titanate” battery; the battery in your current laptop is almost certainly lithium ion. SCiB batteries offer higher thermal stability, faster charges, and are less likely to explode when crushed, all of which make it a good candidate for use in electric cars. Unfortunately, battery voltage is currently lower than that offered by lithium ion, and energy density is lower as well.
A neat application - Schwinn is going to offer an SCiB battery assisted bicycle called the Tailwind, and has already shown a prototype.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
September 30th, 2008
A Rosh Hashana post for you all: 
Scientists have made a breakthrough in the race to produce carbon nanotubes in commercial quantities. So far, they have been spun into superthin ribbons that conduct electricity efficiently and are “five times stronger than steel”. Today, Science reports that scientists from University of Texas at Dallas and CSIRO have demonstrated a technique for manufacturing transparent “sheets” of nanotubes that are stronger than steel sheets of the same weight. From the article:
Carbon nanotube materials have
a number of potential applications in, for example: organic light
emitting displays, low-noise electronic sensors, artificial muscles,
conducting appliqués and broad-band polarized light sources that can be
switched in one ten-thousandth of a second.
Starting from chemically grown,
self-assembled structures in which nanotubes are aligned like trees in
a forest, the sheets are produced at up to seven meters per minute.
Unlike previous sheet fabrication methods – using dispersions of
nanotubes in liquids – this dry-state process produces materials made
from the ultra-long nanotubes required to optimise their unique set of
properties.
Perhaps this might go well with the NJIT nanotube based solar cell
And for you really big geeks, this is just one more step towards a cable for the space elevator:)
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
August 12th, 2008
Newsweek has a good article today about the convergence of behavioral science and genetics; it appears to be possible to genetically determine how children will tend to respond to specific environmental stresses. For instance, children with a “sluggish” version of the MAOA gene are much better prepared to deal with child abuse, because the hippocampus does not go into overdrive when recalling past traumatic memories.
With the misspelled gene, brains have about 30 percent fewer dopamine receptors and less activity in the brain’s frontal cortex (the site of higher-order thinking, including monitoring negative feedback) and hippocampus (memory) than do people with the more common form of the gene. In an experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research in Germany, people with the misspelling weren’t able to avoid choices that they were told over and over were incorrect. Numerous other studies have linked this gene variant to addiction, obesity and compulsive gambling, suggesting that the underlying problem is trouble learning the negative consequences of your actions.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
August 7th, 2008
this is just too cool for words.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
August 5th, 2008
I read about anecdotal results of injecting vitamin C late last year, but the evidence was pretty scant and so I filed it away in my “things to try if I or a loved one gets inoperable cancer” droor until now; tests on mice are yielding impressive results. The general idea is that injected vitamin C becomes hydrogen peroxide in the blood and lymph, and hydrogen peroxide does a pretty good job of killing cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone.
orange attacks cancer squid
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
July 31st, 2008
Forbes has a fascinating article this afternoon about a new process for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen for use in fuel cells; the idea is to build an “organic leaf” using a solar cell to drive the reaction (which requires a solution of cobalt and phosphate in electrified water), then use a fuel cell to generate electricity from the byproducts all day and night. You could use any kind of electricity to split the water, so this would be just as good for storing energy generated from any (preferably green) process - for instance, wind. For best results, you’d want to combine this with the MIT solar concentrators and organic dyes. This may unseat my current 24 hour solar favorite, solar thermal.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
July 8th, 2008
In another blow to my carnivorous impulses, it looks like a sugar that differs slightly in humans from the version in most other animals may be responsible for a host of inflammatory and auto-immune diseases. On the plus side, if they’re right, fixing this might be a great place to start improving our genome.
From the article:
“Prof Varki found that Neu5Gc was foreign to humans, even though we carry a very similar version of the same molecule - which may be one reason why animal-to-human organ and tissue transplants do not work well. But in recent years, he has come to believe that the implications of this molecular difference are much wider. He has built up a range of evidence that potentially links Neu5Gc, a so-called sialic acid, to chronic disease.
This is because the animal version is absorbed by humans as a result of eating red meat and milk products, and there is evidence that the body views it as an invader.
Eating these foods could trigger inflammation and, over the long term, heart disease, certain cancers and auto-immune illnesses. Prof Varki stresses, however, that “we have not proven any link to disease, just suggested that it is something to explore.”
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
