General science advances thread

[ScienceRocks]

http://www.economist...ed/wingsofsteel

A LOT of tosh is talked about “nanotechnology”, much of it designed to separate unwary investors from their hard-earned cash. This does not mean, though, that controlling the structure of things at the level of nanometres (billionths of a metre) is unimportant. In materials science it is vital, as a paper just published in Nature, by Hansoo Kim and his colleagues at the Pohang University of Science and Technology, in South Korea, demonstrates. By manipulating the structure of steel on a nanometre scale, Dr Kim has produced a material which has the strength and the lightness of titanium alloys but will, when produced at scale, cost a tenth as much.

Steel is useful because it is strong and cheap. But it is also heavy. It has, therefore, always been useless for applications such as aircraft. In a world that demands the ever-more efficient use of fuel in motor cars and lorries, it is now falling out of favour there, too. According to Dr Kim, the share by weight of steel in an average light vehicle fell from 68.1% in 1995 to 60.1% in 2011.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Prototype Railgun firing Mach 7 shots has been installed on a Military Catamaran that can reach 52 mph
Next Big Future Prototype Railgun firing Mach 7 shots has been installed on a Military Catamaran that can reach 52 mph

The Navy has installed their prototype railgun on a 1500 ton military catamaran called the joint high speed vessel aka JHSV. Lance M. Bacon reports this development at the Navy Times and Sam LaGrone at UNSI.

The JHSV has 600 tons of excess payload capacity, but Zumwalt Navy destroyers have 20 tons of excess payload capacity. The railgun will need to be made more compact to be installed on the destroyers. The Destroyers at 14500 tons are bigger than the JHSV. The Destroyers are already filled with other systems.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Advanced additive manufacturing could enable planes that are 50% more fuel efficient
Next Big Future Advanced additive manufacturing could enable planes that are 50 more fuel efficient

Pratt and Whitney is exploring making airplane engines with fewer parts using additive manufacturing (aka advanced 3D printing). Those parts would need less assembly and be cheaper to make. Frank Preli, chief engineer for materials and process engineering at the company, anticipates the possibility of radical new aircraft designs “like many engines embedded in a wing for ultra-aerodynamic efficiency.

Such a design could have many benefits, says Mark Drela, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Distributing engines along the trailing edge of wings and in the rear of the fuselage can theoretically cut fuel consumption by 20 percent and decrease an aircraft’s weight. These benefits “add up to very large fuel burn reductions,” Drela says. Savings of 50 percent “are not inconceivable.”

Additive manufacturing techniques need to improve to allow for higher precision. Once researchers understand the fine, molecular-scale physics of how lasers and electron beams interact with powders, he says, “that will lead to the ability to put in finer and finer features, and faster and faster deposition rates.”

 

[ScienceRocks]

Robochop robots will carve foam blocks to online users' specs
By Ben Coxworth
February 10, 2015

How would you like to get an industrial robot to build something that you designed, which you then get to keep? Well, you'll have your chance next month. That's when Germany's GFT Group will be presenting Robochop, an installation of four foam-carving robots that can be controlled by regular people via the internet.

 

[longknife]

Converting Solar Energy to Liquid Fuel


The potential applications of solar power just got a whole lot wider


Researchers at Harvard have discovered how to convert solar energy into liquid fuel, potentially accelerating our switch to the alternative-energy source, according to an article in this month’s scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).


I can't find where Isopropyl is a good fuel and this is a safety factor:


Isopropyl alcohol vapor is denser than air and is flammable with a flammability range of between 2 and 12.7% in air. It should be kept away from heat and open flame. Isopropyl alcohol has also been reported to form peroxides, which may explode upon concentration. Isopropyl alcohol is a skin irritant.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Here is some more news on that.


Bionic leaf: Researchers use bacteria to convert solar energy into liquid fuel
Bionic leaf Researchers use bacteria to convert solar energy into liquid fuel -- ScienceDaily
Harvesting sunlight is a trick plants mastered more than a billion years ago, using solar energy to feed themselves from the air and water around them in the process we know as photosynthesis.

Scientists have also figured out how to harness solar energy, using electricity from photovoltaic cells to yield hydrogen that can be later used in fuel cells. But hydrogen has failed to catch on as a practical fuel for cars or for power generation in a world designed around liquid fuels.

Now scientists from a team spanning Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created a system that uses bacteria to convert solar energy into a liquid fuel. Their work integrates an "artificial leaf," which uses a catalyst to make sunlight split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a bacterium engineered to convert carbon dioxide plus hydrogen into the liquid fuel isopropanol.

The findings are published Feb. 9 in PNAS. The co-first authors are Joseph Torella, a recent PhD graduate from the HMS Department of Systems Biology, and Christopher Gagliardi, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Pamela Silver, the Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at HMS and an author of the paper, calls the system a bionic leaf, a nod to the artificial leaf invented by the paper's senior author, Daniel Nocera, the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Driverless car beats racing driver for first time

Driverless cars now out-perform skilled racing drivers, engineers at Stanford University have shown, after pitting their latest model against a track expert.

The team has designed a souped-up Audi TTS dubbed ‘Shelley’ which has been programmed to race on its own at speeds above 120 mph at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Northern California.

When they tested it against David Vodden, the racetrack CEO and amateur touring class champion, Shelley was faster by 0.4 of a second.

 

[ScienceRocks]

 

[ScienceRocks]

FAA floats new rules for commercial drone use
By Nick Lavars
February 15, 2015
1 Comment

In welcome news for businesses banking on the commercial potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has put forward a proposal for guidelines surrounding commercial drone use. The rules would clear the air for some applications of the technology, though would still leave certain big-name players, such as Amazon, in limbo.

 

[longknife]

9 revolutionary projects the military is funding

Some of these could be quite revolutionary. Worth checking out @ 9 revolutionary projects the military is funding Science Geek.com

 

[ScienceRocks]

SkyProwler combines a quadcopter and a fixed-wing airplane in one device
By Ben Coxworth
February 18, 2015
3 Pictures

Arizona-based start-up Krossblade is developing a five-passenger "flying car"-type vehicle known as the SkyCruiser. Among other things, plans call for it to take off and land like a quadcopter, while transitioning to faster, more efficient fixed-wing flight while en route. Will you ever be able to buy one? Well, that's hard to say, but if Krossblade's current Kickstarter campaign is a success, you will soon be able to buy a functioning miniature prototype known as the SkyProwler.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Limpets sink their teeth into world's strongest natural material crown
By Darren Quick
February 18, 2015
2 Pictures

Spider's silk has long been the strongest natural material known to man, prompting researchers to attempt to uncover its secrets so they can replicate its remarkable properties in man-made materials. But scientists now have a new source of inspiration in the form of limpet teeth, which are made of a material researchers say is potentially stronger than spider silk, is comparable in strength to the strongest commercial carbon fibers, and could one day be copied for use in cars, boats and planes.

 

[ScienceRocks]

How many forces?

If you've read many of my columns, you know quite a bit about the Standard Model. You know that there are quarks and leptons. You've heard about the gluon, the W and Z bosons, the photon and the graviton. And you know that this means that there are four fundamental forces: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Easy peasy.

However, the reality is actually a lot murkier: Not all forces are independent. For instance, back in the 1830s, scientists knew of two distinct forces: electricity and magnetism. But when Maxwell wrote down his equations for electric and magnetic forces in the 1860s, it became clear that the two were really one force, electromagnetism.

 

[ScienceRocks]

After Thousands of Years, Earth's Frozen Life Forms Are Waking Up

What's happening in Siberia's thawing permafrost and Greenland's melting glaciers sounds borderline supernatural. Ancient viruses, bacteria, plants, and even animals have been cryogenically frozen there for millennia—and now, they are waking up.

Cryofreezing is best known for its appearances in science fiction, but self-styled "resurrection ecologists" are now showing the world just how real it is. In 2012, scientists germinated flowers from a handful of 32,000 year old seeds excavated from the Siberian tundra. Last year, researchers hatched 700-year old eggs from the bottom of a Minnesota lake, while another team resuscitated an Antarctic moss that had been frozen since the time of King Arthur. Bacteria, however, are the uncontested masters of cryogenics—one bug, at least, was alive and kicking after 8 million years of suspended animation.

Fear not—while awakening a million-year old plague sounds like a great scifi plot, most of these critters are totally harmless. But they're fascinating for another reason: They're a window into Earth's past; one that may offer clues to how species will cope with change in the future. Here's what the emerging field of resurrection ecology—which is as badass as it sounds—may allow scientists to do.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Researchers first to observe Higgs boson analogue in superconductors

The Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Higgs boson - the "God particle" believed responsible for all the mass in the universe - took place in 2012 at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, an underground facility where accelerated sub-atomic particles zip around the circumference of a 27-kilometer (16.9-mile) ring-shaped tunnel. But what goes around comes around: more than 50 years ago, the first hint of Higgs was inspired by the study of superconductors - a special class of metals that, when cooled to very low temperatures, allow electrons to move without resistance.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Confirmation of ultra-high energy molecules with 500 times the bond energy of a triple carbon bond

Metastable Innershell Molecular State (MIMS), an innershell-bound ultra-high-energy molecule, was previously proposed to explain a ∼40% efficiency of soft-X-ray generation in ∼0.05 keV/amu nanoparticle impact on solids. Here, the MIMS model has been extended and applied to interpreting the experimental K-shell X-ray satellite spectra for more than 40 years in keV-MeV/amu heavy-ion impact on solids. The binding energies of the K-shell MIMS of elements from Al to Ti were determined to be 80–200 eV.The successful extension of the model to the K-shell MIMS confirms that all elements in the periodic table and their combinations are subjected to the MIMS formation. Uranium and gold should have MIMS with bond energies in the range of 4000 eV.

 

[ScienceRocks]

California is getting a Hyperloop, but not where you think
By Eric Mack
February 26, 2015
12 Pictures

Elon Musk's Hyperloop is going to become a reality, but not quite on the grand scale it was originally conceived for just yet. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) has reached an agreement to build a 5-mile (8-km) passenger track for Quay Valley, a proposed "sustainable model town for the 21st century" in California's central valley.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Aluminum "superatoms" hint at a new type of superconducting materials
By Dario Borghino
February 28, 2015

Scientists at the University of Southern California have made steps toward discovering a new family of superconductor materials that work at relatively high temperatures, with possible applications in physics research, medical imaging and high-performance electronics.

 

[ScienceRocks]

A superconductor advance using ‘superatoms’

A unique property of size-resolved metal nanocluster particles is their “superatom”-like electronic shell structure. The shell levels are highly degenerate, and it has been predicted that this can enable exceptionally strong superconducting-type electron pair correlations in certain clusters composed of just tens to hundreds of atoms. Here we report on the observation of a possible spectroscopic signature of such an effect. A bulge-like feature appears in the photoionization yield curve of a free cold aluminum cluster and shows a rapid rise as the temperature approaches ≈100 K. This is an unusual effect, not previously reported for clusters. Its characteristics are consistent with an increase in the effective density of states accompanying a pairing transition, which suggests a high-temperature superconducting state with Tc ≳ 100 K. Our results highlight the promise of metal nanoclusters as high-Tc building blocks for materials and networks.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Let There Be Light! Photo Shows Light As Wave And Particle For First Time

Quantum mechanics is an incredibly complex field for a simple reason: So much of what it studies can be two different things at the exact same time. Light is a great example since it behaves like both a particle and a wave, but only appears in one state during experiments. Mathematically speaking, we have to treat light as both ways for the universe to make sense but actually confirming it visually has been impossible. Or at least that was the case until scientists from Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne developed their own unique photography method.

The image was created by shooting a pulse of laser light at a metallic nanowire to make its charged particles vibrate. Next the scientists fired a stream of electrons past the wire holding the trapped light. When the two collided, it created an energy exchange that could be photographed from the electron microscope.