Lack of electricity is a serious problem for vaccines and medicines that need to be cooled. It is hard to imagine that this is a problem, living in the USA, but this is still a problem today. As readers of this blog notice I really like appropriate technology solutions that provide real quality of life enhancements for hundreds of millions of people (which undoubtedly is influence by my father).
A team led by MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world – one team members believe has the potential to revolutionize global energy production.
The system consists of a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish that team members have spent the last several weeks assembling. The dish, made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror, concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 – creating heat so intense it could melt a bar of steel.
To demonstrate the system’s power, Spencer Ahrens, who just received his master’s in mechanical engineering from MIT, stood in a grassy field on the edge of the campus this week holding a long plank. Slowly, he eased it into position in front of the dish. Almost instantly there was a big puff of smoke, and flames erupted from the wood. Success!
Burning sticks is not what this dish is really for, of course. Attached to the end of a 12-foot-long aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.
Someday soon, Ahrens hopes, the company he and his teammates have founded, called RawSolar, will produce such dishes by the thousands. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within a couple of years with the energy they produce.
“This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence, and it was just completed,” says Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish’s design–the rights to which he has signed over to the student team.
Great job students. Good luck with RawSolar. Photo (by David Chandler): Matt Ritter shows steam coming from the return hose after passing through the coil above the solar dish.
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This is another awesome combination of technology, distributed problem solving, science education…
Essentially the game works by allowing the person to make some decisions then the computer runs through some processes to determine the result of those decisions. It seems the human insight of what might work provides an advantage to computers trying to calculate solutions on their own. Then the results are compared to the other individuals working on the same protein folding problem and the efforts are ranked.
This level of interaction is very cool. SETI@home, Rosetta@home and the like are useful tools to tap the computing resources of millions on the internet. But the use of human expertise really makes fold.it special. And you can’t help but learn by playing. In addition, if you are successful you can gain some scientific credit for your participation in new discoveries.
Proteins are the workhorses in every cell of every living thing. Your body is made up of trillions of cells, of all different kinds: muscle cells, brain cells, blood cells, and more. Inside those cells, proteins are allowing your body to do what it does: break down food to power your muscles, send signals through your brain that control the body, and transport nutrients through your blood. Proteins come in thousands of different varieties, but they all have a lot in common. For instance, they’re made of the same stuff: every protein consists of a long chain of joined-together amino acids.
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structure specifies the function of the protein. For example, a protein that breaks down glucose so the cell can use the energy stored in the sugar will have a shape that recognizes the glucose and binds to it (like a lock and key) and chemically reactive amino acids that will react with the glucose and break it down to release the energy.
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Proteins are involved in almost all of the processes going on inside your body: they break down food to power your muscles, send signals through your brain that control the body, and transport nutrients through your blood. Many proteins act as enzymes, meaning they catalyze (speed up) chemical reactions that wouldn’t take place otherwise. But other proteins power muscle contractions, or act as chemical messages inside the body, or hundreds of other things.
Spore is the hugely anticipated game from Wil Wright (the creator of Sims). In this webcast he discusses the science behind Spore. The creature creator was released this week and the full game will be released soon. Spore has been doing a great job marketing the product and they continue to do so with lots of material on You Tube including the Spore Ultimate Dance Contest.
The idea of the game is to design creatures that then go out into the world and interact and evolution takes it course. It looks very cool.
Geek Pad provides programming, engineering and science students paper with a subtle grid to help organize notes and draw graphs. I don’t exactly see this as revolutionary as the web site claims, but you might find it useful. Plus I like that it was created by a college junior pursuing a B.S. in electronics engineering.
I really liked Gmail. Today Google has blocked me from accessing my email. I do nothing that remotely could be considered suspicious behavior. Yet without any preliminary warnings Gmail just blocked my access to email and provides only the following.
While this might not be evil it is extremely bad service. Email users need to trust providers to provide reliable service. To act with integrity, etc.. When instead they take unilateral, immediate action with no significant response one can only draw the conclusion that they are dealing with another Verizon or Comcast or the long litany of companies that cannot be trusted to treat you well or even remotely fairly.
They do provide a form to fill out, which I have done. They responded with the following: “Thanks for your report. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience. For your security, we may temporarily disable access to your account if our system detects abnormal usage. It will take between one minute and 24 hours for you to regain access, depending on the behavior our system detected.”
Not really clear is it? I still have no access. Google’s “mission”: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” How about making clear the information that Google itself says it has detected, this “abnormal usage.” Have they even made that information “accessible and useful.” No they have not. Google choosing to break Gmail access without notice and without explanation and even after questioning still providing no real explanation seems like a very serious threat to users of Gmail. Google seems to believe that breaking access to Gmail is not something they need to even know why they are doing it. I would say a policy that makes Gmail unreliable for users threatens to send users to a provider that does not chose to act in such a way. This seems like a very bad policy on Google’s part.
This is so frustrating, I actually liked gmail. But I guess I will have to look for a reliable provider unless Google can actually provide an explanation of how they will change to actually provide reliable email services.
My account is back now. Maybe it was down for an hour. Which, frankly, if it had been a technical glitch I would have been fine with. That it was a policy decision to break access without notice or explanation I find extremely worrying, however. How am I suppose to trust that they will not do so at any point in the future. If they send me some explanation of this choice to disable my account temporarily, I will update this post.
“The mathematics behind cloaking has been known for several years,” said Professor John Pendry of Imperial College London, UK, an expert in cloaking. “What hasn’t been available for sound is the sort of materials you need to build a cloak out of.”
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The Spanish team who conducted the new work believe the key to a practical device are so-called “sonic crystals”. These artificial composites – also known as “meta-materials” – can be engineered to produce specific acoustical effects.
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The research builds on work by scientists from Duke University in North Carolina, US, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Earlier this year, independent teams from the two institutions demonstrated the mathematics necessary to create an acoustic cloak. Other scientists have shown that objects can be cloaked from electromagnetic radiation, such as microwaves.
Mr. Harman is a practitioner of biomimicry, a growing movement of the industrial-design field. Eleven years ago, he established Pax Scientific to commercialize his ideas, thinking that it would take only a couple of years to convince companies that they could increase efficiency, lower noise or create entirely new categories of products by following his approach.
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His radical ideas have so far found a cautious reception in the aircraft, air- conditioning, boating, pump and wind turbine industries. Mr. Harman’s experience is not unusual. Rather than beating a path to the door of mousetrap designers, the world seems to actively avoid them.
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Even in fields such as the computer industry, which celebrates innovation, systemic change can be glacial.
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In another hopeful sign, a world that long ignored energy efficiency is suddenly thinking of nothing else. “We tried for years to promote energy conservation, and we couldn’t find one who was interested,” he said. “Now the world has done a U-turn.”
Yet another example that new knowledge is not enough. It takes much longer for good ideas to be put into practice than seems reasonable (until you get your head around the idea it takes a fair amount of time for new ideas to be adopted).
One positive aspect of this reality is that if you can take advantage of new ideas before others you can gain an advantage. It isn’t necessarily true that just because now everyone knows about some new idea that you have no opportunity to use the knowledge before others.
Projections indicate costs will be around one fifth as much as conventional construction. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.
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The machine will cost between $500K to $700K for average size (2000 sq ft — 200 m2) detached houses. This is not much given that a concrete pump truck is now $300k-$400K. Note that with one machine numerous homes can be built. The first commercial machines to be available this year, 2008. The machine will be collapsible to form into an easy truck load. The unloading and setup will take between 1-2 hours.
Behrokh Khoshnevis is the visionary who has been driving this concept. He is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) and Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at USC.
Dean Kamen latest invention was funded by DARPA. Once again he is doing amazing stuff. It is great what engineers can do (many worked together to get the progress so far) when given the opportunity. We need many more such efforts.
DARPA has spent almost $25 million funding two independent teams, Mr. Kamen’s DEKA Research & Development Corp. and a group at Johns Hopkins’ University in an effort they hope will ultimately lead to commercial prosthesis that can be controlled from the human brain.
The innovation in the DEKA arm lies in its ultra light weight carbon shell, giving the user an exoskeleton with which to gain the leverage necessary to do some of the extraordinary things the system makes possible, such as lifting a 40 lb. weight.
To make the system function, the DEKA engineers coated the inside of the shell with a mosaic of thin air bladders that can be individually filled with air to offer padding and rigidity necessary to make possible normally ordinary tasks such as operating a portable power drill. When the arm is not in use the system deflates, or can even alternately fill and empty to offer a massage effect, so that it is not painful to wear for long periods.
The DEKA system is controlled by a joystick that is moved by the remaining portion of the user’s arm and by a second control mechanism in the user’s shoe. Mr. Kamen said that despite the complexity of controlling an ensemble of motors and mechanical servo devices, a user can gain basic functional control in just one day.
