Home Repairs

In making a repair to my toilet last week I found this useful resource: Replace The Toilet Fill Valve, Flush Valve Or Flapper

Your first step is to shut off the water. In most cases, you’ll have a shutoff valve right next to the toilet coming either through the floor or out of the wall… If the height of your valve is adjustable, set the height before you install the valve (Photo 5). If your valve is a different style from the one we show, check the directions. After mounting the valve (Photo 6), connect the fill tube (Photo 7). The fill tube squirts water into the overflow tube to refill the toilet bowl. The water that refills the tank gushes from the bottom of the fill valve. When you install the valve and supply lines, turn the nuts finger-tight. Then give each another one-half turn with a pliers. When you turn the water supply back on, immediately check for leaks and tighten the nuts a bit more if necessary.

The site does a great job of explaining what needs to be done and provides excellent graphics. It is also interesting to take a look at how things we use actually work.

Deep-Sea Denizen Inspires New Polymers

Stealing a trick from a tiny, pickle-shaped creature that dwells in the depths of the ocean, scientists have designed a new polymer that, when exposed to water, can instantly change its rigidity and strength.
…
Christoph Weder, an associate professor in the same department at Case, says he and Rowan thought of copying the sea cucumber’s adaptation more than five years ago. Working with marine biologists, they determined that the deep-sea animal accomplished its transformation thanks to fibers made of a protein known as collagen. The tightness of the connections between those fibers determines how stiff the cucumber’s skin is, and is controlled by the animal’s nervous system.

To get their polymer to do the same thing, the Case scientists used fibers found in another deep sea dweller, sea squirts, and also in cotton. When they mixed those fibers – known as cellulose nanofibers – with the rubbery polymer ethylene oxide–epichlorohydrin, they formed a stiff network, “almost glued to each other,” says Weder. Due to the nature of the bonds between the polymer and the fibers, however, water gets between the two substances, weakening the fibers’ adhesion. The material then becomes soft.

Seeking Solar Supremacy

The dance of the particles

Engineering professors Ray LaPierre, who is working with Cleanfield on solar cells made from a dense turf of nanowires, and Adrian Kitai, who co-founded Flexible Solar to make bendable solar panels that are less costly to manufacture, are showing how skills typically prized in the telecom sector can be repurposed to build better solar technologies.

Similar efforts are also being made at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Optical Sciences, where a new spin-off called The Solar Venture aims to improve the economics of solar. “Ontario was a global leader in telecom, but now that has slowed down,” says Rafael Kleiman, professor of engineering physics and director of McMaster’s Centre for Emerging Device Technologies. “All the people, all this research (in telecom), is finding a new home. I really believe Ontario can make itself a global hub in solar photovoltaic technologies.”
…
A solar cell is just a big specialized chip, so everything we’ve learned about making chips applies,” Paul Saffo, an engineering professor at Stanford University, recently told the New York Times. There’s a reason why California’s Silicon Valley, the headquarters of data-networking king Cisco Systems and semiconductor goliath Intel, is positioning itself as Solar Valley.

All around the world people are aiming to create centers of excellence for solar power research and production.

Dr. Tara Smith

Interview of Dr.Tara C. Smith:

I’ve started to think more seriously about science communication in general over the past few years, so hanging out with so many other people who have a passion for this was a great motivator to simply get more done, especially at the local level. I already run our state’s Citizens for Science group but would like to do more with it; perhaps move more toward the SCONC group model. As far as sessions, I really enjoyed Hemai Parthasarathy’s session on open science; I thought I knew a decent amount about open-access publishing, but I learned a lot more. I also was equal parts enjoying myself and seething with frustration at the session on gender and race in science. It’s so hard to know if you’re doing the right thing as a junior scientist, and especially a junior scientist who’s female or a racial minority. It was interesting listening to ScienceWoman and others talk about the difficulties they had with blogging anonymously; they feel confined in what they write about because they don’t want to blow their cover, while as a junior female scientist blogging under my own name, I feel constrained because I feel I’m under a bit of a microscope.

Photos: Rocky Gap State Park, Maryland

photo of a mushroom Tree on trial in Rocky Gap State Park

More photos from my visit to Rocky Gap State Park, Maryland. Photos by John Hunter. Related: Nature Recreation Declining.

More travel photo essays: Bull Run Trail, Virginia – Mount Rainier National Park – Appalachian Trail, Pennsylvania

Scientists and Engineers in Congress

A list of Congressmen with science PhDs: Vernon Ehlers, Michigan, physics PhD; Rush Holt, New Jersey, physics PhD; John Olver, Massachusetts, chemistry PhD; Brian Baird, Washington, psychology PhD; and now Bill Foster, Illinois, physics PhD. Other scientists, engineers and mathematicians include: Ron Paul, Texas, biology BS, MD; Jerry McNerney, California, math PhD; Dan Lipinski, Illinois, mechanical engineering BS, engineering-economic systems MS; Nancy Boyda, Kansas, chemistry BS; Cliff Stearns, Florida, electrical engineering BS; Joe Barton, Texas, industrial engineering BS. Please comment with additions.

Another Scientist in Congress!

He is not just any old particle physicist, but quite an accomplished one, having been a co-inventor of Fermilab’s antiproton Recycler Ring. Once you’ve mastered antiprotons, the Washington political process should be child’s play. Congratulations!

Vernon Ehlers – “After three years of studying at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Ehlers transferred and received his undergraduate degree in physics and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. After six years teaching and research at Berkeley, he moved back to Grand Rapids to Calvin College in 1966 where he taught physics for 16 years and later served as chairman of the Physics Department. During his tenure at Calvin, Ehlers also served as a volunteer science advisor to then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford.”

Russ Holt – Rep. Holt earned his B.A. in Physics from Carleton College in Minnesota and completed his Master’s and Ph.D. at NYU. He has held positions as a teacher, Congressional Science Fellow, and arms control expert at the U.S. State Department where he monitored the nuclear programs of countries such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union. From 1989 until he launched his 1998 congressional campaign, Holt was Assistant Director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the largest research facility of Princeton University and the largest center for research in alternative energy in New Jersey. He has conducted extensive research on alternative energy and has his own patent for a solar energy device. Holt was also a five-time winner of the game show “Jeopardy.”
Continue reading →

Visitors to the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog

For the month of February the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog had visitors from 140 countries. Granted, quite a few of those countries had fewer than 5 total visits. The top 12 countries were USA, UK, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, Netherlands, Turkey, Italy, Ireland, Mexico and France. Other countries include South Africa 23rd most visits (and 1st for Africa), Brazil 24 (1st for South America), Singapore 30, Japan 31, China 34.

We also received visits from: Ghana, Nepal, Botswana, Bahrain, Mali, Kazakhstan and Faroe Islands. No visits were registered from: Mongolia, Chad, Madagascar and Paraguay.

Those who read us only via RSS feed might not have noticed we added a tag cloud this month. So you can find, among other things: some of our favorite posts – answers to why… – bacteria related posts – post on economic topics and fun posts.

Google Summer of Code 2008

Over the last three years Google Summer of Code has provided 1500 students from 90 countries the chance to work on open source projects. It also has provide some great software and software enhancements to the open source community. Google has increased their funding by another $1 million. Each participant will receive $4,500 as a stipend.

I don’t understand why they have such a short window of opportunity to apply – but this is how they do it every year. They are accepting applications from open source projects, to act as mentoring organizations, through March 13th. Student applications will be accepted from March 24th to March 31st. See Google’s announcement.

externs.com offers listings of science internships and engineering internships.

Laws of Physics May Need a Revision

Something seems wrong with the laws of physics

Einstein’s general theory of relativity swept Newton away by showing that gravity operates by distorting space itself.

Even Einstein, however, may not have got it right. Modern instruments have shown a departure from his predictions, too. In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which operates America’s unmanned interplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, called Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre (designed to speed it on its way to the outer solar system), Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise. But well within the range that can reliably be detected.
…
Altogether, John Anderson and his colleagues analysed six slingshots involving five different spacecraft. Their paper on the matter is about to be published in Physical Review Letters. Crucially for the idea that there really is a systematic flaw in the laws of physics as they are understood today, their data can be described by a simple formula. It is therefore possible to predict what should happen on future occasions.

That is what Dr Anderson and his team have now done. They have worked out the exact amount of extra speed that should be observed when they analyse the data from a slingshot last November, which involved a craft called Rosetta. If their prediction is correct, it will confirm that the phenomenon is real and that their formula is capturing its essence. Although the cause would remain unknown, a likely explanation is that something in the laws of gravity needs radical revision.

An interesting puzzle that illustrates how scientists attempt to confirm our understanding and real world results. And those efforts include uncertainty and confusion. Too often, I think, people think science is only about absolute truth and facts without any room for questions. We understand gravity well, but that does not mean we have no mysteries yet to solve about gravity.

Research paper: The Anomalous Trajectories of the Pioneer Spacecraft