Assorted tech posts and images

[dracodraconis]

Our snow is imported from the South - Much of the snow we have accumulated here in Ontario entered the atmosphere in the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, what fell is heavily laden with moisture so it will, unfortunately, take longer to melt. On the other hand, slow melting means less flooding a more gradual release of toxins currently hidden in our snowbanks.

Boomerangs in space - One of the more unusual experiments recently conducted on the ISS was to determine whether a boomerang would loop back around. Turns out that it does because the effect depends entirely on air resistance, not gravity, as predicted by scientists.

Using lasers to talk to nerves - US researchers are working on an alternative to stimulating nerves using electricity. The have discovered that they can use a solid-state pulsed laser focused on individual nerves to cause them to generate a neural pulse. This result could be used to build better and more precise prosthetics, patches to combat chronic pain, or to stimulate auditory nerves to improve the fidelity dynamic range of cochlear implants.

Save the Earth: stop the LHC - Two men have initiated a lawsuit in the US to stop Europe's Large Hadron Collider from starting up this summer. They are afraid that if the LHC is allowed to operate it will create a black hole that will eventually devour the Earth. CERN responded to the suit by wondering why the men thought a court in Hawaii would have jurisdiction over a project in Switzerland. Found on Scott Adam's blog.

One-way trip to the moon - A US company has announced that they will carry people's cremated remains to the moon for burial.

Fossilized dinosaur skin from a mummified dinosaur found in North Dakota.

A 160-square kilometer chunk of the Antarctic ice sheet broke away on February 28th. The ice sheet is believed to be almost 1,500 years old and is an  example of accelerated rate at which the ice sheets in both poles are deteriorating.

This 6.5 metre creature is a squid preserved using plastination. The process actually caused the carcass to shrink by 2.5 metres.

A new study exploring the feasibility of a space elevator reports that gravitational forces could introduce oscillations into the cable that could make it vear into the path of other space traffic.

The Lynx is a two-person aircraft to be designed with the capability of using a standard airport runway, but will have a ceiling (maximum altitude) of almost 61 kilometres.

Robotic fish fins. Previous researchers focused only on designing fish and dolphin tails. The trick is to use flexible fins that "flick" to release energy more efficiently.

An artificial womb designed to hold test-tube embryos in the more "natural" habitat of the female body. The device is left in the uterus for severals, after which it is removed and the most viable embryos extracted for implantation in the real womb.

BigDog is a quadraped robotic pack horse powered by a gasoline engine. It can carry payloads of up to 340 pounds over rough terrain.

Stanford University researchers have developed a 3D camera that uses 12,616 separate lenses , each illuminating a 256 pixel array. The resulting 3-megapixel image has all surfaces in focus, or the data can be used to generate a depth map because each point on the surface is captured by at least 4 cameras. Basic geometry can the be used to extract the spatial position of the surface point.

The holograms on this piece of steel were generated using sheet explosives, a method known as explosive embossing.

Comments

[ancalagon-tb.livejournal.com]

that walking robot is incredible! It seems more sure footed than some people I know...

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

I had posted about it months ago, but I still find it neat. They also have a six-legged version.