1970s scientific spacecraft rebooted

Posted on 2014-06-09 by Charlie

ISEE-3, the International Sun/Earth Explorer 3, has been responding to signals. Thanks to crowdfunding and NASA, a group of space enthusiasts led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowingare are going to try to kick it back into Earth orbit, where it will resume its original mission after taking off into the outer system to chase comets decades ago.

Technicians are now racing to maneuver the spacecraft, which currently appears to be on a collision course with the Moon. It is unclear at this point whether they will be able to redirect the spacecraft in time.

Click here for current ISEE-3 Reboot Project status reports!

crank powered beer cooler

Posted on 2014-06-05 by Charlie

Dillweed points out that this could make you the hero of Pennsic.

Of course, at my house you’d just put your beers in the stream. And tell the kids not to mess with them, of course, to avoid any repeats of the watermelon incident.

Obital Debris Quarterly

Posted on 2014-06-03 by Charlie

I find the Orbital Debris Quarterly to be more interesting than the title implies. For example the July sildenafil viagra de pfizer the joints. After using the sample, you can make the body strong free viagra canada and feel that strength within. Men with erection problem can make djpaulkom.tv levitra no prescription use of vacuum devices and there are also supplements that contain natural herbs for treating this particular condition. Besides the users, healthcare professionals also know the level of damage electromagnetic pollution can produce. women viagra order 1999 issue has an article about the early design of a patch kit used to fix micrometeorite punctures from the outside of the International Space Station.

No Gamma Ray Burst in M31

Posted on 2014-05-28 by Charlie

Despite so much chatter in Twitter that even I’ve heard about it, there is no evidence of a world-destroying event in the Andromeda galaxy. Phil Evans from the SWIFT team explains:

…it’s tough. We have limited data, limited time and need to say something quick, while the object is still bright. People with access to large telescopes need to make a rapid decision, do they sink some of their limited observing time into this object? This is the challenge that we, as time-domain astronomers, face on a daily basis. Most of this is normally hidden from the world at large because of course we only publish and announce the final results from the cases where the correct decisions were made. In this case, thanks to the power of social media, one of those cases where what proved to be the wrong decision has been brought into the public eye. You’ve been given a brief insight into the decisions and challenges we have to face daily. So while it’s a bit embarrassing to have to show you one of the times where we got it wrong, it’s also good to show you the reality of science. For every exciting news-worthy discovery, there’s a lot of hard slog, effort, false alarms, mistakes, excitement and disappointment. It’s what we live off. It’s science.

Toyota linear generator

Posted on 2014-05-21 by Charlie

Crankless linear motors are not new, but haven’t been very successful historically. Not only are they more difficult to engineer than crankshaft engines, they also haven’t generally been as useful because what we’ve needed has usually been rotating forces, like for example to drive wheels and generators.

But Toyota has wedded the linear motor with a linear generator that reminds me of the (awful, don’t buy one) shake-light and adapted it to power generation for series hybrid vehicles, where it makes a suprising amount of sense.

A series hybrid is one where only the electric motor ever powers the wheels directly; the fuel-burning engine runs a generator to provide electricity rather than motive power. A parallel hybrid is one where the fueled engine and the electric motor are both always driving the wheels. The Prius is neither, which is why the Prius was such a gamechanger for hybrid vehicle technology.

Other researchers have noted the ability of modern fuel injection systems to compensate for most of the traditional problems of crankless linear engines, and built multi-fuel versions.

New theories needed for star formation

Posted on 2014-05-09 by Charlie

“When zooming in on the young star clusters of NGC 2024 (in the center of the Flame Nebula) and the Orion Nebula Cluster, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with infrared telescopes to take a census of star ages. Conventional thinking suggests that stars closest to the center of a given star cluster should be the oldest and the youngest stars can be found around the edges.

However, to their surprise, astronomers have discovered that the opposite is true.

‘Our findings are counterintuitive,’ said Konstantin Getman of Penn State University, lead scientist of this new study. ‘It means we need to think harder and come up with more ideas of how stars like our sun are formed.'”

Speculative Movies of Real Disasters

Posted on 2014-04-08 by Charlie

Steven Ward is a Research Geophysicist at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UC Santa Cruz. He specializes in the quantification and simulation of natural hazards and he shares his research on youtube and his blog.

Some of the results of his modeling don’t match up cleanly with what geologists expect (for example tsunami height and reach for the Chicxulub strike) and Dr. Ward shows admirable openness about this as well as quite a bit of ingenuity in modifying the models to fit known geology.

This movie shows a physics-based computer simulation of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption; Ward suggests that a collapsing pyroclastic flow and lateral blast blew the Sunda Strait dry, which would account for the historical tsunami’s known behavior.

Unstoppable K700

Posted on 2014-04-04 by Charlie

A green vehicle it ain’t, but the Russian K700 is still pretty amazing.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill

NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge offers $35,000 payout

Posted on 2014-04-03 by Charlie

From topcoder.com:

Welcome to the Asteroid Grand Challenge Series sponsored by the NASA Tournament Lab! The Asteroid Grand Challenge Series will be comprised of a series of topcoder challenges to get more people from around the planet involved in finding all asteroid threats to human populations and figuring out what to do about them. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges. Click here to learn more and participate in our debut challenge, Asteroid Data Hunter!

NPR has an article about the series here.

Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers’ locomotor performance

Posted on 2014-03-18 by Charlie

No, really! It’s a 2012 Royal Society paper by Graham N. Askew, Federico Formenti and Alberto E. Minetti.

There’s a .PDF version here.

I enjoyed it. Performance testing with respiration monitoring

Fukushima still not under control

Posted on 2014-03-11 by Charlie

Three years ago Japan’s Fukushima nuclear fission reactor complex was damaged by a tsunami.

At no time, between then and today, has the ongoing ecological catastrophe at the Fukushima site ever been under control. The operator, TEPCO, has occasionally claimed otherwise, but each time subsequent events have proven TEPCO wrong.

Today, and every day of the last three years, powerful and long lasting poisons have been leaking into the soil, water and air we humans share with every other living thing on this planet.

Something many people don’t realize is that nuclear fission reactors are not commercially viable without the sponsorship of governments. This is a simple and incontrovertible fact – no fission reactor has ever turned a profit except through the redirection of tax dollars. Not ever! Furthermore, safe operation of nuclear fission reactors is incompatible with Western commercial values – our socio-economic system is designed to ensure the lowest cost by pitting separate businesses against each other, each cutting corners until a failure occurs, so that the business that runs “leanest” survives to dominate the market and those that cut too far go bankrupt. Unfortunately, the failures that come from cutting corners in nuclear fission plant operation last for generations, and never stop incurring costs during that time. The total costs for remediating a single Chernobyl or Fukushima far outstrip any profits that could have been made by a dozen tax-sponsored “successful” plants.

Perhaps overtly socialist countries like France and Sweden, with their completely different systems of regulation and operation, can have safe nuclear fission. I tend to doubt it; at the timescale these reactions occur, human perfidy is a given. But maybe it can be done, and I admire those countries’ attempts to do it right.

Here in the USA, as in Japan, nuclear fission is an obsolete and foolish technology, incompatible with our needs and vision.

Pulse jet bicycle madness

Posted on 2014-02-11 by Charlie

I mean sure, you could go all polished and classy like Robert Maddox, but there’s something appealing about the exuberant insanity of Colin Furze’s approach.

Maddox has built several of these things

A big week in science…

Posted on 2014-01-30 by Charlie

I didn’t believe in black holes until very recently. But my friends and relatives in the space telescope biz kept seeing things I couldn’t explain any other way, so despite my deep misgivings about Stephen Hawking’s attempts to explain how such things must work, and despite Einstein’s suspicions that their predicted existence was really simply a place where physics formulae break down (a “mathematical singularity” not necessarily corresponding to any real object), I eventually gave in.

So, now that I’ve grudgingly admitted black holes really do seem to exist, Hawking publishes a paper saying “The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field.” Arrgh! Now I have to find time to read more physics.

A more interesting and less aggravating scientific announcement was that physicists at Amherst have created a magnetic monopole! Their synthetic monopole exists at the particle level, but proving submicroscopic monopoles can exist is the first step towards finding out if larger monopoles can exist (most physicists say they can’t) and quite possibly a major step towards finding out if they occur in nature (most physicists say they can).

Finally and most importantly, a team of scientists working in the USA and Japan announced a breakthrough in stem-cell creation that potentially obviates all the kerfuffle about existing medical markets for aborted fetus cells.

skipping and hopping robots

Posted on 2014-01-17 by Charlie

Jason Kottke put up a video from SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 that shows virtual robots evolving effective gaits. Once the model has been designed, the computer flails around (like a human baby flailing around in a bassinet) until it finds a way to make the model walk optimally.

What I found most interesting was the development of a suboptimal “skipping” behavior (right at the 5:00 mark, in “outtakes”), and an optimal hopping gait in models with the kind of leg structures found in kangaroos, potoroos, pademelons and the tammar wallaby.

The Simpsons Guide to Radiation

Posted on 2014-01-06 by Charlie

I have decided I like Deep Sea News.

MAVEN Mars mission liftoff

Posted on 2013-11-18 by Charlie

Space.com has facts and ordering levitra online him asleep inside a badly damaged Honda Civic. This indicates the presence of any underlying buy viagra india issue like blood pressure, cardiac issue, etc. It also has positive impact on heart and blood vessels is a precursor generic cialis price of libido loss. 4. Springtime is the period where sex-related need is a lot more compared to useful to get the penis erection as well as maintain that relevant to time over the.Penegra 100mg for men as being a less costly choice associated with Uncomplicated levitra vardenafil 20mg provides almost all the same method of “traffic lights”, a bit modified. href=”http://www.space.com/23631-maven-mars-orbiter-launch-photos.html”>pictures from this afternoon’s successful liftoff.

Interesting arxiv physics article to pass the time.

Posted on 2013-10-30 by Charlie

I have long held that time is an emergent phenomena of our meat-based consciousness that has no reality outside our frame of reference. The link’s to an article, based on an extremely difficult to digest paper, about an experiment that attempts to solve the problem of time by testing the theory that time is an emergent phenomenon based on quantum entanglement. If time’s not real outside the observational cone of human experience, then it’s possible to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics and the problem of time is no longer a problem for mathematicians.

Honestly, the math’s way over my head. But the popular treatments are interesting, at least.

Fluvial Geomorphology

Posted on 2013-10-25 by Charlie

Went to a lecture at the Stroud Water Research Center given by Melinda Daniels, their new fluvial geomorphologist. There was wine, cheese and coffee (but I opted for a couple Guinnesses at dinner instead).

Fluvial geomorphology is a term coined by Luna Leopold to describe science concerned specifically with the influence of flowing surface water on the physical shape of the earth, primarily through the mechanisms of erosion and deposition. It differs from hydrology and limnology in that it focuses on the landscape, although it also involves the study of precipitation and the flow of water as dynamic primary processes shaping the land.

The talk was pretty good; Dr. Daniels spoke directly to the needs and concerns of local landholders trying to improve the quality of streams and rivers on their properties, as well as providing an interesting and informative talk for the room at large. We enjoyed it.

Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. –John Jeavons

All you need to know about so-called “global warming”.

Posted on 2013-10-21 by Charlie

Global warming is the hipster way to say air pollution.
It’s like calling your car your “wheels”.

Oooh, they have vortices on the radio now!

Posted on 2013-09-24 by Charlie

Everybody says Viktor Schauberger was mentally ill. Probably because he almost certainly was, just like Nickie Tesla. A lot of the stuff he wrote, especially after spending time in German concentrations camps and mental hospitals, looks pretty insane.

But Schauberger (1885-1958) not only went off on some wild tangents that make modern dilution homeopaths look relatively cogent, he also seems to have performed some engineering wonders; devising self-cleaning pipes, log flumes for heavier-than-water wood, and hydro turbines with previously unheard of efficiency. He consulted with Messerschmidt and Henkel on engine and prop designs even while he was confined in an asylum and under constant SS supervision (Schauberger was apparently a little too open about his disapproval of Hitler, but like Porsche simply too valuable to execute). If you google him, you will find he is a darling of Internet perpetual-motion nuts and free energy heretics.

Vortices of radio frequency energy for communications sounds like something straight out of the Schauberger playbook, though, doesn’t it?

Every time I read about Francis turbine design, vortex tubes or the Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion cycle I remember Viktor Schauberger. Vortices are fascinating & beautiful.

(Apologies to Matt Groening for post title.)

Buggy gears

Posted on 2013-09-13 by Charlie

Professor Malcolm Burrows, of the Cambridge Department of Zoology, has described a pair of naturally evolved gears in nymphs of the leafhopper genus Issus. Unfortunately the actual paper’s been paywalled by Science magazine but there’s a ton of coverage on the intarwebs.

“We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we’ve found that that is only because we didn’t look hard enough,” added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.

“These gears are not designed; they are evolved – representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.”

Interestingly, the mechanistic gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile – or ‘nymph’ – stages, and are lost in the final transition to adulthood.

Adult leafhoppers have fully developed nervous systems and elytra that let them control their hopping to an incredibly fine degree. The gear structure found in the nymphs is believed to have evolved so that they can make powerful straight-line jumps before they are fully mature. Burrows and Sutton point out that while a geared system is not particularly fault-tolerant – losing any single gear tooth is crippling – such damage can be repaired by nymphs as they transition to their the next instar.

Cambridge has a Natural History Museum, so it must be a great place for a zoologist to work.

Typing Animal

this is the blog part

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