Txchnologist

by Michael Keller There are a number of references that might...

Thu, 23 May 2013 08:02:00 -0400

A scientist moves his hand through a supercooled cloud inside a GE lab freezer.

A scientist drops tiny pieces of dry ice through a supercooled cloud in a GE lab freezer. The ice creates millions of snow crystals in its wake, just like the vapor trail left behind an airplane.

A supercooled cloud of moisture inside a lab freezer whose crystals have not yet begun to grow.

The ice crystals that have begun to grow rapidly inside a supercooled cloud sparkle because they are prisms that scatter light.

by Michael Keller

There are a number of references that might come to mind when looking at these gifs: Starry Night, a shaken snow globe, the atmosphere of another planet or, perhaps for those of a certain age, Biz Markie’s Vapors.

While these are all fine images to conjure up, the animations here all come from a film made around 1947 to show how scientists make snow in a lab. It was part of research called Project STORMFURY that was undertaken by GE and the U.S. government to see if people could weaken the destructive power of hurricanes. Though the project failed, weather researchers learned much about tropical cyclones.

Click on the gifs for a brief description or watch the full video posted by the Museum of Innovation and Science.

Power Walking, Literally

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:52:56 -0400

by Txchnologist Staff

Rice University mechanical engineering students have built a prototype shoe fitting that generates enough energy to power portable electronics and recharge batteries.

The fitting, called PediPower, diverts the energy of heel strikes while walking, which would otherwise be lost into the ground, through a small gear system and generator. In bench tests, it delivered an average 400 milliwatts, enough to charge a battery or operate a cell phone. Their creation joins another body-powered generator developed by U.S. and Canadian scientists—a knee brace that can recharge up to 10 cell phones at once.

The Rice seniors hope their innovation will be improved upon by the next group taking it up to boost power output and decrease size. The goal is for the device to reliably produce enough energy to power artificial heart valves.

HT to Laughing Squid for spotting this one.

Poetic Justice: Filter Takes Machinery from Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria to Remove Antibiotics From Water

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:02:15 -0400

by Michael Keller

The world is awash in antibiotics. We take them to fight off the bacteria that mean to colonize us. We feed them to animals to prevent the outbreak of disease in densely packed factory-farming operations. Even many of our cleaning and body care products, controversially, now contain them.

But many antibiotics don’t get fully metabolized within humans or animals and, through excretion, find their way into waste and surface waters. It’s a major environmental concern whose full ecological implications still aren’t clear.

And the problem creates a vicious cycle. Evolution gives our microbial adversaries the strategic advantage—the ability to adapt to our weapons and render them harmless. So we engage in a microscopic arms race, battering increasing numbers of antibiotic-resistant bugs with more and more drug compounds to keep them at bay.

So you could call it a small case of poetic justice when researchers figure out how to use the cellular machinery that renders some bacteria drug-resistant to reclaim antibiotics from contaminated water.

University of Cincinnati environmental engineers have pulled a key protein, called AcrB, from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. AcrB protects the bacteria that have it by pumping drugs that would normally kill them out of the cell without causing harm.

“Antibiotic-resistant bacteria survive because of this protein pump,” environmental engineering professor David Wendell tells Txchnologist. “AcrB is a selective garbage disposal that binds and pumps out only these deleterious compounds for the bacteria. It’s an amazing piece of evolution, actually.”

Snatching a weapon for our use

The engineers realized that if they could turn the pump around and embed it into the walls of empty sacs of membrane called vesicles, they could actively filter antibiotics from the surrounding environment.

Wendell and doctoral student Vikram Kapoor isolated the AcrB protein from antibiotic-resistant E. coli, a bacterium found in the intestines of mammals that can cause food poisoning when accidentally ingested. They then latched to AcrB another bacterial protein called delta-rhodopsin that takes sunlight and converts it into energy to power the pump—making the filter solar-powered. Finally, they embedded the two-protein complex into the walls of vesicles they had gleaned from E. coli.

When they placed the microscopic systems into an antibiotic bath and shined a light on them, amazingly, they sprang into action, pumping the drug into the vesicle sacs and dropping its concentration in the surrounding solution. They detailed their findings in the journal Nano Letters. “Essentially, it’s the same pumping that happens in resistant E. coli. The key difference it that things are getting pumped in instead of getting pumped out,” Wendell says.

(Using the mechanism bacteria use to shrug off powerful antibiotics, scientists have developed solar-powered nanofilters that remove antibiotics from lakes and rivers twice as efficiently as the best existing technology. Courtesy Michael Woods/ACS.)

Working better than standard methods

In the lab, their filters, each smaller than a human hair, removed nearly twice as much antibiotic as activated carbon, the conventional material used to scrub water of contaminants. The vesicle system filtered out more than 70 percent of antibiotic compared to a maximum of 44 percent removed by carbon per milligram of either type of filter. “It’s roughly two times as good as carbon,” Wendell says. “That translates to needing half the weight of our vesicles compared to carbon to filter out the same amount of compounds.”

The UC team’s pump isn’t limited to just antibiotics, though. Wendell says other bacterial protein pumps similar to AcrB have different binding sites, which can transport hormones or some heavy metals like silver and copper from water into the vesicles for containment and recycling. “There are a couple—maybe five or six—different models,” he says. “You just swap out the protein pump and you could recover these things.”

Once the contaminants are trapped inside the vesicles, they can be released on demand by applying a bit of mild detergent that makes the sacs leak them out. The addition of another ingredient rehabilitates the vesicles so they can be reused for another round of filtration.

Wendell envisions their innovation filling big bags that can be dipped in rivers and lakes—like teabags that are left underwater until the vesicles are filled with pure antibiotic compounds. Then they could be pulled up and the antibiotics, amazingly, could be recovered and reused. “You can recycle the antibiotics from these vesicles,” he says. “Farmers, healthcare facilities, they all need antibiotics and these drugs cost money. Our filter closes the loop.”

Top Image: Heavy rusty water flap via Shutterstock.

by Michael Keller Pacific Northwest National Laboratory...

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:39:03 -0400

by Michael Keller

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists are developing an electrode with lots of surface area to efficiently purify water. This image, taken at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, shows what is called polypyrrole conductive polymer-coated carbon nanotubes grown on a carbon fiber. They say that these coated nanotubes could be used as an electrochemically switched ion-exchange electrode for water purification. Conductive polypyrrole is also being investigated for use in fuel cells, sensors and electronics. Larger image available here.

Robotic Fire Ants May Lead the March Into Future Search and Rescue Missions

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:02:02 -0400

by Rachel Nuwer

For those unfortunate enough to be trapped in a caved-in mine or under the rubble of a collapsed building, the chance of being rescued largely depends upon trained humans and dogs. The equipment they may be outfitted with—thermal imaging sensors, carbon dioxide detectors and flexible video cameras—may also provide some limited help.

But those buried too deeply for searchers to detect them must put all hope of rescue upon the slim possibility that first responders uncover them by chance. For this reason, researchers are trying to develop search and rescue robots that could vastly improve the odds for victims trapped underground.

“The dream and goal in this field is to turn a robot into a multifunctional device capable of moving everywhere,” says Daniel Goldman, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We’re seeking inspiration for how teams of little robots could self-organize to create structures that allow them to efficiently and effectively move around in nasty environments.”

Goldman and colleagues from the physics and biology departments turned to fire ants for clues about how organisms manage to navigate in confined underground environments. Until recently, not much was known about subterranean ant locomotion, including whether the insects get caught in traffic jams or lose their footing in the tunnels.

Getting a glimpse of the invisible

The team collected thousands of fire ants from around the university’s campus and placed them in containers filled with soil-mimicking materials of various particle diameters and moisture levels. They constantly monitored the animals with high-speed-video tracking equipment and peered in on the 3-dimensional tunnels with X-ray computed tomography. Depending upon soil type and moisture levels, the ants’ underground excavations varied in length and direction, the team found, but the tunnel diameter always remained the same—just slightly larger than the length of an ant. The researchers think the creatures engineer their tunnels this way to optimize movement and reduce the need for complex neural processing—akin to the way stairs in buildings optimize human movement by adhering to a certain height and width.

In a second experiment, the researchers placed ants in glass tubes of different diameters, and then occasionally fired an air piston that jolted the tubes and caused the ants to lose their grip. Surprisingly, the team discovered, the ants quickly arrested their fall and even used their antennae to grip the sides of the tubes and stabilize themselves. The larger the diameter, however, the more difficult it was for them to stop their fall. “This experiment wasn’t simulating any sort of perturbation ants may experience in their natural environment,” says physicist Nick Gravish, the lead author of a paper describing the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We needed to experimentally make them slip to tease out their behaviors.”

“When you see the behaviors these ants do when they’re flung from the walls, it’s just hilarious and totally unexpected,” Goldman adds.

Antennae to the rescue

Thanks to the high-speed camera, the team noticed that ants do trip in their subterranean tunnels and use their antennae and limbs to brace themselves, though those falls are miniscule compared to the ones artificially induced by the researchers. The tunnel’s purposeful diameter allows the ants to quickly recover from slips. “This is just a subtle slip, but it’s very important because it shows their capabilities to use their antennae and limbs,” Gravish says. “The ants can arrest themselves rapidly, whereas in a slightly larger tunnel they wouldn’t be able to do that.”

The team thinks these initial findings may someday lead to biologically inspired robots that apply the same principles and behaviors to search and rescue missions. “Organisms have solved lots of interesting problems of how to move around in the natural environment,” Goldman says. If all goes well, he says, in future disaster zones we could have multitudes of mechanical ants or “little robots that look like cockroaches that will swarm all over the place.”

Top Image: Frame from a high-speed camera that recorded how a fire ant arrested its fall in a synthetic tunnel. Courtesy Daniel Goldman/ Georgia Institute of Technology.

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science journalist who writes for venues including the New York Times, ScienceNOW and Audubon Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. She tweets @RachelNuwer.

by Txchnologist Staff Laser sintering is 3-D printing on...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:11:00 -0400

by Txchnologist Staff

Laser sintering is 3-D printing on steroids. The process is another form of additive manufacturing that shoots laser beams at metal powders to fuse particles together. As the powder bed is lowered, a new layer of particles is put on and then fused onto the emerging shape below it, slowly building up metal components and prototypes. The process, being employed by GE to make jet engine parts, produces little waste and allows for bespoke component designs on demand. See the video here.

Stressing Gorilla Glass Makes It Stronger

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:02:12 -0400

by Sophie Bushwick, Inside Science

Alterations to the usual glass production process, such as putting the material under stress, can introduce effects that linger even after the material hardens. While manufacturers have long exploited this phenomenon to strengthen glass, a new theory aims to get closer to understanding why it happens.

Glass is not as well understood as most materials, because it straddles the line between liquid and solid. In typical crystalline materials, molecules assemble into a set structure over the span of the entire material as the substance solidifies from a disordered liquid form. Glass, on the other hand, retains a liquid-like disorder even after it hardens.

Without a set architecture, these disordered molecules are particularly vulnerable to outside forces. If you push or pull on a substance, you create internal forces, or stress, in the material itself. Once you remove that force, you’d expect the molecules to return to equilibrium, removing the stresses. But glassy materials “remember” the long-gone force.

Glass’s memory

Physicists are trying to understand how glass molecules permanently retain this residual stress. “The material properties depend on how the material is produced,” said Thomas Voigtmann, a physicist at the University of Konstanz and the Institute of Materials Physics in Space, in Koln, Germany. “And that’s a rather fascinating topic to understand.”

In a paper accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, Voigtmann and his coauthors describe glass’s residual stress in physics terms, by observing how the motion of individual atoms affects the entire complex system. But engineers are already taking advantage of glass’s history dependence—no theoretical physics required.

Stress helps glass resist damage. By incorporating it into the manufacturing process, Engineers at Corning, Inc., in N.Y., can give a normally fragile material super-strength. Their Gorilla Glass product now forms the screens of more than 1,000 different devices, from smartphones to tablets to televisions.

To avoid building flaws into the material, Corning creates large, flat panes of Gorilla Glass mechanically. During the process, the molten glass is suspended by its top edge, leaving it untouched by human hands—or anything else. Despite their stability, these sheets cannot prevent future damage…yet. The next step is to apply stress to the glass, compressing its molecules to strengthen the material and enable it to resist flaws.

Molecular sandwich

Cut to appropriate sizes, the unfinished Gorilla Glass then takes a bath in a molten solution of potassium salts. This process leaches small sodium ions out of the glass and replaces them with larger potassium ions. The large particles squeeze the sheet from the outside in, compressing the material. This creates two outer layers squeezing inwards, towards a central layer that balances out the internal forces by pushing back.

“You have an equilibrium of stress and tension,” explained Marcus Haynes, a senior applications engineer at Corning. “There’s a layer of compressive stress, then a layer of central tension, where the glass wants to press out, then another layer of compressive stress.”

Compressing the surface of the glass makes it stronger, able to resist blows and scratches rather than breaking immediately.

“Even if you damage the glass, the flaw is contained within that compressive stress layer,” Haynes elaborated. “It doesn’t allow the flaw to expand.” In order to break a Gorilla Glass screen, a flaw would have to penetrate through the compressive layer and into the tension layer.

Although the ingredients that go into Gorilla Glass also help the material withstand damage, stress is the real key to its abilities. It works even though its creators didn’t understand its exact molecular behavior. But scientists still want to know more.

“We’re trying to give some guidance on why this works and how it can be improved — that’s the long term goal,” said Voigtmann. “What we’re trying to do is give a theoretical physics explanation for empirical laws.”

To formulate this explanation, the scientists used both theoretical physics and experimentation. Molecular interactions are particularly difficult to observe because they occur on such a small scale. Instead of zooming in to the molecular level, the researchers took advantage of a glass substitute: colloids. A colloid is a type of substance with particles suspended in a solution. The common colloid paint, for example, consists of solid pigments floating in liquid.

“These colloids act like atoms,” explained Voigtmann. “It’s a model system that in many respects behaves like window glass, but it’s on a blown-up scale: colloids are big enough to watch under a microscope.”

The researchers put colloids under stress and then observed their behavior through a microscope. This led them to develop a physical theory that describes why forces in molten glass remain locked in the material.

Although this theory accurately models the behaviors that the researchers observed during experiments, the understanding of glass remains a “hotly debated” topic, said Voigtmann.

Top Image: A Gorilla Glass test. Image courtesy Corning.

Sophie Bushwick is a freelance science writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online outlets.

Robot Déjà Vu

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:24:00 -0400

by Michael Keller

The builders of UC Berkeley’s cockroach-inspired STAR robot have strapped a camera onto the little machine to see the world from its angle.

Engineers at the university’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have designed the little transformer robot to “adapt its stiffness, height, and leg-to-surface contact angle.” At full speed, it can run at 5.2 meters or 43 body lengths per second. They say it’s the world’s fastest untethered crawling bot.

The creators write on their Youtube page: “The robot can achieve legged performance over rough surfaces and obstacles using a high sprawl angle, and nearly wheel-like performance over smooth surfaces for small sprawl angles. By changing the sprawl angle it can climb over obstacles or crawl underneath them.”

Is it just me, or—cool as it is—does STAR remind anyone else of one of the stars of the 1984 science fiction movie Runaway, starring Tom Selleck, rocker Gene Simmons and Kirstie Alley? Hopefully, the scampering little STAR won’t be outfitted with acid-injecting syringes or explosively self-destruct like the movie’s robotic spiders.

HT: IEEE Spectrum. Runaway snip courtesy TriStar Pictures.

Nanotech Coating Prevents Stains and Contamination

Fri, 17 May 2013 08:02:07 -0400

by Inside Science TV

University of Michigan researchers have created a nanotech coating that repels liquids—even caustic acids and solvents. The material can shield textiles to create stain- and chemical-resistant garments, and can reduce drag on ships.

When applied, the coating creates a webbed surface that is up to 99 percent air. It is a mixture of rubbery plastic polydimethylsiloxane particles and liquid-resisting nanoscale cubes developed by the Air Force that contain carbon, fluorine, silicon and oxygen.

“Virtually any liquid you throw on it bounces right off without wetting it,” said Anish Tuteja, a materials science and engineering assistant professor who led the development of the product. His team’s work was published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Top Image: The new coating here repels coffee. Image courtesy Joseph Xu/University of Michigan.

Installing the Spire Atop One World Trade

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:53:45 -0400

by Txchnologist Staff

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey released this dizziness-inducing video of construction workers installing the final section of spire atop One World Trade Center. Some seriously brave ironworkers erected the final piece of the building on May 10.

“Using a crane located high above street level, ironworkers lifted the final two pieces off a temporary work platform on the roof of One WTC and attached them to the previously installed 16 sections of spire,” the authority wrote on its Youtube post. “During the installation, ironworkers set and tightened 60 bolts at an altitude of 1,701 feet in the air.”

They report the building now stands at 1,776 feet high, making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and the third tallest in the world. Huzzah, engineering!

New Software Predicts Power Outages From Storms

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:01:51 -0400

by Charles Q. Choi

Researchers have developed software to predict where blackouts are most likely to happen when storms hit, which could help authorities cut the amount of time people are in the dark after disasters like Hurricane Sandy.

Sandy wreaked havoc in 2012, causing as much as nearly $50 billion in damage, making it the second-costliest hurricane to hit the United States. At its peak, it left roughly 8.5 million people without power.

“As large storms increase in frequency and intensity in the United States and worldwide due to changing climate, getting profiles of where places are vulnerable to damage and investing in infrastructure to eliminate those vulnerabilities is integral to maintaining a well-operating power grid,” says Steven Fernandez, a national security issues researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

As hurricanes approach, forecasts about their paths and the wind speeds areas might experience are often fairly accurate up to three days before landfall. Analysts combine this data with knowledge concerning how vulnerable power lines are — for example, if they have a 50 percent chance of failure in 65 mph winds — to predict which parts of the electrical grid might go out when storms hit. Emergency responders can then prepare where to focus their efforts.

However, storms change over time, and researchers want predictions that are as up to date as possible. The problem is that it can take analysts an hour to prepare each estimate based on a weather advisory, and hurricanes that hit the United States typically lead to more than 40 weather advisories, with updates issued every two to three hours around the clock — Sandy alone spawned 64 such advisories. Manually developing estimates based on each update would consume time the few analysts that are typically available might not have, and such tedious, repetitive labor is prone to error.

Manual to automatic

Instead of relying on analysts, Fernandez and his colleagues have developed software that fully automates the process of determining how storms might knock out power.

“This software takes these predictions to the next level,” Fernandez says. “It takes weather models from the National Hurricane Center and flood information from the U.S. Geological Survey. It combines this with national-level models of where power grid components are and where people associated with those grids are from the LandScan program to figure out county by county what percentage of people might lose power, where they are and how long power is going to be out.”

All the extra variables the system analyzes “reduces problems of false positives and false negatives — that is, you don’t predict areas will stay in operation when they actually will get knocked out, or lose power when they actually ride the storm out,” he says. “This will help emergency responders get crews and supplies out to places that need power the most when these big storms occur, to make a difference about whether people survive and to minimize the amount of suffering that happens.”

The software can finish power outage analysis within 15 minutes of receiving a weather advisory. After the software frees analysts up from this labor, these experts will be able to concentrate on refining estimates further by integrating power utility reports and other information from the ground during storms.

It is also possible “to combine these models with climate change predictions to see how electrical grid outages might actually evolve over time as weather changes, where water will be and how people move in reaction to these changes,” he says. “We can make judgments as to what areas in the future will be more or less vulnerable to these extreme events.”

More robust models coming

The research team hopes to make this software available to mobile users. They also plan to expand their model to include factors such as tree density, as well as to analyze storms worldwide instead of just the United States.

“We’d like to more definitively identify vulnerabilities within the power grid — for instance, how disruptions cascade through the infrastructure,” Fernandez adds. “This might help reveal ways to short-circuit those disruptions before they lead to large-scale blackouts by hardening certain transmission lines or power substations.”

More detailed knowledge about conditions areas face is key to improving predictions. For instance, while analysts could accurately predict when 80 percent of people who lost power would get electricity restored, “the 20 percent who waited much longer to get power back were much more dependent on local conditions — say, a tree hit a piece of equipment that took a long time to replace, or it took a longer time for a place to dry out after flooding than what models predicted,” he says.

Future models could model other natural disasters that can impact the electric grid, such as earthquakes and wildfires.

“With wildfires in the West, we can get infrared signatures of those systems and overlay those over infrastructure to predict outages,” he says. “With developing thunderstorm cells, we can look at potential damage associated with tornadoes, which are much more surgical in their damage profiles than hurricanes, but the damage where they do hit is much more complete. We can also look at flooding from stream gauge data and predict what places will get inundated and probably de-energized.”

Top Image: Lightning strikes near power lines via Shutterstock.

Charles Q. Choi has written for Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, Science and Nature, among others. In his spare time, he has traveled to all seven continents, including scaling the side of an iceberg in Antarctica, investigating mummies from Siberia, snorkeling in the Galapagos, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, camping in the Outback, avoiding thieves near Shaolin Temple and hunting for mammoth DNA in Yukon.

Makers With 3-D Printers Build Prosthetic Hands For Children

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:41:00 -0400

by Michael Keller

In the video below, MakerBot Industries, the 3-D printer manufacturer based in Brooklyn, N.Y., shares the story of Richard Van As and Ivan Owen. The two create articulated prosthetic hands for those suffering from a disfiguring congenital disorder.

They are using a donated MakerBot Replicator 2 3-D printer to quickly build major parts of the device out of thermoplastics. The two have loaded the digital files to 3-D print their Robohand onto sharing site Thingiverse so that others can build the devices for people in their community. They are also soliciting crowdfunding through Indiegogo to continue their work.

Van As said that Robohand is just the beginning. “Maybe Robohand took the 3-D printing world by surprise with what we’re doing with it,” he said. “But if you have a look at the broad spectrum of it, I think that printing a mechanical device that can aid you when you’ve lost fingers is just a tiny little part of it. It’s a big, big picture, this 3-D printing.”

Top Image: Richard makes adjustments to Liam’s hand. Image courtesy MakerBot.

LEDs May Be Local Food Movement’s Best Friend in Winter

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:01:00 -0400

by Michael Keller

The harvest season seems to whiz by every year in northern latitudes. Just as the time comes to sink a fork into early spring’s peppery locally grown lettuce and asparagus, the market’s crates are already brimming with winter squash. And the juicy tomatoes that yesterday took a quick ride from a nearby farm start logging thousands of miles from farm to table.

Unfortunately, the only two options for most consumers looking to buy fresh produce during the cold months are either to get them shipped from warmer regions or from greenhouses closer by. Efficiencies in the agricultural and shipping systems being what they are, fruits and vegetables grown in warmer climes—by necessity picked before they ripen to prevent spoilage in transit—cost less than premium-priced food from the greenhouse.

Either way, each of those February cucumbers is the product of a significant energy investment—whether it’s producing the fertilizer, burning fuel in shipping, or lighting and heating commercial greenhouses.

“The average tomato is trucked 1,500 miles from where it’s picked in the winter and it sits on that truck for a week or more,” says Purdue University horticulture professor Cary Mitchell. “By the time it gets to a northern market, it has been in the dark for a while and its quality is degraded. Yet you pay a premium for it—up to four dollars a pound in January.”

Fans of the local food movement who despair through the winter months at high-priced greenhouse-grown or unripe produce transported over thousands of miles might soon find some relief.

Major energy savings

Mitchell is leading a study of advanced lighting in greenhouses that is successfully using cool and efficient LED systems to grow tomatoes in northern greenhouses through the winter. Adopting this new equipment and better growing protocols, commercial growers could cut costs enough to provide produce locally when it’s cold outside.

“There is a lot of potential good to be gotten out of growing produce locally, including food quality, environmental and lower carbon footprint issues,” Mitchell says. “People realize this and the movement to buy local grown produce has grown. The problem has been lighting costs and heating over the seasons when produce can’t be grown outside.”

Mitchell’s team set out to quantify the cost difference between traditional high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps and red- and blue-light LED systems. HPS lamps convert only 30 percent of the energy going into them to plant-usable light—the other 70 percent comes out as heat. LEDs are up to 50 percent efficient and are improving regularly. Plus, by choosing photosynthetically optimized blue and red lights, they don’t waste energy on wavelengths less useful for plant growth. “LEDs are much cooler to the touch and much more efficient,” he says. “They deliver the required amount of light using much less energy.”

Mitchell says the difference between the two types of lighting is a big deal to commercial greenhouse growers—a significant portion of their total costs is spent recreating the sun’s energy to help plants grow.

In their research greenhouse, they grew tomatoes from January to June 2012 to test the winter to summer production period. They split the plants into three groups: a control group received no supplemental lighting, one test group was grown under HPS overhead lighting, and a third group was subjected to LED lighting that was placed between the plants on vertical towers.

The HPS lights needed to be kept farther away from the plants because they throw off enough waste heat to burn nearby plants. The LEDs, on the other hand, could be placed within the tomato plant canopy, allowing more of the plant to soak up the energy. “The leaves are photosynthesizing on the lower parts of the plants, and that may be helping with the plant’s energy,” said doctoral student Celina Gómez, who is contributing to the research project. “We’re getting the high intensity of the LEDs close to the plants because they’re not hot like a high-pressure sodium lamp. If you put one of those close to the plants, you’d scorch it.”

Lower consumption, same yield

Both forms of supplemental lighting produced more fruit and higher total weight of fruit than the plants that only received sunlight coming into the greenhouse. Further, the researchers saw no differences in productivity between plants grown under sodium lights and those grown with LEDs.

The difference in energy costs was significant, though. Breaking down their findings to the individual level, they found that each plant lit by HPS consumed 1,224 kilowatt-hours of energy through harvest while those taking their light from LEDs required only 294 kilowatt-hours each. “The LED in-canopy lighting demonstrated considerable savings,” Mitchell says.

Since the plants grown under the two different types of light produced similar yields of fruit, the difference in energy costs to make produce was also sizable. “The lighting cost per average fruit grown under the [HPS] lamps was 403 percent more than that of using [vertical LED] towers,” they wrote in a study published in the journal HortTechnology.

There are still obstacles to overcome before greenhouse growers adopt the new lighting, which is still being developed by manufacturers. Once they appear on the market, their prices will need to come down to make switching over from HPS cost effective.

But Mitchell says the horticultural advances are just beginning with the new LED systems that can be tuned to produce different wavelengths of light. “This is opening up a whole new range of research now that we have these LEDs,” he says. “It’s the dawn of a new era of plant photobiology.”

Top Image: Cary Mitchell and Celina Gomez harvest tomatoes grown around red and blue LED lights, which use far less energy than traditional high-pressure sodium lamps in greenhouses. Courtesy Tom Campbell/ Purdue University.

by Txchnologist Staff Jet engines need cutting-edge materials...

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:44:00 -0400

by Txchnologist Staff

Jet engines need cutting-edge materials that are strong, light and can withstand extreme heat. GE is developing a material that can handle high temperatures like ceramics can and is also as tough as metal. Here, a projectile fired at a sample of advanced ceramic composite tests the material’s ability to endure the strike.

Ceramics are well known for their tendency to fail in a brittle, catastrophic fashion (think window glass or china dinnerware). GE scientists are working to develop ceramic matrix composite materials that combine high temperature resistance with mechanical toughness.

For next-generation jet engines, adding these advanced lightweight ceramics could have a significant impact on an engine’s energy efficiency through reduced fuel costs and lower emissions. The trick is to take a brittle material and make it virtually unbreakable. As you can see, researchers are on their way.

See this and other groundbreaking research videos at the GE Global Research Youtube page.

by Michael Keller This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I’m...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:48:00 -0400

by Michael Keller

This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I’m stepping through the door

And I’m floating in a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today

For here am I, sitting in a tin can, far above the world

Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.

-“Space Oddity” by David Bowie

The words to the song Space Oddity have been sweeping across the Internet since May 12. But the voice doesn’t belong to the song’s creator, David Bowie, who originally released it in 1969.

Instead, they were sung by Canadian astronaut and International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield, who recorded it and the accompanying video as part of turning over control of the station on May 12. Hadfield was scheduled to return to Earth on May 13 after an inspiring five-month tour aboard the ISS.

The farewell rendition of Bowie’s long popular song might go down as the most epic and thought-provoking transfers of command in human spaceflight history.

The British songwriter responded to Hadfield’s tweeted announcement of the video with another song of his, appropriately named “Hallo Spaceboy…”

Hadfield worked with musician Emm Gryner and producer Joe Corcoran to make the song and video a reality.

“When Chris brought up collaborating while he was on this current mission I of course said YES with a capital Y E S and we went back and forth for a while figuring out what our collaboration might entail,” Gryner wrote on her blog. “When he told me he wanted to cover Space Oddity I was over the moon - pardon the pun.”

This isn’t the first song broadcast by Hadfield from space. The accomplished musician has released others, such as Irish folk song Danny Boy, on his SoundCloud page along with ambient ISS sounds. He has also collaborated from space with the band Barenaked Ladies on an original song called Is Somebody Singing.

Data as Art

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:02:59 -0400

by Txchnologist Staff

PBS web series Off Book has produced a short, compelling video called “The Art of Data Visualization,” which showcases powerful presentations of complex data. Nuances in such information might be lost without displaying it visually.

“Humans have a powerful capacity to process visual information, skills that date far back in our evolutionary lineage,” the team behind the video write. “And since the advent of science, we have employed intricate visual strategies to communicate data, often utilizing design principles that draw on these basic cognitive skills. In a modern world where we have far more data than we can process, the practice of data visualization has gained even more importance.”

Top Image: Hurricanes and Tropical Storms Since 1851 courtesy of data visualization expert John Nelson and IDV Solutions. See the full-sized image here.

Going Against the Flow: Green Tech, Sensors and Industrial Internet Make Sewer Systems Smart

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:02:22 -0400

by Rebecca Ruiz

By the numbers, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy is hard to fathom. The so-called super storm swept through eight states, killing 159 people and causing $70 billion in damage.

From power outages to flooded streets, the hurricane exposed alarming weaknesses in the infrastructure of Eastern Seaboard cities. Now, Climate Central, an independent research and journalism organization based in Princeton, N.J., has added another number to that list: 11 billion gallons of sewage flowed into waterways during the storm.

The majority of overflows occurred in New York and northern New Jersey, where untreated and partially treated sewage flowed into surrounding rivers, bays, canals and, in some cases, streets, according to a recent Climate Central report.

“This record storm revealed how vulnerable the sewage and wastewater treatment system is to major coastal flooding,” says Alyson Kenward, a scientist who is the lead author of the report.

The fact that sewers overflow is no secret to city planners – and the unlucky residents who live near treatment plants. “Combined” sewer systems are common in the Northeast, Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest, and are designed to carry commercial and domestic waste and stormwater in a single pipe. During heavy rains or tidal and coastal flooding, though, the sewers’ pipes can become overwhelmed.

Fixing these combined sewer systems has been a decades-long effort. Rather than face steep fines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, cities agreed as far back as the mid-1990s to commit to long-term plans that would overhaul their network of pipes. The EPA estimates that combined sewers are used in 772 towns and cities across the country and serve 40 million people.

Making the necessary upgrades is hard and expensive work. Some municipalities have paid billions to build new pipes and tunnels that can handle sewage and stormwater separately as well as store overflow. Increasingly, though, there is an emphasis on how to make existing infrastructure smarter by using sensors, real-time monitoring and cloud computing to strategically manage water levels. Some cities have also adopted “green” tactics that divert runoff before it even reaches the sewer system.

Looking beyond “grey” infrastructure

“Before we build anything new, let’s try to figure out how to operate what you have in the best way,” says Marcus Quigley, principal at environmental and civil engineering firm Geosyntec Consultants.

For Quigley, this regularly involves attaching sensors to not only sewage pipes, but also aboveground environmentally friendly infrastructure such as bioretention systems, rainwater harvesting and green roofs. Another example of the rapidly proliferating industrial Internet, these sensors read water levels and communicate with Internet-connected valves that control flow via a cloud-based data management system. This real-time monitoring data is combined with weather forecast information and feeds an algorithm that makes decisions about when to store or release water.

A rainwater-harvesting tank, for example, is managed with a single valve and sensor. When rain falls and is captured and stored, the sensor can tell the cloud how much water is in the tank. A weather forecast tells the algorithm when it’s going to be dry and then a valve connected to the sewer discharges the water at an ideal time. This system is currently used in several cities, including at public housing facilities in St. Louis, firehouses in Washington, D.C., and a library in Austin.

Philadelphia has placed sensors at 164 locations around the city to monitor water levels, but in the past five years has also heavily invested in solutions like rainwater capture, green roofs, extended curbs and bioswales that absorb runoff to prevent overflows.

Philadelphia plans to spend $2 billion over the next 25 years on green infrastructure that manages stormwater. This amount, according to the city, will cost less than building traditional “grey” pipes and tunnels. By comparison, Chicago is expected to spend more than $3 billion over the next decade-and-a-half on constructing three reservoirs and 109 miles of tunnels that will store 17 billion gallons of floodwater and sewage.

Quigley says that even though green solutions can also cost billions over time, they yield savings and benefits not possible through traditional infrastructure, including increased property values and improved air quality.

No matter which approach a city chooses, however,it is impossible to guarantee complete elimination of overflows during extreme weather events where combined systems are still used. In such cases, the EPA allows a permitted number of overflows.

Taking the pulse of a sewer

In South Bend, Ind., the city decided to build new tanks, pipes and tunnels, but discovered it could save $120 million in that process by installing a $6 million sensor system with additional gates and valves that would reduce overflow by 25 percent.

The battery-operated wireless sensors were installed near hydraulic bottlenecks by the local firm EmNet. Software installed in the devices allows them to communicate and collectively determine where the system has more capacity.

EmNet funnels that information to a dashboard viewed by operators. But rather than sending it to a central control room, the system acts more like a beehive for information, and pump stations, gates and valves can react to large storms or excessive flooding by maximizing available capacity.

(Screen capture of EmNet’s dashboard for sewerage in South Bend, Ind. Courtesy EmNet.)

Luis Montestruque, EmNet’s president and CTO, likens this approach to “taking the pulse” of the sewer. The first prototype was installed in 2006 and has yielded important efficiencies since. Previously, for example, the city assigned two workers to rove the city flipping manhole covers to look for possible obstructions and broken pumps or pipes. Now, they consult the dashboard before going into the field.

“The key aspect is the intelligent balancing to optimize how the sewer system operates,” Montestruque tells Txchnologist.

And it seems every bit of intelligence will help. Though a record storm like Hurricane Sandy may be an anomaly, the recent Climate Central report argued that rising sea levels are increasing coastal flooding, which makes sewage treatment plants more vulnerable to failures and overflow. Scientists also predict that bouts of heavy rain will increase in the coming decades, which could cause more overflows from combined sewer systems.

“We haven’t seen an overflow event of this magnitude before,” Dr. Kenward says of Hurricane Sandy, “which isn’t to say it won’t happen again.”

Top Image: Wastewater treatment plant via Shutterstock.

Rebecca Ruiz covers military, veteran and home front issues. She was formerly a reporter for NBC News and a staff writer at Forbes. Follow her on Twitter at @rebecca_ruiz.

by Txchnologist Staff What strange mechanical beast is this?...

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:27:00 -0400

by Txchnologist Staff

What strange mechanical beast is this? Officially, it was called a Cybernetic Anthropmorophous Machine, but you can call it the GE Walking Truck. Read about its development in the 1960s here.

According to Chris Hunter, curator at the Museum of Innovation and Science, which is home to some 15,000 GE documents and artifacts, the Army wanted a vehicle that could navigate rough, steep terrain. It had to be able to push through dense vegetation, step over felled trees, and sidle around standing ones, all while nimbly carrying up to a half-ton in men and material.

Visualizing Meteorites

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:01:56 -0400

by Txchnologist Staff

Add another one to the list of data visualizations that make science engaging and fun.

Data visualization designer Carlo Zapponi has created an alluring website called Bolid.es showing meteorites that have either been found on the ground or seen falling to Earth. The main draw of the site, as seen in the picture above, puts into motion the fraction of heavenly bodies actually witnessed by people or instruments as they crashed through the atmosphere and collided with the planet.

Zapponi has created a timeline that starts with the record of a 470 g meteorite that fell in Nogata, Japan, in the year 861. In total, the animation illustrates 1,045 witnessed meteorite crashes that are on record with The Meteoritical Society of some 34,800 that have been found.

Check out Zapponi’s website at Bolid.es.

by Txchnologist Staff Our eyes here at Txchnologist are usually...

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:56:00 -0400

A 1947 advertisement from the Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation that showed the transportation of the future—presumably using Bohn’s aluminum and brass.

GE’s Pedipulator, or “Walking Truck,” developed for the US Army in the mid 1960s. The machine was officially called a Cybernetic Anthropmorophous Machine.

The always interesting, always awesome vintage Popular Science magazine cover. This one features what seems to be a mass transit spacecraft taking off.

by Txchnologist Staff

Our eyes here at Txchnologist are usually firmly set to the horizon, scanning for what the future holds. Sometimes, though, we get a kick out of turning around and seeing what the past’s modern technology looked like and how people back then thought about the future.

Today, we bring you a few good finds from the vault that capture the future machines of the past. Click here to see a few more.