This week, a place I saw science in the real world was when I was playing tennis against the wall and KM. I noticed Newton's 3rd law that every action has an equal or opposite reaction. The ball coming towards the wall was the action and the ball bouncing back towards me was the reaction. There were other examples of Newton's 3rd law that I saw while playing tennis. The action was when the strings of my racquet slightly cup the ball in its strings and the reaction was the ball being launched towards the other side of the court.
Another place I noticed science was while bowling. I noticed the Law of Inertia. The bowling pins are at rest before you bowl and they stay at rest until an external force (which is the bowling ball) is applied to them.
These are just a couple of examples of science in the real world. I hope that I find more and tell you about them throughout the week.
1/07/2010!!
While trying to think about blogging ideas, I started to think about my winter vacation. Then I thought of a great scientific concept which was bouyancy. Last year during winter vacation, I went to Mexico on a 7-day cruise. Let me tell you a little more about the science behind the ship.
If you think about it, how does a huge ship, that ways thousands of pounds float on water without sinking down to the bottom of the ocean?? Well, Archimedes Principle of Bouyancy tells us how these large ships manage to stay afloat. Archimedes is a very famous ancient greek mathematican and scientist.
Archimedes made this discovery one day while taking a bath. He noticed that when he dipped his body into the tub, the level of the water rised. This is how he realized that there was some relationship between his weight and the volume of water that got displaced when he got into the tub.
Archimedes continued to do more experiments and came with a bouyancy principle, that an object will float when the amount of water it has displaced is equal to the object's weight and anything will float if is shaped to displace its own weight of water before it reaches the point where it will submerge. So how does this apply to a ship? Well, a ship that is launched will sink into the sea until the weight of the water it displaces is equal to its own weight and as the ship is loaded, it continues to sink and the bouyant force acting on the ship increases as the weight of the ship increases.
So this is how ships are able to float, because one day, a man named Archimedes stepped into his tub and saw the level of the water rise!!
Well, I hope that I explained bouyant force well and I can't wait to tell you about my next discovery of science in the real world.
1/15/2010
This week, I am going to talk about friction. An example of friction in the real world is when you are walking outside.
When you are just standing still, static friction is acting against you. Static friction is the force that resists the object's beginning motion. You overcome this energy once you start walking. The friction that you then experience is known as kinetic friction. This is friction that acts on an object that is already moving.
This is just one more of the thousands of ways you can find science in the real world.
1/25/2010
This week, the topic I am going to cover is forces and motion. I will talk about all the science that I see while working in science class. The first element of force and motion that I will talk about is potential energy. Potential energy is a key component of our skateparks because we have to start our marble skaters at a position where they have the most potential energy so that they can manuever around our skate park without someone having to push the marble around. Potential energy is the energy stored in an object due to its position.
Another element of force and motion that we deal with while making our skateparks is friction. While carving pieces of cardboard and creating all of our obstacles, We have to make sure that the amount of friction in our skatepark is put to a minimum because we are not allowed to touch our marble skater while it is rolling through the course. Friction is the force that resists motion of one body that comes in contact with another. In our example, one body is the marble and the other body is the course.
1/27/10
This blog will be about internal combustion in car engines.
The purpose of a gasoline engine is so that you can convert gasoline into movement that propels your car into movement. The easiest way to use gasoline in an engine today is with a fuel injection system. Therefore, a car's engine is an internal combustion engine. There are two other types of internal combustion engines. A diesel engine and a gas turbine engine. Other types of engines are HEMI engines, rotary engines and two-stroke engines. There is also such thing as an external combustion engine like steam engines on trains.
All internal combustion engines use pistons in the four stages of using fuel known as the four-stroke combustion cycle.
The first stroke is the intake stroke. The piston of an engine starts at the top, then the piston moves down to take in a cylinder full of air and gasoline. Only a small drop of gasoline needs to be put into the piston for this to work
The second stroke is the compression stroke. This is when the piston moves up to compress the air and gasoline mixture. Compression makes the upcoming explosion much stronger.
The third stroke is the combustion stroke. Once the piston reaches the top of its stroke, the spark plug emits a spark to ignite the gasoline. The gasoline charge in the cylinder explodes, causing the piston to move down.
The fourth and final stroke is the exhaust stroke. Once the piston hits the bottom of its stroke, the exhaust valve opens and the exhaust leaves the cylinder to go out of the tailpipe.
Then the cycle is repeated again. This is how the engine of a car works. I hope you enjoyed.
1/27/2010
This blog will be about the pH level of your body and how to maintain it.
The normal pH level of a person's blood is about 7.3, which means the blood is slightly alkaline. It is essential to maintain this alkaline pH level of your body because if your body's pH goes too far above or below this pH, your immunity goes down and the body is not able to heal itself. You lose the ability to maintain proper weight and are susceptible to fatigue and illness. The energy production in your body's cells decrease and your blood sugar level can rise too quickly. If the blood's pH is even slightly acidic, at 6.9, it can induce coma and death.
An acidic pH can occur from an acid forming diet, emotional stress, toxic overload and/or lack of excercise. The body tries to compensate for acidic pH by using alkaline minerals. If the diet does not contain enough minerals to compensate a buildup of acids in the cells will occur.
If you have an imbalanced blood pH level, it puts pressure on your body's regulating systems to maintain pH neutrality. This can deplete the body of alkaline minerals, making you prone to chronic and degenerative diseases.
A typical American diet is high in acid producing animal products like meats, eggs, sodas, artificial sweeteners, alcohol and dairy and far too low in alkaline producing foods like fresh vegetables. Generally, alkalike forming foods include lettuce, spinach, green beans, peas, lentils, herbs, most fruits, seeds and nuts.
To maintain health, a diet should consist of 60% alkaline forming foods and 40% acid formind foods. To restore health, the diet should consist of 80% alkaline forming foods and 20% acid formind foods.
1/28/10
Today I read about Apple's newest device, the iPad. This is essentially a giant 9.7 inch iPhone when you just look at it. But once you have it in your hand, it's a totally different story.
The iPad seems like it would be a waste of money since so many people already have bought iPhones and iPod touches. But a webiste called Jobs said that 75 million iPhone and iPod users will immediately invest in the iPad.
Typing on the iPad, as suspected, is not so simple. Typing is done via soft keyboard,just like on the iPhone and iPod touch, but since the screen is much bigger than an iPhone's, so it can sometimes be quite the workout for your thumbs. Another way to type is to hold the device in one hand while pecking at the screen with the other. But probably the easiest way would be to set it in your lap and type like you would on a normal keyboard, which is the most efficient way for people with small hands.
The iPad runs apps exactly like the iPhone. You still have to download apps from the App Store. One feature that might not be to the liking of most is the resolution of the apps in full screen mode. When you open an app, it comes up as the size of a regular iPhone screen, so the resolution is just as good as it would be on the iPhone, but once you change to full screen, the resolution decreases. But this problem should not last for too long because app makers have been given 60 days to change their apps resolution so it looks fine on both an iPhone and an iPad.
While trying to keep their high reputation, Apple also had to battle with the popular device known as the Kindle. This is a device that lets you download books and read them without the hassle of having to carry around thick books. The iPad has an app called iBooks that is much like the Kindle, except for that instead of having to press a button and wait two seconds for the page to flip, you can turn pages with a quick swipe of your finger. But the one disadvantage of iBooks is that it was created on an LED-lit LCD, not e-ink like the Kindle, which is a special type of screen that creates no stress on your eyes, so your eyes will be more stressed looking at an iBook instead of a book on a Kindle.
Apple has also developed iPad word processor, presentation and spreadsheet softwares, which are $10 each through the App Store. The interface of these softwares are very impressive for light editing of pictures, text and small presentation work. It is still not recommended to type text in length on the iPad because of the diffuculty to type, but you can purchase a seperate keyboard if you would like to type in length.
Another drawback of the iPad would be that there is no built in camera, so you must sync pictures from your computer, onto your iPad. But from there, you can view your pictures like you would in the iPhone. Just swipe your finger along the screen as you move through pictures.
These are some of the key features in the upcoming iPad by Apple. I think that Apple is doing a good job in preparing us for a future in where almost all computing will be done on multi-touch screens. This would probably be a product that I would reccomend for people who do not own an iPhone or an iPod touch, who want to take a look at some of Apple's latest technology.
2/2/2010
This week, I will be blogging about the extremely popular medication Aspirin. I was in CPR/First Aid class and Mr. Kuolt said that if you see signs of a heart attack in a person, you should give them an Aspirin immediately. This got me thinking. What is so special about this medicine?
If you have ever had a headache and taken medication for it, you have had Aspirin before. Aspirin can also be taken for other things such as inflammation or fever. Let me explain to you exactly what Aspirin is.
Aspirin is a member of a family of medicines called salicylates. These chemicals have been known by people interested in medicine for centuries. One of the most famous and earliest physicians named Hippocrates, wrote about a bitter powder extracted from willow bark that could ease aches and pains. After scientists researched, they found out that the part of the willow bark that was bitter and was good for reducing fever and pain is a chemical known as salicin.
The problem with these chemicals is that they would upset the user's stomach fairly badly. In fact, some people had bleeding in their digestive tracts from high doses of these chemicals needed for pain or swelling. There was a German man named Hoffman. His son, named Felix Hoffman, who worked for a company known as Friederich Bayer & Co. wanted to create a chemical that was not so hard on his dad's stomach, reasoning that salycylic acid may be irritating because it is an acid, he put the compound through a couple of chemical reactions that covered up one of the acidic parts with an acetyl group, converting it to acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). He found that ASA not only could reduce fever and relieve pain and swelling, but he believed it was better for the stomach and worked even better than salicylic acid. By 1899, one of Bayer's top chemists, named Dreser, had finished demonstrating the usefullness of this potent new medicine and called it Aspirin. It's name is believed to have come from a plant relative of the rose that makes salicylic acid.
Now that you know what Aspirin is, let me tell you about how it actually works.
We know that pain is something you feel in the brain. For example, let's say that you hit your finger with a hammer. The part of your finger that is damaged has nerve endings in it. These are little detectors in your fingers that sense things like heat, vibration, light touches and big crushing smashes. The damaged tissue in your fingers also releases some chemicals that make hard crushes seem stronger. Some of these chemicals are known as prostaglandins and working cells in the damaged tissues make these chemicals using an enzyme known as cyclooxygenase. Because of these prostaglandins, the pain is now much stronger, so there is a signal sent up through your arm and into your brain saying that you are hurt. Prostaglandins not only help you feel the pain, but they also cause your finger to swell up.
When you have a headache, it is probably from your stress on your scalp or neck muscles. Aspirin helps with these types of problems by stopping cells from making prostaglandins. So Aspirin is pretty much stopping the activity of the cyclooxygenase enzyme, which is what creates prostaglandins. Aspirin does not stop the problem that is causing you pain, but it does lower the amount of pain that you are experiencing.
2/11/2010
This week I am going to blog about an article that I read on PopularScience.Com. It said that organ shortage is such a big problem in the world, that many transplant recipients die while they are on the waiting list. Doctors tried to use animal organs on humans but they discovered that the human body swiftly rejects these organs. Animal organs stop functioning as soon as they come into contact with human blood. But now, doctors in Australia have figured out a way to use genetically altered pig lungs to pump human blood. Since pig lungs are dramatically close to the size of human lungs, this could dramatically change the number of lungs available for transplants.
2/25/10
This week I am going to blog about an article that was asking a very interesting question. Do baby’s cries mean anything, or is it just a bunch of gibberish. Though it is highly uncertain whether infants have anything interesting to say, for some reason, people agonize over what babies might be communicating through all of that wailing. Although mankind has done so much, from creating the atom bomb, to traveling to the moon, the shrieks and squeals of babies are still more or less a mystery to us. But now, a group of Japanese scientists says that they have cracked the code. In the past, the farthest we had gotten to understanding babies was a commercial product known as Why Cry, but all this product did was measure the frequency at which a baby was crying. But the Japanese approach is the first that we know of that employs computer systems that not only measure the power and frequency of the baby's cry, but also employs statistical analysis that establish patterns of crying that correlate to different emotions.
Since infants cannot confirm their emotions, researchers worked closely with parents to try to determine infants emotional states. But since even the most devoted mother cannot assure anyone of her child's emotion, they further experimented with more specialized groups to narrow their results. For example, the researchers recorded a group of babies with a painful genetic disorder to establish the difference between pained cries and other types of crying, since that group can be said with relative certainty to all be experiencing a similar type of pain from time to time. In theory, this should produce similar cries, which researchers can isolate and tag as painful cries.
So is this the future for baby monitoring products? Many critics think not. Although the Japanese scientist's idea is much more grounded than some junk thrown out there, it still seems to be somewhat of an approximation. It does not seem to account for the idea that infants could be in pain as well as hungry at the same time. This method also relies on the theory that all babies express themselves in similar ways, a theory which no one is really so sure about.
Besides, many parents believe that this is the most beautiful time between a child and their parents. Pretty soon, they will be telling you exactly what they want and don't want and then you'll wish that you really didn't know their emotions back then.
3/4/10
Today I read an article about a man who is allergic to radio waves. Per Segerback, a 54 year old man who lives in Sweden. He lives in a modest cottage located in a nature reserve around 75 miles away from the nearest town. Many wild animals such as wolves, moose and brown bears walk freely past his front door. He keeps very limited human company because human technology makes him physically ill. While on a walk last summer, he ran into one of his few neighbors and started chatting with him. During the conversation, the neighbor's cellphone rang and Segerback was overcome by nausea. In seconds, he was unconscious
Segerback suffers from electro-hypersensitivity (EHS), which means that he has severe reactions to the electromagnetic radiation produced by common consumer technologies such as computers, TVs and cellphones. Symptoms range from burning or tingling sensation in the skin to dizziness, nausea, headaches, sleep disturbance and memory loss. In extreme cases like Segerback, breathing problems, heart palpitations and loss of consciousness can result.
A cellphone has to be in use for Segerback to experience this effect. Phones that are on but not sending or receiving a call or text message do not create enough radiation to be noticeable. It is not the sound of the phone that puts Segerback in danger. Once, when he was on a sailboat with some friends, he was on the front deck when someone made a call beneath the main deck and the symptons started. Headache, nausea then unconsciousness. When Segerback is in range of an active cellphone, he says that he experiences a feeling as if "there is not enough room in my skull for my brain."
Sweden is the only country in the world that recognized EHS as a functional impairment and Segerback's experience has been important in creating a policy to address the condition. People in Sweden who suffer from EHS (about 3 percent of the population), are entitled to similar rights and social services and blind and deaf people. Today, local governments will pay to have the home of someone diagnosed with EHS electronically "sanitized" if necessary, through the installation of metal shielding.
3/11/10
Today I read an extremely interesting article from popularscience.com, that showed how a scientist from MIT created a catalyst that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to be able to power a home using only a water bottle and sunlight.
400 million dollars have been funded into ARPA-E, the civilian, energy-focused cousin of DARPA. In the first ever ARPA-E conference, MIT chemist Dan Nocera showed how well he can use that money by highlighting his new photosynthetic process. Using a special catalyst, the process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to power a home using only sunlight and a bottle of water.
Like organic photosynthesis, Nocera's reaction uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and energy. However, whereas plants create energy in the form of sugars, this process creates energy in the form of free hydrogen. That hydrogen can either be recombined with the oxygen in a fuel cell to generate electricity or can be converted into a liquid fuel.
In around 4 hours, water treated with Nocera's catalyst can produce 30 kilo-watts of energy. What is even better about this process is that it is cheap. So cheap, in fact, that Nocera has no problem envisioning a day when each house generates its own fuel and electricity from photosynthesis.
3/18/10
Mountain-bike suspensions are difficult, if not impossible to adjust while riding. Cannondale's Simon features a hydraulic shock that can instantly change its resistance and how far it travels. Meanwhile, a motion sensor and computer calculate the best settings for the trail. Let's say that you go off some sort of ramp. The shocks will soften up so you can have a smoother landing. Let's say that you are riding on a flat area where you are pedaling hard. The shocks will firm up to boost your power. Simon is currently a prototype, but Cannondale expects to see pieces of the technology arrive on bikes within a few years. Let me tell you exactly how this technology works.
A joystick lets riders select from five preset setting, such as "DH", for absorbing big downhill impacts. You can also choose for the suspension to continually recalibrate itself.
A motion-sensing accelerometer in the front fork detects bumps and impacts. Meanwhile, an optical sensor inside the shock keeps track of its position, gauging how open or compressed it is.
Info from the sensors is sent to a computer 500 times a second. Software decides how to change the suspension based on how many bumps you've hit, how far the shock can still move, how fast you're going and more.
An electric motor adjusts the shock. It is a typical hydraulic shock, in which a piston pushes oil through a valve, but the motor changes the valve's size. Smaller means less oil flow and a firmer ride and larger means a more cushiony ride.
The shock reacts with thousandth-of-a-millimeter accuracy every seven milliseconds, protecting you from bumps faster than the human brain can register them, much less react to them.
3/25/10
This week, I read an article from the popular science website. The main question of that article was: Should I be worried about Electromagnetic Pulses destroying my electronics? This is what the article had to say:
This depends on the source of the pulse. Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) powerful enough to cause you trouble come in two varieties: those produced by the sun and those produced by a nuclear bomb. With the sun produced variety, especially coronal mass ejections (CMEs), your electronics will probably be fine. But a really large CME can take down a power grid. Power lines transmit energy as an alternating current, but a pulse from a CME and introduce a direct current into the system. This can cause transformers to overheat and work sluggishly, or fail all together.
Despite the grid's numerous safeguards, if enough transformers go down, they could take large chunks of the grid with them. Usually, the only way to get them up and running again would be to replace all of the damaged equipment. On the bright side, although CMEs have been known to put satellites out of commission, our atmosphere deflects most of the energy, so the radiation is too diffuse by the time it reaches your electronics to destroy them.
A man-made EMP poses a greater threat. If one goes off in your neighborhood, there's a significant risk that the concentrated pulse will induce extra voltage in the circuit-board components, frying them for good. The best bet for protecting your electronics is to store them in a Faraday cage. A Faraday cage is a cube of interweaving metals, preferably copper and quarter-inch-thick steel, which together can act as an electromagnetic shield. Like in a lightning rod, the copper attracts electricity while the steel absorbs magnetic pulses. A cage big enough to hold all of your electronics is usually around $15,000. An EMP could also crash the power grid, so you might want to spring for an extra cage to protect your generator as well.
4/01/10
Imagine. It's midnight, you are a cop patrolling the bad side of town and you see someone getting mugged. The assailant is around 40 feet away, out of range for your stun gun. You shout, but he runs into a black alley with a dead end. You get closer to the assailant and they throw a broken glass bottle at your head and make a break for the street.
What caused this was something known as the "capability gap", which is one of the trickiest situations in law enforcement. This gap is an area 35 to 60 feet away from an assailant, which is long enough to keep the assailant out of range of a Taser and yet close enough for them to hurl something deadly at an officer's head. This brings the officer one step closer to having to use deadly force. Officers need a less lethal option that works from a farther distance. That is where the Extended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, comes in. Unlike Taser's stun gun, which shoots tethered probes up to 35 feet to deliver an incapacitating jolt, the company's new XREP is a 12-gauge wireless projectile that can be fired up to 100 feet using any pump-action shot gun. It sails through the air like a normal slug yet induces muscle paralysis on impact.
Logistically, the biggest challenge was the miniaturization. With a Taser, two probes attach to the assailant, arcing up to 50,000 volts of electricity, enough to penetrate clothing. The XREP, on the other hand, uses just 500 volts to allow for smaller circuitry. Instead of arcing the current, it sends it directly into the body via barbed electrodes that pierce the skin. The current, shaped to minimal electrical signals in the body, jams the nervous system.
Since its debut last year, XREP has been fired successfully four times in the line of duty. Taser is now working on a grenade version for the Department of Defense that will launch up to 200 feet. So how about that capability gap? Consider it bridged.
4/08/10
The new iPad has been out for 6 days now and I was looking at the reviews and thought that I should do a little recap on them.
Many people think that the iPad has completely the world of computing. Although it lacks a USB port and a webcam, the overall change that it has brought to computing amazes all the critics. Lets take a look at what the critics think about every part of this amazing device.
The oohs and ahhs start from the minute you pick up this device. Just looking at the screen gives you goosebumps. Although it does not have the highest resolution out there, the fact that the screen is the the only thing there is the reason why it is so attractive and just in case you didn't know, you can touch it. It is entirely touch screen and reacts amazingly fast. The glass of the screen feels so smooth. It is so pleasurable to the mind to be able to manipulate something so shiny and sleek with only our hands that it is indescribable by many. This is the way the iPad changes everything. The layers of abstraction are gone and we are interacting with graphic information in the most natural way possible.
The overall interface of the iPad is also very pleasurable for many. Think about it--on your computer, interfaces are stacked inside each other like a Russian doll. The web site you're looking at sits inside the browser, which sits inside a folder, which sits inside your operating system. Each interface has its own set of conceits and constraints, meaning the resulting experienced is subject to a great many rules dictating what it can and can’t be. But that's not how it is on the iPad. There, a weather app adopts the perfect interface for browsing weather information--pinch and zoom on the giant world radar map; tap the forecast and current conditions blocks for more detailed pop-ups. You touch and it responds. That's not it, that's only the weather.
Another feature that critics appreciate about the iPad is its versatility. Like the iPhone, the iPad is blank slate ready to morph into any device with any interface imaginable. It is a million gadgets in one. The iPhone has made so many real-world gadgets completely irrelevant. For example, the cheap pocket digital camera, GPS navigators, e-readers, voice recorders, iPods and more. The iPad, which has a screen four times bigger, will make this list even longer.
One of the complaints that critics had about the iPad before it came out was that the word processing system was going to fail completely. Fortunately for those who bought the iPad, they were wrong. The iPad's word processor is very handy. You can connect any bluetooth keyboard to the system, which lets you type like we have doing for generations and to edit the paper and add pictures, you simply turn the screen into vertical view and off you go, inserting pictures with the touch of a finger. Touch a mispelled word and you can go through the list of suggested words. I don't know about you, but this is how I would want to create anything with pictures and text in the future.
Although this device seems completely immaculate, it still has its flaws (tear). First of all, multitasking is impossible. There is no taskbar and there is no ctrl-alt-delete. Only the occasional reminder that you have a new IM or email while you are reading your Twitter or updating your status on Facebook. Without this multitasking ability, one of the internet's fundamental forms of communication, the instant message, is impossible. When you are sitting with your laptop at home and IMing, you have 12 browsers open and 3 Google Chat windows. Not possible with the iPad.
The ability to only use one app at a time is very frustrating for iPad users. Oh, your trying to read a book on your iPad for free, well guess what, you have a new email! Someone has replied to your Tweet!! Tap tap tap, book interrupted.
In the end, the iPad is just a new device. Not something that everyone needs or should think about buying in the near future. If you have some kind of fetish with the iPad and you must have it, then do us all a favor and wait for around 6 months to a year and wait for the second and third generation iPads to come out. You will be saving everyone a lot of complaints.
4/15/10
Nuclear waste has been piling up over the years and now everyone is looking for a place to put it. There have been many ideas in circulation on how to get rid of it, but one in particular stood out to me. Why don't we just shoot it all into the sun?
On paper, this is a fantastic way to wipe our hands clean of all of that pesky waste. The sun is a constant nuclear reaction that's about 330,000 times as massive as Earth. It could swallow the tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear rods as easily as a forest fire consumes a drop of gasoline, and NASA has two probes currently orbiting the sun, so the technology exists to get the job done. But sadly, the benefits fall short of the risk involved.
There is not one space agency or private firm on the planet with a spotless launch record, and we're not talking about little bottle rockets here, last year, the craft carrying NASA's $280 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory fizzled out and crashed into the sea near Antarctica. It's too bad when a satellite ends up underwater, but it's a completely different story if that rocket is packing a few hundred pounds of uranium. If the uranium caught on fire, it could stay airborne and circulate for months, covering the globe with radioactive ash. Does it still seem like a good idea now?
4/22/10
What if you could go to sleep with a vision problem, but wake up looking at a crystal clear world. A Spanish optometrist not only says that this is possible, but he wants you to sleep in your contacts. His patented contacts, designed to achieve the same effects of corneal surgery, can correct vision deffects such as myopia (nearsightedness), stigmatism and now hyperopia (farsightedness), without taking sharp instruments or lasers to your eyes.
Reshaping the cornea is not easy buisness of course, and generally requires a surgical procedure to permanently fix the problem. But Jaume Paune's corrective lenses don't aim to permanently reshape the corneas at all, but rather to temporarily reshape them each night while you sleep.
Every cornea deformation is a little bit different, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach to fixing the problem, hence the usual need for surgery if a patient doesn't want to be stuck with glasses or contacts. But Paune's system involves custom designing a pair of rigid, gas-permeable contact lenses for each patient based on his or her particular deformities, a process known as orthokeratology, or ortho-k.
During the night the lenses gently reshape the cornea by pressuring the film that coats the outside of the cornea, changing its shape by half the width of a human hair. The next morning, the lenses come out and the patient has perfect vision, at least for the duration of the day. The changes are not permanent so the patient must repeat the process each night, which could prove to be a tedious chore. But the farsightedness is gone, allowing the patient to go through the day without constantly squinting or groping about for his or her glasses.
The cost of the system however, might sway patients back towards surgery. $1,350 up front to custom-design the lenses, plus another $550 or so each year thereafter to replace them. Then again, you don't have to take a laser in your iris, so there is certainly a give and take.
4/26/10
A team of researchers from Japan and Michigan have built a molecular computer whose operation mimics a human brain. The tiny circuit, comprised of organic molecules on a gold substrate, is capable of super-fast concurrent calculations that rival the firing of neurons..
When it comes to multitasking, even the fastest computers are still miles behind the human brain. Neurons only fire about a thousand times per second, way slower than the petaflops achieved by today's fastest digital processors, yet people are still smarter than computers.
This is because digital computers process information sequentially, while the brain is a tangled web. Electrical impulses in the brain follow complex nuerological networks involving several concurrent operations. Computers can't do that.
To make a smarter computer, the scientists used an organic molecule called DDQ, which is made of nitrogen, oxygen, chlorine and carbon. It can switch among four conducting states, 0,1, 2 and 3, compared to the binary switches, 0 and 1, used by digital computers. The neat part is, approximately 300 molecules talk to each other at a time during information processing. The scientists have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain.
The organic processor is intelligent and self-healing. It can solve several problems on the same grid, and if there is a defect, it heals itself. Similarly, the brain also solves several problems at the same time, and if one neuron dies, another takes over its job. This organic processor can provide answers for problems that cannot be solved by existing computers. With a breakthrough like this, the future that we see in movies seems to be getting closer and closer.
5/6/10
Among NASA’s top priorities is the goal of locating life in the universe and it has – on Earth. But in doing so, NASA may have found a new tool to help it seek out life elsewhere in our solar system. An imaging satellite has located microbial life on the ground from space for the first time. And if it can do that here, it stands to reason that the technology might be able to do so on other planets as well.
NASA’s Advanced Land Imager (ALI) riding on the EO-1 satellite spotted a small patch of yellow ice in the Canadian Arctic that is the only known place on Earth where sulfur is pumped to the surface by natural processes, much like a spring. Looking down form a helicopter the stain is visible but from space it is very hard to spot.
So NASA engineers went looking for it in the invisible part of the spectrum using a hyperspectral sensor on ALI called Hyperion. From that data, researchers were able to identify the discolored ice by the chemical signature of sulfur, which was strong enough to be visible (strong enough, in fact, that researchers can actually measure the amount of sulfur from the Hyperion data alone).
But none of that has anything to do with life. The underlying processes, however, are the key to this discovery. This particular sulfur starts out in the seawater beneath the Arctic as hydrogen sulfide. It’s only after microbes in the water strip the hydrogen away that the sulfur alone rises up to stain the ice, which acts as a big yellow arrow pointing to the microbial life below.
As Discover News points out, this Canadian Arctic scenario is like a microcosm of other rocky, icy bodies in the universe, specifically one in our solar system: Jupiter’s moon Europa. We know Europa is icy and we suspect there may be liquid oceans beneath that ice that could theoretically harbor life. While sending a Europa rover to the planet to drill through the surface sounds fun and all, it would be a lot easier to send an orbiter, sporting Hyperion-like sensors, to go search for the telltale signs of life beneath the ice.
It’s clearly an idea in its infancy, but it’s a pretty cool one.
5/11/10
Automakers are already mass producing cars that will parallel park themselves, but the rudimentary sensor-based systems on the latest Lexus or Buick have nothing on Junior. The Stanford Racing Team's autonomous car can throw itself into reverse, jam the accelerator to the floor, and slam on the brakes at 25 miles per hour, sliding sideways into a parking space in an amazing display.
This maneuver, while exhilarating in the James Bond sense, is not just for fun. The team is trying to teach the car to think for itself. Junior usually uses a model of the car's dynamics to control steering, gas, and braking. This is relatively easy when the car is moving straight ahead, but when it's sliding sideways across the pavement, the variables -- friction of the tires, texture of the pavement, grade of the roadway -- are far more diverse. That means working from a fixed model is far more difficult.
So the team also implemented a two-prong approach. There's the physics-based simulator that understands how the car moves in space, and a second system that draws from past demonstrations of the car sliding across the pavement. That second system works more or less by trial and error; it draws on the cars "experience," repeating the control inputs it used in other successful slide maneuvers to try to reproduce the successful results.
The trick was teaching Junior to employ both systems, and to learn when to switch between the two. Junior uses the physics based model to make its approach, then must switch to the demonstration-based model to throw the brakes and slide quite coolly into the parking space. The software must make the decision when to make that switch.
The car has a margin of error of about two feet, so don't expect Lexus to make it a standard feature any time soon. But from a machine learning standpoint, it's quite an impressive maneuver. If we can teach our machines to be more flexible, using a kind of learned intuition to switch between control models, developers should be able to create better autonomous robots that can handle not just preprogrammed tasks, but variables that arise out of the blue. That's not even factoring in their eligibility for style points.
5-21-10
Dr. Laurence Katz's emergency room patients receive a lot of different medications. Over the years, he noticed that some patients' body temperatures were dropping during treatment, due to some unknown drugs or combinations of drugs.
Inducing hypothermia can help save the lives of patients whose brains have been starved of oxygen, so Dr. Katz, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, didn't want to stop the drops in body temperature -- he wanted to figure out how to chill more patients.
Last year, after several years of research, he co-founded Hibernaid, a company he hopes will use his research to make the first commercially available drug for inducing therapeutic hypothermia.
Since 2003, the American Heart Association has been advising doctors to induce hypothermia in patients who remain unconscious after cardiac arrest. Cooling patients for 12 to 24 hours protects their brains from the harmful chemical reactions that come from oxygen deprivation, and considerably improves your chance of surviving cardiac arrest. Yet only about half the patients in the U.S. who could be helped through chilling receive it.
The problem, experts say, is that the current methods of cooling people can be cumbersome and expensive. And all are mechanical ways of forcing the body to cool -- from ice bags to chilled intravenous saline -- while the body fights to retain its normal temperature through violent shivering that often requires doctors to temporarily paralyze patients.
Katz figured that if he could recreate what was happening in his ER patients, he could formulate a drug to lower body temperature in a more natural way. Essentially, the body's thermostat, which is housed in the hypothalamus, would be "reset" by the drug so the brain is tricked into thinking the body should be between 89.6 and 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit, instead of 98.6.
"We kept going like mad scientists," Katz said of the roughly five years of trial and error that led to what he now believes is the correct combination of commonly used ER drugs, which he's successfully used in animal studies. Katz isn't the only researcher pursuing a drug to induce hypothermia, but he hopes Hibernaid can be the first company to bring its formulation to market.
Because the company hasn't yet received a patent on its drug combination, Hibernaid CEO Stephen Petti declined to name the exact drugs in Katz's formula. But Petti said they are all used at dosage levels below what they'd normally be given at in the ER. He hopes to start clinical trials in humans within a year.
Vinay Nadkarni, an associate professor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and past chair of the American Heart Association's Emergency and Cardiovascular Care Committee, is a staunch advocate of getting more emergency medical personnel equipped and trained to induce hypothermia.
"There is clearly a need for the development of these novel approaches that give us options," Nadkarni said of the potential to induce hypothermia with a drug instead of forcing the body to cool down.
A drug would eliminate the need to temporarily paralyze a shivering patient, and would allow for much easier access to patients by nurses and doctors who sometimes have to deal with patients covered in cooling blankets or surrounded by bags of ice, Nadkarni said. It would also mean ambulances don't have to buy the refrigerators needed to keep saline chilled, if that's their preferred method of inducing hypothermia.
While a drug would be a useful new option to help spread the availability of therapeutic hypothermia, Nadkarni cautions against the idea that any drug would provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Every drug carries a risk of potentially dangerous side effects, he said, and once you inject a drug into a person, you can't reverse that decision if the patient starts reacting badly.
Current methods to cool aren't perfect, he said, "but you can easily take a blanket off. When you've give a drug you're stuck with what you've got."
For Katz, who hopes that his research will eventually help other types of patients who have seen benefits from therapeutic hypothermia, such as victims of strokes and traumatic brain injury, getting a drug on the market can't happen fast enough.
6-11-10
For the first time, astronomers have been able to track the movement of a planet outside the solar system as it orbits a star, which is a great achievement in the world of astronomy.
The star and planet are both fairly young. The star, Beta Pictoris is only around 12 million years old. Because there is already a planet orbiting Beta Pictoris, it shows that planets can be formed fairly quickly, even within as little as a few million years.
Astronomers have known about the planetary disc around Beta Pictoris for a long time. The disc is actually fairly close to our solar system, at only 63 light years away.
In 2003, they noticed a pale dot close to the star, but they could not be sure that it was a planet or not. The dot then dissapeared, only to come back in the fall of 2009, on the opposite side of the star. This is what proved that the object was a planet, and it had been hiding out in front of or behind the star.
The planet has been nicknamed Beta Pictoris b. It is around 9 times larger than the planet Jupiter, and it is as close to Beta Pictoris as Saturn is to our Sun.
Astronomers only have around 10 pictures of planets outside our solar system, so each one is a monumental discovery. But this one is especially different because you can see the planet moving around its star. This planet is also unique because it is the only planet outside our solar system discovered by astronomers that is this close to its star. Most are as far away from their star as Neptune is from our Sun. Another special thing about this planet is that unlike many other planets outside our solar system, it may have been formed in the same way as the planets in our solar system. This leads astronomers to think that planets like these could potentially hold life.
6-11-10
Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is the technology used in MRIs, which are machines that can be used to identify things in your body such as chemical compositions and protein structures. But there is one huge drawback to MRIs. The cost and sheer size of the superconducting magnets used in MRI scanning make it an immobile and extremely expensive process. Researchers in Germany however, have discovered a smaller magnet, that could the MRI devices from room-sized, to palm-sized.
The breakthrough will not be able to replace the large machines necessary for a good medical scan, but it could lead to handheld devices that could take readings of fossils found in archaeological digs and be able to identify blood clots or cancer cells right in the doctor's office.
The way that this special magnet is made is very complex, but put in simple words, it is three stacked rings of samarium cobalt. Each of these rings contains trapezoid-shaped magnets with gaps in between. These gaps contain rectangular magnets, which are the key to the technology of these magnets. Engineers can adjust the rectangular magnets in order to smooth out the magnetic field created by the magnet.
Scientists are currently testing the magnet using highly sophisticated computer models, which give them realistic data and allow them to correctly analize the magnets and adjust as minutely as possible. This breakthrough will sure shake up the world of medicine and bring it one step closer to the future.
This week, a place I saw science in the real world was when I was playing tennis against the wall and KM. I noticed Newton's 3rd law that every action has an equal or opposite reaction. The ball coming towards the wall was the action and the ball bouncing back towards me was the reaction. There were other examples of Newton's 3rd law that I saw while playing tennis. The action was when the strings of my racquet slightly cup the ball in its strings and the reaction was the ball being launched towards the other side of the court.
Another place I noticed science was while bowling. I noticed the Law of Inertia. The bowling pins are at rest before you bowl and they stay at rest until an external force (which is the bowling ball) is applied to them.
These are just a couple of examples of science in the real world. I hope that I find more and tell you about them throughout the week.
1/07/2010!!
While trying to think about blogging ideas, I started to think about my winter vacation. Then I thought of a great scientific concept which was bouyancy. Last year during winter vacation, I went to Mexico on a 7-day cruise. Let me tell you a little more about the science behind the ship.
If you think about it, how does a huge ship, that ways thousands of pounds float on water without sinking down to the bottom of the ocean?? Well, Archimedes Principle of Bouyancy tells us how these large ships manage to stay afloat. Archimedes is a very famous ancient greek mathematican and scientist.
Archimedes made this discovery one day while taking a bath. He noticed that when he dipped his body into the tub, the level of the water rised. This is how he realized that there was some relationship between his weight and the volume of water that got displaced when he got into the tub.
Archimedes continued to do more experiments and came with a bouyancy principle, that an object will float when the amount of water it has displaced is equal to the object's weight and anything will float if is shaped to displace its own weight of water before it reaches the point where it will submerge. So how does this apply to a ship? Well, a ship that is launched will sink into the sea until the weight of the water it displaces is equal to its own weight and as the ship is loaded, it continues to sink and the bouyant force acting on the ship increases as the weight of the ship increases.
So this is how ships are able to float, because one day, a man named Archimedes stepped into his tub and saw the level of the water rise!!
Well, I hope that I explained bouyant force well and I can't wait to tell you about my next discovery of science in the real world.
1/15/2010
This week, I am going to talk about friction. An example of friction in the real world is when you are walking outside.
When you are just standing still, static friction is acting against you. Static friction is the force that resists the object's beginning motion. You overcome this energy once you start walking. The friction that you then experience is known as kinetic friction. This is friction that acts on an object that is already moving.
This is just one more of the thousands of ways you can find science in the real world.
1/25/2010
This week, the topic I am going to cover is forces and motion. I will talk about all the science that I see while working in science class. The first element of force and motion that I will talk about is potential energy. Potential energy is a key component of our skateparks because we have to start our marble skaters at a position where they have the most potential energy so that they can manuever around our skate park without someone having to push the marble around. Potential energy is the energy stored in an object due to its position.
Another element of force and motion that we deal with while making our skateparks is friction. While carving pieces of cardboard and creating all of our obstacles, We have to make sure that the amount of friction in our skatepark is put to a minimum because we are not allowed to touch our marble skater while it is rolling through the course. Friction is the force that resists motion of one body that comes in contact with another. In our example, one body is the marble and the other body is the course.
1/27/10
This blog will be about internal combustion in car engines.
The purpose of a gasoline engine is so that you can convert gasoline into movement that propels your car into movement. The easiest way to use gasoline in an engine today is with a fuel injection system. Therefore, a car's engine is an internal combustion engine. There are two other types of internal combustion engines. A diesel engine and a gas turbine engine. Other types of engines are HEMI engines, rotary engines and two-stroke engines. There is also such thing as an external combustion engine like steam engines on trains.
All internal combustion engines use pistons in the four stages of using fuel known as the four-stroke combustion cycle.
The first stroke is the intake stroke. The piston of an engine starts at the top, then the piston moves down to take in a cylinder full of air and gasoline. Only a small drop of gasoline needs to be put into the piston for this to work
The second stroke is the compression stroke. This is when the piston moves up to compress the air and gasoline mixture. Compression makes the upcoming explosion much stronger.
The third stroke is the combustion stroke. Once the piston reaches the top of its stroke, the spark plug emits a spark to ignite the gasoline. The gasoline charge in the cylinder explodes, causing the piston to move down.
The fourth and final stroke is the exhaust stroke. Once the piston hits the bottom of its stroke, the exhaust valve opens and the exhaust leaves the cylinder to go out of the tailpipe.
Then the cycle is repeated again. This is how the engine of a car works. I hope you enjoyed.
1/27/2010
This blog will be about the pH level of your body and how to maintain it.
The normal pH level of a person's blood is about 7.3, which means the blood is slightly alkaline. It is essential to maintain this alkaline pH level of your body because if your body's pH goes too far above or below this pH, your immunity goes down and the body is not able to heal itself. You lose the ability to maintain proper weight and are susceptible to fatigue and illness. The energy production in your body's cells decrease and your blood sugar level can rise too quickly. If the blood's pH is even slightly acidic, at 6.9, it can induce coma and death.
An acidic pH can occur from an acid forming diet, emotional stress, toxic overload and/or lack of excercise. The body tries to compensate for acidic pH by using alkaline minerals. If the diet does not contain enough minerals to compensate a buildup of acids in the cells will occur.
If you have an imbalanced blood pH level, it puts pressure on your body's regulating systems to maintain pH neutrality. This can deplete the body of alkaline minerals, making you prone to chronic and degenerative diseases.
A typical American diet is high in acid producing animal products like meats, eggs, sodas, artificial sweeteners, alcohol and dairy and far too low in alkaline producing foods like fresh vegetables. Generally, alkalike forming foods include lettuce, spinach, green beans, peas, lentils, herbs, most fruits, seeds and nuts.
To maintain health, a diet should consist of 60% alkaline forming foods and 40% acid formind foods. To restore health, the diet should consist of 80% alkaline forming foods and 20% acid formind foods.
1/28/10
Today I read about Apple's newest device, the iPad. This is essentially a giant 9.7 inch iPhone when you just look at it. But once you have it in your hand, it's a totally different story.
The iPad seems like it would be a waste of money since so many people already have bought iPhones and iPod touches. But a webiste called Jobs said that 75 million iPhone and iPod users will immediately invest in the iPad.
Typing on the iPad, as suspected, is not so simple. Typing is done via soft keyboard,just like on the iPhone and iPod touch, but since the screen is much bigger than an iPhone's, so it can sometimes be quite the workout for your thumbs. Another way to type is to hold the device in one hand while pecking at the screen with the other. But probably the easiest way would be to set it in your lap and type like you would on a normal keyboard, which is the most efficient way for people with small hands.
The iPad runs apps exactly like the iPhone. You still have to download apps from the App Store. One feature that might not be to the liking of most is the resolution of the apps in full screen mode. When you open an app, it comes up as the size of a regular iPhone screen, so the resolution is just as good as it would be on the iPhone, but once you change to full screen, the resolution decreases. But this problem should not last for too long because app makers have been given 60 days to change their apps resolution so it looks fine on both an iPhone and an iPad.
While trying to keep their high reputation, Apple also had to battle with the popular device known as the Kindle. This is a device that lets you download books and read them without the hassle of having to carry around thick books. The iPad has an app called iBooks that is much like the Kindle, except for that instead of having to press a button and wait two seconds for the page to flip, you can turn pages with a quick swipe of your finger. But the one disadvantage of iBooks is that it was created on an LED-lit LCD, not e-ink like the Kindle, which is a special type of screen that creates no stress on your eyes, so your eyes will be more stressed looking at an iBook instead of a book on a Kindle.
Apple has also developed iPad word processor, presentation and spreadsheet softwares, which are $10 each through the App Store. The interface of these softwares are very impressive for light editing of pictures, text and small presentation work. It is still not recommended to type text in length on the iPad because of the diffuculty to type, but you can purchase a seperate keyboard if you would like to type in length.
Another drawback of the iPad would be that there is no built in camera, so you must sync pictures from your computer, onto your iPad. But from there, you can view your pictures like you would in the iPhone. Just swipe your finger along the screen as you move through pictures.
These are some of the key features in the upcoming iPad by Apple. I think that Apple is doing a good job in preparing us for a future in where almost all computing will be done on multi-touch screens. This would probably be a product that I would reccomend for people who do not own an iPhone or an iPod touch, who want to take a look at some of Apple's latest technology.
2/2/2010
This week, I will be blogging about the extremely popular medication Aspirin. I was in CPR/First Aid class and Mr. Kuolt said that if you see signs of a heart attack in a person, you should give them an Aspirin immediately. This got me thinking. What is so special about this medicine?
If you have ever had a headache and taken medication for it, you have had Aspirin before. Aspirin can also be taken for other things such as inflammation or fever. Let me explain to you exactly what Aspirin is.
Aspirin is a member of a family of medicines called salicylates. These chemicals have been known by people interested in medicine for centuries. One of the most famous and earliest physicians named Hippocrates, wrote about a bitter powder extracted from willow bark that could ease aches and pains. After scientists researched, they found out that the part of the willow bark that was bitter and was good for reducing fever and pain is a chemical known as salicin.
The problem with these chemicals is that they would upset the user's stomach fairly badly. In fact, some people had bleeding in their digestive tracts from high doses of these chemicals needed for pain or swelling. There was a German man named Hoffman. His son, named Felix Hoffman, who worked for a company known as Friederich Bayer & Co. wanted to create a chemical that was not so hard on his dad's stomach, reasoning that salycylic acid may be irritating because it is an acid, he put the compound through a couple of chemical reactions that covered up one of the acidic parts with an acetyl group, converting it to acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). He found that ASA not only could reduce fever and relieve pain and swelling, but he believed it was better for the stomach and worked even better than salicylic acid. By 1899, one of Bayer's top chemists, named Dreser, had finished demonstrating the usefullness of this potent new medicine and called it Aspirin. It's name is believed to have come from a plant relative of the rose that makes salicylic acid.
Now that you know what Aspirin is, let me tell you about how it actually works.
We know that pain is something you feel in the brain. For example, let's say that you hit your finger with a hammer. The part of your finger that is damaged has nerve endings in it. These are little detectors in your fingers that sense things like heat, vibration, light touches and big crushing smashes. The damaged tissue in your fingers also releases some chemicals that make hard crushes seem stronger. Some of these chemicals are known as prostaglandins and working cells in the damaged tissues make these chemicals using an enzyme known as cyclooxygenase. Because of these prostaglandins, the pain is now much stronger, so there is a signal sent up through your arm and into your brain saying that you are hurt. Prostaglandins not only help you feel the pain, but they also cause your finger to swell up.
When you have a headache, it is probably from your stress on your scalp or neck muscles. Aspirin helps with these types of problems by stopping cells from making prostaglandins. So Aspirin is pretty much stopping the activity of the cyclooxygenase enzyme, which is what creates prostaglandins. Aspirin does not stop the problem that is causing you pain, but it does lower the amount of pain that you are experiencing.
2/11/2010
This week I am going to blog about an article that I read on PopularScience.Com. It said that organ shortage is such a big problem in the world, that many transplant recipients die while they are on the waiting list. Doctors tried to use animal organs on humans but they discovered that the human body swiftly rejects these organs. Animal organs stop functioning as soon as they come into contact with human blood. But now, doctors in Australia have figured out a way to use genetically altered pig lungs to pump human blood. Since pig lungs are dramatically close to the size of human lungs, this could dramatically change the number of lungs available for transplants.
2/25/10
This week I am going to blog about an article that was asking a very interesting question. Do baby’s cries mean anything, or is it just a bunch of gibberish. Though it is highly uncertain whether infants have anything interesting to say, for some reason, people agonize over what babies might be communicating through all of that wailing. Although mankind has done so much, from creating the atom bomb, to traveling to the moon, the shrieks and squeals of babies are still more or less a mystery to us. But now, a group of Japanese scientists says that they have cracked the code. In the past, the farthest we had gotten to understanding babies was a commercial product known as Why Cry, but all this product did was measure the frequency at which a baby was crying. But the Japanese approach is the first that we know of that employs computer systems that not only measure the power and frequency of the baby's cry, but also employs statistical analysis that establish patterns of crying that correlate to different emotions.
Since infants cannot confirm their emotions, researchers worked closely with parents to try to determine infants emotional states. But since even the most devoted mother cannot assure anyone of her child's emotion, they further experimented with more specialized groups to narrow their results. For example, the researchers recorded a group of babies with a painful genetic disorder to establish the difference between pained cries and other types of crying, since that group can be said with relative certainty to all be experiencing a similar type of pain from time to time. In theory, this should produce similar cries, which researchers can isolate and tag as painful cries.
So is this the future for baby monitoring products? Many critics think not. Although the Japanese scientist's idea is much more grounded than some junk thrown out there, it still seems to be somewhat of an approximation. It does not seem to account for the idea that infants could be in pain as well as hungry at the same time. This method also relies on the theory that all babies express themselves in similar ways, a theory which no one is really so sure about.
Besides, many parents believe that this is the most beautiful time between a child and their parents. Pretty soon, they will be telling you exactly what they want and don't want and then you'll wish that you really didn't know their emotions back then.
3/4/10
Today I read an article about a man who is allergic to radio waves. Per Segerback, a 54 year old man who lives in Sweden. He lives in a modest cottage located in a nature reserve around 75 miles away from the nearest town. Many wild animals such as wolves, moose and brown bears walk freely past his front door. He keeps very limited human company because human technology makes him physically ill. While on a walk last summer, he ran into one of his few neighbors and started chatting with him. During the conversation, the neighbor's cellphone rang and Segerback was overcome by nausea. In seconds, he was unconscious
Segerback suffers from electro-hypersensitivity (EHS), which means that he has severe reactions to the electromagnetic radiation produced by common consumer technologies such as computers, TVs and cellphones. Symptoms range from burning or tingling sensation in the skin to dizziness, nausea, headaches, sleep disturbance and memory loss. In extreme cases like Segerback, breathing problems, heart palpitations and loss of consciousness can result.
A cellphone has to be in use for Segerback to experience this effect. Phones that are on but not sending or receiving a call or text message do not create enough radiation to be noticeable. It is not the sound of the phone that puts Segerback in danger. Once, when he was on a sailboat with some friends, he was on the front deck when someone made a call beneath the main deck and the symptons started. Headache, nausea then unconsciousness. When Segerback is in range of an active cellphone, he says that he experiences a feeling as if "there is not enough room in my skull for my brain."
Sweden is the only country in the world that recognized EHS as a functional impairment and Segerback's experience has been important in creating a policy to address the condition. People in Sweden who suffer from EHS (about 3 percent of the population), are entitled to similar rights and social services and blind and deaf people. Today, local governments will pay to have the home of someone diagnosed with EHS electronically "sanitized" if necessary, through the installation of metal shielding.
3/11/10
Today I read an extremely interesting article from popularscience.com, that showed how a scientist from MIT created a catalyst that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to be able to power a home using only a water bottle and sunlight.
400 million dollars have been funded into ARPA-E, the civilian, energy-focused cousin of DARPA. In the first ever ARPA-E conference, MIT chemist Dan Nocera showed how well he can use that money by highlighting his new photosynthetic process. Using a special catalyst, the process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to power a home using only sunlight and a bottle of water.
Like organic photosynthesis, Nocera's reaction uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and energy. However, whereas plants create energy in the form of sugars, this process creates energy in the form of free hydrogen. That hydrogen can either be recombined with the oxygen in a fuel cell to generate electricity or can be converted into a liquid fuel.
In around 4 hours, water treated with Nocera's catalyst can produce 30 kilo-watts of energy. What is even better about this process is that it is cheap. So cheap, in fact, that Nocera has no problem envisioning a day when each house generates its own fuel and electricity from photosynthesis.
3/18/10
Mountain-bike suspensions are difficult, if not impossible to adjust while riding. Cannondale's Simon features a hydraulic shock that can instantly change its resistance and how far it travels. Meanwhile, a motion sensor and computer calculate the best settings for the trail. Let's say that you go off some sort of ramp. The shocks will soften up so you can have a smoother landing. Let's say that you are riding on a flat area where you are pedaling hard. The shocks will firm up to boost your power. Simon is currently a prototype, but Cannondale expects to see pieces of the technology arrive on bikes within a few years. Let me tell you exactly how this technology works.
3/25/10
This week, I read an article from the popular science website. The main question of that article was: Should I be worried about Electromagnetic Pulses destroying my electronics? This is what the article had to say:
This depends on the source of the pulse. Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) powerful enough to cause you trouble come in two varieties: those produced by the sun and those produced by a nuclear bomb. With the sun produced variety, especially coronal mass ejections (CMEs), your electronics will probably be fine. But a really large CME can take down a power grid. Power lines transmit energy as an alternating current, but a pulse from a CME and introduce a direct current into the system. This can cause transformers to overheat and work sluggishly, or fail all together.
Despite the grid's numerous safeguards, if enough transformers go down, they could take large chunks of the grid with them. Usually, the only way to get them up and running again would be to replace all of the damaged equipment. On the bright side, although CMEs have been known to put satellites out of commission, our atmosphere deflects most of the energy, so the radiation is too diffuse by the time it reaches your electronics to destroy them.
A man-made EMP poses a greater threat. If one goes off in your neighborhood, there's a significant risk that the concentrated pulse will induce extra voltage in the circuit-board components, frying them for good. The best bet for protecting your electronics is to store them in a Faraday cage. A Faraday cage is a cube of interweaving metals, preferably copper and quarter-inch-thick steel, which together can act as an electromagnetic shield. Like in a lightning rod, the copper attracts electricity while the steel absorbs magnetic pulses. A cage big enough to hold all of your electronics is usually around $15,000. An EMP could also crash the power grid, so you might want to spring for an extra cage to protect your generator as well.
4/01/10
Imagine. It's midnight, you are a cop patrolling the bad side of town and you see someone getting mugged. The assailant is around 40 feet away, out of range for your stun gun. You shout, but he runs into a black alley with a dead end. You get closer to the assailant and they throw a broken glass bottle at your head and make a break for the street.
What caused this was something known as the "capability gap", which is one of the trickiest situations in law enforcement. This gap is an area 35 to 60 feet away from an assailant, which is long enough to keep the assailant out of range of a Taser and yet close enough for them to hurl something deadly at an officer's head. This brings the officer one step closer to having to use deadly force. Officers need a less lethal option that works from a farther distance. That is where the Extended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, comes in. Unlike Taser's stun gun, which shoots tethered probes up to 35 feet to deliver an incapacitating jolt, the company's new XREP is a 12-gauge wireless projectile that can be fired up to 100 feet using any pump-action shot gun. It sails through the air like a normal slug yet induces muscle paralysis on impact.
Logistically, the biggest challenge was the miniaturization. With a Taser, two probes attach to the assailant, arcing up to 50,000 volts of electricity, enough to penetrate clothing. The XREP, on the other hand, uses just 500 volts to allow for smaller circuitry. Instead of arcing the current, it sends it directly into the body via barbed electrodes that pierce the skin. The current, shaped to minimal electrical signals in the body, jams the nervous system.
Since its debut last year, XREP has been fired successfully four times in the line of duty. Taser is now working on a grenade version for the Department of Defense that will launch up to 200 feet. So how about that capability gap? Consider it bridged.
4/08/10
The new iPad has been out for 6 days now and I was looking at the reviews and thought that I should do a little recap on them.
Many people think that the iPad has completely the world of computing. Although it lacks a USB port and a webcam, the overall change that it has brought to computing amazes all the critics. Lets take a look at what the critics think about every part of this amazing device.
The oohs and ahhs start from the minute you pick up this device. Just looking at the screen gives you goosebumps. Although it does not have the highest resolution out there, the fact that the screen is the the only thing there is the reason why it is so attractive and just in case you didn't know, you can touch it. It is entirely touch screen and reacts amazingly fast. The glass of the screen feels so smooth. It is so pleasurable to the mind to be able to manipulate something so shiny and sleek with only our hands that it is indescribable by many. This is the way the iPad changes everything. The layers of abstraction are gone and we are interacting with graphic information in the most natural way possible.
The overall interface of the iPad is also very pleasurable for many. Think about it--on your computer, interfaces are stacked inside each other like a Russian doll. The web site you're looking at sits inside the browser, which sits inside a folder, which sits inside your operating system. Each interface has its own set of conceits and constraints, meaning the resulting experienced is subject to a great many rules dictating what it can and can’t be. But that's not how it is on the iPad. There, a weather app adopts the perfect interface for browsing weather information--pinch and zoom on the giant world radar map; tap the forecast and current conditions blocks for more detailed pop-ups. You touch and it responds. That's not it, that's only the weather.
Another feature that critics appreciate about the iPad is its versatility. Like the iPhone, the iPad is blank slate ready to morph into any device with any interface imaginable. It is a million gadgets in one. The iPhone has made so many real-world gadgets completely irrelevant. For example, the cheap pocket digital camera, GPS navigators, e-readers, voice recorders, iPods and more. The iPad, which has a screen four times bigger, will make this list even longer.
One of the complaints that critics had about the iPad before it came out was that the word processing system was going to fail completely. Fortunately for those who bought the iPad, they were wrong. The iPad's word processor is very handy. You can connect any bluetooth keyboard to the system, which lets you type like we have doing for generations and to edit the paper and add pictures, you simply turn the screen into vertical view and off you go, inserting pictures with the touch of a finger. Touch a mispelled word and you can go through the list of suggested words. I don't know about you, but this is how I would want to create anything with pictures and text in the future.
Although this device seems completely immaculate, it still has its flaws (tear). First of all, multitasking is impossible. There is no taskbar and there is no ctrl-alt-delete. Only the occasional reminder that you have a new IM or email while you are reading your Twitter or updating your status on Facebook. Without this multitasking ability, one of the internet's fundamental forms of communication, the instant message, is impossible. When you are sitting with your laptop at home and IMing, you have 12 browsers open and 3 Google Chat windows. Not possible with the iPad.
The ability to only use one app at a time is very frustrating for iPad users. Oh, your trying to read a book on your iPad for free, well guess what, you have a new email! Someone has replied to your Tweet!! Tap tap tap, book interrupted.
In the end, the iPad is just a new device. Not something that everyone needs or should think about buying in the near future. If you have some kind of fetish with the iPad and you must have it, then do us all a favor and wait for around 6 months to a year and wait for the second and third generation iPads to come out. You will be saving everyone a lot of complaints.
4/15/10
Nuclear waste has been piling up over the years and now everyone is looking for a place to put it. There have been many ideas in circulation on how to get rid of it, but one in particular stood out to me. Why don't we just shoot it all into the sun?
On paper, this is a fantastic way to wipe our hands clean of all of that pesky waste. The sun is a constant nuclear reaction that's about 330,000 times as massive as Earth. It could swallow the tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear rods as easily as a forest fire consumes a drop of gasoline, and NASA has two probes currently orbiting the sun, so the technology exists to get the job done. But sadly, the benefits fall short of the risk involved.
There is not one space agency or private firm on the planet with a spotless launch record, and we're not talking about little bottle rockets here, last year, the craft carrying NASA's $280 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory fizzled out and crashed into the sea near Antarctica. It's too bad when a satellite ends up underwater, but it's a completely different story if that rocket is packing a few hundred pounds of uranium. If the uranium caught on fire, it could stay airborne and circulate for months, covering the globe with radioactive ash. Does it still seem like a good idea now?
4/22/10
What if you could go to sleep with a vision problem, but wake up looking at a crystal clear world. A Spanish optometrist not only says that this is possible, but he wants you to sleep in your contacts. His patented contacts, designed to achieve the same effects of corneal surgery, can correct vision deffects such as myopia (nearsightedness), stigmatism and now hyperopia (farsightedness), without taking sharp instruments or lasers to your eyes.
Reshaping the cornea is not easy buisness of course, and generally requires a surgical procedure to permanently fix the problem. But Jaume Paune's corrective lenses don't aim to permanently reshape the corneas at all, but rather to temporarily reshape them each night while you sleep.
Every cornea deformation is a little bit different, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach to fixing the problem, hence the usual need for surgery if a patient doesn't want to be stuck with glasses or contacts. But Paune's system involves custom designing a pair of rigid, gas-permeable contact lenses for each patient based on his or her particular deformities, a process known as orthokeratology, or ortho-k.
During the night the lenses gently reshape the cornea by pressuring the film that coats the outside of the cornea, changing its shape by half the width of a human hair. The next morning, the lenses come out and the patient has perfect vision, at least for the duration of the day. The changes are not permanent so the patient must repeat the process each night, which could prove to be a tedious chore. But the farsightedness is gone, allowing the patient to go through the day without constantly squinting or groping about for his or her glasses.
The cost of the system however, might sway patients back towards surgery. $1,350 up front to custom-design the lenses, plus another $550 or so each year thereafter to replace them. Then again, you don't have to take a laser in your iris, so there is certainly a give and take.
4/26/10
A team of researchers from Japan and Michigan have built a molecular computer whose operation mimics a human brain. The tiny circuit, comprised of organic molecules on a gold substrate, is capable of super-fast concurrent calculations that rival the firing of neurons..
When it comes to multitasking, even the fastest computers are still miles behind the human brain. Neurons only fire about a thousand times per second, way slower than the petaflops achieved by today's fastest digital processors, yet people are still smarter than computers.
This is because digital computers process information sequentially, while the brain is a tangled web. Electrical impulses in the brain follow complex nuerological networks involving several concurrent operations. Computers can't do that.
To make a smarter computer, the scientists used an organic molecule called DDQ, which is made of nitrogen, oxygen, chlorine and carbon. It can switch among four conducting states, 0,1, 2 and 3, compared to the binary switches, 0 and 1, used by digital computers. The neat part is, approximately 300 molecules talk to each other at a time during information processing. The scientists have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain.
The organic processor is intelligent and self-healing. It can solve several problems on the same grid, and if there is a defect, it heals itself. Similarly, the brain also solves several problems at the same time, and if one neuron dies, another takes over its job. This organic processor can provide answers for problems that cannot be solved by existing computers. With a breakthrough like this, the future that we see in movies seems to be getting closer and closer.
5/6/10
Among NASA’s top priorities is the goal of locating life in the universe and it has – on Earth. But in doing so, NASA may have found a new tool to help it seek out life elsewhere in our solar system. An imaging satellite has located microbial life on the ground from space for the first time. And if it can do that here, it stands to reason that the technology might be able to do so on other planets as well.
NASA’s Advanced Land Imager (ALI) riding on the EO-1 satellite spotted a small patch of yellow ice in the Canadian Arctic that is the only known place on Earth where sulfur is pumped to the surface by natural processes, much like a spring. Looking down form a helicopter the stain is visible but from space it is very hard to spot.
So NASA engineers went looking for it in the invisible part of the spectrum using a hyperspectral sensor on ALI called Hyperion. From that data, researchers were able to identify the discolored ice by the chemical signature of sulfur, which was strong enough to be visible (strong enough, in fact, that researchers can actually measure the amount of sulfur from the Hyperion data alone).
But none of that has anything to do with life. The underlying processes, however, are the key to this discovery. This particular sulfur starts out in the seawater beneath the Arctic as hydrogen sulfide. It’s only after microbes in the water strip the hydrogen away that the sulfur alone rises up to stain the ice, which acts as a big yellow arrow pointing to the microbial life below.
As Discover News points out, this Canadian Arctic scenario is like a microcosm of other rocky, icy bodies in the universe, specifically one in our solar system: Jupiter’s moon Europa. We know Europa is icy and we suspect there may be liquid oceans beneath that ice that could theoretically harbor life. While sending a Europa rover to the planet to drill through the surface sounds fun and all, it would be a lot easier to send an orbiter, sporting Hyperion-like sensors, to go search for the telltale signs of life beneath the ice.
It’s clearly an idea in its infancy, but it’s a pretty cool one.
5/11/10
Automakers are already mass producing cars that will parallel park themselves, but the rudimentary sensor-based systems on the latest Lexus or Buick have nothing on Junior. The Stanford Racing Team's autonomous car can throw itself into reverse, jam the accelerator to the floor, and slam on the brakes at 25 miles per hour, sliding sideways into a parking space in an amazing display.
This maneuver, while exhilarating in the James Bond sense, is not just for fun. The team is trying to teach the car to think for itself. Junior usually uses a model of the car's dynamics to control steering, gas, and braking. This is relatively easy when the car is moving straight ahead, but when it's sliding sideways across the pavement, the variables -- friction of the tires, texture of the pavement, grade of the roadway -- are far more diverse. That means working from a fixed model is far more difficult.
So the team also implemented a two-prong approach. There's the physics-based simulator that understands how the car moves in space, and a second system that draws from past demonstrations of the car sliding across the pavement. That second system works more or less by trial and error; it draws on the cars "experience," repeating the control inputs it used in other successful slide maneuvers to try to reproduce the successful results.
The trick was teaching Junior to employ both systems, and to learn when to switch between the two. Junior uses the physics based model to make its approach, then must switch to the demonstration-based model to throw the brakes and slide quite coolly into the parking space. The software must make the decision when to make that switch.
The car has a margin of error of about two feet, so don't expect Lexus to make it a standard feature any time soon. But from a machine learning standpoint, it's quite an impressive maneuver. If we can teach our machines to be more flexible, using a kind of learned intuition to switch between control models, developers should be able to create better autonomous robots that can handle not just preprogrammed tasks, but variables that arise out of the blue. That's not even factoring in their eligibility for style points.
5-21-10
Dr. Laurence Katz's emergency room patients receive a lot of different medications. Over the years, he noticed that some patients' body temperatures were dropping during treatment, due to some unknown drugs or combinations of drugs.
Inducing hypothermia can help save the lives of patients whose brains have been starved of oxygen, so Dr. Katz, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, didn't want to stop the drops in body temperature -- he wanted to figure out how to chill more patients.
Last year, after several years of research, he co-founded Hibernaid, a company he hopes will use his research to make the first commercially available drug for inducing therapeutic hypothermia.
Since 2003, the American Heart Association has been advising doctors to induce hypothermia in patients who remain unconscious after cardiac arrest. Cooling patients for 12 to 24 hours protects their brains from the harmful chemical reactions that come from oxygen deprivation, and considerably improves your chance of surviving cardiac arrest. Yet only about half the patients in the U.S. who could be helped through chilling receive it.
The problem, experts say, is that the current methods of cooling people can be cumbersome and expensive. And all are mechanical ways of forcing the body to cool -- from ice bags to chilled intravenous saline -- while the body fights to retain its normal temperature through violent shivering that often requires doctors to temporarily paralyze patients.
Katz figured that if he could recreate what was happening in his ER patients, he could formulate a drug to lower body temperature in a more natural way. Essentially, the body's thermostat, which is housed in the hypothalamus, would be "reset" by the drug so the brain is tricked into thinking the body should be between 89.6 and 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit, instead of 98.6.
"We kept going like mad scientists," Katz said of the roughly five years of trial and error that led to what he now believes is the correct combination of commonly used ER drugs, which he's successfully used in animal studies. Katz isn't the only researcher pursuing a drug to induce hypothermia, but he hopes Hibernaid can be the first company to bring its formulation to market.
Because the company hasn't yet received a patent on its drug combination, Hibernaid CEO Stephen Petti declined to name the exact drugs in Katz's formula. But Petti said they are all used at dosage levels below what they'd normally be given at in the ER. He hopes to start clinical trials in humans within a year.
Vinay Nadkarni, an associate professor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and past chair of the American Heart Association's Emergency and Cardiovascular Care Committee, is a staunch advocate of getting more emergency medical personnel equipped and trained to induce hypothermia.
"There is clearly a need for the development of these novel approaches that give us options," Nadkarni said of the potential to induce hypothermia with a drug instead of forcing the body to cool down.
A drug would eliminate the need to temporarily paralyze a shivering patient, and would allow for much easier access to patients by nurses and doctors who sometimes have to deal with patients covered in cooling blankets or surrounded by bags of ice, Nadkarni said. It would also mean ambulances don't have to buy the refrigerators needed to keep saline chilled, if that's their preferred method of inducing hypothermia.
While a drug would be a useful new option to help spread the availability of therapeutic hypothermia, Nadkarni cautions against the idea that any drug would provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Every drug carries a risk of potentially dangerous side effects, he said, and once you inject a drug into a person, you can't reverse that decision if the patient starts reacting badly.
Current methods to cool aren't perfect, he said, "but you can easily take a blanket off. When you've give a drug you're stuck with what you've got."
For Katz, who hopes that his research will eventually help other types of patients who have seen benefits from therapeutic hypothermia, such as victims of strokes and traumatic brain injury, getting a drug on the market can't happen fast enough.
6-11-10
For the first time, astronomers have been able to track the movement of a planet outside the solar system as it orbits a star, which is a great achievement in the world of astronomy.
The star and planet are both fairly young. The star, Beta Pictoris is only around 12 million years old. Because there is already a planet orbiting Beta Pictoris, it shows that planets can be formed fairly quickly, even within as little as a few million years.
Astronomers have known about the planetary disc around Beta Pictoris for a long time. The disc is actually fairly close to our solar system, at only 63 light years away.
In 2003, they noticed a pale dot close to the star, but they could not be sure that it was a planet or not. The dot then dissapeared, only to come back in the fall of 2009, on the opposite side of the star. This is what proved that the object was a planet, and it had been hiding out in front of or behind the star.
The planet has been nicknamed Beta Pictoris b. It is around 9 times larger than the planet Jupiter, and it is as close to Beta Pictoris as Saturn is to our Sun.
Astronomers only have around 10 pictures of planets outside our solar system, so each one is a monumental discovery. But this one is especially different because you can see the planet moving around its star. This planet is also unique because it is the only planet outside our solar system discovered by astronomers that is this close to its star. Most are as far away from their star as Neptune is from our Sun. Another special thing about this planet is that unlike many other planets outside our solar system, it may have been formed in the same way as the planets in our solar system. This leads astronomers to think that planets like these could potentially hold life.
6-11-10
Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is the technology used in MRIs, which are machines that can be used to identify things in your body such as chemical compositions and protein structures. But there is one huge drawback to MRIs. The cost and sheer size of the superconducting magnets used in MRI scanning make it an immobile and extremely expensive process. Researchers in Germany however, have discovered a smaller magnet, that could the MRI devices from room-sized, to palm-sized.
The breakthrough will not be able to replace the large machines necessary for a good medical scan, but it could lead to handheld devices that could take readings of fossils found in archaeological digs and be able to identify blood clots or cancer cells right in the doctor's office.
The way that this special magnet is made is very complex, but put in simple words, it is three stacked rings of samarium cobalt. Each of these rings contains trapezoid-shaped magnets with gaps in between. These gaps contain rectangular magnets, which are the key to the technology of these magnets. Engineers can adjust the rectangular magnets in order to smooth out the magnetic field created by the magnet.
Scientists are currently testing the magnet using highly sophisticated computer models, which give them realistic data and allow them to correctly analize the magnets and adjust as minutely as possible. This breakthrough will sure shake up the world of medicine and bring it one step closer to the future.