Fracking without Water May 20, 2013
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, Science & Technology.Tags: Energy, Environment, Fracking, Natural Gas
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It’s possible to fracture gas-rich rock formations without using any water at all. Indeed, gas and oil companies have been using carbon dioxide this way for decades, albeit on a limited basis. Right now carbon dioxide fracking is used in places, like Wyoming, that already have carbon dioxide pipelines. But if this approach is going to be used on a large scale, it will require a major investment in infrastructure for getting carbon dioxide to fracking sites. And in some cases a price on carbon emissions may be the only way to make the economics work.
A price on carbon, for example, could create a big supply of cheap carbon dioxide by giving utilities incentive to capture it from power plants’ smokestacks. This might make sense in China, where the best shale gas deposits are in arid areas (see “China Has Plenty of Shale Gas, but It Will Be Hard to Mine”).
via Fracking with Carbon Dioxide Could Help Shale Gas Production in Arid Areas | MIT Technology Review.
How Vaccines Have Changed Our World April 1, 2013
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, health, Science & Technology.Tags: common infectious diseases, Disease, health, Medicine, morbidity, Vaccination, vaccines
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The data in this graphic come from the web site of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, but a graphic designer in Purchase, N.Y., named Leon Farrant has created a graphic that drives home what the data mean.
Below is a look at the past morbidity (how many people became sick) of what were once very common infectious diseases, and the current morbidity in the U.S.
via How Vaccines Have Changed Our World In One Graphic – Forbes.
When Enlightenment Meets Science April 1, 2013
Posted by tkcollier in health, Lifestyle, Religion, Science & Technology.Tags: Meditation, Psychology, Zen
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The veteran meditators in the MRI could do each of the resting states perfectly, but when it came to creating a contrasting condition, they were helpless. They had lost the ability to “let their minds wander” because they had long ago shed the habit of entertaining discursive narrative thoughts. They no longer worried about how their hair looked, or their to-do lists, or whether people thought they were annoying. Their minds were largely quiet. When thoughts did come – and they did still come – these subjects reported that the thoughts had a different quality, an unfixated quality. The thought “This MRI machine is extremely loud” might arise, but it would quickly evaporate. Thoughts seemed to emerge as-needed in response to different situations and would then disappear crisply into the clear backdrop of consciousness. In other words, these practitioners were always meditating.
This turned out to be the least dramatic of Vago’s discoveries. With the two most experienced meditators, something even more surprising happened, something that, to the knowledge of the investigators involved, had never before been captured on any kind of brain imaging technology.
Lying on their padded gurneys in the center of the humming MRI in this famous research hospital in the heart of East Boston and Harvard Medical School, each of the two research subjects suddenly … disappeared.
Har-Prakash Khalsa, a 52-year old Canadian mail carrier and yoga teacher – and one of the veterans to whom this happened – describes his experience:
“It’s a kind of pressure or momentum. I was in one of the rest states, and as I let go of it, I felt myself heading into a much bigger dissolution – a bigger ‘gone’ as Shinzen would call it. It felt impossible to resist. My mind, body and world just collapsed.”
A few moments later – blinking, refreshed, reformatted – Har-Prakash returned to consciousness, not at all sure how he was to supposed to fit this experience into the research protocol. He couldn’t indicate it with a button press even if he wanted to: there was no one present to press the button.
This wasn’t rest – it was annihilation.
via Understanding Enlightenment Could Change Science – Psychology TomorrowPsychology Tomorrow Magazine.
Solar Panel Breakthrough April 1, 2013
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, In The News, Science & Technology.Tags: Alternative Energy, Science & Technology, Solar
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A novel fabrication technique developed by a University of Connecticut engineering professor could provide the breakthrough technology scientists have been looking for to vastly improve the efficiency of today’s solar energy systems.
Silicon solar panels have a single band gap which, loosely speaking, allows the panel to convert electromagnetic radiation efficiently at only one small portion of the solar spectrum. The rectenna devices don’t rely on a band gap and may be tuned to harvest light over the whole solar spectrum, creating maximum efficiency.
The nano-antennas – known as “rectennas” because of their ability to both absorb and rectify solar energy from alternating current to direct current – must be capable of operating at the speed of visible light and be built in such a way that their core pair of electrodes is a mere 1 or 2 nanometers apart, a distance of approximately one millionth of a millimeter, or 30,000 times smaller than the diameter of human hair.
The potential breakthrough lies in a novel fabrication process called selective area atomic layer deposition (ALD) that was developed by Brian Willis, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Connecticut and the former director of UConn’s Chemical Engineering Program.
The atomic layer deposition process is favored by science and industry because it is simple, easily reproducible, and scalable for mass production. Willis says the chemical process is particularly applicable for precise, homogenous coatings for nanostructures, nanowires, nanotubes, and for use in the next generation of high-performing semi-conductors and transistors.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-fabrication-technique-key-solar.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-fabrication-technique-key-solar.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-fabrication-technique-key-solar.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-fabrication-technique-key-solar.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-fabrication-technique-key-solar.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-fabrication-technique-key-solar.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-fabrication-technique-key-solar.html#jCp
via New patented fabrication technique key to new solar power technology.
Debunking the Moon Landing Hoax January 25, 2013
Posted by tkcollier in Science & Technology, Video.Tags: Hoax, NASA, Science & Technology, Video
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Even though this came out back in December, in case you haven’t already seen it…
How Leaded Gasoline Caused Our Violent Crime Wave. January 5, 2013
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, health, Science & Technology.Tags: Cars, Crime, Environment, Lead
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Starting in the 1960s, America saw a huge increase in levels of violent crime that peaked in the early 1990s, then steadily declined, and continues to decline today. All kinds of theories have been promulgated to explain this peak and decline in crime, and plenty of politicians in the 1990s took credit for it. Lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to “fill ‘er up with ethyl,” they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
The use of lead pipes to carry water to wealthy neigh
borhoods is claimed to be one major factor that contributed to the weakening and eventual destruction of the Roman Empire. At least we had the Science to discover our lead folly and correct it, even though much is to still be remediated. But the huge penal/judicial/police industrial complex budget justifications are threatened by such a simple crime source. Turns out criminologists were blaming the wrong Lead, when some accused the music of Led Zeppelin, among others.
Arctic Ocean Flowers December 15, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Cool photos, Enviroment, Science & Technology.Tags: Arctic Ice, climate, Cool photos, Environment, Nature, Science
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These spiky little bunches of ice form on thin and new ice in the Arctic Ocean. But these badboys can only form under very special conditions:
1) Calm winds. We can’t have these beauties blown away can we?
2) Cold, cold air. It has to be about 20C less than the water and since seawater freezes around -2C, that means the air must be about -22C or -7.6F. BRRR.
Frost flowers form when newly formed ice sublimates, that is ice changes directly from a solid to a gas totally bypassing the liquid stage. Initially, the water vapor formed by sublimation is the same temperature as the sea ice, but gets quickly cooled by the cold air. The air is then becomes supersaturated with water vapor, which means the air has too water much in it. Air really doesn’t want to hold all that excess water vapor, so when the supersaturated air touches another ice crystal the water vapor quickly turns back into ice. (Click the image to enlarge)
Video – Southern Lights From Space Station December 9, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Science & Technology, Video.Tags: Aurora, Space
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Video of the Aurora Australis taken by the crew of Expedition 29 on board the International Space Station. This sequence of shots was taken September 17, 2011 from 17:22:27 to 17:45:12 GMT, on an ascending pass from south of Madagascar to just north of Australia over the Indian Ocean.
Explore A Virtual Human Body With Stunning Graphics December 6, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Cool Sites, health, Science & Technology.Tags: Anatomy, Education, medical, Science
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In the old days, learning about the components of the human body meant poring over a copy of Grey’s Anatomy. Or, if you were studying medicine, you could take a scalpel to a real cadavre of course.
Now, thanks to a fabulous web site at www.biodigitalhuman.com, you can learn about the makings of the human body without having to resort to boring textbooks or a lab.
With nothing more than a web browser and a decent internet connection you can browse the virtual skeleton. You can choose between male and female, zoom and rotate the skeleton, and turn on/off the display of specific bodily systems such as reproductive, cardiovascular and so on. You can also view the location and symptoms of hundreds of common diseases.
Watch “NASA | Earth at Night” on YouTube December 5, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, Science & Technology, Video.Tags: Space
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Trying To Prove We Live In A Virtual Reality October 30, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, Religion, Science & Technology.Tags: Astrophysics, Matrix, Science, Science Fiction
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One of modern physics’ most cherished ideas is quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong nuclear force, how it binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons, how these form nuclei that themselves interact. This is the universe at its most fundamental.
So an interesting pursuit is to simulate quantum chromodynamics on a computer to see what kind of complexity arises. The promise is that simulating physics on such a fundamental level is more or less equivalent to simulating the universe itself.
There are one or two challenges
of course. The physics is mind-bogglingly complex and operates on a vanishingly small scale. So even using the world’s most powerful supercomputers, physicists have only managed to simulate tiny corners of the cosmos just a few femtometers across. (A femtometer is 10^-15 metres.)
That may not sound like much but the significant point is that the simulation is essentially indistinguishable from the real thing (at least as far as we understand it).
It’s not hard to imagine that Moore’s Law-type progress will allow physicists to simulate significantly larger regions of space. A region just a few micrometres across could encapsulate the entire workings of a human cell.
Again, the behaviour of this human cell would be indistinguishable from the real thing.
It’s this kind of thinking that forces physicists to consider the possibility that our entire cosmos could be running on a vastly powerful computer. If so, is there any way we could ever know?
Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals. They say there is a way to see evidence that we are being simulated, at least in certain scenarios.
via The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation | MIT Technology Review. (more…)
See Inside Google’s Brain October 20, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Science & Technology.Tags: Data Center, Google, Science & Technology
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Data centers – Google Data centers.
Photo of the brains behind Paw (dad for those that don’t speak Country). Does have a Sci-Fi Matrix-like look to it. This link will take you to a wall of photos, of various Google Data centers, inside and out. Google has also posted a video.
Civilization’s Tools, Just Add People – Open Source Ecology September 22, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in cool stuff, Enviroment, Science & Technology.Tags: Civilization, Environment, Science & Technology
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If you escaped to a Utopia and wanted to bring the discoveries that feed, build and power our civilizations along, these are the machines you would want to bring with you. The only thing that I see missing is the means to defend your colony from others who may want your technology, rather than build it themselves. Some of these have come to fruition, such as an inexpensive machine that can create 16 earth rammed bricks a minute. This creation should have great 3rd world applications today - in the best Stewart Brand “Whole Earth Catalog” tradition from the 60′s.
The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comfortset these.
2012 winners : Astronomy Photographer of the Year September 21, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Cool photos, Enviroment, Science & Technology.Tags: Astronomy, Cool photos
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A repeat win by Martin Pugh. Click on the link to see the rest.
2012 winners : Astronomy Photographer of the Year : Exhibitions : Visit : RMG.
Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science September 15, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Geopolitics, Religion, Science & Technology.Tags: History, Islam, Religion, Science
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From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. Click on this link to see 20 of the their greatest discoveries. How Islamic inventors changed the world – Science – News – The Independent.
Today Muslims are a fifth of the world’s population, yet contribute only 7% of the world’s GDP. Arabs comprise 5 percent of the world’s population, but publish just 1.1 percent of its books, according to the U.N.’s 2003 Arab Human Development Report. Between 1980 and 2000, Korea granted 16,328 patents, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., granted a combined total of only 370, many of them registered by foreigners.
What went wrong?
The Is
lamic turn away from scholarship actually preceded the civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world.
While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.
The Ash’ari view has endured to this day. Its most extreme form can be seen in some sects of Islamists. For example, Mohammed Yusuf, the late leader of a group called the Nigerian Taliban, explained why “Western education is a sin” by explaining its view on rain: “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.” As Robert R. Reilly argues in The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), “the fatal disconnect between the creator and the mind of his creature is the source of Sunni Islam’s most profound woes.”
Inquiry into the history of Arabic science, and the recovery and research of manuscripts of the era, may have a beneficial effect — so long as it is pursued in an analytical spirit. That would mean that Muslims would use it as a resource within their own tradition to critically engage with their philosophical, political, and founding flaws. If that occurs, it will not arise from any Western outreach efforts, but will be a consequence of Muslims’ own determination, creativity, and wisdom — in short, those very traits that Westerners rightly ascribe to the Muslims of the Golden Age
The New Atlantis » Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science.
The End of Cheap Food September 15, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, Food, Science & Technology.Tags: Famine, Food, Future, Science
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Ever since the days of Thomas Malthus, who famously predicted in the 18th century that population increases would far outstrip gains in food production, those who have foreseen global famine have been proved relentlessly wrong.
Twice before, our species has been saved from starvation by science. But as we move towards a planet of eight billion people, we are in uncharted territory. Let’s hope a new Norman Borlaug is waiting in the wings.
Shortly after Malthus made his grim prediction, we saw the first Agricultural Revolution – the systematic application of science and technology to farming. New varieties of crops, an understanding of crop rotation and the development of mechanisation saw yields soar. Hunger was also averted by the development of a global trade in food, spurred by the advent of steam ships and refrigeration.
Still, the population kept rising – but along came a saviour in the form of Norman Borlaug, one of the most important human beings ever to have lived. Hitler will always be famous for killing millions; yet Dr Borlaug, an American food scientist, saved billions, and yet relatively few of us have heard of him. In the 1960s, he bred new varieties of wheat and rice and other crops, a breakthrough now called the Green Revolution. If it hadn’t been for him, then Asia and perhaps South America would have seen serious famine in the 1970s.
Now we are reaching the limits of the Green Revolution.
via Can science prevent the great global food crisis? – Telegraph.
Galactic Camouflage –”Advanced ET Civilizations May be Undetectable” September 15, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Enviroment, Science & Technology.Tags: ET, UFO, Universe
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“Intelligent species might reasonably worry about the possible dangers of self-advertisement and hence incline towards discretion” — the “Undetectability Conjecture,” put forth by Beatriz Gato-Rivera, a theoretical physicist at the Instituto de Fisica Fundamental (previously Instituto de Matematicas y Fisica Fundamental) of the CSIC (Spanish Scientific Research Council) in Madrid.
According to Gato-Rivera, we may find ourselves in a universe in which there exist intelligent technological civilizations but they have chosen to be undetectable, camouflaging themselves mainly for security reasons (because advanced civilizations could also be aggressive).
Stephen Hawking says “there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?”
Why hasn’t the Earth been visited, and even colonized? Hawking asks. “I discount suggestions that UFO’s contain beings from outer space. I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant.”
via Galactic Camouflage –”Advanced ET Civilizations May be Undetectable” (Today’s Most Popular).
Russia’s Bridge to Nowhere September 8, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in In The News, Politics, Science & Technology.Tags: Bridge, Geopolitics, Politics, Putin, Russia
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Alaska doesn’t have the biggest boondoggle bridge project. Putin just wasted over a billion dollars on a bridge to show off at this week’s 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference. The bridge to the Russky island, the world’s largest cable-stayed bridge, dead-ends just beyond the bridge, meaning that the 5,000 local residents, who live on the other side of the island and have no access to telephones, public lighting or running water, still have to use a ferry to reach the mainland.
via Bridge to Russky Island – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Movie Deal for 14 year-old’s Garage Fusion Reactor August 14, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in In The News, Science & Technology.Tags: Education, Nuclear Physics, Prodigy
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Taylor Wilson always dreamed of creating a star. Now he’s become one. This story about a 14 year old prodigy will be directed by Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols. Wilson gained notoriety for experimenting with nuclear materials with his parents’ approval, and achieving nuclear fusion by the age of 14.
When his grandmother became ill with cancer, Wilson also attempted to develop a cure for the disease using short-lived isotopes.
The film will reportedly contrast Wilson’s story with the similar tale of Michigan teenager David Hahn, whose attempt to build a breeder reactor in his parents’ shed achieved results that were more dangerous than desirable. Link below is to original story. Picture is of Taylor in his garage.
A Computer Built For Mars August 11, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in In The News, Science & Technology.Tags: Computers, Curiosity, Mars Rover, Science, Space
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The PowerPC RAD750 chip at the heart of the Curiosity Mars rover’s central computer can withstand temperature extremes and massive doses of space radiation without the dreaded ‘blue screen of death.’
“First, you have to develop the radiation hardening techniques and actually implement them in the design,” said Scott Doyle, a BAE systems engineer for satellite electronics. “The next step is you have to qualify each of those individual components and that qualification is normally a year, a year-and-a-half, just to do that.”"Then they get integrated on the board, and that board has to go through qualification activity to prove out the board. Then once that board gets integrated into the satellite at the system level, there’s several years worth of qualification testing that goes in at the satellite level. You add all that up, you’re talking five to eight years of qualification work.”
The resulting computers can cost anywhere from $200,000 to a half-million dollars. While all that might seem like overkill to an outsider, space-based computers simply have to work. “There’s no repairman in space,” Doyle said.
But given the unavoidable limitations in processing speed and memory, Curiosity’s programmers face a daunting task when it comes to writing software. “What’s hard about this, my phone has a processor that’s 10 times as fast as the processor that’s on Curiosity and it has 16 times as much storage as Curiosity has and my phone doesn’t have to land anything on Mars,” Cichy said. “All my phone has to do is follow (a friend’s) Twitter feed.”
via Slow, but rugged, Curiosity’s computer was built for Mars | Cutting Edge – CNET News.
Fire and Ice and Aurora in Iceland July 9, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Cool photos, Science & Technology.Tags: Astronomy, Aurora, Cool photos, Volcano
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Sometimes both heaven and Earth erupt. In Iceland in 1991, the volcano Hekla erupted at the same time that auroras were visible overhead. Hekla, one of the most famous volcanoes in the world, has erupted at least 20 times over the past millennium, sometimes causing great destruction. The last eruption occurred only twelve years ago but caused only minor damage
Amazing Micron Pictures June 27, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Cool photos, Science & Technology.Tags: Biology, Cool photos, Science
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Wellcome Image Awards 2012 | Wellcome Image Awards.
Click on the link above to see the 16 finalists and the winning photo closeup of a living brain.
Catherine Draycott, head of Wellcome Images and a member of the judging panel, said: ‘The Wellcome Image Awards are unique in that the winners are chosen for their scientific and technical merit as much as for their aesthetic appeal.
‘They offer people a chance to get closer to science and research and see it in a different way, as a source of beauty as well as providing important information about ourselves and the world around us.
The other picture here is of a Caffeine Crystal. 
Easter Island Heads Have Bodies! May 30, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Art, Science & Technology.Tags: Archeology, Art, History
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Our EISP excavations recently exposed the torsos of two 7 m tall statues (Figure 4). Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors to the island have been astonished to see that, indeed, Easter Island statues have bodies! More important, however, we discovered a great deal about the Rapa Nui techniques of ancient engineering:
- the dirt and detritus partially burying the statues was washed down from above and not deliberately placed there to bury, protect, or support the statues
- the statues were erected in place and stand on stone pavements.
- post holes were cut into bedrock to support upright tree trunks
- rope guides were cut into bedrock around the post holes
- posts, ropes, stones, and different types of stone tools were all used to carve and raise the statues upright Thanx to Neil Rooney Read More
Newly Discovered Mayan Calendar Disproves End-of-the-World Hoopla May 19, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in In The News, Religion, Science & Technology.Tags: Doomsday, Mayan Calendar, Science
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Oldest Known Mayan Astronomical Calendar Stuns Scientists – TIME.
Archaeologists, excavating the ninth-century Maya complex of Xultun in Guatemala, say they have found what may have been a workspace for the town’s scribe. Paintings on the walls, they report, appear to include calculations related to the Maya calendar.
The researchers, writing in today’s edition of the journal Science, say the calculations project 7,000 years into the future. There’s no hint that the calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012, despite popular belief.
“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” said Anthony Aveni at Colgate University, a scholar of Maya astronomy and a co-author of the paper. “You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on.”
“He has WiFi” May 14, 2012
Posted by tkcollier in Humor, Science & Technology.Tags: birds, Humor, WiFi
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