Science, Engineering, & Technology in the News

The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
This movie looks great. What if America had really pushed rocket technology right after WW II? Would we have been on Mars by 1968? :think:
 
Nick M

Nick M

Plymouth Colonist
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Hall of Fame
Sorry to interupt, why don't you like the Osprey? I am aware of the many devolopement problems, but what is it that you see as wrong?

You know that if the Army or Marine corp was adamant about a machine that could do something would help them, it will get done.
 
The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
Nick M said:
Sorry to interupt, why don't you like the Osprey? I am aware of the many devolopement problems, but what is it that you see as wrong?

You know that if the Army or Marine corp was adamant about a machine that could do something would help them, it will get done.
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I LOVE the concept of the Osprey! The Osprey just looks COOL! :thumb: It's quite an engineering marvel. However, it's not ready for active service even though the Marine Corp says it is. The design compromises are troubling. But the Marine Corp is under pressure to get this aircraft up and running. But the Marine Corp has never really had much experience with an aircraft program like this. It's been in development for decades. Also, in the report I posted many people who are close to the project have said it's the Osprey still has design and engineering issues. I want American servicemen to have equipment that will help then do their jobs and not get them killed. I still think the Osprey has more potential in commerical markets. But they have to work out the kinks.
 
Nick M

Nick M

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I don't see how it is more useful than their main bird as is. But obviously they do. I haven't seen it yet here, but I am not in Anbar anymore either.
 
The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
Don't mess with the pachyderms! :think:

Elephants can literally sniff out danger

By Michael Kahn
Reuters
Thu Oct 18, 12:20 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Elephants can literally smell danger, according to a study on Thursday that shows the animals can sniff out whether humans are friends or foes.

The study in Kenya found elephants detected both the scents and colors of garments worn by Masai tribesman who often come into conflict with the animals when herding cattle.

When detecting the scent of a Masai, the elephants turned up their trunks to orient themselves to the smell and then stampeded away until they reached cover in the tall grass.

"The degree with which the elephants are able to classify people hasn't been shown before in any animal," said Lucy Bates, a cognitive psychologist at the University of St. Andrews, who worked on the study published in Current Biology.

Working with the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in southern Kenya, the researchers presented the animals with clean clothing and material worn by either a Masai or Kamba tribesman.

They did not stampede when sniffing either clean clothes or those worn by Kamba tribesmen, farmers who pose little threat to the animals, Bates said.

"The reactions between the Masai and the Kamba were so different," Bates said in a telephone interview. "They weren't reacting as if it was the same predator."

To test their reactions further, the researchers presented the elephants with red material, the same color as the Masai's traditional costume, and plain white clothing.

When the animals spied red, they stamped their feet and shook their heads in an aggressive manner while the color white failed to spark such aggressive behavior, Bates said.

"The reaction with the Masai clothes was very intense," Bates said.

The findings could boost conservation efforts in Kenya focused on keeping people and pachyderms apart, Bates said.

The researchers suspect elephants across Africa are just as perceptive. "Elephants would likely have the same ability to make these discriminations across Africa but it would be for different groups," Bates said.
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MaryContrary

MaryContrary

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Genesis 9:2 "The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands."
 
The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
I was wondering how many of you ever knew the USSR built and flew their own space shuttle called the Buran. It flew once in 1988 before the USSR collapsed and the program was canceled. I actually got to see the Buran up close in April 2002 when I traveled to Baikonur to launch a satellite. It looked really impressive a bit dusty though. I was lucky because about three weeks after I saw it the entire roof collapsed on top of the Buran killing eight men. :noid: I'll say one thing about :Commie: 's they sure can build some cool aerospace vehicles.
 
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The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
:think:
Astronomers find system with five planets

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science EditorTue Nov 6, 3:39 PM ET

NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system and say the discovery suggests there are many solar systems that are, just like our own, packed with planets.

The new planet is much bigger than Earth, but is a similar distance away from its sun, a star known as 55 Cancri, the astronomers said on Tuesday.

Four planets had already been seen around the star, but the discovery marks the first time as many as five planets have been found orbiting a solar system outside our own with its eight planets, said Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University.

Life could conceivably live on the surface of a moon that might be orbiting the new planet, but such a moon would be far too small to detect using current methods, the astronomers said.

"The star is very much like our own sun. It has about the same mass and is about the same age as our sun," Fischer told reporters.

"It's a system that appears to be packed with planets."

It took the researchers 18 years of careful, painstaking study to find the five planets, which they found by measuring tiny wobbles in the star's orbit. The first planet discovered took 14 years to make one orbit.

They said 55 Cancri is 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, a light-year being the distance light travels in one year -- about 5.8 trillion miles.

The newly discovered planet has a mass about 45 times that of Earth and may resemble Saturn, the astronomers said.

HARBORING LIFE?

It is the fourth planet out from the star and completes one orbit every 260 days -- a similar orbit to that of Venus.

"It would be a little bit warmer than the Earth but not very much," said Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona.

The planet is 72 million miles from its star -- closer than the Earth's 93 million miles, but the star is a little cooler than our own sun.

"If there were a moon around this new planet ... it would have a rocky surface, so water on it in principle could puddle into lakes and oceans," said Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.

But the moon would have to carry a lot of mass to hold the water, he said. Water is, of course, key to life.

"This discovery of the first-ever quintuple planetary system has me jumping out of my socks," Marcy added. "We now know that our sun and its family of planets is not unusual."

Marcy and other astronomers strongly believe that many stars are hosts to solar systems similar to our own. But small objects such as planets are very hard to detect.

Technology that would allow scientists to detect planets as small as Earth is decades away, the scientists agreed.

The researchers have been looking at 2,000 nearby stars using the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

They have posted images of what the planets may look like on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/telecon-20071106/.

The inner four planets of 55 Cancri are all closer to the star than Earth is to the sun. The closest, about the mass of Uranus, zips around the star in just under three days at a distance of 3.5 million miles.
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The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
Wow.

New technique creates cheap, abundant hydrogen

AFP
Mon Nov 12, 2007
5:12 PM ET



US researchers have developed a method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material, potentially providing an abundant source of this clean-burning fuel, according to a study released Monday.

The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water.

Numerous public transportation systems are moving toward hydrogen-powered engines as an alternative to gasoline, but most hydrogen today is generated from nonrenewable fossil fuels such as natural gas.

The method used by engineers at Pennsylvania State University however combines electron-generating bacteria and a small electrical charge in a microbial fuel cell to produce hydrogen gas.

Microbial fuel cells work through the action of bacteria which can pass electrons to an anode. The electrons flow from the anode through a wire to the cathode producing an electric current. In the process, the bacteria consume organic matter in the biomass material.

An external jolt of electricity helps generate hydrogen gas at the cathode.

In the past, the process, which is known as electrohydrogenesis, has had poor efficiency rates and low hydrogen yields.

But the researchers at Pennsylvania State University were able to get around these problems by chemically modifying elements of the reactor.

In laboratory experiments, their reactor generated hydrogen gas at nearly 99 percent of the theoretical maximum yield using aetic acid, a common dead-end product of glucose fermentation.

"This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added in the process," said Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State.

The technology is economically viable now, which gives hydrogen an edge over another alternative biofuel which is grabbing more headlines, Logan said.

"The energy focus is currently on ethanol as a fuel, but economical ethanol from cellulose is 10 years down the road," said Logan.

"First you need to break cellulose down to sugars and then bacteria can convert them to ethanol."

One of the immediate applications for this technology is to supply the hydrogen that is used in fuel cell cars to generate the electricity that drives the motor, but it could also can be used to convert wood chips into hydrogen to be used as fertilizer.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Nick M

Nick M

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That will be interesting.

What is also interesting is how it is always mentioned that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but the main part of it is available in water and hydrocarbon on earth is left out.

We harvest one very easily compared to the other.
 
The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
:car:

Alternative fuels may boost pollution

AFP
Tue Nov 13, 2007

Some alternative vehicle fuels such as liquid coal can cause more harmful greenhouse gas emissions than polluters such as petrol or diesel, scientists warned in a US study released Tuesday.

"Liquid coal, for example, can produce 80 percent more global warming pollution than gasoline," said the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit environmental group, in a statement introducing its study.

Liquid coal is viewed as a potential replacement to the oil on which countries rely heavily to fuel vehicles.

"Corn ethanol, conversely, could be either more polluting or less than gasoline depending on how the corn is grown and the ethanol is produced," the report said.

The analysis was based on replacing a fifth of all gasoline consumed in the United States with alternative fuels by 2030.

If most of these alternatives consist of liquid coal, the change could pump pollution into the atmosphere equivalent to 34 million more cars on the road. Favoring cleaner "advanced biofuels," on the other hand, could cut harmful gases by a similar amount.

The cleanest alternative, the report said, is cellulosic ethanol, made from grass or wood chips -- it could cut emissions by more than 85 percent.

"We need to wean ourselves off oil, but we should replace it with the cleanest alternatives possible," said the author of the study, Patricia Monahan, in the report. "Let's not trade one bad habit for another."
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The Berean

The Berean

Well-known member
:shocked: :shocked:

Scientists find fossil of enormous bug

By THOMAS WAGNER
Associated Press Writer

This was a bug you couldn't swat and definitely couldn't step on. British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever. How big? Bigger than you, and at 8 feet long as big as some Smart cars.

The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study's three authors.

"This is an amazing discovery," he said Tuesday.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were," he said.

The research found a type of sea scorpion that was almost half a yard longer than previous estimates and the largest one ever to have evolved.

The study, published online Tuesday in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, means that before this sea scorpion became extinct it was much longer than today's average man is tall.

Prof. Jeorg W. Schneider, a paleontologist at Freiberg Mining Academy in southeastern Germany, said the study provides valuable new information about "the last of the giant scorpions."

Schneider, who was not involved in the study, said these scorpions "were dominant for millions of years because they didn't have natural enemies. Eventually they were wiped out by large fish with jaws and teeth."

Braddy's partner paleontologist Markus Poschmann found the claw fossil several years ago in a quarry near Prum, Germany, that probably had once been an ancient estuary or swamp.

"I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realized there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab. After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw," said Poschmann, another author of the study.

"Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out. The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together. It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilize it," he said.

Eurypterids, or ancient sea scorpions, are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of today's scorpions and possibly all arachnids, a class of joint-legged, invertebrate animals, including spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks.

Braddy said the fossil was from a Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae, a kind of scorpion that lived only in Germany for about 10 million years, about 400 million years ago.

He said some geologists believe that gigantic sea scorpions evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others suspect they evolved in an "arms race" alongside their likely prey, fish that had armor on their outer bodies.

Braddy said the sea scorpions also were cannibals that fought and ate one other, so it helped to be as big as they could be.

"The competition between this scorpion and its prey was probably like a nuclear standoff, an effort to have the biggest weapon," he said. "Hundreds of millions of years ago, these sea scorpions had the upper hand over vertebrates — backboned animals like ourselves."

That competition ended long ago.

But the next time you swat a fly, or squish a spider at home, Braddy said, try to "think about the insects that lived long ago. You wouldn't want to swat one of those."
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