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Bridge Power!

When you ask someone what they think of when someone mentions renewable energy the most common answer is solar power or wind power. The problem with these two sources is that they are annoyingly unpredictable. Solar power only works for half the day when the sun is out and even during the day, certain conditions such as clouds and rain can restrict the amount of energy collected. Wind turbines obviously use the wind to generate electricity but as everyone knows, the wind is arguably one of the most unpredictable things created by Mother Nature. People have started to realize this and its resulted in wind power efforts to be the lowest they have been in the last four years.

Tidal power on the other hand, is relatively predictable and since our planet’s surface is 70% ocean there is an abundance of real estate available. If all the world’s oceans were set up with some type of tidal power harnesser, in five days enough energy would have been generated to power the entire United States of America for a year!! I think that one fact tells us the answers to all our energy problems. Obviously I know that we can’t hook up the entire ocean because of problems such as not having an efficient way to transport electricity long distances and extreme temperatures and pressures. The most popular way to capture tidal power is to plant underwater windmills everywhere. The problem with this is the that most of the underwater currents just kind of slip around the blades of the windmill which results in only 35% of the energy in the currents to harnessed.

A Canadian company called Blue Energy has created a turbine system that is installed underneath bridges. The system stacks hundreds of seven-megawatt turbines on top of each other so that there is no free space for the water to flow except through the turbines. This creates a slight damming effect that forces the water through but it is still slow enough to be safe for fish. This system results in each turbine generating 4 times as much power that a standard “underwater windmill” turbine makes. IF the Golden Gate Bridge was to be outfitted with this system it would create enough electricity to power the ENTIRE CIRTY OF SAN FRANSICO! That’s the equivalent of 2,000 megawatts!

Another thing this system has over other dam systems is that to maintain the turbines a permanent crane on rails is attached to the road deck where individual turbines can be brought up so that they can be periodically serviced. Other systems similar to this, divers or for larger systems, specialized submarines must go and service the turbines underwater.

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Helping the World with One Tab at a Time

Google has now come out with this new extension that records every tab you open and they donate to charity. They have charities such as: The nature conservation, for planting trees, Charity water for building wells to bring people safe drinking water, doctors without borders to provide vaccinations, Un Techo para mi País to provide shelter for those that don’t have, and finally, Room to read to bring books to children in developing countries to learn more. 

Not every tab provides one of each it more like a fraction of one. For example if I open a new tab it will give me .1 vaccinations. I myself am up to 57 tabs and 2.2 vaccinations, 5.7 books, 0.3 person's clean water provided, .6 square feet of shelter built, and 5.7 trees built. So if you don’t have Google chrome download that here and if you do have it you can download the extension here.

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Nexus S Review

As Google released their newest and best phone they have updated it to the new gingerbread 2.3. So before I begin talking about the phone it isn’t really comparable to other phone yet because nearly none of them have the same software yet, gingerbread 2.3.

Let’s start with the hardware, showing off its 1GHz Hummingbird CPU, 512MB of RAM, a 4-inch, 800 x 480 curved Super AMOLED display, 16GB of storage, a 5 megapixel rears and VGA front-facing camera, and near field communication capabilities. This is just part of the phone because some of the most astonishing stuff is inside the new software that has debuted with the Nexus S.

The screen is something that is a little weird....because it is curved. As seen here in this picture it has two lips on the top and bottom ends. 

This gives a good feel to the phone when you are using the screen.  I really like the feel of this phone when you hold it you feel like it belongs in your hand. On the left-hand side you will find the volume rockers and on the right-hand side you will find a power/sleep button and on the bottom there is a micro usb port, and 3.5mm headphone jack. 

Now on to the processor, because it has a 1GHz hummingbird CPU which is stunningly fast. While taking it on a benchmark test it got 55.6 FPS (frames per second) which is one of the fastest, if not THE fastest score I’ve seen.  
There is also 16 GB of internal memory but honestly it was a huge mistake not having a micro SD card slot. For most people 16 GB is enough but being limited by it is not the best thing. 

Now the call quality of the phone, the call quality is among the best, I have found it better than my Droid incredible but this is subject to certain areas. Also the speaker phone quality didn’t break up and showed promise and stability. The data speed is a little better than att service by about .5 Mbps.

Now to some of the most important things like the camera and battery life, the camera is exceptional but not the best because it is a 5 megapixel and is good in low light shots. The disappointing fact about rare front camera is a vga one, which mean low-res, and grainy. This is usual with front facing cameras but I was hoping this phone would change that. The battery life is very promising, powered by the 1500 mAh stock battery; it lasted about 20 hours before I had to start to charge it again, compared to 16 hours on my Droid Incredible even after flashing new roms and kernels for the battery to live longer. I still believe people will mess with the software to longer the battery and/or buy extended batteries. 

The most important thing about this phone is the fact that it was released with 2.3 gingerbread which has also been stunning. The user interface of the phone is like taking froyo and putting a suit on it. It just has so many small enhancements, such as scrolling on any setting screen when the screen hits the bottom it flashes yellow letting you know you have reached the bottom. The little things like the icons at the top now being green and the menu is now black and not white just makes the UI look a lot better and it is all a step in the right direction.  One of the most anticipated new features is the keyboard which some have had for weeks, which is now black and will allow you to multitouch type. For example if I am touching "h" and "i" at the same time the keyboard will recognize that I touched "h" first and it will type "hi" for me. This is really amazing because before it would only types the one letter "i" instead of "hi." But it isn’t all good because they have changed it so when you type a punctuation it doesn’t switch back to letters which is really unusual and bad because that means we have to do it ourselves. 

In the end this is a really good phone but most of it is just usual and nothing groundbreaking. I would give it an 8/10 based on reliability and performance. 

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How to Cloak a Crime in a Beam of Light

The 14th member of Danny Ocean's team of thieves might just be a physicist, making use of an "event cloak" dreamed up by Martin McCall's team at Imperial College London.

Unlike invisibility cloaks, which bend light around an object, an event cloak would open up a time gap in the light by controlling its speed through optical fibres, and then seal it again to hide all traces of activity within the gap. A modified version could, in principle, allow a safe-cracker to work while the security camera appears to record an empty room.

McCall's colleague Alberto Favaro compares the way it works to the way a road packed with speeding cars can still allow a pedestrian to cross. Some cars slow down, creating a jaywalker-friendly, vehicle-free gap, before speeding up again to re-establish the seamless flow of traffic.

In the Imperial team's blueprint for their cloak, an optical fibre serves as the road, while the photons passing down the fibre take the place of the cars.

This approach relies on an unusual property of silica optical fibres: their refractive index, the measure of how fast light travels through the silica, changes with the brightness of the light. To open an event cloak in the stream of light passing down the fibre, a control laser injects an additional pulse of light. The increased brightness slows the light down, says team member Paul Kinsler.

As the brighter section moves along the fibre it falls progressively further behind the dimmer, faster-moving light ahead, creating a gap in illumination. The brighter laser pulse is then filtered out again, leaving all of the light with the same brightness and travelling at the same speed, and so maintaining the size of the gap.

The light signal to be "cloaked" can be injected into this gap and sent down the optical fibre with the rest of the light. After the signal has been read, it can be removed to leave a gap once again.

To seal the gap, a bright laser pulse is injected into the light stream in front of the gap, slowing it down enough to allow the light behind the gap to catch up. Finally, the bright pulse is filtered out again. From then on, an observer monitoring the light would be unaware that it had once contained a gap – or a cloaked signal – apart from a slight delay to the light (see diagram).

To make the changes to the light stream completely undetectable, a more complex arrangement would be needed in which the gaps were created by speeding up some parts of the light stream and slowing down others. This would only be possible using metamaterials.

Because the event cloak opens a gap in the flow of light, anything – or anyone – exploiting it would be working in the dark. But the biggest hindrance to cloaking a safe-cracker is that the longer the event you want to hide, the greater the distance required to manipulate the light. "Light travels so fast that even a very small time corresponds to a very big space," says Favaro.

Using 9 kilometres of optical fibre, the elementary set-up McCall and his team envisage could open and close a gap wide enough to equate to about 5 nanoseconds – long enough to allow a high-priority signal to pass through a data fibre already at capacity.

Alexander Gaeta of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has built what he calls a time telescope, which also manipulates the speed of light through fibres. Though he says it would be interesting to try and demonstrate the event cloak, he foresees a possible snag. The intensity of light needed for such substantial changes in the optical fibre's refractive index may also generate scattered photons which could interfere with the control laser beam, Gaeta says.

[Via Gizmodo]

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Holographic Maps for the Battlefield

It’s one of those grandiose ideas that gets bandied about by Pentagon scientists and pops up in the press every few years. The “Face of Allah” weapon would beam a massive, lifelike hologram over a battlefield, projecting the image of some deity “to incite fear in soldiers on a battlefield,” according to one researcher.

We last checked in on holographic weapons research two years ago, when the University of New Hampshire was working on some Pentagon-funded projects. Since then, another university team has turned holograms into a reality — but not as tools of war. Not yet, at least.

Optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian and his teammates at the University of Arizona have demonstrated what The New York Times calls “actual moving holograms that are filmed in one spot and then projected and viewed in another spot.” The Times likens the holograms to the tiny image of Princess Leia that R2D2 showed Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars, only “a lot more haltingly, as the display changes only every two seconds.”

Peyghambarian’s hologram is created by a suite of 16 cameras that use lasers to record data on “smart” plastic some distance away that, when hit by a special light, project the image in solid-looking 3D. A partner team at Columbia University is studying ways to beam the holo-data via the Internet, to allow 3D video chats or instantaneous transmission of holographic maps, blueprints or medical scans. Peyghambarian said it might take a decade for the technology to become affordable and widespread. Weaponization would be much further behind (though we wouldn’t bet on today’s cash-strapped military to invest in a Face-of-Allah gun). Cost aside, it’s just not very PC.

Early holograms are already a fixture in military headquarters, according to the Times article. A company called Zebra Imaging in Texas has been selling 2-by-3-foot plastic holographic maps to the Pentagon — its “main customer” — for $1,000 to $3,000 a pop. The military “sends data in computer files to the company. Zebra then renders holographic displays of, for example, battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.” No goofy 3D glasses required, just a custom-made LED flashlight that “activates” the image encoded in the plastic.

Zebra’s technology has other military applications, such as post-blast IED forensics, according to the company’s Website. “Analysts trying to understand the nature and construction of an explosive device … are able to understand the scene in 3D far better than the classic 2D ‘bird’s-eye view.’”

[Via Wired]

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BMW Uses Subliminal Messages To Sell Motorcycles

The BMW S1000R is fast enough and sexy enough (other than that one lazy eye) to sell itself, and you'd think a commercial showing World Superbike rider Ruben Xaus flogging one around the track would be quite enough to get people inclined to buy the things. Not enough for BMW. The company used the optical illusion of afterimage to temporarily imprint "BMW" onto the retinas of theater-goers. Behind the screen was a giant cut-out backed by an even bigger light (a Profoto Pro-7B, we're told). It flashed for an instant during the commercial and, while all the spectators noticed was a quick pop, when they were asked to close their eyes they saw the logo hovering in their vision. Subliminal? Possibly. Illegal? Maybe. Ingenious? Absolutely.
[Via Endgadget]

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Dragon Spacecraft Success Opens a New Era In Space Exploration

The Dragon spacecraft is now the first private spaceship to reach orbit and return safely to Earth. It just splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, after a perfect mission. This is a huge milestone in the history of space exploration.

After aborting the first launch attempt because of a false telemetry reading, the Falcon 9 rocket zoomed up flawlessly from Cape Canaveral (">watch video here), flying over the Atlantic Ocean and reaching orbit in under ten minutes. Seconds after shutting down its second stage, the Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket.

Dragon orbited the planet gathering crucial data for future missions. Then it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, opening its parachute and splashing gracefully in the Pacific Ocean, right on its projected target—this hasn't happened since the Apollo years! The SpaceX crew has already recovered the capsule.

But the important thing here is the fact that this feat—launching a spacecraft capable of carrying seven astronauts and returning it safely to Earth—has never been achieved outside of state agencies. By completing this mission, SpaceX has demonstrated that any private company with the needed resources could fly a spaceship into orbit. Like NASA Administrator Charles Bolden just declared:

While rocket launches from the Cape are considered a common occurrence, the historic significance of today's achievement by SpaceX should not be lost.

[...]

These new explorers are to spaceflight what Lindhbergh to commercial aviation.

We're witnessing the dawn of a new era whose ultimate result could be routine, safe access to space, with industry, academia, other agencies and other governments regularly sending payloads and people to low Earth orbit.

The Dragon capsule will enable the United States to stop depending on the Russians for launching astronauts to the space station. After the end of the space shuttle program, this will be badly needed.

It may very well be the main way to ferry both astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station and other private space stations in orbit, like the ones now being built by Bigelow.

This launch signals a new beginning in the age of space exploration. Congratulations, SpaceX.

[Via Gizmodo]

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HAPPY THOUSAND VIEWS!!!

Thank you, the readers, for 1000 page views! Heres to another thousand!

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3D TVs without glasses?!

First it was DLP then LCD then Plasma then LED. The new thing is 3D TVs and even though they have barely been out for 6 months, they are already being upgraded. The biggest complaints that people have with 3D TVs is that you have to wear special glasses to view 3D media. Now a few companies like Samsung and Intel have created special TVs that do not require glasses to watch 3D media. Of course this technology is still almost in the concept form. Intel gave a demonstration on their glassless 3D TVs and the Engadget reporter said that the experience was phenomenal if you stood at one of the eight postions where it worked. Otherwise the experience was sub-par and also, even if you were standing from one of the 8 “optimal” viewing angles, the quality was still sub 720p quality. I myself have seen a glassless 3D in person at the Museum of Science and Industry and I had the same experience as the guys over at Engadget in which it was very blurry when I viewed it from a distance and there was like 1 spot where it really was clear and the 3Dness (if that’s a word…) was perceptible.

With this information I’m very skeptical about many of the mobile devices with “3D” screens. India’s “Spice Mobility” has just announced the release of its “M-67 3D” phone which has a glassless 3D screen and only costs $97. The Nintendo 3DS is one of the better known glassless 3D devices which has yet to come out (anytime now Nintendo…..) but from the previews we have seen of it, it doesn’t look too bad. 

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New file format and grass roofs?!

There are millions of people out there who are trying to make us greener to save the planet. Many ingenious ideas have arisen through this “green movement” but the new .WWF file format is not one of them. The people over at the World Wildlife Fund decided that it would be a good idea to create a new file format that was pretty much the exact same thing as .pdf except it doesn’t allow you to print the document. The idea is that if you can’t print then you will be saving trees because you won’t be wasting paper but wow…what a dumb idea. The only thing this will succeed in is thoroughly pissing everyone off. I can’t really remember the last time I printed of something from a pdf document that I didn’t absolutely have to (probably because I NEVER have!..word documents on the other hand…). Another bad thing about the .WWF format is that right now, it is only available on Macs…..well I guess that’s a good thing since I only use windows.

Well on to an actually interesting green idea…The Lincoln Center in New York City has a roof covered in grass! OMGWTF?! Yes you heard correctly it truly is a grass roof. The project is called the “Hypar Pavilion” and covers an area of about 7,200 square feet. It is a perfect idea because it allows for business people to build what they want where they want while still keeping the environmentalists happy. As a bonus feature, since this is a relatively new thing, it will attract many tourists to the building, helping the restaurant below! It will not only keep the environmentalists happy because it brings some CO₂ munching greenery into the city but for many other reasons too. One of the things it will do is it will decrease the amount of storm-water runoff during storms which is always a good thing. Another way it helps is if you are replacing a black roof (which most roofs are) they decrease the albedo (measure of how strongly it reflects light from light sources such as the Sun) of the building top, which in turn reduces the heat island effect (and has a teeny-tiny effect on global warming but it's so small I really shouldn't mention it. In addition, since this is a restaurant, the rood could be used to grow fresh fruits and vegetables. 

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Netflix News

Everyone’s favorite streaming media service, Netflix, has decided that they don’t have enough TV shows (which I completely agree with) so what do they do? Announce that they are willing to pay $75,000 to $100,000 per episode!! Yes you read correctly. Per EPISODE not per season. One would think that when they are offering so much money they will get what they want immediately but of course that's not how it works. Let’s say that a show has 24 episodes (can you guess what show I’m talking about) per season and if Netflix is willing to pay $100,000 per episode, that amounts to $24,000,000! To help put this in perspective, as of December 2nd Netflix has spent a total of $350 million dollars on media rights for the movies and TV shows they stream. So in other words if Netflix spends about $24 million on a TV show season, they could only get 14 seasons for $350 million. Also another piece of data that may be helpful is that Netflix spends about $500 to $600 million on shipping per year!

 As always money is the root of all problems and when a huge amount of money like this is involved chaos ensues, in this case, over whether the TV network or the company that actually made the show gets the money. The TV networks says they have the rights to the “in-season distribution” and the production companies say they own the shows and they can do whatever they want with them including selling the rights to Netflix. So at least until this debate is worked out, Netflix’s buying spree may have to be put on hold for a bit.

No one is sure whether the $100,000 per episode went through or not but it seems that somehow or another Netflix has managed to sign a contract with the Disney-ABC Television Group granting Netflix the rights to keep a couple shows they already have through their streaming service but it also grants them full access to older shows. Some of the shows on the list from ABC include Scrubs (YES!), Ugly Betty, Reaper, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Brothers & Sisters. There are also many shows for the younger audiences out there from Disney such as Phineas and Ferb, The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and Hannah Montana.

In other random Netflix news, Barry McCarthy has decided to resign from his position of CFO of Netflix after a decade so that he can "pursue broader executive opportunities outside the company.” “HA! WHAT AN IDIOT!” is what I am thinking right now and I’m sure many of you agree with me. Netflix is the biggest streaming media service available right now and is showing no signs of slowing down. Every major platform available right now has a Netflix application including iOS, Android, PS3s, Wiis, Xbox 360s, many TVs and many many more. I'm not sure where McCarthy thinks he is going to get a better job than the CFO of Netflix but I guess it’s his choice….

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Navy Railgun Breaks World Record At Mach 7

There wasn’t much left of the 23-pound bullet, just a scalded piece of squat metal. That’s what happens when an enormous electromagnetic gun sends its ammo rocketing 5,500 feet in a single second.


The gun that fired the bullet is the Navy’s experimental railgun. The gun has no moving parts or propellants — just a king-sized burst of energy that sends a projectile flying. And today its parents at the Office of Naval Research sent 33 megajoules through it, setting a new world record and making it the most powerful railgun ever developed.


Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.


All that energy was “dump[ed] in 10 milliseconds,” says Charles Garrett, project manager at Dahlgren for the railgun.


But since there no explosion powering the projectile, why should the railgun have made any noise at all? Answer: the bullet went so fast it released a sonic boom.



Since 2005, the Navy has spent $211 million testing whether it can harness electromagnetic energy into a gun. The ultimate goal is to fire the gun at 64 megajoules, making it capable of sending a bullet 200 miles in six minutes. That’s 10 times farther than the Navy’s already-powerful guns can fire, keeping its ships far out of range of enemy anti-ship systems.


The Navy wants to put the railgun on a ship and power it through the ship’s batteries, something that’ll take years to develop. And since the gun’s power can be adjusted — it depends only on the batteries and the capacitors on board a ship, railgun scientists explained — it could theoretically be used to stop cruise missiles or even ballistic missiles.


That’s still a long way off. The Office of Science and Technology will keep running tests until 2017, largely for “thermal management,” says program manager Roger Ellis, basically to ensure that the materials used for the gun don’t get as fried as the bullet under the intense power generated. The Navy guesstimates that it’ll be ready for shipboard defense between 2020 and 2025.

Oh, and the last record holder for most powerful railgun? The same gun when it fired off a shot using 10.64 megajoules two years ago.
[Via Wired]

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The XM-25, A Computerized Grenade Launcher

Words like "futuristic," "computerized," "explosive," and "grenade launcher" really tickle our sensibilities, so perhaps it was no surprise that we honored the XM-25 grenade launcher - that futuristic-looking, computerized-targeting infantry weapon that hurls smart explosive rounds downrange - with a Best of What's New award last year. But with so much defense tech falling victim due to cost overruns, impracticality of deployment, or simple bureaucratic indecision, we're always pleasantly surprised to see new systems hit the battlefield. And that's exactly where the XM-25 is headed next month.


The shoulder-fired XM-25 supposedly deployed with Special Forces in Afghanistan this summer, though we couldn't tell you anything about that. The weapon packs 25-millimeter "smart" grenades that can be programmed to explode at a predetermined range. Each round contains a small magnet that generates AC current as it spins through the air, allowing a tiny on-board microprocessor to determine how far it's traveled.


The soldier can dial in the range on the weapon itself before firing, essentially giving him or her the ability to fire around corners. If an enemy combatant is hiding out of line of sight, the soldier can simply fire a round over the enemy's head or around a corner, programming the round to explode near the target (a laser range finder mounted on the gun helps the soldier make precise distance measurements). The ensuing burst of shrapnel makes for an unwelcome addition to any combatant's day.


The Army initially said it would incorporate some 12,000 of the weapons into its arsenal starting in 2012, but it appears the XM-25 made an impression on someone up the chain of command. Defense blog Soldier Systems reports five developmental XM-25 systems are bound for the 101st Airborne in eastern Afghanistan, slated for arrival in November. An additional 36 weapons will arrive to replace the original five sometime thereafter.
[Via PopSci]

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China Telecom Reroutes 15% of The Internet

For about 18 minutes in April, a Chinese telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the Internet, redirecting U.S. government and military traffic through Chinese servers. The misdirection affected NASA, all four branches of the military, the office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Senate.


We don’t yet know what this means — the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which released report on the incident today, says it is unclear whether it was intentional or just an accident — but at the very least, it’s one more piece of disturbing evidence showing the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack.


The hijacking was reported when it first happened, but this is the first acknowledgement that American government sites were affected. Along with the military and organizations like NASA and NOAA, the redirect affected commercial websites like Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft and IBM, according to ABC News, which broke the story this morning.


It’s not clear what happened to the data once it was rerouted through China Telecom, which is denying any hijack of Internet traffic. It could have been a pure technical error that “advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese servers,” as the report puts it.


Whether or not this was an innocent mistake, it’s clear the capability to reroute huge streams of data could enable malicious activities. Given Chinese entities’ Internet history, this is not good news. Remember last January’s attack on Google, intended to get human rights activists’ e-mail addresses?


From the report: “This level of access could enable surveillance of specific users or sites. It could disrupt a data transaction and prevent a user from establishing a connection with a site. It could even allow a diversion of data to somewhere that the user did not intend.”
Government officials are claiming their traffic was encrypted. so they have nothing to fear. But when members of Congress are “100 percent certain” the U.S. will suffer a cyberattack, incidents like this should sound the alarm.
[Via Pop-Sci]

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Upgrading=Downgrading?

Usually when you hear that a new car model is coming out you would expect some small aesthetic differences, new technology and maybe a better engine. Unfortunately, because of this issue called global warming everyone wants fuel efficient cars, changing what we would usually expect from a new car. So in order to get people to buy their cars, car manufacturers are devising ways to make their cars more and more fuel efficient. The most common ways to do this is to make cars lighter, able to use E85 gas and make hybrid models. Apparently this isn’t enough so automakers including Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo and Fiat (a European company) have decided that in their newer models they will be putting downsized engines that are fuel efficient due to the sole fact that they are TINY!

 To the car enthusiasts dismay (me included) more and more cars are becoming this way and they are going to keep coming. For example the lowest end Corolla has a 1.6 liter engine and the lowest end Nissan, the Versa starts at $9,900 has a 1.6 liter engine. Volvo has been planning on debuting a new engine that is also 1.6 liters with 113 horsepower, but the problem is that Volvo does not make any tiny cars. At the moment, their smallest car starts at $24,000 and has a 2.5 liter engine making 227 horsepower. If they try to stick this tiny engine into any of their cars, I will probably cry. As always please comment bellow!

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High Speed Trains

Almost everywhere in the world except for the US use trains as a means of transportation across long distances. Some countries even have high speed train networks such as France, China and Japan. China has decided that just being a part of this list wasn’t good enough but they needed to be better than everyone else.

During their last test run, the Chinese hit a top speed of 302 miles per hour (486 kilometers per hour) between Beijing and Shanghai. This is a world record speed for an unmodified commercial train. When the line opens in 2012, the 824 mile (1318 kilometers) journey will be cut by five hours because of the ridiculously high speed of the trains. China already has the world's longest high-speed rail network, and it plans to cover 8,125 miles (13,000 kilometers) by 2012 and 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) by 2020.

This is all well and good for China but where the heck is our high speed railway?? In President Obama’s stimulus plan, there is $8 BILLION allocated for building nine lines for “bullet trains”. The plan calls for three lines to run through Illinois, turning Chicago into a bullet train hub. One would connect Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin, to Chicago and might later join Milwaukee to Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. In Ohio, a line would connect the cities of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus.

 Why isn’t this happening you ask you ask? One reason is because so government officials are worried that the money should be used to fix our road and highway system instead of creating a railroad that is “unwanted”.  Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker wrote this in a letter to the Transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, "I believe it is a grave mistake for the federal government to insist on building an unwanted passenger rail system at a time when our roads and bridges are literally crumbling," 

I personally think that we should be building these trains as they would greatly lower the congestion on inter-city highways and would be much more convenient than driving and cheaper than flying. If you have a different opinion please comment bellow!

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Robotic Camera Mimics Speed Of Human Eye

Some researchers at the Technical University of Munich have built an unassuming but no-less-remarkable mechanism for tilting and panning a small camera robotically. Designed to keep up with the eye movements of a human in gaze-tracking studies, the camera mount features three degrees of movement, and can flick around at a rapid 2500 degrees per second -- our flesh-composed eyeballs max out at a mere 1000. The setup uses ultrasonic piezo-actuators, which move prismatic joints, which drive spherically-jointed rods attached to the camera, keeping the weight under 100 grams and still acting gently enough to avoid rattling on top of the wearer's head.
[Via Engadget]

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NASA Find New Life

Biologists have isolated a bacterium that can use a deadly chemical in place of one of life’s key building blocks, in a finding NASA says could have major implications for astrobiology and our understanding of life on Earth.

In the study, researchers examined a bacteria living in a very salty and arsenic-heavy lake in northeastern California, not far from Yosemite National Park. It is not a space alien, nor is it “new life” — it’s an existing bacteria that lives in a difficult environment and was deliberately manipulated in a lab.

But the results are interesting because nothing like this has ever been done before. All life as we know it depends on six key ingredients — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. This bacteria can switch from phosphorus to arsenic — usually a deadly toxin — and not only survive, but thrive. It can swap arsenic for phosphorus so completely that arsenic is incorporated into its DNA and other biomolecules like ATP, according to the study. This is a first, and it upends our assumptions about how life works.

What this means for astrobiology is pretty speculative, however. When looking for life in other worlds, especially promising places like Saturn’s moon Titan or in the Martian soil, scientists look for telltale signs of life as we know it. That means carbon-based life, respiration with oxygen and carbon dioxide, amino acids, and so on.

This finding tells us that we should ditch these assumptions and broaden our horizons. If a humble Earthling bacteria can live on a poisonous chemical, then who knows what might lurk elsewhere in the solar system? We’ll have to recalibrate our mass spectrometers.

"I find this result delightful because it may have to expand my notion of what environmental constituents might enable habitability," said Pamela Conrad, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a principal investigator on the new Curiosity Mars rover, which will carry experiments designed to look for signs of life. "The implication is that we still don't know everything there is to know about what might make a habitable environment on another planet. We have to increasingly broaden our perspective."

In terms of its metabolism, the bacterium — a proteobacteria called GFAJ-1 — is actually not very interesting, according to Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a scientist with NASA's Astrobiology Institute and lead author of the paper released today. It is not a chemosynthetic bacteria, for instance, using chemicals instead of light to produce food. In that way, it's less exciting than well-studied extremophiles that live near superheated hydrothermal vents or the unforgiving sulfur lakes of Yellowstone National Park.

But it's interesting because it's a chemical mutant. In an arsenic-enriched environment in Wolfe-Simon's lab, its very DNA changed. It swapped arsenic for phosphorus in the nucleic acids that make up the backbone of DNA, and that's a revolutionary result, Elser said.

"Every living thing uses phosphorus to build its DNA," Elser said at a press conference Thursday. "The fact that I am sitting here today discussing the possibility that that is not true is quite shocking."

At the very least, that is interesting for our understanding of microbes, Wolfe-Simon said. Microorganisms are the oldest and most prevalent form of life, and this study shows that we know less about them than we thought. There may be many other species of microbes that can tolerate or thrive with arsenic, for instance. This is just the first time anyone has really ever tried to find one.

Wolfe-Simon said she had been thinking about chemical substitution for several years. Back in 2006, while she was a postdoctoral fellow at ASU, she proposed looking for life forms that can survive even substituting various chemicals for the building blocks of life. It's not a wild hypothesis — there are a few previous examples of trace metallic elements substituting for one another, including the switching of copper for iron as an oxygen carrier in some mollusks, for instance. The swapped elements share some chemical similarities, making the transition simpler.

Arsenic and phosphorus are also chemically analagous — arsenic is directly below phosphorus on your periodic table, and the elements have the same number of electrons in their outer shells, which makes them behave similarly. So swapping arsenic for phosphorus makes sense on paper. Wolfe-Simon wanted to find out if it worked in practice, and she went looking in a likely place — California's Mono Lake, which teems with life despite containing high levels of arsenic and a salinity level three times that of the oceans.

Wolfe-Simon and colleagues took core samples from the lake and brought GFAJ-1 into the lab. They simulated the lake environment and diluted the natural phosphorus until the mixture was rich in arsenic instead. The microbe thrived, and grew 1.5 times its previous size — its cells developed internal vacuole-like structures that account for some of that growth. Conrad, at NASA, said it makes sense that a life form's structure would change in response to its environment.

The team used various types of analysis to show the microbe accumulated arsenic in its DNA. It still contained some phosphorus, too, but not nearly enough to account for its growth, Wolfe-Simon said.

She is already working on an updated study to determine what the microbe will do when it can replicate with both arsenic and phosphorus as DNA ingredients. It will likely be the first of many studies to determine what the microbe can do — and how it can be used. It could help clean up arsenic-laden toxic waste, for instance. In a world with diminishing energy supplies (and dwindling phosphorus supplies) it could even conceivably lead to non-phosphorus-based sources of biofuel. But for now, that's largely science fiction, Elser said.

And, despite the hype over this little microbe, alien life remains firmly in that category as well.

[Via Pop-Sci]

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Hydrogen, Solar and Wind powered Ferry

Plan on visiting the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island via ferry next year? If so, pay close attention to the vessel you board, as it just might be the world's first to rely on hydrogen, solar and wind power for motorization. Currently, the New York Hornblower Hybrid (not to be confused with the San Francisco Hornblower Hybrid) is under construction in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and if all goes well, it'll reach completion in April. The 600-passenger boat be equipped with Tier 2 diesel engines, hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels and wind turbines, with power coming from a proton exchange membrane fuel cell that turns hydrogen into electricity. We're told that the diesel rigs will only kick in to cover "additional energy needs," but it's hard to say how often they'll actually be used. The eventual goal, however, is to do away with emissions altogether in the ferry process, and it seems that the technology is already capable of being scaled for use in other hybrid ferries, hybrid yachts and even hybrid tugs.
[Via Engadget]

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We're Baaaccckk

Yes its true, new articles will be posted starting this week.

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