Monday 7 April 2014

Converting waste heat into electricity

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Bruce White worked with semiconductors and transistors at Motorola and Texas Instruments. But when he left industry for a position on Binghamton University’s faculty, the materials scientist decided to take his research in a new direction. “I didn’t want to just continue to work on transistors and memory,” White says. “I wanted to try to apply those tools to big problems that impact society.” Energy is one of those big problems; in the United States, more than half of the energy we burn each year gets lost as heat instead of being put to use. “We do all this work to get oil out of the ground and to refine it, but when we try to do some work with it, most of the energy goes out the exhaust pipe of a car or out the smokestack of a power plant,” White says. “Even if we could reclaim a small fraction of what we throw away as heat, that would have a significant impact on our energy use.” There are ways to turn heat into electricity. If a material is hot on one side and cold on the other, the flow of heat from hot to cold can be turned

The post Converting waste heat into electricity has been published on Technology Org.


#materials
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For Space Projects, Zero Gravity

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The Mars rover Opportunity, still operating after 10 years on the planet, and the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn are among the NASA missions facing budget extinction.















via New York Times

If no other astronomy images

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If no other astronomy images
...make you stop and think, I think these will. The first one is often called the Eye of God - for obvious reasons. Happy with that :)
 #chandra

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory originally shared:

Chandra Flashback of the Day – NGC 6543: A Planetary Nebula Gallery
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/pne/

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Rebar technique strengthens case for graphene: Hybrid nanotube-graphene material promises to simplify manufacturing

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Carbon nanotubes become reinforcing bars that make two-dimensional graphene much easier to handle in a hybrid material. Chemists set nanotubes into graphene in a way that not only mimics how steel rebar is used in concrete but also preserves and even improves the electrical and mechanical qualities of both. The technique should make large, flexible, conductive and transparent sheets of graphene much easier to manipulate, which should be of interest to electronics manufacturers.

via Science Daily

BOSS quasars track the expanding universe—most precise measurement yet

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The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), pioneered the use of quasars to map density variations in intergalactic gas at high redshifts, tracing the structure of the young universe. BOSS charts the history of the universe's expansion in order to illuminate the nature of dark energy, and new measures of large-scale structure have yielded the most precise measurement of expansion since galaxies first formed.



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You are all stardust print

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


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You are all stardust

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Crows feed cuckoo chicks, get stinky defense against predators

Science Focus

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Vittorio Baglione

If you come across a young cuckoo in a bird’s nest this summer, you’ll be witness to one of the most bizarre sights in nature. Cuckoo chicks are interlopers in the nests of other species, and they can be seen being frantically fed by their unwitting foster parents even though they’re often many times larger than their hosts.

It makes you wonder: why on earth does this bird expend so much energy raising such clearly unrelated offspring? Or, more accurately, why haven’t all the species victimized by the cuckoo evolved some form of defense against this nest parasitism? The clue comes from thinking about this puzzle in terms of costs and benefits.

Raising a cuckoo chick often comes at an obvious cost. Common cuckoo chicks, for example, famously remove any host eggs or young from the nest within days of hatching. Chicks of some other cuckoo species will grow up alongside their host’s own offspring, yet they still remove competition. Magpie chicks often die of starvation when sharing a nest with great spotted cuckoo chicks, because the cuckoos beg to be fed more intensely.

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Explainer: what a flexed BICEP tells us about the big bang

Science Focus

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BICEP2 has spotted something pretty special from its South Pole base. Steffen Richter (Harvard University) The cosmological community is bubbling with the news that theBICEP2 experiment may have detected gravitational waves through measuring the radiation left over from the big bang. If the findings are correct, we will have the most convincing evidence to date that very early on, the universe experienced a phase of extremely rapid expansion known as “inflation”, during which a very small region was stretched to an enormous size, becoming bigger than our observable universe. We’ll also have a direct window into understanding particle physics at incredibly high energies and, in particular, the period of “grand unification”. This is far beyond what is possible to probe in particle experiments like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The big bang model says our universe is expanding and, as it does, it is slowly cooling down. Turning back the clock, this means that when the universe was much younger, it was also much hotter. The cosmic microwave background, which BICEP2 was probing, is radiation left over from this hotter epoch and provides the best evidence we have that the big bang actually happened. But while the big bang model has been confirmed

The post Explainer: what a flexed BICEP tells us about the big bang has been published on Technology Org.


#physics
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VIDEO: 'A deep misunderstanding of genetics'

Science Focus

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Prof Steve Jones says Boris Johnson shows a "deep misunderstanding of genetics" when he talks about cornflakes.
#science
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Sculpted Region of the Orion Nebula Rectangular Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: peel off, galaxies and stars, orion nebula detail, sculpted gas clouds, sgcion, stellar winds, sculpting trapezium stars, messier 42, messier 43

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A region within the Orion Nebula showing the sculpting effect that stars can have on any surrounding gas clouds. This glowing region reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected by the nearby Trapezium stars - collide with material.

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image code: sgcion

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

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A Solar Eclipse from the Moon

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Shifting evolution into reverse promises cheaper, greener way to make new drugs

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By shifting evolution into reverse, it may be possible to use “green chemistry” to make a number of costly synthetic drugs as easily and cheaply as brewing beer. This alternative approach to creating artificial organic molecules, called bioretrosynthesis, was first proposed four years ago by Brian Bachmann, associate professor of chemistry at Vanderbilt University. Now Bachmann and a team of collaborators report that they have succeeded in using the method to produce the HIV drug didanosine. The proof of concept experiment is described in a paper published online March 23 by the journal Nature Chemical Biology. “These days, synthetic chemists can make almost any molecule imaginable in an academic laboratory setting,” said Bachmann. “But they can’t always make them cheaply or in large quantities. Using bioretrosynthesis, it is theoretically possible to make almost any organic molecule out of simple sugars.” We really need a green alternative to the traditional approach to making chemicals.Putting natural selection to use in this novel fashion has another potential advantage. “We really need a green alternative to the traditional approach to making chemicals. Bioretrosynthesis offers a method to develop environmentally friendly manufacturing processes because it relies on enzymes – the biological catalysts that make life possible – instead

The post Shifting evolution into reverse promises cheaper, greener way to make new drugs has been published on Technology Org.


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Alien sand dunes

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Space Science Image of the Week: These eerily familiar patterns are found far from home – on Saturn’s moon, Titan

via ESA Space Science

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/04/Cassini_captures_familiar_forms_on_Titan_s_dunes

Wobbling like a top

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Wobbling like a top

Would love to see a time lapse of this covering, say, the last few million years.

  #chandra   #forwidersharing  

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory originally shared:

Chandra Flashback of the Day – Runaway Pulsar Firing an Extraordinary Jet 
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2014/igrj11014/

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The Cosmic Web Poster

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The shape and dynamics of the largest structures in the Universe

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Butterfly Nebula in Scorpius Constellation Stickers

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tagged with: envelope sealers, galaxies and stars, stellar winds, btbgneb, butterfly nebula, bug nebula, scorpius constellation, ngc 6302, sculptured gas clouds

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series NGC 6302, more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula, lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius.
The central dying star cannot be seen because it's hidden within a doughnut-shaped ring of dust, which appears as a dark band pinching the nebula in the centre. The thick dust belt constricts the star's outflow, creating the classic "bipolar" or hourglass shape displayed by some planetary nebulae.
The nebula's reddish outer edges are largely due to light emitted by nitrogen, which marks the coolest gas visible in the picture. The white-coloured regions are areas where light is emitted by sulphur. These are regions where fast-moving gas overtakes and collides with slow-moving gas that left the star at an earlier time, producing shock waves in the gas (the bright white edges on the sides facing the central star).

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image code: btbgneb

image credit: NGC 6302 was imaged on 27 July 2009 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in ultraviolet and visible light. Filters that isolate emissions from oxygen, helium, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur were used to create this composite image.

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Ring Nebula (M57) Wall Graphics

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


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"The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest view yet of the most famous of all planetary nebulae: the Ring Nebula (M57). In this October 1998 image, the telescope has looked down a barrel of gas cast off by a dying star thousands of years ago. This photo reveals elongated dark clumps of material embedded in the gas at the edge of the nebula; the dying central star floating in a blue haze of hot gas. The nebula is about a light-year in diameter and is located some 2,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra."

(qtd. from Hubblesite.org NewsCenter release STScI-1999-01)

Credit: The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA)

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Blue Cat's Eye Nebula Cover For iPad Mini

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


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Pretty blue NASA/Hubble space image of The Cat's Eye Nebula.

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