Steps into Space - Commercialisation, Occupation, Colonization: 05/25/14

Sunday, 25 May 2014

Solar cells based on stacked textile electrodes for integration into fabrics

Your tablet on your jacket sleeve, your smartphone in your watch—conventional batteries are not practicable for ever-lighter wearable electronic devices. A possible alternative is solar cells in the form of a textile that can simple be integrated into clothing. In the journal Angewandte Chemie Chinese researchers have now introduced novel, efficient solar cells based on stable, flexible textile electrodes that can be integrated into fabrics. Various types of threadlike solar cells that can be woven into textiles have previously been produced by twisting two electrically conducting fibers together as electrodes. Practical application of these has been hampered by the fact that it is difficult to make long, efficient, thread-shaped electrodes. The wire-shaped cells are limited to lengths of a few millimeters. It has also been difficult to connect a larger number of crossed wire-shaped solar cells that have been woven into electronic textiles. A team from Fudan University and Tongii University in Shanghai has now developed an alternative approach for the production of flexible solar cells that can be integrated into fabrics. Their method is based on textile electrodes that are stacked into layers. Read more at: Phys.org

The post Solar cells based on stacked textile electrodes for integration into fabrics has been published on Technology Org.

#materials
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

Study reveals a way to improve chances of winning at rock-paper-scissors

Science Focus

original post »

The Rock-Paper-Scissors game. (A) Each matrix entry specifies the row action’s payoff. (B) Non-transitive dominance relations (R beats S, P beats R, S beats P) among the three actions. (C) The social state plane for a population of size N = 6. Each filled circle denotes a social state (nR, nP , nS); the star marks the centroid c0; the arrows indicate three social state transitions at game rounds t = 1, 2, 3. Credit: arXiv:1404.5199 [physics.soc-ph] A trio of researchers at Zhejiang University in China has found a way for players to improve their odds of winning when playing the hand game rock-paper-scissors. In their paper they’ve uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the researchers describe a field study they undertook with a large crowd of volunteers and how it revealed the secret. Scientists in many fields have studied game theory for thousands of years, some to gain military or social advantage, others to better understand human psychology. Onegame stands out, the hand game rock-paper-scissors, likely because of its simplicity, and because it can be used to make group decisions. Plus, it’s universal, requiring nolanguage skills or preconceived social notions—therein lies its inherent beauty. Also, it’s supposed to be fair, with every player having a

The post Study reveals a way to improve chances of winning at rock-paper-scissors has been published on Technology Org.

#physics
» see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/d0qQIuxZH74/
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

X-rays shine light on mystery 'bird'

Science Focus

original post »
A new 3D fossil-scanning technique inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s camera obscura has produced the clearest images yet of Archaeopteryx, “the first bird”.
#science
» see original post http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27502354#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

Dumbbell Nebula in Taurus Oval Stickers

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

Dumbbell Nebula in Taurus Oval Stickers

tagged with: awesome astronomy images, inspirational, dmbblneb, vulpecula constellation, intense ultraviolet radiation, messier 27 ngc 6853, heavens, stars, dumbbell nebula, the fox constellation, european southern observatory, eso, vista

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great photo from deep space featuring the Dumbbell Nebula - also known as Messier 27 or NGC 6853. It's a typical planetary nebula and is located in the constellation Vulpecula (The Fox).

The distance is rather uncertain, but is believed to be around 1,200 light-years. It was first described by the French astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier who found it in 1764 and included it as no. 27 in his famous list of extended sky objects.

Despite its class, the Dumbbell Nebula has nothing to do with planets. It consists of very rarefied gas that has been ejected from the hot central star (well visible on this photo), now in one of the last evolutionary stages. The gas atoms in the nebula are excited (heated) by the intense ultraviolet radiation from this star and emit strongly at specific wavelengths.

This image is the beautiful by-product of a technical test of some FORS1 narrow-band optical interference filters. They only allow light in a small wavelength range to pass and are used to isolate emissions from particular atoms and ions.

In this three-colour composite, a short exposure was first made through a wide-band filter registering blue light from the nebula. It was then combined with exposures through two interference filters in the light of double-ionized oxygen atoms and atomic hydrogen. They were colour-coded as “blue”, “green” and “red”, respectively, and then combined to produce this picture that shows the structure of the nebula in “approximately true” colours.

more items with this image
more items in the Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series
Image code: dmbblneb

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

»visit the HightonRidley store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

Camelopardalids and ISS

From a camp on the northern shores of the Great Lake Erie, three short bright meteor streaks were captured in this composited night skyscape. Recorded over the early morning hours of May 24, the meteors are elusive Camelopardalids. Their trails point back to the meteor shower's radiant near Polaris, in the large but faint constellation Camelopardalis the camel leopard, or in modern terms the Giraffe. While a few meteors did appear, the shower was not an active one as the Earth crossed through the predicted debris trail of periodic comet 209P/LINEAR. Of course, the long bright streak in the image did appear as predicted. Early on May 24, the International Space Station made a bright passage through northern skies.

Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Research in phonon scattering sheds more light on graphene as a replacement for silicon

original post »

New research in phonon scattering sheds more light on graphene as a replacement for silicon Pictured is an illustration of multilayer graphene supported on an amorphous SiO2 substrate. [Image courtesy of Jo Wozniak, Texas Advanced Computing Center] Graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the carbon material graphite, has been hailed as a wonder material — strong, light, nearly transparent, and an excellent conductor of electricity and heat. But a number of practical challenges must be overcome before it can emerge as a replacement for silicon and other materials in microprocessors and next-generation energy devices. One particular challenge concerns the question of how graphene sheets can be used in real devices. “When you fabricate devices using graphene, you have to support the graphene on a substrate and doing so actually suppresses the high thermal conductivity of graphene,” said Li Shi, a professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, whose work is partially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Thermal conductivity is critical in electronics, especially as components shrink to the nanoscale. High thermal conductivity is a good thing for electronic devices fabricated from graphene. It means the device can spread the heat it generates to prevent the formation

The post Research in phonon scattering sheds more light on graphene as a replacement for silicon has been published on Technology Org.

#materials
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'

I'm an astronaut!

original post »

I'm an astronaut!
This is an amazing 360 panorama of Mars. +Pixie Copley - you'll love this!
#forwidersharing #outerspace

Felix K. originally shared:

Mars Panorama - NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover selfie: Martian night
https://www.360cities.net/image/mars-panorama-curiosity-selfie-night *Other Mars Gigapixel Panoramas* :
-> http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-gigapixel-panorama-curiosity-solar-days-136-149 ->http://www.360cities.net/image/curiosity-rover-martian-solar-day-2 -> http://www.360cities.net/image/curiosity-mars
https://twitter.com/FelixK___

View full size (8000x4000)

» see original post https://plus.google.com/116000959328274308893/posts/1dqsQmpueHZ
Zazzle Space Gifts for every occasion

Crab Nebula in Taurus - Our Awesome Universe Sticker

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

Crab Nebula in Taurus - Our Awesome Universe Sticker

tagged with: crbneb, astronomy, messier 1, neutron stars, star ejecta, pulsars, supernovae explosions, heavens, european southern observatory, supernova, eso, vista

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great outer space picture featuring a three colour composite of the well-known Crab Nebula (also known as Messier 1), as observed with the FORS2 instrument in imaging mode in the morning of November 10, 1999.

It's the remnant of a supernova explosion at a distance of about 6,000 light-years, observed almost 1,000 years ago, in the year 1054. It contains a neutron star near its center that spins 30 times per second around its axis (see below).

In this picture, the green light is predominantly produced by hydrogen emission from material ejected by the star that exploded. The blue light is predominantly emitted by very high-energy ("relativistic") electrons that spiral in a large-scale magnetic field (so-called synchrotron emission). It's believed that these electrons are continuously accelerated and ejected by the rapidly spinning neutron star at the centre of the nebula and which is the remnant core of the exploded star.

This pulsar has been identified with the lower/right of the two close stars near the geometric center of the nebula, immediately left of the small arc-like feature, best seen in ESO Press Photo eso9948.

Technical information: ESO Press Photo eso9948 is based on a composite of three images taken through three different optical filters: B (429 nm; FWHM 88 nm; 5 min; here rendered as blue), R (657 nm; FWHM 150 nm; 1 min; green) and S II (673 nm; FWHM 6 nm; 5 min; red) during periods of 0.65 arcsec (R, S II) and 0.80 (B) seeing, respectively. The field shown measures 6.8 x 6.8 arcminutes and the images were recorded in frames of 2048 x 2048 pixels, each measuring 0.2 arcseconds. North is up; East is left.

more items with this image
more items in the Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series
image code: crbneb

ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

»visit the HightonRidley store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place