Raise Crops on the Moon with Plant-Growing Jelly In dry areas like the desert, on mountain tops or on the moon it’s impossible to grow anything. Or is it? A rain in the desert sparks extreme plant growth from the moment the raindrops hit the ground. As long as the ground is irrigated and fertilized, plants will grow during the warm periods of the day. Conceived of by industrial design students Ruud van Reijmersdal, Tom Slijkhuis, Joppe Spaans and Jeroen Rood, this speculative project consists of a gel which serves as an ideal growing environment for food crops. Want to learn more about the inspiration and specifics for this project?
Brief Answers to Cosmic Questions Structure of the Universe Does the Universe have an edge, beyond which there is nothing? Are the galaxies arranged on the surface of a sphere? Why can't we see the whole universe? Does the term "universe" refer to space, or to the matter in it, or to both? Evolution of the Universe Did the Universe expand from a point? More about the Big Bang When they say "the universe is expanding," what exactly is expanding? Structure of the Universe Does the Universe have an edge, beyond which there is nothing? Are the galaxies arranged on the surface of a sphere? Why can't we see the whole universe? If you could suddenly freeze time everywhere in the universe, and magically survey all of creation, you would find galaxies extending out far beyond what we can see today. Does the term "universe" refer to space, or to the matter in it, or to both? Today, the situation is reversed. Discovering the properties of space remains one of the deepest and most important problems in modern science.
Future proof » Tim’s laptop service manuals Have you come to this webpage looking for Toshiba laptop service manuals? Please read this. Introduction In the same vein as in my driver guide, I’ve started finding laptop service manuals and hosting them on my site. They generally detail the exact list of parts in each model of laptop – often down to individual screws, if you happen to have lost some and need to know the exact size for a replacement – and describe the procedure for disassembling and reassembling the entire machine, including panels, RAM, wireless cards, keyboards and touchpads and LCD screens, all the way down to the motherboard itself. They’re difficult to find – you have to know where to look in their support site, or come up with the right Google search string, or beg and steal from someone you know in the industry. This page, and indeed my whole site, has no ads. Practical stuff Firstly, I do not claim ownership, authority or copyright of anything here on this page. Organisation Some of these files are quite large.
The Bottle of The Future is an Edible Blob Like in a microcosm, what if we could drink from a giant drop of water? The bottle of the future has the shape of a soft, hygienic, biodegradable and edible blob, where the liquid is kept together by a solution of brown algae and calcium chloride. Ooho is a project from the Spanish trio Skipping Rocks Lab that represents a brilliant solution to the major international issue of plastic bottle waste. Inspired by the consistency of an egg yolk and applying a method used in molecular gastronomy, Rodrigo García González, Pierre Paslier and Guillaume Couche made an edible gel that encase water via spherification. Designers explain: “We do this process with the water frozen and we do it with a double membrane.” Production costs? “It’s is very easy to make, that’s one of the things we’re trying to push forward. Are you ready to cook your own sphere of water? Source: Wired
News ::: Columbia Engineers Prove Graphene is Strongest Material July 21, 2008 Columbia Engineers Prove Graphene is the Strongest Material Research scientists at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science have achieved a breakthrough by proving that the carbon material graphene is the strongest material ever measured. Graphene holds great promise for the development of nano-scale devices and equipment. Until now, graphene’s estimated strength, elasticity and breaking point were based on complex computer modeling theories. “Our team sidestepped the size issue by creating samples small enough to be defect-free,” said Columbia Professor Jeffrey Kysar. The studies were conducted by postdoctoral researcher Changgu Lee and graduate student Xiaoding Wei, in the research groups of mechanical engineering professors Kysar and James Hone. “Our research establishes graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel,” Hone said.
The Turing Test First published Wed Apr 9, 2003; substantive revision Wed Jan 26, 2011 The phrase “The Turing Test” is most properly used to refer to a proposal made by Turing (1950) as a way of dealing with the question whether machines can think. According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion (442). However, if we consider the more precise—and somehow related—question whether a digital computer can do well in a certain kind of game that Turing describes (“The Imitation Game”), then—at least in Turing's eyes—we do have a question that admits of precise discussion. Moreover, as we shall see, Turing himself thought that it would not be too long before we did have digital computers that could “do well” in the Imitation Game. The phrase “The Turing Test” is sometimes used more generally to refer to some kinds of behavioural tests for the presence of mind, or thought, or intelligence in putatively minded entities. 1. 2.
First 3D-printed Skull implanted Almost one year ago we reported about the first full-face transplant using 3D-printed bones in Belgium. Now the first 3D-printed skull has been implanted on a 22 years old Dutch women, affected by a rare bone disease. The skull of the patient never stopped growing, so the surgeons at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, led by neurologist Dr. Bon Verweij, replaced her skull bone with a 3D-printed implant mede out of PEEK (polyetherketoneketone). It’s a thermoplastic, extremely strong and temperature resistant. And it’s almost transparent. “Implants used to be made by hand in the operating theatre using a sort of cement which was far from ideal. Source: Dutch NewsRelated Post: 3D Printing a New Face
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov by Isaac Asimov I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, here and elsewhere, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the Universe straight. I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proven to be wrong. "Wrong!"
BOINC: compute for science BOINC is a program that lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and many others. After installing BOINC on your computer, you can connect it to as many of these projects as you like. You may run this software on a computer only if you own the computer or have the permission of its owner. Tested on the current Ubuntu distribution; may work on others. After downloading BOINC you must install it: typically this means double-clicking on the file icon when the download is finished. System requirements · Release notes · Help · All versions · Version history · GPU computing
15 Awesome Chemistry GIFs You don’t need to watch Breaking Bad to know that chemistry is pretty awesome. Below, we explore our favorite 15 chemistry GIFs and the science behind them (when we could figure it out): Melting Metal With Magnets The Science: The copper wire has a significant amount of AC electricity running through it, causing it to act like a really strong electromagnet. In the metal slug, eddy currents form due to the magnetic field the copper wire is causing while the copper wire has high frequency AC flowing through it. Orange LED Light In Liquid Nitrogen The Science: When an LED is immersed in liquid nitrogen, the electrons lose a lot of thermal energy, even when the light isn’t turned on. Awesome Chemistry GIFs: Heating Mercury Thiocyanate Hydrogen Peroxide Catalyzed By Potassium Iodide
Schopenhauer's Stratagems Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer)