After a weekend bender you might want to look into one of these…
Tag: Science
No Ice Please
This is pretty neat stuff, the thing that makes it even neater is that it uses the same principal that keeps a gecko lizard stuck to walls.
Dartmouth College engineering professor Victor Petrenko… has devised a way to use a burst of electricity to remove ice caked on walls or windows. For surfaces coated with a special film, the jolt gets rid of ice in less than a second, far less time than it takes to hack at it with an ice scraper.
Look for this soon on everything from car windows to the wings of airplanes.
Spiffy Sci-fi Glasses With Auto Focus
Hum, glasses with LCD ‘lenses’ in them that will auto focus and thus eliminate the need for bi-focals. This is so cool because I’m sure that in a few years I’m going to need them. I wonder if when they hit the street they will be featured in a movie. You know, one of those product placement deals where the item gets some serious closeups when the protagonist has pensive moments.
"…The dynamic glasses change focus using a 5-micron-thick layer of nematic liquid crystal, sandwiched between two pieces of glass. Molecules of the liquid crystal reorient themselves when exposed to an electric field and the researchers used this to create a type of dynamic Fresnel lens.
In a normal Fresnel lens, concentric rings are carved into a piece of glass causing light to become focused in a similar way to a conventional lens. Dynamic glasses mimic the Fresnel effect using concentric circles of clear electrodes on the pieces of glass containing the crystal. Activating these electrodes causes the liquid crystal to align into rings and focus light passing through the lens…"
Google Mars
Google has expanded their online mapping service to include the planet Mars. Pretty cool being able to find the landing (sometimes crashing) spots of the probes that have been sent there.
Science For Lovers
With birth rates low, the Japanese government is looking to get into the match making game and at the same time get people interested in science. the new magazine ‘Science Walker’ will be added as an insert in the popular magazine ‘Tokyo Walker‘ (translated version here). The idea is that the science insert will give young couples more things to talk about. I don’t know if it will work but what do they have to lose? I know that if my girlfriend asked me what photosynthesis was or if I read about the latest JAXA mission was, I’d be out looking for a ring the next day.
[via Boingboing]
No Science For You!
This is quite sad. Another blow to amateur scientists everywhere:
The United States CPSC has initiated criminal legal action against us and other chemical suppliers. In short, the CPSC would like to ban the public from all access to chemicals. This would mean an end to hobbies such as model rocketry, pyrotechnics and of course chemistry. One by one, our freedoms are slowly being taken away from us – this action must be stopped now.
I suppose that in 15 years people in the US will look around themselves in their high security cities and wonder why all the equipment and technology is being sold to them by Chinese R&D labs. I suppose they won’t care because the call center jobs pay pretty well even if you do have to learn Mandarin to work there.
(There’s irony in there but the fedral government doesn’t want anyone to point it out.)
Boing Boing:US bans sale of chemicals to hobbyists without $1K license