Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Very nice, I like the part about the propellant being frozen while it’s being loaded into the motor.
Researchers are developing a new type of rocket propellant made of a frozen mixture of water and “nanoscale aluminum” powder that is more environmentally friendly than conventional propellants and could be manufactured on the moon, Mars and other water-bearing bodies.
New aluminum-water rocket propellant promising for future space missions.
Everyone gets email these days. Most of the time it’s stuff you want, confirmation of an order made online, notes from a friend, amusing photos from a coworker. Stuff you want and know that it’s on the level. But what about the chain emails that some people think are just so important they have an overwhelming need to share it with everyone in their address book? Generally it will be a message of some dire predicament that the government is going to put everyone in if they vote a certain way or some message of warning that some food will kill you faster than life normally would or even that our country is going to hell in an express hand basket because our cities don’t look as clean and neon lit as someone else’s city. It’s filled with FUD. What is FUD? It’s a catch all term for ‘Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt’. It’s the monosodium glutamate of today’s information, sad to say… I personally don’t make a point of correcting the enormous fallacies the chain emails promote, but in the past I have done just that. It takes time and eventually I realize that I’m just shouting in the wind, it’s going to to little good to whomever sent me the rant. I now realize that a much better plan is to attempt to educate the general population as to how best to avoid bogus email in the first place.
In looking around the interwebs I found this gem from FactCheck.org. These are the folks that go to the trouble to verifying that what politicians say is how it actually is. It matters little what your political affiliation is because this place is an equal opportunity offender. They call it like it is saying yep or nope to the points in question. Handy site to refer to in these days of amazingly polarized opinion.
If there was ever a case where readers should apply a guilty-until-proven-innocent standard, this is it. We at FactCheck.org ask the public to be skeptical about politicians’ claims. With these e-mails, outright cynicism is justified. Assume all such messages are wrong, and you’ll be right most of the time.
I like their style. ‘Question and verify’, words to live by if you read anything on the Internet or hear anything on the news. Even more so with chain emails. So have a nice sit down and read their how-to guide over a strong cup of tea and maybe you will think twice before you forward a chain email message.
That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is Likely Bogus. Seriously. | FactCheck.org
Need to keep something heavy stuck to a wall? Fire proof Velcro sneakers for Iron Man? Maybe you just want a better way to hang your solid rocket boosters off your space ship. Super industrial strength steel hook and loop to the rescue!
Hook and loop fasteners have become commonplace features of both industry and households. However, they have one snag: they are too weak for many applications. Hook and loop fasteners made of spring steel have now been developed at the Institute of Metal Forming and Casting of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen. These fasteners are resistant to chemicals and can withstand a tensile load of up to 35 tonnes per square meter at temperatures as high as 800°C.
It’s called “Metaklett” if you want to try and find some.
I seriously doubt that you will be playing Super Mario Brothers on this any time soon but it would be fantastic for a self operating chemical analysis machine.
Each pneumatic valve is operated by changing the air pressure in a small chamber below the air channel, separated from the circuit by a flexible impermeable membrane. When the lower chamber is filled with air the membrane pushes upwards and closes the valve, preventing the binary signal flowing across one of the processor’s junctions.
Sucking out the air from the chamber reopens the valve by forcing the membrane downwards, letting the signal move across the junction.The two researchers used the valve-controlled channels to produce a variety of logic gates, flip-flops and shift registers, which they linked together to create a working 8-bit microprocessor. That means that the longest discrete pieces of data it can handle are eight binary digits long, like the processors used in 1980s consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System.
I’m not sure what comment, if any is appropriate for this Japanese TV show. Wow…
Well, you watch this trailer for The Amazing Dogoo Girl — which is going to be a prime-time Japanese TV show from the makers of The Machine Girl, Ju-On and Tokyo Gore Police — and you tell me. Not only is it primetime, it’s replacing perennial children’s TV classic Ultraman, meaning this is more or less designed for Japanese boys aged 6-11 or so… and yet features a heroine with magic breasts, not to mention the villains with evil breasts (like the bee woman). The show isn’t technically as weird as Robogeisha, but I’d say these circumstances propel it past even the legendary Geisha Chainsaw in terms of total insanity
[Thanks to Lonelocust for this one]
An open-source digital camera platform… Wow… The video for this project makes mention of on the fly dynamic range adjustments and infinite focus via micro lens arrays. Amazing stuff, I can hardly wait for something like this to make it to the general public.
Anyone will be able to create new features for the camera by writing aps that control all the camera’s functions — focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. Cameras could be taught new tricks with downloadable apps, analogous to iPhone apps.
[A tip of the CyberHelm to Special Agent Greg for this one]
Stanford open-source camera could revolutionize photography.