Sciencegasm!

[tw]

Originally Posted by BigV

I admit I have not made any household incandescent/fluorescent to led switchovers yet, but that has been mostly for cost reasons. But just as I have made the change from incandescent to fluorescent in the house as the cost per bulb has fallen, I expect to make another change when the led bulbs become reasonable.

You have not done it because it does not yet exist economically. From Electronics Design Magazine of 9 April 2009:

The Department of Energy is offering a prize of as much as $10 million to create the first solid-state replacement for the 60 W incandescent light bulb ... "

Sylvania recently offered one for consideration. Reliability still remains a problem.

LEDs have a 100,000 or 50,000 hour life expectancy. Life expectancy and efficiency numbers that fall quickly with higher power ratings. A low power LED would typically do 90 lumens per watt. A 100 watt incandescent bulb is 1500 lumens. A 20 watt compact fluorescent at 1500 lumens is 75 lumens per watt. LEDs at these lumen levels still are not competitive with compact fluorescent. A 180 watt sodium lamp is 27,000 lumens - or 150 lumens per watt. LEDs have a long way to go.

Now for history. No matter how many advances are made, we routinely spend 0.72% of GDP on lightning. Lights with greater efficiency did not mean less energy use. But it does mean an economic increase in productivity. How great? Varies significantly. Advances dur to LEDs (productivity increases) would be greatest in Africa. But the idea that LEDs will decrease energy consumption contradicts the lessons of history.

What factors cause lighting energy reduction? Increases in cost of energy or a reduction of living standards.

[dar512]

Chess set made of vacuum tubes.

[classicman]

That is awesome dar - great find! Makes me want to get back into playing chess. I have been out of the loop for a loooooong time.

[ZenGum]

An optical transistor that uses one laser beam to control another could form the heart of a future generation of ultrafast light-based computers, say Swiss researchers.

Conventional computers are based on transistors, which allow one electrode to control the current moving through the device and are combined to form logic gates and processors. The new component achieves the same thing, but for laser beams, not electric currents.
...
...
...
To make their device, Vahid Sandoghdar and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, suspended tetradecane, a hydrocarbon dye, in an organic liquid. They then froze the suspension to -272 °C using liquid helium – creating a crystalline matrix in which individual dye molecules could be targeted with lasers.

When a finely tuned orange laser beam is trained on a dye molecule, it efficiently soaks up most of it up – leaving a much weaker "output" beam to continue beyond the dye.

But when the molecule is also targeted with a green laser beam, it starts to produce strong orange light of its own and so boosts the power of the orange output beam.

This effect is down to the hydrocarbon molecule absorbing the green light, only to lose the equivalent energy in the form of orange light.

"That light constructively interferes with the incoming orange beam and makes it brighter," says Sandoghar's colleague Jaesuk Hwang.

More here. And pics.

[ZenGum]

WHEN the supersonic car Bloodhound SSC streaks across the desert sometime in 2011 in its bid to break the land speed record, it will be powered by no fewer than three different types of engine.

A rocket will boost the car to around 1200 kilometres per hour, (Mach 1) while a Eurofighter jet engine will provide more controllable thrust to coax it up to 1600 km/h (1000 miles per hour). Finally, the car is equipped with a V12 petrol engine to pump the fuel and provide electrical and hydraulic power to the jet and rocket.

It needs a V12 for auxillary power??? HFS!

More here, pics and vids.

Wow, I'm having a multi-science-gasmic morning.

[ZenGum]

I love it when Star Trek comes to life.

Transparent aluminium, a sci-fi material brought to 20th century Earth by the crew of The Enterprise in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, turns out to exist after all - if you see in X-rays.

To create this exotic state of matter, researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg, Germany, took a thin piece of aluminium foil and blasted it with an X-ray laser that can generate about 10 million gigawatts of power per square centimetre.

[Doc! Doc! What the hell is a gigawatt?]


At standard temperature and pressure, solid aluminium is a lattice of ions, with a sea of free electrons in between. The FLASH beam had enough energy to knock an electron out of each ion and set it free, while the photon got absorbed in the process.

Normally in a solid metal, another electron will instantly take the place of the missing one. Flash is so powerful that it can rip an electron out of every atom before others have a chance to replace them. With one electron removed, the remaining electrons around each ion settle into a different configuration, becoming too tightly bound for the laser to remove.

That means the X-ray photons can't be easily absorbed, and they fly straight through the material, making the previously opaque aluminium transparent to X-rays.

This state doesn't last long, though. Within fractions of a nanosecond, the energy pumped into the electrons is delivered to the ions, and the ions fly apart violently. "As soon as you make it, the stuff blows up," says Justin Wark of the University of Oxford.

But for an instant, Wark and his team can create a new state of matter that is as dense as ordinary solid matter, but extremely hot. "That is the sort of matter you would get towards the centre of a giant planet," says Wark.

The team hopes to study the properties of this hot, dense matter using new, more powerful lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, California. These lasers produce higher-energy X-rays that could probe the structure of the new material and measure its properties – perhaps providing some insight into the heart of Jupiter and the other giant planets.

[ZenGum]

The full article is too long to paste, but here is the link.


The idea is to fight viruses, not by attacking proteins on the surface of the virus itself (the current method, which is vulnerable to the viruses making tiny mutations) but by turning off one of the protiens in the host cells which the virus relies on to reproduce. The advantages are (1) no resitance to the drugs and (2) broad spectrum antivirals, including "on the shelf" treatments for new diseases before they even emerge.

Some highlights:

They are working on an entirely new class of antiviral drugs that should do something seemingly impossible: work against a wide range of existing viruses and also be effective against viruses that have not even evolved yet. What's more, it should be extremely difficult for any virus to become resistant to these drugs.

SNIP

Back in the late 1990s, when Goldblatt was at DARPA, he began to wonder whether there was another strategy, one that exploits the key weakness of all viruses: their utter dependence on their hosts. By themselves, viruses are more helpless than newborn babies. They can replicate only by tricking their host cells into making more copies of them, a process that can involve hundreds of host proteins.

What if, Goldblatt wondered, some host proteins are essential for viral replication but not for the survival of the host? If so, disabling these proteins should block viral replication without killing healthy cells.

SNIP

Dubbed FGI-104, the drug inhibits a wide range of viruses in cell culture, including hepatitis C and HIV, and has also been shown to protect mice against Ebola

SNIP

So far, the researchers have identified more than 30 viruses that rely on TSG101, from a wide range of virus families. The antibody binds to cells infected with all those they have tested, including flu, Ebola, HIV and herpes, and also reduces HIV below detectable levels in human cells in culture.

SNIP

Like the antibody, this drug also works against a number of viruses, including Marburg and parainfluenza, with no apparent serious side effects.

SNIP

One compound, for example, has been shown to be effective against six different flaviviruses in tests in cell cultures, including dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile fever and hepatitis C. In all, the company is developing drugs targeting 14 of the 21 virus families known to cause human disease...

SNIP

The company developing bavituximab, Peregrine Pharmaceuticals of Tustin, California, is now testing it against a variety of other viruses, including HIV, hepatitis C, influenza, measles and members of the smallpox and rabies virus families. So far, every virus they have checked has left a phosphatidylserine footprint. "We feel like there's a good potential that they'll all have it exposed," says the head of Peregrine, Steven King. If he is right, drugs like bavituximab could help fight every known human virus.

I'm sending a heads-up to the Nobel Prize committee...

[ZenGum]

So, since it seems I have this thread all to myself, I'm gonna have some FUN science in it too.

Via the BBC.

Science ponders 'zombie attack'

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.

They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures.

The scientific paper is published in a book - Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress.

In books, films, video games and folklore, zombies are undead creatures, able to turn the living into other zombies with a bite.

But there is a serious side to the work.

In some respects, a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal rapidly-spreading infection.

In their study, the researchers from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University (also in Ottawa) posed a question: If there was to be a battle between zombies and the living, who would win?

Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake) and colleagues wrote: "We model a zombie attack using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies.

"We introduce a basic model for zombie infection and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions."

On his university web page, the mathematics professor at Ottawa University says the question mark distinguishes him from Robert Smith, lead singer of rock band The Cure.

To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films.

"While we are trying to be as broad as possible in modelling zombies - especially as there are many variables - we have decided not to consider these individuals," the researchers said.

Back for good?

Even so, their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.

In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".

They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."

According to the researchers, the key difference between the zombies and the spread of real infections is that "zombies can come back to life".

But they say that their work has parallels with, for example, the spread of ideas.

The study has been welcomed by one of the world's leading disease specialists, Professor Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK government's chief advisors on controlling the spread of swine flu.

"The paper considers something that many of us have worried about - particularly in our younger days - of what would be a feasible way of tackling an outbreak of a rapidly spreading zombie infection," said Professor Ferguson, from Imperial College London.

However he thinks that some of the assumptions made in the paper might be unduly alarmist.

"My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever. So perhaps they are being a little over-pessimistic when they conclude that zombies might take over a city in three or four days," he said.

I'm disappointed that there is no rigorous comparison of the relative merits of decapitation, flamethrowers, and a shotgun blast to the brain stem.

[Scriveyn]

Also via the BBC:

Video appears in paper magazines

Magazine publishers are beginning to experiment with new technologies

The first-ever video advertisement will be published in a traditional paper magazine in September.

The video-in-print ads will appear in select copies of the US show business title Entertainment Weekly.

The slim-line screens - around the size of a mobile phone display - also have rechargeable batteries.

The chip technology used to store the video - described as similar to that used in singing greeting cards - is activated when the page is turned.

Each chip can hold up to 40 minutes of video.

The first clips will preview programmes from US TV network CBS and show adverts by the drinks company Pepsi.

They will appear in 18 September editions of the magazine distributed in Los Angeles and New York. ....

[ZenGum]

Cool technology, but that is a lot of potentially reusable resources to build into a single use magazine.

[Scriveyn]

... or the fastest tea kettle evah.

A team of British engineers has broken the longest-standing world land speed record in California.

The steam car, Inspiration, recorded an average speed of 139.843mph (225.06km/h) at Edwards air base, in the Mojave Desert, smashing the 1906 record. .... a true testament to British engineering, good teamwork and perseverance. ... [read in full at BBC news]

[xoxoxoBruce]

I met Fred Marriot when he wrapped the boiler for my uncle's car. He showed me the pictures of his crash, doing 140 to 150, the year after he set the record.

[ZenGum]

Pneumatic microprocessor

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-thin-air.html

[regular.joe]

I know I already said this once.

I HEART Quantum Mechanics!

1. INTRODUCTION
During the last decade, several experiments have
indicated the existence of correlations between brain
electrical activities of emphatically bonded but
spatially separated and sensory isolated human
subjects. In the first of these experiments, performed
by Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., it was shown that
neural events stimulated in one human brain (visual
evoked potentials — VEPs) can induce neural events
of similar morphology (“transferred potentials”) in
the brain of a nonstimulated subject if the subjects
have interacted nonverbally in some fashion (for
example, by meditating together for a certain time)
prior to their separation inside their own Faraday
chambers (FCs).(1) Technically, protocolary, and methodologically
improved, the Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al.
experiments (GZEs) have been subsequently successfully
replicated by two research groups: the first in cooperation
between the Bastyr University and the University
of Washington,(2,3,4) under a two-year research grant
awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
and most recently by a group at the Freiburg University.(
5,6) The two groups confirmed the existence of
the phenomenon, although the latter group raised
certain questions about the original GZEs. Namely,
the Freiburg group found that the results were the
same or even better for pairs of subjects who had not
interacted in any fashion as were the results for those
pairs who had interacted prior to the experimental
sessions, and that the transferred potentials were not
necessarily of a morphology similar to the original
VEPs in the stimulated subjects, so a more sophisticated
data-analytic technique was necessary to detect
an effect opposing the null hypothesis. However, they
nevertheless concluded that “we are facing a phenomenon
which is neither easy to dismiss as a
methodological failure or a technical artifact nor
understood as to its nature” (Ref. 6, pp. 63–64). Due
to a strong analogy to the existence of quantummechanical
nonlocal correlations between onceinteracting
but subsequently also spatially separated
elementary particles, and due to the fact that subjects’
separation inside FCs rules out any electromagnetic or
neural energy transfer mechanism, the phenomenon
has been referred to as the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen
(EPR) nonlocal correlations between human brains,(1)
or simply the “biological nonlocality.”(7,8)

Quoted from: Physics Essays. A Proposed Experiment on Consciousness-Related
Quantum Teleportation
Boris Kožnjak