Cowboy Dynamics

This is what the sky should look like at night (though I'm pretty sure your eyes aren't as sensitive as a CCD with a long exposure time).

tl;dr We're a tiny step closer to harnessing fusion power, which is the holy grail of energy.

A while back I wrote a post about how we are all star dust. It described the process by which stars make big atoms by smashing small atoms together. That's fusion; two atoms are fusing together. Contrast with fission wherein one atom is split (fissured). 

Fission power is what drives our current nuclear reactions. Uranium decays and releases heat, then we use that heat to make electricity. But fission power requires really nasty, radioactive stuff, and its waste is really nasty, radioactive stuff. We want something better.

That something better is fusion. It uses non-radioactive fuel and produces (mostly) non-radioactive waste. It's theoretically SAFER and MUCH MORE EFFICIENT than fission power. If we could get it off the ground, it could solve all of the world's energy problems (not a hyperbole). But it is REALLY hard to harness. Imagine trying to create a star and keeping it confined so that we can use it to make electricity. Tough stuff.

There was a lot of excitement about fusion power after we made a fusion bomb. It seemed so easy to make a reactor since we understood all the physics. But the engineering turned out to be SUPER difficult. It's a lot harder to control something than to blow it up.

The main strategy has been to make a hot plasma inside of a donut shaped magnetic field. We've done this, but it doesn't last very long and it doesn't make more energy than we use to light the fire. One problem has been little electromagnetic bubbles in the plasma that pop and spread, making the whole thing unstable. 

Well some guys in Europe (where all of the good fusion research takes place) solved the bubble problem. They put antennas on the donut so that they could pop the electro-bubbles before they get big enough to extinguish the plasma. 

It's not the sexiest result, and I don't know if I'd call it a "break through". But it brings us one step closer to harnessing the best power source known to man.

tl;dr Biological engineers at UC Santa Barbara have designed and programmed bacteria that glow blue and blink in unison. 

This one is seriously mad science. Well, mad engineering.

Jeff Hasty at UC Santa Barbara has been working for five years to make a biological LED screen, and he recently succeeded. To do this, he (/cough his grad students /cough) had to make a bacteria that glows, then control when it glows, then get all the cells to talk to each other and blink together. Check out this video.

They actually had to PROGRAM the bacteria like a computer by changing its DNA. They designed feedback loops, switches, etc coded in DNA, then inserted these into the bacteria (E. Coli).

The goal of this research is to create biological circuits for "medicine". Seems more like cyborgory to me, of which I totally approve. 

tl;dr: This device, needing no connections to any circuit, will make hydrogen and oxygen when put in a water and sunlight.

That little sheet is made from inexpensive materials. When you put it in water and shine it with light, it splits the bonds in the water. One side makes hydrogen, the other side makes oxygen. It doesn't need any fancy computers to do this. It just does it on its own. 

Why would anybody want to do it? Hydrogen and oxygen are the fuel for hydrogen fuel cells, which are pretty interesting for a new green technology. Also, they're rocket fuel. Which is cool in itself. What's more, these water splitters are usually made out of platinum, making them prohibitively expensive. 

If they can get it to work in salt water, we could turn the oceans into fresh water AND make fuel for our cars at the same time. The future is now.

Thanks again, MIT.

News Brief

tl;dr Researchers have developed a circuit that can fix itself if it gets cracked, kinda. 

You drop your phone on the ground. It looks fine. No big cracks. But the damn thing doesn't turn on. You take it into the tech guys and they tell you they can't do anything about it because the board is cracked. You have to buy a new phone. Lame. 

Consider an alternate scenario. You drop your phone and the board cracks. But it still turns on and works perfectly. Why? Because it fixed itself before you even noticed it was broken. Researchers at the University of Illinois are working on just that.

On your board are little lines of metal. They're only a few microns deep. If one gets a hairline fracture, the WHOLE BOARD is broken and cannot be fixed. Not even by a man with the tiniest of hands. 

The image below illustrates how one of these fractures could fix itself. Tiny capsules of liquid metal are put on top of the wire lines. Liquid metal, terminator style. If one of them gets fractured, it leeks its conductive gooey goodness onto the circuit, shorting the break. This restores 99% of the conductivity within a microsecond. A microsecond motherfuckers.

This is an evolution of work in self-healing polymers. If you put similar capsules inside of plastic, it can heal itself too. Pie in the sky: a transparent circuit printed on plastic that heals itself structurally and electrically. 

News Brief

tl;dr Plastic robots powered by air are squishy like squid and can fit into tight places.

This is some seriously space age shit guys. The Whitesides Group from Harvard created these robots that are made of pneumatic and made of plastic. The robot has a bunch of little air pockets inside of it. If you're clever about the way you inflate and deflate those pockets, the robots will move (like in the video above) or pick things up (like in the video below).

What's REALLY cool about these robots is how they are made. They drew the design on a computer in something like google sketchup. Then they had a 3D printer make a mold from their drawing and filled this mold with plastic. Boom, done. In the world of robotics, that is fantastically easy. 

No motors. No nuts and bolts. No metal at all. Just plastic. 

The researchers envision these softbots going into disaster wreckage or holding body parts very softly while surgeons are doing their thing. 

The robots are pretty much ready for production to work as soft grippers. In order to do something more useful, like search for survivors in a plane crash, they'll need a camera installed. That's not too difficult. 

The catch? They still need to be tethered to an air supply and a computer controlling that air supply. That's not a big deal for larger bots, but it's a big hurdle for smaller bots like the ones in the videos. 

Now imagine, if you will, a swarm of these little squiddies coming at you. Creepy.

Would you believe it if I told you that is an actual figure from an actual research paper in an actual peer-reviewed journal? The title is "Sun-Believable Solar Paint. A transformative One-Step Approach for Designing Nanocrystalline Solar Cells".

Sun-Believable. Really. Here's the paper if you don't believe me.

Pft. Chemists.

Anyway, the tl;dr is this. Chemists made a paint that turns sunlight into electricity. 

So how did they do it? Well first let me tell you a bit about regular solar cells. If you take two semiconductors and put them together, and you pick the semiconductors just right, you will have a solar cell. You need TWO; one that attracts electrons and one that pushes them away. When you put them together, you're making a hill for the electrons to fall down. Put a battery at the bottom of the hill and they'll fall in. 

How do electrons get there in the first place? The photoelectric effect, describing which landed Albert Einstein his Nobel prize. Basically, when light (aka photons) strikes an atom, the electrons in the atom may absorb the light. When they do this, they suck up all the photons energy and start running around. They get "excited". 

Now most of the time, the electrons have nowhere to run so they just simmer and sit back down next to their nucleus. For example, if you excite an electron inside an insulator, it can't go anywhere because it's not inside a conductor. But if you push two semiconductors together, the electrons will have a hill to run down. Right into your battery.

So this research group at Notre Dame took semiconductor nanoparticles and put them into a solution of another semiconductor. They were left with a bunch of tiny solar cells waiting to happen. They did some chemistry magic to turn them into a paste. They then took their little paint brush and literally painted some conductive glass, then topped off the whole thing with some graphene (those are the electrodes for the battery). Pretty nifty.

So what's the catch? It's toxic, only comes in bright yellow, still needs the electrodes, and is only 1% efficient. Also, the research is highly derivative, but nobody reading this blog probably cares about that.

This work directly address President Obama's (ludicrously uninformed) call for, well, solar paint. But file it under "not gonna happen except in SciFi novels".

tl;dr These tiny robots can work as a team, like all those nanobots in scifi movies.

A Harvard engineering team has developed what they call a "kilobot" (named for its ability to work in swarms of thousands, not because it will murder you in your sleep... or will it?).

These robots are small and cheap. They have short range communication capabilities. They basically vibrate on three little legs and chirp to each other with radio. That's all they can do. 

The point of this research is to figure out how to control swarms of robots. It's actually quite a difficult programming problem. The video demonstrates their ability to act like little ants, disperse, and follow the leader; these are pretty essential tasks for a swarm of nanobots.

Once the necessary control algorithms are developed, the task will be to make a more capable swarming robot. Something with a hand, or something that can fly like a helicopter.

So we're nowhere near to the nanobots from I, Robot (movie) or the Dyson machines from Space Odyssey 2010, but we're taking nanosteps.

This is a two dimensional Ruben's tube.

A Ruben's tube is a long rod with a speaker on one end, a bunch of tiny holes running down its length, and a propane tank on the other end. When the speaker hits the right note (the resonant frequency) the holes expand and contract in such a way to shape the flame into a wave.

tl;dr All of the atoms in your body, except the hydrogen, were made inside a star.

The above paper, by E. Margaret Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle is a fantastically thorough (and thus pretty boring) free read from 1957. The authors detail a process through which our sun makes atoms. The solar wind then carries these atoms out into the universe where they land on planets and asteroids and other rocks in space.

So here's how it works. The sun is a giant ball of self-sustaining plasma powered by nuclear fusion. Remember, fusion is when two atoms come together; they fuse. Stars start out with a lot of hydrogen, which is a single proton with maybe some electrons and neutrons hanging out. The fusion fire of the sun smashes two hydrogens together to make helium. Then it smashes three heliums together to make carbon.

Boom. The foundation of terrestrial life, carbon. Made inside a star, spat out by giant magnetic fields. 

But it doesn't stop there. Carbon plus helium is oxygen. So that gives us hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, also known as sugar. The sun is pretty sweet.

There are so many more reactions like this, too many to list really. Suffice to say, we think that every single atom that is on Earth was at one time produced by stars. These stars went supernova and sent their quantum progeny into the void. After billions of years of this, and some handwaving, these atoms came together to make new stars, rocky planets, gas giants, etc. 

This isn't the whole story. Some atoms come into being by decay. If the star makes a giant atom, the nuclear forces will eventually give out and some of the protons and neutrons will drop off. This is how uranium eventually (in thousands of years) will turn into lead.

So hydrogen comes together to make a star. The star makes all sorts of elements, blows up, and sends them out into the universe. Some of these elements decay into smaller atoms. And that is how the periodic table came into existence.

This is an extremely well written article about CERN's promising results regarding the Higgs boson, put in layman's terms by our friends at The Economist. 

That creepy alien looking thing is a biological circuit. It can measure the signal that nerve cells make. 

The thick, straight lines are the conducting part of the circuit. The bright green parts are where the research team has grown nerve cells. They look green because they are fluorescing, kind of like glow-in-the-dark stickers. 

Measuring the signal from a nerve cell is old news. HOWEVER since this device is made of carbon, it could be implanted into a human body. This form of carbon is known as graphene. It is a transparent, flexible, and about one or two atoms thick. It also happens to be a better conductor than any metal. 

So these guys invented a circuit that you could put inside your body to read what's going on in your nervous system. The circuit will bend as you move. And since its not made of silicone or metal, your immune system won't attack it. That is pretty huge. 

But let's not get carried away. This could not read your mind. It could not send a phone call directly to your brain. We don't know enough about the brain to be able to do that... yet. And we are far far away from actually putting this into somebody. The FDA will need to get involved, so think 20-50 years.

But things made like this COULD read the signals that your brain is sending to your arms or your legs. This research will help amputees and people with spinal cord injuries by allowing them to control robotic arms and legs.

So remember folks, treat our disabled friends kindly. Some day, they may look like this.