In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. The photographer made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.
After 14 years of work and $5.5 billion, the LHC has survived faulty magnets, avian sabotage, and the threat of malevolent time travelers to finally collide its first particles.
This image shows the collision as recorded by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector. The red and blue bars represent subatomic particles flying forth from the proton collision like atomic shrapnel. When the LHC finally ramps up to full power, the 3,600 scientists at the will witness the most powerful particle collisions ever engineered by man.
Scientists measure methane at the source: In a lush pasture near Buenos Aires, this cow and its compatriots are digesting important information: how much methane—a greenhouse gas 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide—is released by the country’s 55 million bovines. Researchers from Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology connected inflatable tanks to the cows’ first stomach, where methane is made, through a small hole between their ribs.
By measuring methane production directly inside each cow, biologist Silvia Valtorta hopes to more accurately determine the country’s overall agricultural contribution to global warming. According to the data, an average cow releases more than 70 gallons of the stuff every day. But a change in diet could reduce that. Cows that eat mostly grain produce 20 to 25 percent less methane than grazing cows, and adding tannin—a bitter chemical found in wine—to the feed could lower it further.
Ferrofluids are made up of tiny magnetic fragments of iron suspended in oil (often kerosene) with a surfactant to prevent clumping (usually oleic acid). The fluid is relatively easy to make at home yet extremely expensive to buy on-line. How does $165 a liter sound? Still very awesome.
Two All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (ATHLETE) rovers traverse the desert terrain adjacent to Dumont Dunes, CA. The ATHLETE rovers are being built to be capable of rolling over Apollo-like undulating terrain and “walking” over extremely rough or steep terrain for future lunar missions.
Swimming around in their tank, these autonomous robotic jellyfish move alone or in a swarm and communicate with their brethren to avoid underwater collisions. Developed by German industrial-automation company Festo as an attention-grabbing experiment in cooperative robotics, each AquaJelly uses eight bendable “tentacles” to propel itself forward. But the AquaJelly does more than swim around and look pretty. Each is coated with conductive metal paint that draws the robot to a nearby charging station. It also has LED illumination, integrated pressure, light and radio sensors, and 11 infrared light-emitting diodes used for jelly-to-jelly communication.
Above water, the robots use a short-range radio system to signal to one another that a charging station is occupied.
Markus Fischer, the head of corporate design at Festo, hopes the AquaJelly will lead to a robotic workforce that can adapt to complicated tasks. Whereas today’s robot assembly lines can produce only a single product, “there is a possibility that [someday] several autonomous robots will work together and produce personalized products.”
Nature unleashes a torrent of energy as ash fills the air: After lying dormant for more than 9,000 years, the Chaitén volcano belched forth a 40,000-foot-tall ash plume in early May, touching off lightning and a monthlong eruption. The volcano, situated 700 miles south of Santiago, Chile, forced the evacuation of 8,000 people from the nearby village of Chaitén. It was roughly comparable in size to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption that released hundreds of millions of tons of debris in an explosion 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
Scientists suspect that volcanic lightning results from particles in the ash cloud rubbing together as the plume swirls. They aren’t sure about which types of particles generate the most static electricity, nor do they know how much energy is produced during the event. Of course, the lack of research done in the field is understandable: Even scientists, when they see an erupting, lightning-spewing volcano, tend to run in the opposite direction.
Boeing recently announced it successfully tracked and shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle with a laser weapon. Actually, it shot down five UAVs at various ranges with the trailer-mounted Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX).
Developed at the request of the Air Force Research Laboratory, MATRIX integrates with standard test-range radar, focusing a single energy beam on moving aerial vehicles and blasting them out of the sky. It’s the future of aerial seek and destroy, defending against always orbiting unmanned craft, and Boeing isn’t the only one testing this technology.
This striking image actually shows part of an ox’s eye, and the capillaries in it. Capillaries are small blood vessels, which act as the connective network between arteries and veins. The capillaries have been made visible by injection of an insoluble dye into the artery that supplied them.
Wu Zhongyuan, 22, a local farmer, sits in his self-made helicopter, in Jiuxian county, Henan province August 1, 2009. The local government, out of safety concerns, later halted Wu’s plan to fly the helicopter. The aircraft took Wu two months to build and cost more than 10,000 yuan ($1,460).
The Dubai Airshow is the largest aerospace event in the Middle East and the fastest-growing airshow in the world.
A miner is seen in the main tunnel of an underground nuclear waste depository in Bataapati, 120 miles south of Budapest, Hungary. The depository will host Hungary’s radioactive waste in subsurface, granite facilities.
Humanoid robots produced by Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, named Momoko (R) and Takeo (L) take part in a drama for the world’s first robot and human experimental theatre, written and directed by Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata at Japan’s Osaka University in Osaka, western Japan on November 25, 2008. The 20-minute performance was put on display for the media ahead of a possible run for the public next year.
On Sept. 10, 2009, NASA lit up the Utah sky with the initial full-scale, full-duration test firing of the first stage motor for the Ares I rocket. The 154-foot solid rocket motor produced heat two-thirds the temperature of the sun and its 12-foot-diameter cylinder delivered 3.6 million pounds of thrust.
So complex is this 768-foot-tall anti-skyscraper that the architects, the Netherlands-based Office of Metropolitan Architecture, chose to show off the structural seams for visual effect. The building is a continuous loop (resembling a twisted doughnut to some, “big shorts” to others), a shape that would normally be too stiff to stand up against the region’s famously epic earthquakes. Inventive engineering provides the solution.
Robo-Q, rescue robot of the Tokyo Fire Department, collects a mock injured man during an anti-terrorism exercise conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government at Tokyo Big Sight on November 7, 2008 in Tokyo, Japan. The rescue robot is designed to collect humans from environments dangerous to firefighters. The first anti-RDD (radiological dispersal device) terrorism field training exercise on the local government level in Japan is being held to improve management abilities on RDD or ‘dirty bomb’ attack cases by using the latest equipment, facilities and vehicles
Here, microwires emerging from the green and orange tubes connect to two arrays of 16 microelectrodes. Each array is embedded in a small mat of clear, rubbery silicone. The mats are barely visible in this image. These microelectrode arrays sit on the brain without penetrating it, a step toward longer-lived, less invasive versions of “neural interfaces” that in recent experiments elsewhere have allowed paralyzed people to control a computer cursor with their thoughts. The new microelectrode arrays were placed in two patients at the University of Utah who already were undergoing brain surgery for severe epilepsy. The larger, numbered, metallic electrodes are used to locate the source of epileptic seizures in the brain, so the patients allowed the microelectrodes to be placed on their brains at the same time.
Inner ear hair cells. Colored scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of sensory hair cells from the organ of corti, in the cochlea of the inner ear. These cells are surrounded by a fluid called the endolymph. As sound enters the ear it causes waves to form in the endolymph, which in turn cause these hairs to move. The movement is converted into an electrical signal, which is passed to the brain. The V-shaped arrangement of hairs lies on the top of a single cell. Magnification: x21,000 when printed 10cm wide.
Probably one of my favorite inventions, a machine that can suck out the moisture in the air, filter it and sterilize it, serving it up either hot or cold. Producing up to 7 gallons of pure water using half the the electricity of your microwave. Whats better is its available to the public for a affordable price $1200. Whether your trying to get a little extra water at your cabin or trying to prevent world hunger this is the machine for you. Water wells can cost anywhere between $6000-10000, and theres no guarantee you will hit water, especially where its most needed the desert. It is my believe that if this machine was sold on the mass market like walmart, and costco the price would dramatically come down to $600 and efficiently go up to 10 or more gallons of water per day.
