From the category archives:

Brevia

Factory in a box

August 17, 2010

Mobile factories that fit in a standard shipping container make replacement parts on-site, on-demand. Better and smaller systems in your neighborhood someday; military systems in Afghanistan today. John Robb sees them as part of a trend toward hyperlocal manufacturing.

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Between conferences

August 5, 2010

Last weekend: the O’Reilly Media / Nature Publishing Group “Science Foo Camp” at Google. An amazing event, as always. I spoke at a session led by Michael Nielsen — he asked four of us to speak on Three Rules (for something); I outlined rules for broad learning about science. Later in the day I led [...]

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Super Battery!!!

July 14, 2010

A benchmark for judging hype:
WSU Researchers Use Super-high Pressures to Create Super Battery
The researchers created the material on the Pullman campus…The cell contained xenon difluoride (XeF2), a white crystal used to etch silicon conductors, squeezed between two small diamond anvils….The researchers eventually increased the pressure to more than a million atmospheres, comparable to what would [...]

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“The China Study” Considered Harmful

July 11, 2010

An influential study of diet and health has been exploded here. The data and the conclusions don’t just disagree, they aren’t even on speaking terms.

Meanwhile, randomized intervention trials indicate that advice on the perils of saturated fat has been wrong. I suggest some reforms.

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Next up: Asteroids

July 4, 2010

Soon after Earth’s life first touched the Moon, NASA promised to make spaceflight routine and inexpensive, and I began studying the prospects for space as a genuine frontier.
Geologists had analyzed the new, hard-won lunar samples, and I read up on the results in the local college library. Not nice: almost no carbon, nitrogen, or hydrogen, [...]

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Arctic sea ice yesterday

July 3, 2010

In 2007, the area of Arctic sea ice reached a record low. By comparison, here’s the current story:

   National Snow and Ice Data Center

Looks low by about 4 standard deviations. (Yes, too much geophysics & climate…)

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Mission of Gravity, Part 3:
GOCE updates the shape of the Earth

June 28, 2010

The GOCE satellite flies extraordinarily low and it thrusts constantly to compensate for air drag while making exquisite measurements of the gravitational gradient. The just-released result is a map of the geoid — the gravitational equipotential surface of the Earth — shown below as a delta from an idealized ellipsoid. GOCE can measure the geoid [...]

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Data-mining the bioscience literature

June 24, 2010

Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics now meet paperomics: Automated trawling, not of whole slices of nature, but of whole slices of the scientific literature — the idea is to look for indirect links among papers that may indicate undiscovered links in nature.
From the Computable Genomix website:
…Powered by patent pending next generation text mining technology, GeneIndexer [...]

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Foldamers: Accomplishments and Goals

June 1, 2010

As regular readers know, I see foldamer engineering as a key to next-generation atomically precise nanosystems. Valuable in themselves, foldamers can also serve as components of composite systems that exploit diverse materials and nanotechnologies of qualitatively different kinds.
“Foldamers: Accomplishments and Goals”, by Samuel Gellman, heads a collection of 59 abstracts from [...]

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Nano promise to be fulfilled?

May 29, 2010

The Economist reports that “…a bright future beckons, and some of the nanohype that has been swirling around might actually get translated into a useful product.”
The reason is that “…adding a sprinkle of nanoparticles to water can improve its thermal conductivity, and thus its ability to remove heat from something that it is in contact [...]

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When a bureaucrat is a physicist…

May 27, 2010

How do you see whether critical valves in a blowout protector are open or closed, a mile deep in the sea and through inches of steel?
Gamma-ray imaging, as suggested by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu:
Atlantic: How is it that you know enough about gamma rays and oil spill technology to be helpful? I wasn’t aware [...]

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Flattening the Matterhorn

May 19, 2010

Text and graphics excerpted from Figure 4 of a recent paper on a new form of nanoscale lithography:
AFM scan of the replica of the Matterhorn written into the molecular glass (3D data source: geodata © swisstopo).
The maximum steepness of slopes is an important parameter in scanning probe lithography. It would be easy to misread the [...]

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