Waste isn't waste...it's fuel

The Bio-Bug has been converted by a team of British engineers to be powered by biogas, which is produced from human waste at sewage works across the country. They believe the car is a viable alternative to electric vehicles.

Excrement flushed down the lavatories of just 70 homes is enough to power the car for 10,000 miles - the equivalent of one average motoring year. This conversion technology has been used in the past but the Bio-Bug is Britain's first car to run on methane gas without its performance being reduced.

It can power a conventional two litre VW Beetle convertible to 114mph. Mohammed Saddiq, of sustainable energy firm GENeco, which developed the prototype, claimed that drivers "won't know the difference".

He said: "Previously the gas hasn't been clean enough to fuel motor vehicles without it affecting performance.

Scientists have always known that human waste was a good fuel, as is cow waste and other products. Now, though, we can see an alternative use for the waste: power for a car. It's a great concept, let's hope it catches on.

For your funny bone

This post comes from my daughter who never stops reminding me that as an engineer there are certain social skills I lack.

Thank you, sweetheart, for thinking of me!

Check out the Bar Codes

Researchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. The tag uses ink laced with carbon nanotubes to print electronics on paper or plastic that could instantly transmit information about a cart full of groceries.

And if you're worried that others will know what you have (once the groceries are yours), there's a way to maintain your privacy:

And for those who would rather not have their food broadcast radio waves after getting it home, fear not. Tour says the signals can be blocked by wrapping groceries in aluminum foil.

It's easy to envision shopping with a grocery cart and then check out with a swipe of your credit card (or via your personal digital assistant like an iPad) and then just exist the store. In fact, it's possible that you simply swipe in to the store and when you leave, you just leave. The costs are automatically tallied, and charged or transferred from your account, as you depart.

This would lessen shoplifting, to an extent, too. To shoplift one would have to cover the product in tin foil. Not an impossible task, but it would take more effort than hiding an item in your purse. Of course, if your purse is coated with metal, well, I guess shop lifting would still continue.

Dogs: Ethics with a tail!

Fair play, then, can be understood as an evolved adaptation that allows individuals to form and maintain social bonds. Canids, like humans, form intricate networks of social relationships and live by rules of conduct that maintain a stable society, which is necessary to ensure the survival of each individual. Basic rules of fairness guide social play, and similar rules are the foundation for fairness among adults. This moral intelligence, so evident in both wild canines and in domesticated dogs, probably closely resembles that of our early human ancestors. And it may have been just this sense of right and wrong that allowed human societies to flourish and spread across the world.

We can learn a lot from our four legged friends!

Laptops out of some classroom

On a windy morning in downtown Washington, a hundred Georgetown Law students gathered in a hall for David Cole's lecture on democracy and coercion. The desks were cluttered with books, Thermoses and half-eaten muffins.

Another item was noticeable in its absence: laptop computers. They were packed away under chairs, tucked into backpacks, powered down and forgotten.

Cole has banned laptops from his classes, compelling students to take notes the way their parents did: on paper.

Computers are a tool that should help students with research, papers, and analysis. Class time is meant for learning and that's best done with attention to the teacher and without distractions.

Salt: Good for you or not?

Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect?

A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine).

B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene).

C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association).

D) Not much one way or the other.

E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.

Don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer, at least not yet. That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to.

When you don’t know past trends, predicting the future is a wide-open game.

The truth is, salt is not bad for you. I can't say that too much is good or bad, but we use minerals, like salt, in our brains to help with synapses, those little electrical charges that are responsible for thought.

If we didn't ingest salt, well, we'd have trouble thinking. In fact, this issue is a big one for marathoners. Because the race is so long (26.2 miles!) many runners sweat out their minerals. Thinking becomes difficult and they become disoriented. That's why some drinks have minerals in them; to replace what was sweated out from the body.

Salt isn't going away anytime soon. Seems like if we all exercised more (maybe not all of us in marathons though) we could eat our salt and not worry so much.

For now, I'm off to the gym. :-)

Fractal Video, to 10^214 in scale

This is a fractal zoom [of the Mandelbrot Set] to e.214 [that is, 10^214]

e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earth’s orbit.
e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way.
e.42 would be equal to the universe.

This took a month to render.
Watch full screen in HD. The last 2 minutes are the best.

The last two minutes are the best, and I watched the whole thing.

Here's the Mandelbrot Set, often called the most complicated set in mathematics:

USA Science and Engineering Festival

USA Science & Engineering Festival

Festival Dates: 10/10/10 - 10/24/10
Expo on the National Mall: October 23 & 24, 2010

The Inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival will be the country’s first national science festival and will descend on the Washington, D.C. area in the Fall of 2010. The Festival promises to be the ultimate multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary celebration of science in the United States. The culmination of the Festival will be a two-day Expo in the nation’s capital that will give over 500 science & engineering organizations from all over the United States the opportunity to present themselves with a hands-on, fun science activity to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

I hope to see you there!

Extraordinary Video

Fish comes back

Last night I changed the water in my fish tank. The tank has a capacity of 10-gallons and holds a single goldfish. Once I had cleaned the tank, I put the fish in it. This sort of goldfish does not require a heater and the fresh water was quite cold. So the little fellow was fine at first (say, for three seconds!) and then sunk to the bottom where he pooped just a bit from stress I guess (see the photo) and where he stayed all night.

He wasn't dead, his gills were working, but he sure looked bad. Then, tonight he is miraculously transformed anew and is swimming about happily! It just goes to show, the fish is cold-blooded and once the water warmed, the fish came back to life. No miraculous really, but kind of cool.

A quote on string theorists

It's rare for a scientist---even a string theorist, beholden neither to instruments nor to data--to submit 7 articles in an entire year, let alone one month.

David Kaiser's review of Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich in American Scientist, Nov.--Dec. 2009,

On the book: I haven't read the book (only this review) but this quote summarizes a large part of physics today.

They knew more than we think

X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.

In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device – researcher Derek J. de Solla Price laid the groundwork by establishing initial tooth counts and suggesting that the device followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world.

It took X-ray imaging and specialized processing techniques to uncover what was inside a barnacle encrusted and corroded container. Yet, what was left inside lent deep insight into advancements long ago.

The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.

Here's a device that "could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon's phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn."

You can see a video here.

The ancients were neither primative nor ignorant. I am reminded of Doron Zeilberger's quote (somewhere on his site) to the effect that our ancestors were much wiser than we know. This is more evidence of that.

(hat tip: andy i.)

Snowflakes or fakes?

During the holiday season we see images of lots of stuff not found in nature: flying reindeer, sugarplum fairies, and geometrically incorrect snowflakes. Now, Thomas Koop, a chemist, is trying to fix the snowflake problem.

Koop thinks ice crystals are masterpieces of natural beauty. Unfortunately, he says, "This beauty is sometimes corrupted."

The quest for accuracy in advertising. An exercise in futility if ever there were one!

Santa Physics: His existence is a miracle!

Santa has 31 hours to visit 378 million Christian children; at the rate of 3.5 children per household, and assuming at least one good child per home, this comes to 108 million homes; if each child receives no more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh would be carrying more than 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself; Santa would thus need at least 360,000 Reindeer to pull the sleigh; since Santa must visit 108 homes in 31 hours, he will have to travel at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound; at that speed, the lead pair of Reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each and vaporize – indeed, the entire Reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second; Santa himself would be subjected to forces of 17,500 G's; a 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, and be crushed.

This just shows that there's a miracle for Santa to exist!

A reason NOT to go into law

From Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia (and I don't think he's talking about engineers):

I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?

I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

And they appear here in the Court, I mean, even the ones who will only argue here once and will never come again. I’m usually impressed with how good they are. Sometimes you get one who’s not so good. But, no, by and large I don’t have any complaint about the quality of counsel, except maybe we’re wasting some of our best minds.

The Family Guy does physics

From Hulu.com, we have the Family Guy (Fox TV) and the multiverse.

The show is fun to watch, a bit raunchy, but the physics aspect is horrible. Still, one wouldn't watch the show to learn physics.

Humans: Some of what we don't know

Blushing, laughter, pubic hair, teenagers, dreams, altruism, art, superstition, kissing, and, (my favorite!) nose picking.

Do you have more?

Cheerleader for Science

This comes via Fox News where a cheerleader has blog for science. It's pretty good and motivating.

It used to be people liked science for its intrinsic knowledge and for the love of discovery. Today, we don't really seem to find value in knowledge for the sake of knowing. That's too bad.

So, if a cheerleader can promote science, well, maybe people will move from seeing science as a cheer to seeing science as worthwhile in itself.

Laptops and real viruses: A winning combination

[T]he same team used viruses to construct the negative electrode, or anode, of the battery. In the new work, the researchers engineered viruses for the positive electrode, or cathode. When the two are put together, the virus batteries should perform better than traditional lithium ion batteries and also be environmentally friendly, the team reports.

“Because the viruses are living organisms, we had to use only water-based solvents, no high pressures and no high temperatures,” says Angela Belcher, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a study coauthor.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

From the site:

Explanation: Two galaxies are squaring off in Virgo and here are the latest pictures. When two galaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. This is because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small fraction of that space. But during the collision, one galaxy can rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. If the two galaxies merge, black holes that likely resided in each galaxy center may eventually merge. Because the distances are so large, the whole thing takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. Besides the two large spiral galaxies, a smaller third galaxy is visible on the far left of the above image of Arp 274, also known as NGC 5679. Arp 274 spans about 200,000 light years across and lies about 400 million light years away toward the constellation of Virgo.

This is interesting, to me, for the following:

1. The collision is a "non-event." Sure, it'll happen but take almost forever to do so.
2. The collision will effect little: When it happens there is little actually colliding, just dust and gas. Yawn!
3. The galaxies seem to have spirals in the opposite sense: This actually is interesting. The middle galaxy is spinning clockwise while the galaxy on the right is spinning counter-clockwise. I find that pretty neat.