Science Odds and Ends

I've been waiting for this technology! I hope they commercialize it quickly - I need to replace my 20 year old windows to improve my energy efficiency and would love to have them collect energy too!

http://topicfire.com/share/Turning-wind ... 52393.html
Turning windows into powerplants
If a new development from labs at MIT pans out as expected, someday the entire surface area of a building’s windows could be used to generate electricity — without interfering with the ability to see through them.
by David L. Chandler
April 15, 2011

Previous attempts to create transparent solar cells have either had extremely low efficiency (less than 1 percent of incoming solar radiation is converted to electricity), or have blocked too much light to be practical for use in windows. But the MIT researchers were able to find a specific chemical formulation for their cells that, when combined with partially infrared-reflective coatings, gives both high visible-light transparency and much better efficiency than earlier versions — comparable to that of non-transparent organic photovoltaic cells.

The paper: http://topicfire.com/share/Turning-wind ... 52393.html

In the health center, BearMtnHIB pointed out that scientists could really use the expertise of engineers in designing experiments. I agree - science works best when there is cross-talk between diverse perspectives. It's been a slowly increasing movement over the last few decades - multidiscplinary research. Here's another example:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podca ... h-11-04-13
Paul Davies: Physics Could Help Fight Cancer
At a science and tech policy discussion, cosmologist Paul Davies talked about being recruited by the National Cancer Institute to study metastasis.
Steve Mirsky reports
| April 13, 2011

“When cancer cells spread around the body, this is a physics problem. These cells are microscopic bodies being swept along in this raging torrent. They wriggle around, they latch on to surfaces, they drill their way through. This is the sort of language that physicists and engineers can understand. Cancer research is dominated by genetics and biochemistry. That’s why we have the therapies, genetic and chemotherapy, as the main approaches. I think that we can open up a whole new frontier just by thinking about the problem in a totally different way.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/ ... c=fb&cc=fp
The Triceratops Panic: Why Does Science Keep Changing Its Mind?
by Robert Krulwich
April 14, 2011

One of the nice things about growing up is you don't have to spend time thinking about planets, digestion or awesome dinosaurs if you don't want to, because what you were taught was "science" so those things are supposed to stay that way forever.

Except for what this reveals about public attitudes toward science. Brian Switek, on his wonderful blog Dinosaur Tracking, describes how the media portrayed the Triceratops study as a pointy-headed attack on a beloved dinosaur. It's all the scientists' fault, the headlines seemed to say. (See article for more on the triceratops, brontosaur, and Pluto)

The lesson here is that when science slips from the academy into popular culture, people love, honor and protect what they know, what they've learned. What they don't understand is all science knowledge is tentative. Something is "true" only as long as the facts support the premise. When the facts change, science has to change with it.People don't want their eternalities to change. They hate that. But, in the end, science has to win.

Now, before you go jumping on "climate science is the same thing - it could easily be proven wrong", yes that is absolutely true. But what I want to emphasize is that in order to accept that it can change, you first must accept that it's steadily been accumulating evidence for the last 40+ years and is the current, best explanation for what's being seen around the globe in terms of sea level rise, plant and animal habitat migration, glacial melting, etc - you can't dismiss it until you've honestly considered it.

http://topicfire.com/share/Prenatal-pes ... 90602.html
Prenatal pesticide exposure tied to lower IQ in children
April 21, 2011 By Sarah Yang

The researchers found that every tenfold increase in measures of organophosphates detected during a mother's pregnancy corresponded to a 5.5 point drop in overall IQ scores in the 7-year-olds. Children in the study with the highest levels of prenatal pesticide exposure scored seven points lower on a standardized measure of intelligence compared with children who had the lowest levels of exposure.

"These associations are substantial, especially when viewing this at a population-wide level," said study principal investigator Brenda Eskenazi, UC Berkeley professor of epidemiology and of maternal and child health.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podca ... a-11-04-20
Coating Heals Itself with Phase Change
A metal-polymer coating can heal its own scratches by liquefying when exposed to UV and then resolidifying. Karen Hopkin reports
April 20, 2011

Are your car’s bumpers riddled with scars from encounters with tight parking spaces? Did the furniture movers scratch your floor? Wouldn’t it be great if those marks could just disappear? Well, thanks to the magic of chemistry, maybe such nicks will soon be nipped. Because scientists have produced a material that can actually heal itself, work published in the journal Nature. [Mark Burnworth et al., "Optically Healable Supramolecular Polymers"] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 09963.html

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/ ... your-brain
It's Not Just Rude, It's Ruining Your Brain
By Kevin Drum
Tue Apr. 19, 2011

a professor friend emails to remind me that rudeness is actually the least of the problems with the perpetual multitasking of the smartphone generation:....But here's the thing: there is convincing evidence that this inveterate multitasking has a serious, measurable and long lasting negative effect on cognitive function. Look up Stanford psychologist Clifford Nass sometime. There's a lovely episode of Frontline from a year or so ago featuring him. He has shown that multitaskers are not only bad at multitasking, but they are also worse than nonmultitaskers on every individual one of the tasks.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... /nass.html
Interview Clifford Nass
This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Dec. 1, 2009.

What did you expect when you started these experiments?

Each of the three researchers on this project thought that ... high multitaskers [would be] great at something, although each of us bet on a different thing.

And what did you find out?

We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task to another.

Happy Belated Birthday to the Hubble Telescope! 21 years old!
http://topicfire.com/share/Gorgeous-gal ... 85540.html
Gorgeous galaxies celebrate Hubble’s 21st birthday
by Phil Plait
April 20th, 2011

Happy 21st birthday, Hubble Space Telescope!

On April 24th, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery roared into space, carrying HST into orbit and into history. In honor of this anniversary, astronomers have released a new image of the interacting galaxies Arp 273, and it’s a beaut:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ty-on-mend
Lung-gevity: Longer U.S. Life Expectancy One Benefit of the 1970 Clean Air Act
Air quality across the U.S. has improved dramatically since 1970. According to the EPA, levels of all major air contaminants are down significantly since Congress passed the Clean Air Act that year
| April 25, 2011

According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), levels of all major air pollution contaminants (ozone, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and lead) are down significantly since 1970; carbon monoxide levels alone dropped by more than 70 percent.

Pope and his team analyzed life expectancy, economic, demographic and pollution data from 51 metropolitan areas, and found that when fine-particle air pollution dropped by 10 micrograms per cubic meter, life expectancy rose by 31 weeks—such as in Akron, Ohio and Philadelphia. Where fine particle counts dropped even more—by 13 to 14 micrograms, such as in New York City, Buffalo and Pittsburgh—people lived some 43 weeks longer on average.

But according to the American Lung Association (ALA), even though air quality around the country is improving overall, some 175 million Americans—58 percent of the population—still live in places where pollution levels can cause breathing difficulties or worse.

http://topicfire.com/share/Purdue-stude ... 12159.html
Purdue students build street-legal 2, 200 mpg solar powered car
by Jim Schenke
April 25, 2011

The team is drawn from an array of undergraduate programs including mechanical, electrical and computer engineering and aviation technology. It spent one year designing the $90,000 prototype and one year building it.

The Celeritas prototype can handle a full-sized driver seated upright in a car equipped with headlights, taillights, a trunk, energy regenerative braking, pothole-handling suspension and rearview backup cameras. The car, equipped with five onboard computer systems, generated so much electricity it was in jeopardy of overloading its onboard batteries.

http://topicfire.com/share/Zeroing-in-o ... 16057.html
Zeroing in on the elusive green LED
Provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
April 25, 2011

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method for manufacturing green LEDs with greatly enhanced light output. We already have powerful, inexpensive red and blue LEDs. Once we develop a similar green LED, it should lead to a new generation of high-performance, energy-efficient display and illumination devices.

The color of light produced by LEDs depends on the type of semiconductor material it contains.The holy grail of solid-state lighting, however, is a true white LED, Wetzel said. The white LEDs commonly used in novelty lighting applications, such as key chains, auto headlights, and grocery freezers, are actually blue LEDs coated with yellow phosphorus – which adds a step to the manufacturing process and also results in a faux-white illumination with a noticeable bluish tint. The key to true white LEDs, Wetzel said, is all about green.

The paper: http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v9 ... horized=no