A New Way to Make Useful Chemicals from CO2
Posted on February 1, 2010 Leave a Comment
A New Way to Make Useful Chemicals from CO2
A copper-based catalyst helps turn the gas into antifreeze and household cleaners.
When it’s exposed to the elements, the surface of copper turns green because it reacts with oxygen. But now scientists have discovered a copper-based material with a surprising property: it reacts with carbon dioxide in air rather than oxygen. Though the reaction is not a practical way to remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it does provide an alternative new route, using a cheap, nonpetroleum feedstock, to make useful chemicals.
Researchers have been looking for such a material for a long time, taking a cue from plants, which use atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce a wide range of useful materials. But previous approaches have fallen short in a variety of ways. For example, they’ve required large amounts of energy and concentrated streams of carbon dioxide rather than the trace amounts found in air. One of the big challenges is that materials tend to preferentially react with oxygen, which is much more reactive than carbon dioxide and far more abundant. Oxygen makes up over 20 percent of the atmosphere, whereas there are only a few hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide.
Toyota Sees Robotic Nurses in Your Lonely Final Years
Posted on January 31, 2010 Leave a Comment
Toyota Sees Robotic Nurses in Your Lonely Final Years
Now Toyota, looking ahead at the second half of this century, sees a mounting health care crisis and aging population coming to Japan. It sees a future where manufacturing robotic workers is the hot new industry and “autonomation” takes on a whole new meaning.
And the first place we might see these robots is in hospitals.
Japan’s aging population and low birthrate point to a looming shortage of workers, and Japan’s elder care facilities and hospitals are already competing for nurses. This fact has not escaped Toyota, which runs Toyota Memorial Hospital in Toyota City, Japan. Taking a lead from Honda, Toyota in 2004 announced plans to build “Toyota Partner Robots” and begin selling them in 2010 after extensive field trials at Toyota Memorial.
Mom Questioned for Posting Photo of Baby Smoking on Facebook
Posted on January 30, 2010 Leave a Comment
Mom Questioned for Posting Photo of Baby Smoking on Facebook
Topping the list of idiotic things to share on Facebook, 18-year-old mother Rebecca Davey of Southend, Essex (in the UK), posted a photo of her six-month-old son Ollie with an unlit cigarette in his month.
The Daily Mail reports that the smoking baby photo alarmed a few online friends, who reported Davey to the local authorities.
The Google Decade Ends
Posted on January 28, 2010 Leave a Comment
As we near the end of the second decade of the Internet as a mass medium, no one can deny that the last 10 years have been all about Google (GOOG). When the aughts began, Google was a clever search algorithm with a little venture capital but no CEO, no substantial brand recognition, and no clear way to make money. Now, it’s a verb, a tech empire, and a public company with a market capitalization just shy of $200 billion (and sitting on $20 billion in cold, hard cash).
Company by company, industry by industry, the growth of Google can be measured by the rivals who are dead, dying, or struggling to live. Here’s a sampling of the butcher’s bill.
Stuck Mars Rover About to Die?
Posted on January 27, 2010 Leave a Comment
Stuck Mars Rover About to Die?
Built to rove for 90 days, Spirit has lasted six years on Mars. But now it’s stuck and may lose power by May. Even standing still, though, Spirit can do a surprising amount of science, NASA says.
NASA’s Mars rover Spirit passed its six-year anniversary January 3rd, but the upcoming Mars winter may spell the end for the ‘all-terrain’ vehicle.
Last year, Spirit’s wheels broke through a crusty Mars surface layer and became trapped in the loose sand hidden underneath. Here, a NASA scale model mockup is seen trying to maneuver out of the predicament.
Black Holes Pair Up For Double Whammy
Posted on January 27, 2010 Leave a Comment
Black Holes Pair Up For Double Whammy
What’s worse than one giant black hole waiting to swallow up everything nearby? Try two supermassive black holes packing a galactic double whammy.
A team of astronomers recently discovered 33 sets of double black holes in distant galaxies. Though these black hole pairs had been predicted theoretically, only a handful had been observed so far.
“[The findings] show that dual supermassive black hole systems are much more common than previously known from observations,” said researcher Julia Comerford, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The economics of happiness
Posted on January 26, 2010 Leave a Comment
Last year was not a happy one. Economic crisis. Job losses. Wars. Yet, while we can quantify things such as gross domestic product or home foreclosures, it’s harder to measure their impact on our collective happiness.
One way to gauge that effect is through what has become known as the economics of happiness — a set of new techniques and data to measure well-being and contentment. Hundreds of thousands of people are surveyed and asked how happy or satisfied they are with their lives, with possible answers on a scale between very unhappy and very happy.
How much happiness does money really buy? How do you weigh the relative loss in happiness resulting from a pink slip, a divorce or a diagnosis of illness? Such questions have gone from the fringes to the center of the dismal science, with economics journals now boasting thousands of articles from “Does Happiness Pay?” to “Do Cigarette Taxes Make Smokers Happier?”
A history of walking on water
Posted on January 25, 2010 Leave a Comment
On the afternoon of 22 January 1907, a wailing chorus of steamboat whistles sent the residents of Memphis, Tennessee, running to the banks of the Mississippi river. “A great crowd assembled on the riverside, thinking some great disaster was taking place on the water,” reported the Memphis News-Scimitar. Instead, the swelling crowd was greeted by the sight of a man calmly walking on water. This was no miracle. Gliding along on a pontoon-like pair of “water shoes” was “Professor” Charles W. Oldrieve, the world’s pre-eminent “aquatic pedestrian”.
It Was a wild wager: $5000 if he could walk all the way from Cincinnati to New Orleans - on water. But as the self-styled “Professor” Charles W. Oldrieve deftly dodged the wake from passing steamboats, it looked as if he might just collect. He had left Cincinnati, Ohio, on New Year’s Day 1907. Under the terms of his bet with Boston gambler Alfred Woods, he had just 40 days to reach New Orleans, a 2600-kilometre walk along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. As he strode downriver in “water shoes” of his own design, followed by his wife and judges in a skiff, people flocked to the riverside to cheer him on.
Fruits of the sea: Startling strawberry crab discovered off Taiwan
Posted on January 25, 2010 Leave a Comment
Fruits of the sea: Startling strawberry crab discovered off Taiwan
A marine biologist has discovered a startling new crab species that resembles a large strawberry.
The unusual crustacean was found off the coast of southern Taiwan. It has a dramatic bright red shell covered with small white bumps.
China’s Scary Space Ambitions
Posted on January 23, 2010 Leave a Comment
China’s Jan. 11 test of exoatmospheric missile interception is worth paying attention to—especially in Washington. It isn’t just an early step toward development of a missile-defense system; it’s also a signal of a radical change in the country’s stance on the militarization of space. The United States should take this as a wake-up call that in the long term, China intends to challenge its strategic superiority in aerospace.
The People’s Liberation Army publicly unveiled its new strategy as part of the Air Force’s 60th anniversary in November last year. It appears that this strategy was formulated in 2004, but the world did not learn about it until PLA Air Force Commander General Xu Qiliang summarized it as “effecting air and space integration, possessing capabilities for both offensive and defensive operations.”
Meanwhile, Chinese diplomats continued to hew to the line set down in 1985 by the late leader Deng Xiaoping, when he told former U.S. President Richard Nixon that China “is against whoever goes in for development of outer space weapons.” China started an intensive diplomatic and propaganda campaign against American missile defense programs. Most recently Beijing added its vocal assistance to Vladimir Putin’s intimidation campaign, which succeeded in helping to convince current U.S. President Barack Obama to reverse his predecessor’s commitment to build ground-based defenses in Europe against Iran’s Chinese-aided nuclear missile threat.