New Spider-Man Device Could Let Humans Walk on Walls
“A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man or create adhesive devices that could be turned on and off with the flick of a switch.
The contraption, inspired by a beetle that can hold on to a leaf with a force 100 times its weight, uses the surface tension of water to make an adhesive bond, but it does so with a creative twist. It could be used to create sticky shoes or gloves, researchers said today.
The device consists of a flat top plate riddled with tiny holes, each just a few hundred microns (a millionth of a meter) wide. A bottom plate holds water. In between is a porous layer. A 9-volt battery powers an electric field that forces water to squeeze through the tiny holes in the top layer.
The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip another surface — much the way two pieces of wet glass stick together. Turn the electricity off, and the bond breaks.
“In our everyday experience, these forces are relatively weak,” explained Paul Steen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University. “But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces.”"
Read more at Live Science (Thanks Katherine)
Huge Solar Storm Triggers Unusual Auroras
“Auroras create green curtains of light August 4 over the Rupert River in Waskaganish (see map), a Cree Nation community in Quebec, Canada.
Last week’s northern lights—which lasted a few days—were products of a large burst of plasma, or charged gas, from the sun known as a coronal mass ejection. A NASA orbiter called the Solar Dynamics Observatory saw last Sunday’s eruption, which was aimed directly at Earth and sparked predictions of a shimmering sky show.
Now it seems aurora fans may be in for another treat: A solar flare spotted Saturday by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory was even more powerful than the previous eruption. Although this time the bulk of the plasma burst isn’t aimed right at Earth, scientists say it could still trigger another round of colorful auroras.”
See more photos at National Geographic (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Trap Lightning in a Block
“To create beautiful electrical-charge patterns like this, you could use a giant particle accelerator. But shag carpeting will also do just fine. Watch how Lichtenberg figures are made in our amazing video. A Lichtenberg figure being created by a tap from a nail. In just a few hundred nanoseconds, electrons trapped in plastic exit suddenly as a bright, branching spark.”
Read more at PopSci (Thanks DG)
Invisibility Cloak Made From Silk
“For thousands of years people have worn shimmering silk to stand out in a crowd. Within the next few years people could wear silk to become invisible in a a crowd.
For the first time ever, scientists have created an invisibility cloak made from silk, and coated in gold.
The new metamaterial, as invisibility cloaks and their kin are technically called, only works on relatively long terahertz waves (a region of the electromagnetic spectrum between radio and infrared light), but the Boston-area scientists who developed the technology think that silk could work as an invisibility cloak at much smaller wavelengths, even in the visible range.
The research could lead to a wide range of optically unique materials for use in biomedicine or defense.
“This is an unusual angle for a metamaterial because of silk’s ability to interface with the human body,” something that no other metamaterial is currently capable of, said Fiorenzo Omenetto, a scientist at Tufts University who, along with colleagues at Boston University, helped develop the silk-based metamaterial and detail their new research in the journal Advanced Materials.
“On the sensing side it gives you a platform that is very adaptable.”"
Read more at Discovery News (Thanks Steve)
Brainless slime mould makes decisions like humans
“A couple arrive at a fancy restaurant and they’re offered the wine list. This establishment only has two bottles on offer, one costing £5 and the other costing £25. The second bottle seems too expensive and the diners select the cheaper one. The next week, they return. Now, there’s a third bottle on the list but it’s a vintage, priced at a staggering £1,000. Suddenly, the £25 bottle doesn’t seem all that expensive, and this time, the diners choose it instead.
Businesses use this tactic all the time – an extremely expensive option is used to make mid-range ones suddenly seem like attractive buys. The strategy only works because humans like to compare our options, rather than paying attention to their absolute values. In the wine example, the existence of the third bottle shouldn’t matter – the £25 option costs the same amount either way, but in one scenario it looks like a rip-off and in another, it looks like a steal. The simple fact is that to us, a thing’s value depends on the things around it. Economists often refer to this as “irrational”.
But if that’s the case, we’re not alone in our folly. Other animals, from birds to bees, make choices in the same way. Now, Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman from the University of Sydney, have found the same style of decision-making in a creature that’s completely unlike any of these animals – the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum. It’s a single-celled, amoeba-like creature that doesn’t have a brain.
Physarum spends most of its life as a large mat called a ‘plasmodium’, which is a single cell that contains many nuclei. The plasmodium searches for food by moving along like an amoeba and sending out a network of tendrils. Its search patterns are very sophisticated for a brainless organism. A Japanese group found that if they placed the mould among food sources arranged like Tokyo’s urban centres, it created a network that closely resembled Tokyo’s actual railway system. The slimy network was optimised to transport nutrients to the main plasmodium.
Scientists have long since discovered that you can run simple decision-making experiments with Physarum by presenting it with several food sources and seeing how it behaves. Typically, the plasmodium touches all the potential meals and then either ‘decides’ to move towards one, or splits itself among many.”
Read more at Discover
Supernova ejects material asymmetrically
“A team of astronomers based in Europe has obtained a three-dimensional view of the innermost material released by a supernova – something never before seen. The researchers discovered a turbulent environment where stellar material is being ejected in a highly asymmetric fashion.
The subject of the study is Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), located in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. Due to its proximity to the Milky Way, SN 1987A has caused a flurry of astronomical interest since it first appeared in 1987. It has been the basis for several remarkable observational “firsts”, including the detection of neutrinos released when its core collapsed, direct exploration of the radioactive elements present during the blast, and it revealed insights into how dust is formed during a supernova explosion.
This latest research, led by Karina Kjaer of Queen’s University, Belfast, looks at the geometry of the supernova blast. Kjaer worked with colleagues from the European Southern Observatory and Stockholm University, Sweden, to image the aftermath of the star’s explosion. This was done using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) fitted with SINFONI (Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared). This equipment allowed the team to obtain detailed analysis of SN 1987A through use of its very high resolving ability and light filtering system.”
Read more at Physics World (Thanks @MiniOptimus)
Oldest house in Britain discovered to be 11,500 years old
The home is so old that when it was built Britain was still part of Continental Europe. The circular structure near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, which dates back to the Stone Age 8,500 years BC, was found next to a former lake.
The house predates the dwelling previously thought to be Britain’s oldest, at Howick, Northumberland, by at least 500 years. The team said they are also excavating a large wooden platform made of timbers which have been split and hewn. It is thought to be the earliest evidence of carpentry in Europe.
Dr Chantal Conneller and Barry Taylor from the University of Manchester have been working with Dr Nicky Milner from the University of York at Star Carr since 2004. The house was first excavated by the team two years ago.
According to the archaeologists, the site was inhabited by hunter-gatherers from just after the last Ice Age, for between 200 and 500 years.
More at the Telegraph
Lightning in slo-mo
“This fantastic footage of a lightning storm was filmed at 9,000 frames a second and then played back real slow.”
Via Sunday Mercury (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
What Colliding Galaxies Look Like: Photos That Will Amaze
“Earlier today NASA released this gorgeous new image of two colliding galaxies that began colliding about 100 million years ago.
The imaging data, which were taken between 1999 and 2005, show the Antennae galaxies, so called because of the long antenna-like “arms,” viewed in wide-angle views of the system. NASA says the features got generated by tidal forces produced during the collision, which is still occurring some 62 million light-years away from the Earth.
It must be one heck of a show to observe up close as it has led to the formation “of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies”. The biggest of these young stars have already grown up and since exploded as supernovas.
To find your way through this composite photo, the image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory is blue, the Hubble Space Telescope is in ggold and brown, while and the Spitzer Space Telescope is in red.”
Read more at CBS News
Future Crimes Can Be Predicted Perfectly, Scientists Say
“A team from Northwestern University claim they have achieved 100 percent accuracy in reading the minds of make-believe terrorists — simply by attaching electrodes to their scalps and examining their brain waves.
For the study, 29 students were given mock terrorist plans and 30 minutes to learn about an attack on a certain U.S. city. They were asked to work out their own details based on information they were given regarding weapons and methods.
The researchers, who also knew about the mock terrorist plans, monitored the students’ brain waves to find out whether they gave away details of where and when the attacks were to take place. They correlated a rise in brain wave activity to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy across all the students that participated.
According to psychology professor J. Peter Rosenfeld, the “guilty” patterns occur in “P300″ brain waves when meaningful information is shown to a person with “guilty knowledge.”
What makes the result so impressive is that in a real-life situation, the knowledge would be much more deeper entrenched, given the months or years of planning that a participant would be subject to.”
Read more at Fox News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
