Science Made Cool

Activate the Cold Ray!

In one of Sir Arthur C. Clarke's nostalgic essays about prewar science fiction he drops a little scorn on a story by S.P. Meek about a "cold ray." Clarke points out that you can't have a "beam of cold" because cold isn't a thing, it's an absence. So the whole idea is silly.

Unless it isn't. Behold laser refrigeration! It's not quite a "cold ray" but it does use lasers to make the target colder. The trick is that the target is a Ytterbium crystal and the lasers are exactly tuned to stimulate fluorescence by the crystals. The energy emitted is greater than the energy absorbed, making the crystals colder.

Now unless you happen to routinely wear Ytterbium clothes, you're not going to have to worry about Mr. Freeze zapping you with his cold ray, but it's still pretty awesome. Now excuse me while I fire up the laser to cool my drink. 

Trifecta!

Every now and then an idea comes along that sets a new benchmark for silliness. This is especially true in techno-solutions for social and environmental problems. Something about giving engineers a fresh pad of paper and some sharpened pencils and saying "Save the World!" opens the floodgates. These plans always seem to involve monorails, or magnetic levitation, or electric cars. Now an outfit in (where else?) California has come up with the trifecta of techno-utopian silliness:  SKY PODS.

SKY PODS are individual-sized electric mag-lev monorail cars. So they combine the immense capital cost of trains (and the aesthetic and practical horrors of elevated monorails) with the limited capacity of personal cars. It's like a ZipCar which can only follow a single predetermined route, and you have to climb up a flight of stairs to get on board!

The evolution of technology in the past century has taught us valuable lessons about the importance of flexibility, adaptability, scalability, and decentralization. SKY PODS are inflexible, un-adaptable, un-scalable (is that a word?) and highly centralized. Back in 1930 they would have been pleasantly silly on the cover of an issue of Science Wonder Stories or whatever. In 1970 they would have been another earnestly silly idea on the cover of Popular Mechanics. In 2009 they represent a stunning failure of imagination and inability to learn. I don't know of any social or environmental problem which could actually be solved by throwing monorails at it.

Taxonomy of Design

Interior design isn't usually considered a "science" the way quantum physics or paleontology are. But why not? It deals with matters of perception, psychology, energy use, flow of air and traffic, and a host of other topics which are entirely within the bounds of science. Like all arts, it is based on judgement and taste -- what looks good or looks right -- and has generally been done in an intuitive, subjective manner.

Kite Power!

Here's a piece from WIRED about the prospects for large-scale use of wind power generated at high altitudes. It's not a bad article, full of gee-whiz and enthusiasm for the idea. It even notes, optimistically, that high-altitude wind power can be tapped directly over major population centers, instead of having to put wind farms on the ground out in the middle of nowhere.

Interestingly, there's a word missing from the article. The word is "airplane." Areas of high population density are also areas with lots of air traffic. Putting what amounts to barrage balloons, reaching up to 40,000 feet, right in the middle of busy air corridors seems to be somewhere between "really stupid" and "incredibly dangerous."

If only we could tap the mighty power of the Atom . . .

Apollo 11 Redux

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, the website We Choose The Moon is replaying the live transmissions from the Apollo 11 mission in realtime. At this moment 40 years ago, the Command Service Module was nearly 169,000 nautical miles from Earth, heading toward the moon at 3349 feet/second. They'll be entering lunar orbit around this time tomorrow. And if listening to the radio chatter isn't enough for you, the site also has lots of photos and videos from the mission to explore.

Be warned site is Flash-heavy. (Thanks to Bad Astronomy for the pointer!)

Equally cool: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is currently in orbit around the moon, taking high-definition photographs of its surface. It took images of the lunar landing sites last week. 

Robot Jellyfish!

Robot Jellyfish! What else need be said? A group of engineers in South Korea have built a robot jelly which swims the same way that living ones do, using electo-active polymers which work like muscles.

But who cares? It's a Robot Jellyfish!

Solar-Powered Flight

There's a report in WIRED about the Solar Impulse, a prototype aircraft designed to use solar power for a round-the-world flight. The pilot for the trip will be Bertrand Piccard, the long-range balloonist and one of Those Piccards. (Insert boilerplate joke about "Captain Piccard" here.)

According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations by an aerodynamicist we know, the plane would fly at about 25 miles per hour, making for a trip time of about a month -- although the low speed means a good tailwind could be a tremendous advantage. (Insert boilerplate joke about commercial aviation here.) The route will likely be somewhat meandering, as such a large, light aircraft will have to stay far away from active weather.

A month-long flight means the pilots will have to deal with some of the health issues previously only faced by astronauts. How do you stay fit and avoid bone degeneration when you're just sitting in a cockpit 24 hours a day? How do you avoid going bonkers from boredom? And (all together now) how do you go to the bathroom?

Let's hope the Solar Impulse project gets airborne, and good luck to all involved.

Sound Beams!

A few years ago we mentioned the nifty technology of "Sonic Blasters." While the name is awesomely cool, the actual device is essentially nothing but a really loud speaker. Not the stuff of true science fiction. Well, science has finally caught up with fiction. Researchers in Nottingham and Ukraine have developed the world's first working "SASER." The "SASER" uses the same principle as a laser, applied to sound -- it emits a super high-frequency sound beam. It has tremendous potential applications in nanotechnology and imaging, among others.

One application the linked article is rather coy about is how, um, destructive a terahertz sound beam might be. The higher the frequency, the higher the energy. A terahertz is a frequency of 1 trillion oscillations per second; by contrast, human hearing maxes out at 20 thousand hertz, so SASER emissions ought to be on the order of 10 million times more energetic than the noises we can hear. (Experts on acoustics are encouraged to tell me what I'm getting wrong.)

So while it seems unlikely that SASERS will be able to vaporize people or shoot down spaceships, it does sound like they could do some damage in the hands of a suitably mad scientist. Or really mess up some pirates.

Twittering Brains

Our resident cyborg passed along this amazing new development: using brainwaves to send text messages via Twitter. Now, at one level this seems almost nightmarishly trivial, using advanced brain-interface technology to allow idiots to bore us with their lives more than they do already. But consider the case of people with severe spinal damage or other conditions which prevent them from communicating by speech or sign language. A brainwave interface holds incredible potential for them -- they can Twitter, in a few years it may let them talk, it could someday even allow them to control mechanical limbs.

Space Power For Real?

Pacific Gas & Electric, the big California power utility, has contracted to buy 200 megawatts of solar power generated in space from a company called Solaren, beginning in 2016.

The idea of generating power in space isn't a new one. Peter Glaser came up with it back in 1968, and Gerard K. O'Neill and his space colonization acolytes made the construction of powersats the goal and justification for building habitats in orbit. The concept is pretty simple:  build arbitrarily large photoelectric generating panels in space, and send the power to Earth using microwave beams.

The devil is in the details:  one would need something on the order of 700,000 square meters of photovoltaic panels in orbit to generate that much power -- 140 football fields' worth. Even if it was as thin as aluminum foil, an array that size would be about 300 tons, not counting the framework, the microwave beam equipment, controls, and various space doodads and solar thingmajigs. Assume (very optimistically) a total of 400 tons for the 200 MW system.

How is Solaren going to get all that stuff up to geosynchronous orbit by 2016?  Right now the biggest heavy-lift rocket available is the Delta IV, which can put 13 tons into geosynch. Maybe one could talk the Russians into digging up some old Energia boosters, which can manage 20 tons. Either way, you're talking about 20 or 30 launches of some really huge rockets over a span of only 7 years -- and that's if the whole thing was ready to go right now. Either Solaren is going to revolutionize the space launch business, or they're going to miss their scheduled completion date.

Of course, an old-school Orion booster could put the whole shebang into orbit in one launch, but if you start using nuclear energy to solve environmental problems who knows where that might lead . . .