Science Made Cool

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 . . .

It's ALIVE!

There's a long but interesting article in NewScientist about efforts underway to create artificial life. You can read the first part here and the second part here. I'll wait.

What I find interesting is how utterly dependent on existing biology this all is. They're creating "artificial life" by combining components derived ultimately from living things. It's like building a homemade clock by taking apart a bunch of clocks you got at the store and using parts from them.

I'd like to see a totally new approach based on pure chemistry and nanotechnology. Design from first principles -- pick some suitable long-chain molecule as an information-storing analog to DNA. Why a chain, even? Why not some carbon compound that forms large sheets so you can have whole "pages" of genetic information? Find ways to extract and store energy at the molecular level to power this artificial life. Maybe think "outside the box" about features of natural life: does your artificial life form have to be an enclosed cell? Does it need water as a solvent?

Such a project would be more than just cool. (It would, of course, be VERY cool.) By trying to create a living or quasi-living system without using the existing terrestrial-life toolbox, it would teach us a lot about what features of our own biology are necessary, as opposed to those which are historical accidents.

Anyone out there have a university-class chemistry lab, a dedicated corps of researchers, and a couple of billion dollars to throw at the project?

News From the New Millennium VII

I grew up in New Orleans, a city which has long been disputed territory between humans and mosquitos. At times during the 19th Century the mosquitos seemed to be winning, when yellow fever epidemics killed 41,000 people over the course of the century. Humans fought back with pesticides. I can clearly remember the diesel-oil scent of the mosquito spray trucks as they rumbled past on summer evenings, blanketing the city in pyrethum (or DDT, or whatever the heck it was).

How primitive that seems. Now Bill Gates, his henchman Nathan Myrhvold, and professional mad scientist Jordin Kare have come up with something much cooler for mosquito eradication. Lasers. They want to build drones equipped with tiny tracking systems and lasers to shoot down mosquitos. Like this, only smaller. Basically this is a James Bond villain plot -- if James Bond was an insect.

Words cannot express how much I want to have a flying robot in my house shooting mosquitos with a laser. I'd buy mosquito eggs, breed them, and fill the house with them, just to watch.

Our Nanotube Buddies

Yet another very interesting potential application for carbon nanotubes: miniature fuel cells. Apparently nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes catalyze hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells even better than platinum does. (Note:  skip past the ad page to reach the article.) Why is this important? It would allow construction of very small but quite powerful hydrogen fuel cells, capable of running things like cell phones or laptops. And while nanotubes ain't cheap, they don't cost as much as platinum does, either.

Note, by the way, that fuel cells are NOT a source of energy. They are a method of STORING energy. Free hydrogen doesn't exist on Earth, so if you're using hydrogen fuel that means that the hydrogen was produced from water by electrolysis, using energy from a powerplant somewhere. The advantage is that hydrogen is clean-burning, so you can concentrate pollution in efficient large powerplants  rather than having lots of little pollution sources.

The answer to all of life's problems:  carbon nanotubes.

Cool Stuff

Two really neat inventions.

First, an astronaut creates an orbital coffee mug which makes use of surface tension to keep the coffee from floating around in blobs. This is an old problem, of course, and previously NASA solved it by packaging all liquids in sealed bags or tubes. But there are some things -- coffee and wine in particular -- that you just don't want to suck through a straw. Now you can drink in style in space. (Spotted by the always-fascinating Ephemeral Isle 'blog.)

Second, a functioning mermaid tail for a woman legless since childhood, created by the mad geniuses at Weta Workshop. These guys can build Orcs and rayguns, and now, apparently, mermaids as well. (There's an old Avram Davidson story about a girl unable to walk who takes up a career as a mermaid in a remote part of central Europe.) (Spotted by the ever-vigilant David Thompson.)

Ministry of Space

As America's Space Shuttle fleet slides into obsolescence, scheduled to be replaced with a vehicle described as an "Apollo capsule on steroids," there's a surprising new entry into the reusable spaceplane category. Behold the Skylon. It's a British project which both looks and sounds like something from the days of Dan Dare or Gerry Anderson. 

I have my doubts about whether the Skylon will ever get built; blue-sky projects are a dime a dozen (actually they tend to cost a great many dimes, even if they never fly). But here's hoping that a revival of postwar British technological optimism is in the works. The Ministry of Space would be proud!

Carnivorous Robots?

A group of engineers at the University of the West of England have designed a robot ("EcoBot") which powers itself by catching and consuming houseflies. This suggests three responses.

1.  Hey, cool!
2.  There must be one hell of a fly problem in Bristol.
3.  Once they find out we taste like bacon, we're doomed.