Month: November 2007

…from a solar-powered toothbrush, of course.

The invention, from University of Saskatchewan professor Kunio Komiyama and his colleague Dr. Gerry Uswak, uses electrons to replace toothpaste. Apparently, according to a piece on canada.com, it utterly destroys the two types of bacteria responsible for most peridontal disease.

Komiyama’s first model, which was described 15 years ago in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology, contained a titanium dioxide rod in the neck of the brush, just below the nylon bristles. It works when light shines on the wet rod, releasing electrons. Those electrons react with acid in the mouth, which helps break down plaque. No toothpaste is required.

Now Komiyama’s back with a newer model, the Soladey-J3X, which he says packs twice the chemical punch compared to the original.

It’s also turned up on BoingBoing Gadgets and Gizmodo, naturally.

UN Scientists looking at the weather have found that over the past 500 years, climate change has marched hand in hand with war, New Scientist reports:

The 100-year warming period would have briefly relieved social tensions, …[says Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology]. But, from the early to mid-1800s, temperatures dropped again, and conflicts resumed.

Although the world is now predicted to get warmer, not cooler, the researchers point out that forecasts suggest global warming will lead to long-term food shortages much as cooling did during the Little Ice Age, by disrupting global water cycles.

“Modern societies have more mechanisms to cope with these problems,” says Brecke. But he cautions that the mechanisms may fail if society is forced to cope with a whole slew of environmental problems at the same time, as is predicted by several major environmental reports.

Arthropods are the creatures that have armor-like skin and jointed legs – the group that includes crawfish, scorpions, spiders and insects. The bugs. The largest arthropod currently crawling around Earth is Macrocheira kaempferi, the Japanese spider crab, which has a 2-foot long body and long, skinny legs stretching as wide as 13 feet.

Sure, it’s big, but a few million years ago, New Scientist reports, it would have been lunch. Researchers are investigating the remains of a prehistoric water scorpion that measured more than 8 feet long:

Researchers say the monstrous creature is the largest arthropod ever known – over 30 centimetres bigger than the previous largest specimen of the same species.
Simon Braddy at the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues examined the 46-centimetre-long claw, found in a quarry in western Germany, and believe it belonged to a sea scorpion species called Jaekelopterus rhenaniae that roamed the ocean floors some 390 million years ago.

Some believe this giant creature became the ancestor of all modern, land-dwelling scorpions.

Say hi to grandma, kids.

Despite being dead for, oh, 65 million years or so, dinosaurs still turn up in the darnedest places. Mainly museums, of course, but even there, the dusty shelves can still be full of surprises, as New Scientist reports:

PhD student Mike Taylor spotted a fossil vertebra, which he says “leapt out” at him as being entirely unfamiliar. What makes it startling is that the fossil had been sitting in the museum’s archives for over a century, ever since it was unearthed in the 1890s.

The species has now been named Xenoposeidon proneneukus.

Slightly farther afield, palaeontologists are oohing and ahhing over another new dinosaur discovery, the utterly bizarre vacuum mouth of Nigersaurus. As National Geographic reveals:

Research into the 30-foot-long (9-meter-long) sauropod has shown the dinosaur to have a range of extreme adaptations.

These include a broad, square-edged muzzle tipped with 500 to 600 replaceable teeth that were used like scissors to shear off vegetation—mostly ferns and horsetails.

…

The team’s findings suggest the dinosaur’s head faced downward, at a right angle to the neck.

“That made a lot of sense given the shape of the muzzle—it was mowing down plants along the ground,” Sereno said.

Now, scientists think a lot of other long-necked sauropods – like the mighty Diplodocus – might have spent their lives looking down as well.

Take a look at the curious creature in an artist’s rendering or a close-up photo of its garden-shear mouth, or browse a wide selection of frankly peculiar prehistoric animals.

That’s the not-terribly cheerful news from Nature on the vaquita (Phocoena sinus), a porpoise from Mexico’s Pacific coast:

In 1999, researchers estimated there were 567 vaquitas left in the northern Gulf of California. Mexican biologist Armando Jaramillo-Legorreta, lead author of the new report, says that the rising number of fishing boats is killing the porpoises at a rate of at least 40 a year. A population of about 100 must be saved for sufficient genetic diversity, the team says.

Previous attempts to create no-fishing zones and buy out fishermen in the vaquita’s habitat have failed. But now the environmental groups WWF, Nature Conservancy and Conservation International have joined forces in a $10 million pledge.

That’s the good news. The bad news:

Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, has joined the push to save the animal. But fishing industry advocates sometimes speak openly of wiping it out.

You can read more about the world’s most endangered dolphin (now that the baiji is officially no more) on vaquita.org and Wikipedia.

If Einstein was around today, he’d probably surf, too.

There’s a piece in the Telegraph (based, apparently, on a New Scientist clip) about Dr. A. Garrett Lisi, an “impoverished surfer” who looked hard at a pretty geometrical shape (called “E8”) and realized it could possibly be used as a map for everything. He might just have solved the step beyond Grand Unification Theory. (Though there’s no word as to whether he, like Nobel-winning surfing biochemist Kary Mullis, had any, um, biochemical assistance in making his conceptual breakthrough, just look at E8, maaan). Anyway, this realization – that the forces of the universe could be shaped like this spirograph-like swirl of interconnected lines – could be a very big deal indeed:

Lisi’s inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 – a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says “I think our universe is this beautiful shape.”

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi’s breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8’s structure matched his own. “My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” he tells New Scientist. “I thought: ‘Holy crap, that’s it!’”

Researchers might well be testing some of this stuff at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva next year.

If you’re up for the science, here’s Lisi’s publication, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”.

Popular Science has named the nanosolar powersheet the “Best of What’s New 2007,” and for good reason. Instead of using big glass frames to generate electricity at an average cost of $3 per watt, this flexible stuff can be shipped in rolls and costs 30 cents per watt. Their secret? Photovoltaic ink. It’s like printer toner that turns light into energy. Finally, solar power is cheaper and easier than oil- or coal-driven power plants:

The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year.

…
“You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.”

You can go visit the Nanosolar website and be even more impressed. They’ve got a few images of the product and news videos showing their process, as well as an email list for updates (like when can I finally buy this stuff and stick it on my roof?).

People nowadays look at Jules Verne as one of the forefathers of science fiction, anticipating amazing technological developments like swift, giant submarines and capsules landing on the moon. But an old New Scientist article discusses his little-known work peering into the future of society. In 1863, he wrote a novella about life in Paris one hundred years later. It was never published in his lifetime, but a manuscript discovered in an old trunk proves that his vision was eerily accurate. It’s not exactly cheerful reading:

Parisians in the 1960s live in structures with as many as 12-storeys, a far cry from Baron Haussmann’s six floor buildings of the 19th century that line the city’s streets today.

Life as imagined by Verne is nothing more than a gigantic marketplace where people no longer fight over ideas but only for riches. Verne seems to mourn the absence of bravery in soldiers who no longer go into hand-to-hand combat but fight on distant technological battlefields. Michel works briefly at rewriting classic plays to suit contemporary, pablum-fed audiences. Here Verne seems to have predicted the TV sitcom complete with fake clapping on the soundtrack.

He also takes a dim view of the battle of the sexes:

Michel’s only pleasure comes from his tiny circle of fellow artist friends and a young woman who catches his fancy. In Paris in the 20th Century Verne rants against women’s liberation, or what he calls the evolution of Parisiennes into American women. He says they speak seriously about serious affairs, dress poorly and have no taste. There are no more women in France under the age of 95, a helpful friend of Michel’s explains. Verne predicts women in the workforce, a declining birthrate, and horrors of horrors, more and more illegitimate children.

You can read more about Paris in the 20th Century over on Wikipedia and in a Science Fiction Studies review, or buy a copy on Amazon.

Sometimes, you just can’t win.

You’d expect a country that’s embracing electric bicycles as an alternative to cars to be lauded as an environmental savior. But scale – scale has a way of undoing our best intentions. So, when40 million Chinese pick up battery-powered bikes, people (like the writers at LiveScience) just have to ask – “So where is all the lead going?”:

I found that electric bikes travel about 35 percent faster than bicycles and have a much larger range. In the city of Kunming, an electric bike can access 60 percent more jobs within 20 minutes than a traditional bicycle. Compared to a 30-40 minute bus ride, an electric bike rider can access three to six times the number of jobs.

While this increase in mobility is remarkable, this mobility does come at a cost, namely increased lead pollution from battery use.

Electric bikes use one car-sized lead acid battery per year. Each battery represents 30-40 percent of its lead content emitted to the environment in the production processes, resulting in about 3 kilograms of lead emitted per battery produced. When scaled up the 40 million electric bikes currently on the roads, this is an astonishing amount of lead emitted into the environment.