This naturally occurring chunk of silver came from Michigan. Scientists used much, much smaller pieces of silver to make surprisingly stretchy nanowires. JAMES ST. JOHN/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0) Many metals can be fashioned into wires. You just have to stretch out a piece of the metal until it’s long and thin. Keep pulling, and the wire will eventually break. But new research reveals that when wires are extremely small, they can be super-stretchy. That’s especially true when they’re made of a single crystal of silver and stretched slowly. These wires can stretch to almost three times their original length before they snap, new data show.
And that’s a big deal for engineers. They could use that sort of stretchiness to design flexible electronics that resist damage. Read Article: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/nanowires-made-silver-are-super-stretchy Huskies may be the closest you can get to adding a “Game of Thrones” direwolf to your family outside of Westeros, but think twice before adopting a look-alike on a whim, says show star Peter Dinklage.
Dinklage — who plays Tyrion Lannister on the hit HBO series — teamed up with PETA to address an alarming trend among fans who have been adopting huskies thanks to their resemblance to direwolves, only to abandon the canines once the novelty wears off. “Not only does this hurt all the deserving homeless dogs waiting for a chance at a good home in shelters, but shelters are also reporting that many of these huskies are being abandoned — as often happens when dogs are bought on impulse, without understanding their needs,” Dinklage said in statement released by the animal rights organization. Read Article: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/peter-dinklage-asks-fans-stop-buying-direwolf-like-huskies-article-1.3413739 Hurricanes are the most violent storms on Earth. People call these storms by other names, such as typhoons or cyclones, depending on where they occur. The scientific term for all these storms is tropical cyclone. Only tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or eastern Pacific Ocean are called “hurricanes.”
Whatever they are called, tropical cyclones all form the same way… Read Entire Article: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/ THE TOTALITY LASTED no more than two minutes and 41 seconds, which makes the idea of spending hours driving to see it seem a bit foolish. Yet countless people did just that, simply to say they saw the sun go dark.
Photographer Rachel Bujalski joined the pilgrimage, but found herself at least as interested in the crowds as the eclipse that drew everyone together. She photographed more than two dozen sun watchers trekking up the west coast as she made the drive from San Francisco to Mitchell, Oregon, for Monday’s big show. She met all sorts during the trip, from parents toting kids to a couple in their nineties who wanted to see just one more eclipse. The portraits she posted to Instagram convey the excitement everyone felt ahead of the big event. “They’d been planning this for so long and they were just ready to see it,” Bujalski says. Read Article: https://www.wired.com/story/follow-eclipse-hunters-on-the-pilgrimage-to-totality/ A new medical-diagnostic device made out of paper detects biomarkers and identifies diseases by performing electrochemical analyses — powered only by the user’s touch — and reads out the color-coded test results, making it easy for non-experts to understand
Read Article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170822153617.htm Nighttime may be snow-time on Mars.
Low evening temperatures could cool clouds and trigger turbulent winds that fuel fast-falling snowstorms on the Red Planet, new simulations suggest. This process, reported August 21 in Nature Geoscience, may account for surprising observations of snowfall by one of NASA’s Martian landers. Couds and snowfall have emerged in recent years as central players in the water cycle and climate of Mars,” says Paul Hayne, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the research. The new study was able to create the rapid snowfall by simulating climate on a much finer scale than previous simulations. That shows the need for local-scale weather data to understand the most fundamental aspects of Mars’ climate, Hayne says. Satellite observations show that snow made of both water and carbon dioxide cover the Martian poles, and, in 2008, NASA’s Phoenix lander detected streaks of snow falling below a nighttime water-ice cloud (SN Online: 6/20/08). This was the first time scientists had seen evidence of snowfall on Mars. Read Article: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mars-has-nighttime-snow-storms New study shows that chimps’ ability to learn simple circular relationships is on a par with that of 4-year-old children Chimpanzees of all ages and all sexes can learn the simple circular relationship between the three different hand signals used in the well-known game rock-paper-scissors. Even though it might take them longer, they are indeed able to learn the game as well as a young child. Jie Gao of Kyoto University in Japan and Peking University in China is lead author of a study in the journal Primates, which is the official journal of the Japan Monkey Centre, and is published by Springer. The research compares the ability of chimpanzees and children to learn the rock-paper-scissors game.
Read Article: davidloteacher.wordpress.com/2017/08/18/chimpanzees-learn-rock-paper-scissors/ Robots are branching out. A new prototype soft robot takes inspiration from plants by growing to explore its environment.
Vines and some fungi extend from their tips to explore their surroundings. Elliot Hawkes of the University of California in Santa Barbara and his colleagues designed a bot that works on similar principles. Its mechanical body sits inside a plastic tube reel that extends through pressurized inflation, a method that some invertebrates like peanut worms (Sipunculus nudus) also use to extend their appendages. The plastic tubing has two compartments, and inflating one side or the other changes the extension direction. A camera sensor at the tip alerts the bot when it’s about to run into something. In the lab, Hawkes and his colleagues programmed the robot to form 3-D structures such as a radio antenna, turn off a valve, navigate a maze, swim through glue, act as a fire extinguisher, squeeze through tight gaps, shimmy through fly paper and slither across a bed of nails. The soft bot can extend up to 72 meters, and unlike plants, it can grow at a speed of 10 meters per second, the team reports July 19 in Science Robotics. The design could serve as a model for building robots that can traverse constrained environments. Read Article: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/robot-grows-plant?mode=topic&context=96 Levitation techniques are no longer confined to the laboratory thanks to University of Bristol engineers who have developed an easier way for suspending matter in mid-air by developing a 3D-printed acoustic levitator.
Read Article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170815111129.htm |
AuthorDavid Lo |