Whilst lookin up information on the effiency of a trompe pump i discovered this link.
It may give ideas to someone to try and perfect it for third world countries or where there is no electricity
http://www.appropedia.org/Pulser_pump#Principle_of_Operation
Hurray, Google's made search cleverer in three ways to make up for our, uh, less cleverness. If you misspell a name, it uses identifier words to fix your search, so if you search 'kyle vanhelsing gizmodo' it should take you to the right guy. Also, if you search for "aiprt," autocorrection now skips the usual "did you mean airport?" banter, taking you directly to results for "airport." (With the option to actually search for "aiprt," if that's what you meant.) More »
"In our country, we think the doctor should have all the medical records," said Dr. James McElligott, a pediatrician at the Medical University of South Carolina who worked on the study. "I like the idea of putting the ownership back in Mom's hands and empowering her a little bit."
When parents kept a so-called shot card, their child's odds of being up-to-date on vaccinations rose by more than half.
40 percent of the toddlers had a shot card, and 84 percent of these had up-to-date vaccinations. By contrast, only 79 percent of the children without a card had all their shots.
Use the card: it doesn't have a downside and it's cheap."
References:
Posted at Clinical Cases and Images. Stay updated and subscribe, follow on Twitter and Buzz, and connect on Facebook.
Buzz Aldrin Explains Importance of Obama's Mars Mission, CBS
"Aldrin said the key to the space program in the future is sustainable colonies on celestial bodies, rather than on orbiting space stations. Aldrin said he wanted to see "permanence on Mars within 15 years," and that Mars' moon Phobos may be the best spot for a permanent settlement. "This moon is the key to permanence of human beings from Earth on another planet in the solar system," said Aldrin."
Has Obama's NASA Strategy Fizzled at Launch?, Time
"Never mind the tropical sun. Visit Florida and dis the space program, and the reception you'll get is going to be awfully cool. Nobody knew that better than President Obama on Thursday, when he toured the Kennedy Space Center and then spoke to a roomful of 200 VIPs about his plans for NASA after the shuttle program ends later this year. The President had to know that more than the agency's future could be on the line. In Florida -- the ultimate presidential swing state -- his could be too. So how was the temperature in the room? Chilly -- and not without reason."
NASA and Obama's budget: the politics and ideals of human space exploration, CS Monitor
"... public reaction pushed the president on Thursday to set a timetable for the first Mars trip - by the mid-2030s - as well as a schedule to land on an asteroid (near 2025). He also had to set 2015 for starting construction of a heavy-lift launcher based on new innovative technology. But Obama only partially backed down on his proposal to cancel a Bush-era program called Constellation."
Not Your Grandfather's Space Program, US News & World Report
"Space-policy analyst Howard McCurdy of American University in Washington, D.C., says he doesn't see much difference in adherence to timetables and goals between Bush's plan and that of Obama's. But he says he's intrigued by Obama's willingness to "leapfrog" over smaller goals."
Obama's Hollow Promise On Space, Opinion, Tim Jones, Fox
"Last year the U.S. had a proven spacecraft in the shuttle, and a well-defined plan for sending American astronauts to deep space. Next year we will have no spacecraft, and no credible plan to develop our own deep space craft for a decade or more. Our experienced NASA team will have left for jobs elsewhere--if they can find them. Our claims for space leadership will be believed only by the president's speechwriters."
Click here to view the embedded video.
Here’s a video of the meteor seen over the midwest last night. I am hearing fragments have been found in Wisconsin. Updates as I hear new info.
The STEREO spacecraft (ahead) sees a huge solar prominence. Credit: NASA
The Sun is coming alive with activity. At the top of the image you can see what NASA is calling the biggest prominence eruption in 15 years. The prominence was caught in extreme UV light on April 12 and 13, 2010. This prominence is about 500,000 miles long.
There is a video taking in about 19 hours available here.
Generally, I'm a pacifist. But this Department of Defense image of F/A-18 Super Hornets flying over Afghanistan (lit by some sort of flare?), makes mechanized war look as romantic as any chick flick. Meanwhile, this refueling shot is pure sci-fi: More »
"The President stressed the importance of a transformative agenda for NASA, and the critical role of breakthrough technologies in enabling NASA and our nation to create the future we wish to see come to pass. The Society congratulates the president for refining his vision to include such incremental goals as the design of a Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle by 2015, and a preliminary timetable for human exploration destinations."
"As with President Kennedy's speech in 1961, President Obama set out goals that will test our ability to advance technology, field revolutionary new systems, and sustain commitment over many years, ensuring the United States will maintain its leadership role in space in the 21st century as we were in the 20th."
Space Frontier Foundation Urges Support for New NASA Space Plan
"The Foundation, often a critic of NASA programs and plans as wasteful or counter productive to US space ambitions, finds itself strongly supporting many of the new changes. It says this is the first administration that has truly committed to the revolutionary changes needed to what has been a moribund space program that was going nowhere at great cost."
From Medgadget:
In the beginning of the month New England Journal of Medicine published an article detailing the security risk of wireless controlled implantable devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators. Researchers at Microsoft have proposed a possible solution that would all
From Boing Boing:
Nick Clegg, leader of the UK Liberal Democrats party, has pledged to repeal the odious Digital Economy Act, which was rushed through without substantial debate before Parliament adjourned for the election. Time to start asking the other party leaders and MPs if th
Tomorrow, squads of rough and tumble robots will face off in an elaborate competition involving hard-hitting soccer in a robo-ready jungle gym arena. The craziest part: all the bots are built by high school students. More »
A team of French scientists have proposed that when it comes to multi-tasking, our brains can handle only so much. In a new study, published in Science, scientists Sylvain Charron and Etienne Koechlin found that while the brain can easily divide its attention between two tasks, a third task will begin to slow it down–suggesting there is an upper limit to our multi-tasking abilities.
The scientists asked volunteers to do two complicated matching tasks simultaneously. With two tasks to deal with, the brain’s frontal lobes swung into action, working together to get the job done. The left side of the brain picked up one assignment while the right managed the other. But when scientists threw a third task into the mix, the brain began to fumble, with the volunteers making mistakes and slowing down, leading Koechlin to suggest that our frontal lobes “can’t maintain more than two tasks.”
To find out more about how the brain maxes out on multi-tasking and what this means for people who drink coffee and text while driving, head to Not Exactly Rocket Science’s for Ed Yong’s post: When multi-tasking, each half of the brain focuses on different goals.
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80beats: Multitaskers Are Bad at Multitasking, Study Shows
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Image: Etienne Koechlin
Response to both Obama’s space policy and my blog post about it were pretty much as I expected. Haters, lovers, people who didn’t actually read what I wrote or listened to what Obama actually said, some thoughtful, some knee jerk. The usual.
But my favorite is from Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO), who, in a press release, posted this:
The decision by the Obama administration to gut NASA’s manned flight program does more than jeopardize the long term goals of solar system exploration, the cancellation of the space shuttles replacement will effectively leave the United States reliant upon the Soviet Union to grant us access to low earth orbit. As a member of the Armed Services Committee I am very concerned with that possibility, and as an American I am disappointed by the prospect.
It doesn’t surprise me that someone would erroneously say that Obama is gutting the manned space flight program, when we know he isn’t and when he may in fact be saving it. It doesn’t surprise me that people are forgetting that private industry is poised to take us into low Earth orbit before Constellation could have, though it’s odd for a "fiscally conservative" Republican Congressman — and therefore, one assume, pro-business — to forget such a thing.
It also doesn’t surprise me that someone would blame Obama about us having to rely on foreign partners for access to space after the Shuttle retires, and it certainly doesn’t surprise me that a Republican Congressman would say such a thing, even though this necessity came about because of President Bush’s decision to retire the Shuttle and not have a replacement ready for at least five years after.
But what I do find really interesting is that a Congressman on the Armed Services Committee would refer to Russia as "the Soviet Union".
Pssst! Congressman Akin: it’s the 21st century. It stopped being the USSR in 1991. I guess it’s hard to keep up with such things if you can’t see Russia from your state, though.
[Update (14:30 MT): Apparently, Congressman Akin's release has been updated, replacing "Soviet Union" with "Russian Federation". My congratulations and thanks to his team. Now, if they could fix the other egregiously wrong things he said in that release, we'll be copacetic.]
Tip o’ the Cossack hat to ScottW.
From Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News:
The introduction of genetically modified crops has had a positive impact on farm sustainability, according to a new report by the National Research Council (NRC). But the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds could erase the effective
From Geeks are Sexy Technology News:
So, can't stand the view of the wall from your windowless office? Wish you could see something else than a featureless landscape from your drab bedroom? Enters Winscape: 1Because waking up in the same place every morning is just too boring.
This is all well and good, until a pedestrian rips your iPad out of the plastic pocket, jumps on their flame-throwing moped and speeds off, leaving you bereft and without visible turning aids. More »
Something important to keep in mind when you write to us: Unless you say it is off the record, we reserve the right to publish the email. If it's a tip, however, we'll keep your personal information completely confidential. More »
From NYT > Science:
As an Icelandic volcano spewed more ash on Friday, disrupting air travel in Europe for a second day, the big question for scientists was how long the eruption might continue. The answer will go a long way toward determining any lasting impact on air travel, c
If past is prelude, then the volcanic eruption in Iceland whose plume of ash has grounded almost 300 flights across Europe may not only affect air travel in the coming days, it may also have a lingering impact on Europe’s weather. Experts are looking back to the aftereffects of a previous eruption–when the Laki volcano in Southern Iceland exploded more than 200 years ago. That explosion had catastrophic consequences for weather, agriculture and transport across the northern hemisphere – and helped trigger the French revolution [The Guardian].
The Laki volcanic fissure erupted over a eight month period between June 1783 and February 1784. Within Iceland, the lava and poisonous clouds of gas ushered in a time known as the “Mist Hardships”: farmland was ruined, livestock died in vast numbers, and the resultant famine killed almost a quarter of the population.
The eruption’s impact wasn’t confined to Iceland alone. Dust and sulfur particles thrown up by the explosion were carried as a haze across Northern Europe, clouding the skies in Norway, the Netherlands, the British Isles, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. In conjunction with another volcanic eruption and an unusually strong El Nino weather pattern, the Laki eruption is thought to have contributed to extreme weather across Europe for the next several years.
Describing the summer of 1783 in his classic Natural History of Selborne, British naturalist Gilbert White wrote it was “an amazing and portentous one … the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man” [The Guardian]. Gilbert wrote that the haze blanked out the sun at midday, that it was “particularly lurid and blood-colored at rising and setting,” and that the heat was so intense that “butcher’s meat could hardly be eaten on the same day after it was killed.” This bizarre summer was followed by an usually harsh winter, historians say. Environmental historians have also pointed to the disruption caused to the economies of northern Europe, where food poverty was a major factor in the build-up to the French revolution of 1789 [The Guardian].
Experts observing this week’s volcanic eruption at Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced AY-ya-fyat-la-yo-kult) say that while the scale of crisis may not be the same, continued eruptions at the spot could cool temperatures in Northern Europe. Richard Wunderman, a volcanologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program said the volcanic plume contains a lot of sulfur “that can become an aerosol up there that hangs around a long time reflecting sunlight” [The New York Times], creating a regional “volcano weather” effect.
But a bigger concern lurks nearby. Just a few kilometers to the east of the erupting vent is a much bigger and potentially more dangerous volcano called Katla. In the past, when Eyjafjallajökull erupted, Katla did too. So scientists are closely monitoring Katla to see if it, too, might go [Science News].
The one bright spot in the current explosion, say scientists, is that there may be enough aerosols in the atmosphere to cause brilliant red sunsets across Europe.
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80beats: Volcanic Eruption in Iceland Causes Floods, Shuts Down European Air Travel
Bad Astronomy: Iceland Volcano Eruption Making an Ash of Itself
DISCOVER: Disaster! The Most Destructive Volcanic Eruptions in History (photo gallery)
DISCOVER: World Versus the Volcano, how massive eruptions leave the world cold and hungry
80beats: Three Miles Down in the Carribean, the Deepest Volcanic Vents Ever Seen
80beats: Volcanoes on Venus Could Be Alive and Ready To Erupt
80beats: Congo Volcanic Eruption Threatens To Surround Native Chimps with Lava
Image: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team
You may seek perpetual motion; we're more fascinated by the (made up) principles of perpetual explosion exhibited by the BANG BOOM* Comic Book Lamp. More »
