Conrad Foundation and ManSat Limited Join Forces

Posted on by

Conrad Foundation & ManSat Limited Expand the Spirit and Innovation Awards program on International Stage

"Officials with The Conrad Foundation today announced ManSat Limited, a global commercial space corporation headquartered on the Isle of Man , has joined with the Conrad Foundation to expand the 2010-2011 Spirit of Innovation Awards program on the international stage. ManSat will sponsor a national competition on the Isle of Man from which one finalist team will participate in the annual awards competition, which gives high school students the opportunity to design, develop and commercialize innovative products that help solve challenges of the 21st century."

Finally! A Self-Sustaining, Sewage-Processing, Poop-Powered Rocket | Discoblog

Posted on by

rocketToday’s sewage is tomorrow’s rocket fuel–at least, according to Stanford researchers. Raw sewage has long posed a problem for scientists who aim to get rid of it. That’s because the chemical byproduct of the bacteria that break down waste is nitrous oxide–a greenhouse gas also known as laughing gas.

The proposed solution? Using the nitrous oxide produced by waste as rocket fuel, of course, according to Popular Science:

“[The] rocket thruster, which was designed for use in spacecraft, can consume the excess nitrous oxide to produce heat. In a Stanford press release, [researcher] Cantwell says the nitrous oxide can heat an engine to almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and expel nitrogen and oxygen at 5,000 feet per second.”

Hot oxygen and nitrogen are far less harmful to the environment than nitrous oxide, and the methane that also is produced can help power other wastewater plants, the researchers say. This method, in which bacteria break down the waste in the absence of oxygen, is faster and cheaper than letting sewage decompose in an oxygenated environment, in which “wastewater treatment plants pump oxygen into a roiling mix of raw sewage, to encourage good bacteria to break down organic matter.”

So the next time you head to the bathroom, remember that your contribution could one day prove valuable to rocket scientists. Just another reason to flush with pride.

Image: flickr / ecsuecsu

Related content:
Discoblog: Buzz Aldrin Explains: How to Take a Whiz on the Moon
Discoblog: A Novel Geoengineering Idea: Increase the Ocean’s Quotient of Whale Poop
Discoblog: The Coolest Carnivorous Plant/Toilet Plant You’ll See This Week


Pipe coatine wastage estimation

Posted on by

HI , We got a project of coating pipes 2" dia and 800 sq.m total area . we have encountered wastage of 60% of paint . we are using Graco extreme with Nozzle size 219

any idea what is the industry standard for pipe wastage percetage , how to reduce the wastage . Thanks

Why Keep Your Body? Help Yourself to Big Muscles, Cyborg Limbs, and a Big Booty | Science Not Fiction

Posted on by

Colonel Quaritch with his best friend
Colonel Quaritch and his exoskeleton from Avatar

Science fiction is sometimes a playground to explore what it would be like to have a different body. Most recently, in Avatar and Iron Man 2 we saw people joined to exoskeletons, which are being developed in real life for the military and for rehabilitation. The biomechanics of these exoskeletons are a close mimic of our own but with much more power or size. In Avatar, we also witnessed people experience the novelty of inhabiting a three-meter-tall blue body with movable ears and a neural interface that conveniently doubles as a tail.

But why wait for the shapeshifting future? Corsets and girdles are the best known types of “foundation garments” or “shapewear,” but for me at least, they are more Jane Eyre than Madonna, despite the latter’s use of them in her performances over the past twenty years.

For those who actually use shapewear on a day-to-day basis, the most common types must be the padded bra and shoulder pads. But the past week highlighted two new ways of changing the shape of our body. The first was in a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Dodes on padded panties that promise to give Beyoncé-level gluteus maximi to the large behind-inclined; the second is from Sylvester Stallone’s comment that “action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on.”

booty_before_afterThree cheers to Stallone for bringing male shapewear to our attention. Besides those sometimes unsettling codpieces we see when we watch ballerinos perform the Nutcracker, it turns out that you can purchase just about as many kinds of shape enhancing undergarments for men–bottoms and tops–as for women. Unlike the “Booty Pops” talked about in the WSJ article, which are available at Walgreens and Bed Bath and Beyoncé Beyond, these are not quite as readily available, however (or so I’m told).

Changing our body and face shape is an old past time, of course but shapewear now seems an especially timely approach as a form of body shaping on the cheap, with no trainer or surgery required. In words that would make the hover-chaired human blimps of Wall-E eat another banana split, these two new types of shapewear have already been tied to freedom from the misery of physical movement. Stallone now realizes that he “didn’t have to go to the gym for all those years,” while Booty Pop’s website celebrates that “No expensive surgery or overpriced trainer required.” This is body-shaping custom-tailored for the calorically abundant and economically depressed times of Homo sedentarius.

hover_chair

The mass embrace of the Booty Pop, to choose my words carefully, hints at a new stance toward the human body as human scaffold. It’s a fitting preamble to the future envisaged by sci-fi, when robotic augmentation or more radical reshaping of our body shape through genetics may come to pass. My personal hope is that I’ll have a chance to be an octopus in some future life, so that I can answer emails with two tentacles while using others for stuffing my clam-hole with deep fried cheese, doing an experiment, and lifting barbells. Or maybe I’ll just get Octobooty Pop instead.


Study: The Brains of Storytellers And Their Listeners Actually Sync Up | 80beats

Posted on by

BrainYou may be talking and I may be listening, but our brains look strikingly similar.

That’s the conclusion of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. After conducting brain scans of a woman telling a story off the cuff and then of 11 people listening to a recording of her, researchers Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson say they found that the same parts of the brains showed activation at the same time, suggesting a deep connection between talker and listener.

Graduate student Lauren Silbert was the team’s storytelling guinea pig. She recounted tales of high school, like deciding whom to take to prom, while undergoing an fMRI scan.

As Silbert spoke about her prom experience, the same areas lit up in her brain as in the brains of her listeners. In most brain regions, the activation pattern in the listeners’ brains came a few seconds after that seen in Silbert’s brain. But a few brain areas, including one in the frontal lobe, actually lit up before Silbert’s, perhaps representing listeners’ anticipating what she was going to say next, the team says [ScienceNOW].

When the neuroscientists scanned the same listeners while they heard a story in Russian that they couldn’t understand, the coupling of brain regions didn’t show up.

The study certainly comes with caveats: Its sample size is small, and scientists don’t know exactly what causes the synchronization, nor the exact function of the brain regions in question to any more specificity than “language.” But Stephens and Hasson argue that their findings speak to conceptual common ground people must meet to make conversation possible:

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain” [Wired.com].

The findings leave neuroscientists with a host of directions in which they could go. Hasson says his team’s next step is to go beyond one talker and a bunch of listeners and actually study people engaged in dialogue.

Related Content:
80beats: Boom Boom Krak-oo! Have Monkeys Demonstrated Syntax?
80beats: Electrodes Stuck in the Brain Show How Thoughts Become Speech
80beats: TV Can Slow Language Development, Even in the Background
DISCOVER: Why Has Steven Pinker Studied Verbs for 20 Years?

Image: iStockphoto


Website Details Needed

Posted on by

There is one RTU in One of the GOSP ,we will be doing some revamp work for the GOSP

RTU Make is Haris Controls Australia Ltd

Westronic Australia ,

can anyone plz provide the contact details

I have tried google but not much help

Regards

Jose

High Speed and Lockout Trip Relays

Posted on by

hi all,

what can we use instead of with electromecanique reset high speed and lockout trip relays.

they are very expensive

GE HSA :

AREVA MVAJ : 500 EURO

what is the best and cheapest solve ?

thanks ahead for your reply

Effect of File Name on Data Recovery

Posted on by

This is regarding the names of files and folders we use in windows to identify the matter inside it.

There was discussion on the topic and someone told that it is difficult to recover the files/folders with names which contains special characters such as "-" Dash, "." dot, " " space etc.

Bad Universe coming to a Discovery Channel near you | Bad Astronomy

Posted on by

[I know I already posted this, but the video of the trailer had to be taken down, fixed, and put back up, so I'm reposting to give everyone a chance to actually watch it. Everything works now. Yay! Also, it's up on reddit (actually twice) and Fark, too.]

Finally, at last, after many months, I can now officially reveal the Sooper Sekrit Project that has kept me so busy over all this time. I think you’re gonna like this… so why not just jump right in to the teaser trailer posted online by a small TV network you may have heard of called THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL!

[evil laugh]

How ’bout that?

I’ve been working with the Discovery Channel on hosting a new TV science show called "Phil Plait’s Bad Universe". It’s a three-part program where I dissect issues in astronomy and science, putting claims to the test. There’s no air date yet, but I’m hoping it’ll be on your TV sets this fall.

As you can see in the trailer, the first episode is about asteroid impacts, and we tackle the issue in a way that I don’t think has been done on TV. I get right into the mix, blowing things up, flying in a jet, going where the action is so that I can participate in experiments with scientists and try to find out what works and what doesn’t. The idea here is not to have some dry, narrated documentary. Instead I will show you what’s going on, take you along, so that you can see how these things work and what we’re doing to investigate these issues.

I’ve been having a tremendous time filming this, flying around the country, seeing things I ordinarily would never get to see. And the beauty is, you can come too!

Eventually I’ll post some pictures I’ve taken on this adventure, and we’ll be posting more video online as well as more information about the show soon. I’d like to thank everyone at Discovery Channel and Morningstar Entertainment for giving me this chance to fulfill a long-standing dream of mine. We’ve worked very hard on this program, and I hope you like it.

Yay!


Jellyfish eye genes suggest a common origin for animal eyes | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Posted on by

Cladomena

Jellyfish may seem like simple blobs but some have surprisingly sophisticated features, including eyes. These are often just light-sensitive pits but species like the root-arm medusa have complex ‘camera’ eyes, with a lens that focuses light onto a retina. Not only are these organs superficially similar to ours, they’re also constructed from the same genetic building blocks.

Hiroshi Suga from the University of Basel has been studying the eyes of the root-arm medusa (Cladonema radiatum). His work strongly suggests that all animal eyes share a common origin, whether they belong to a human or an insect, an octopus or a jellyfish. The details may be different but they’re all under the control of closely related ‘master genes’ that themselves evolved from a common ancestor.

As you might imagine, growing an eye is a complicated business and involves a huge alliance of different genes, switching on and off in a coordinated way. But in humans and other animals, this alliance all comes under the control of a master gene called Pax-6. Pax-6 was discovered in 1994 by Walter Gehring, who also led the current Cladonema study. Faulty copies can cause serious eye problems in animals as diverse as flies and rodents. And activating the gene in the wrong part of the body can produce eyes where they really shouldn’t exist, like the leg of a fly.

Pax-6 is so important that it’s largely the same in very distantly related animals (the technical term is ‘conserved’). You can take the version of Pax-6 from a mouse and shove it into a fly, and it will still be able to trigger the development of an eye. Even though these misplaced eyes have been activated by a mouse gene, they have the compound structure of typical fly eyes. This underlies the role of Pax-6 as a conductor – its job is to coordinate an orchestra of other eye-producing genes.

Pax-6 is just one of a number of closely related Pax genes. Cladonema doesn’t have a direct equivalent of Pax-6 but it does have three Pax genes of its own, each belonging to a distinct lineage. Only one of these – Pax-A – is actually active in the eyes and Suga clearly showed it’s the jellyfish’s master eye gene. When he transferred it into a fruit fly, he managed to trigger the development of eyes on odd body parts.

Cladonema isn’t the only jellyfish with complex eyes. Another one called Tripedelia belongs to a different group of jellies altogether and it too has a master eye gene called Pax-B, which belongs to a different group to either Pax-A or Pax-6. These three groups of genes evolved shortly after the very dawn of animal evolution from a single ancestral gene that duplicated itself several times. Its copies diverged into the different Pax groups.

So three groups of animals build their eyes using related master eye genes: the hydrozoan jellyfish, represented by Cladonema, use Pax-A; the cubozoan jellies, represented by Tripedelia, use Pax-B; and the bilaterians, including humans and the vast majority of other animals, use Pax-6.

You could argue that this means animal eyes evolved independently at least three times. But Suga disagrees – if this was the case, you might expect the master genes to be recruited from different gene families. As it is, they’re all Pax genes. Instead, Suga thinks that the building blocks of all animal eyes share a common origin. It’s a view that runs counter to the common assertion that animal eyes evolved many times independently but it’s one that Gehring has been championing for years.

When the common ancestor of jellyfish and more complex animals initially evolved eyes, Suga thinks they were under the control of several different Pax genes from the various families. As the bilaterians, hydrozoans and cubozoans diverged from one another, their eye programs eventually fell under the control of single Pax genes from different families. This shared origin explains why genes from one Pax group can still perform the role of genes from the others, and why Cladonema’s Pax-A can produce eyes in a fly.

Eye-evolutionThe evolution of Pax genes. 1) An ancestral gene duplicates itself to produce different classes of Pax genes. 2) The ancestral animal eye evolves under the control of several different classes of Pax genes. 3) In three different animal groups, the Hydrozoa and Cubozoa (both jellyfish) and the Bilateria, eye development comes under the control of species Pax genes. 4) Some of the Pax genes in Bilaterians have been altered.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1008389107

More on eye evolution:

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here


Twitter.jpg Facebook.jpg Feed.jpg Book.jpg

Rethinking the Automobile

Posted on by

90-95 percent of all cars carry just one person, particularly during rush hours when traffic is at its worst. Sleek, lightweight vehicles have many advantages: superior fuel economy, lower emissions, new design perspectives, and lean production potential. We are talking 80 to 110 mpg with sm

Design of a Trolly

Posted on by

I am willing to design a trolly with 4 tyres and two axle to carry different equipments such as bulk meter, filter vessel, small tank of capacity 60 lits , ect... the total load for these equipments could be about 400 - 500 kg.

The trolly will be designed as portable filling station,