Daily Data DumpGene Expression

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Dave Weigel is up & running at The Washington Post, covering conservative politics.

Archaeologists Uncover Land Before Wheel; Site Untouched for 6,000 Years. Of course the New World civilizations ~1492 were also pre-wheel.

Realty Check: ‘Extreme Makeover’ Downsizes Its Dream Homes. Mo money = mo problems (remember, home equal = $).

The Science of Kissing COVER! Sheril has a cover. Nice.

Today’s Social Liberal Is Tomorrow’s Social Conservative. Looking at the GSS I’ve found that conservatives of all ages tend to agree when it comes to issues like homosexuality, while liberals exhibit a split between old & young. Don’t know whether this is transitory, or a general feature of social change in the United States.

Solar Activity and the Shuttle

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Discovery takes flight. Image credit: NASA

The crew of STS-131 have been pretty busy with the inspection of the heat shield and getting ready for docking with the ISS.  I was hoping to hear something this morning because I believe I saw a piece of ice hit the, lemme think…the lower starboard side, just after the external tank separated. The ice appeared to change directions abruptly upon impact and I don’t mean to infer damage just curious is all.

Turns out there was a Ku-band radio anomaly so the inspection results were not sent to the ground.  Instead last I heard the images will be digitized and sent to the ground after docking tomorrow and everything is set for that to happen.

NASA didn’t elaborate on the Ku-band anomaly, probably just something normal.   However there has been a uptick in solar activity since the launch took place and we’ve been in an geomagnetic storm.  While it is true a geomagnetic storm can interfere with radio signals, I tend to doubt the current storm has anything to do with the radio anomaly, the frequency is just too high.

Oh the other hand — , the aurora is back!  The Boulder K hit 7, which it hasn’t done in a long time.  The activity has been tapering off some, but there have been a few further surges.  The Boulder K was at 5 this morning, I went running outside to find clouds over the northern sky.  It appears the new solar cycle is kicking in.  Normally at a Boulder K of 5 I can see a little of the aurora  and 6 or higher is usually a pretty nice show.

The Space Weather Prediction Center has a great page on viewing the aurora and you can check a chart (and map) to see what level of Planetary K index it take to produce a visible aurora at a given latitude.  You will note I am using two scales the Boulder K (KB) and Planetary K (KP) indices.  I use the Boulder K because I am more used to it.

You can get a quick look at what is going on from the SWPC in a variety of scales here.

How to Make a Bulletproof T-Shirt | Discoblog

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armoured-t-shirt-400_tcm18-176689Imagine a day in the future when a soldier could just roll out of bed, pull on a cotton T-shirt, and head out into a combat zone, without worrying about taking a bullet through the chest.

An international team of scientists from Switzerland, China, and the United States have moved one step closer towards the goal of a bulletproof T-shirt by combining cotton with boron carbide–the third hardest material known on earth and the stuff used to armor battle tanks.

Chemistry World reports:

Modern military forces use plates of boron carbide (B4C) as ceramic inserts for bulletproof clothing but these can restrict mobility, so the design of a nanocomposite — where B4C is used to reinforce another material — could provide the perfect balance of strength and flexibility.

The scientists created the new bulletproof material by cutting squares from a pure cotton T-shirt and soaking them in a solution containing boron powder and a nickel-based catalyst. Then they heated the cloth patches to 2012 degrees Fahrenheit under a stream of argon that prevented the material from burning. In the process, the cotton fibers changed to carbon fibers, which reacted with the boron powder to form “nanowires” of boron carbide. The researchers describe their breakthrough in the journal Advanced Materials.

The cloth changed color from white to black after the reaction, but remained remarkably strong, lightweight, and flexible. But cops and soldiers won’t be sporting these bulletproof T-shirts anytime soon, Chemistry World adds:

But despite the dramatic change in their properties, this type of ‘armored cotton’ is not yet ready to replace conventional bulletproof materials, such as Kevlar.

Related Content:
80beats: New Latex & Plastic Soundproofing Could Stop Even Rumbling Bass Sound
80beats: Could a Deep-Sea Snail’s Shell Inspire Next-Gen Body-Armor?
80beats: Self-Healing Coating Could Make Scratch-Proof Cars
80beats: Super-Strong Ceramic Mimics Seashells’ Tough Mother-of-Pearl Coating

Image: Xiaoding Li. The image shows the nanowire arrays in the cotton fabric, and a cross-section diagram of the carbon microfiber coated with boron carbide nanowires.


Huge Offshore Wind Network Could Solve the Calm-Day Problem | 80beats

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windmill-turbine-2

When it comes to generating clean energy, the strong offshore winds that blow in from the ocean are a great source. But while these sea breezes are often stronger than land winds, they’re not consistent; instead their force tends to ebb and flow like the tides. Wind turbines that use offshore winds to produce energy can therefore have a tough time maintaining a steady supply of power, but now scientists from the University of Delaware have proposed a novel idea on how to keep the power supply steady.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Willet Kempton and his team suggest that by connecting offshore wind farms in a long network running along the entire Eastern Seaboard, power fluctuations could be cut down, as electricity from interconnected farms would be easier to manage and more valuable than from wind at a single location [BusinessWeek]. The researchers suggest that by creating a 1,550-mile-long network of wind turbines, the network could provide power from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Kempton says linking the turbines would also help eliminate the possibility of a complete power outage should wind speeds drop in any one location. If the wind drops in North Carolina, say, power could be rerouted from somewhere else in the network where the winds are blowing strongly, scientists explain. The concept is simple: If you spread out wind stations far enough, each one will experience a different weather pattern. So it’s very unlikely that a slackening of the wind would affect all stations at once. The result is steadier power [Wired.com].

Kempton’s team proposed the idea after studying five years of offshore wind data from Florida to Maine. Simulating a series of underwater transmission cables that stretched about 1,550 miles and connected 11 stations, which they called the “Atlantic transmission grid,” scientists found that although individual stations showed erratic power supplies, the aggregate power output changed very little. Not once during the five year period studied did the overall power output drop to zero. “We took an intermittent resource and made it not intermittent anymore,” Kempton said [Wired.com].

Though the United States is the world’s largest producer of wind power, no commercial offshore wind farms are up and running yet here; Kempton’s research may provide support for the various offshore wind projects in the planning stages along the Atlantic coast. Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Standford University comments: “The technology’s there, the materials are there, we have the willpower to reduce carbon emissions, we have a reliable power supply that doesn’t lead to fuel shortage…. The next step is really to start implementing this on a large scale” [Wired.com]. However, installing cables like those Kempton used in his study to hypothetically connect the different turbines could cost as much as $1.4 billion.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: High-Flying Windmills Blow Away Their Ground-Based Cousins
80beats: Windmills on NYC Skyscrapers Sound Cool, but Wouldn’t Work
80beats: Wind Turbines Could Theoretically Power the Entire World, and Then Some
80beats: Will New York City Harness Wind Power?

Image: iStockphoto


Software Licensing: The Next Generation

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As the software industry evolves, software producers, high-tech manufacturers, and enterprises are becoming more focused on improving the management of their software license assets. Software as a service (SaaS), virtualization, and an increasing demand for granular pay-per-use pricing model

An overactive spam filterGene Expression

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It has been brought to my attention that some legitimate comments without copious linkage seem to have gotten caught in the spam filter. If your comment is legit and it isn’t showing up after a day (or, if you’ve already been approved for comments and it doesn’t show up immediately), email me.

Over rated Generator

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Hello Folks,

We have Diesel Engine generator which has been overrated,

Presently At the max the load on the engine is 20%, would you suggest any ways we can increase the load for the purpose of breakin, such as load banks used for testing the generators load testing, by doing so are we l

Action as violence

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Why in everiday life when people speak about action they reffer to acts of violence, destruction, killings and stuff like that. Are we just a bunch of "neanderthals"? Further more one question remains: How do we change this?

Watch the skies for the Shuttle and ISS | Bad Astronomy

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The Space Shuttle Discovery launched successfully yesterday, and it’s on its way to the International Space Station. It will dock with ISS tomorrow, April 7.

Until then, the Orbiter has to play catch up, slowly changing its orbit until it matches the station’s. The thing is, you may be able to watch this unfold! Both the Orbiter and the ISS are easily visible to the unaided eye, and in fact the station is potentially the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, Moon, and Venus). As they approach each other, you can see them as bright(ish) stars moving rapidly across the sky.

You can find out if they are visible to you by going to a site like Heavens-Above. Enter your latitude and longitude (try Google maps to get that) and it will put you on a page that gives you times, directions, and brightnesses (in magnitudes, so a more negative number is brighter) of a lot of different satellites. Click on ISS or STS-131 to get the station or Orbiter times.

All the good passes for the next week in Boulder, for example, are in the early morning. I suspect I’ll miss them. But check your local times and see if you can catch them! It’s an amazing sight. The picture here is one I took myself using nothing more than a digital camera on a tripod — click to embiggen it. It shows a time exposure of Atlantis and the ISS from 2007, and you can see how they are on very slightly different orbits. The two were separated by a small amount; you can tell by the different end points of the trails.

There aren’t many Shuttle flights left, so get out there and observe this while you can!


Zigbee-WiFi Hub

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Hi

I am working on a ubiquitous computing project these days. Was wondering if anyone had heard of a commercial zigbee wifi hub? Or tried to make one themselves?

Cheers!

Flash 10.1 Release Candidate Now Available For Download [Flash]

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Looks like Flash 10.1 is emerging from the beta depths and almost ready for prime time. This is particularly good news for you owners of netbooks with Broadcom Crystal HD accelerators, since now you'll be able to watch HD Flash video. The hardware video acceleration applies to Windows XP, Vista, and 7, though Mac and Linux owners are just gonna have to be patient. You can read more in the release notes here (PDF), or go get your download here. [Liliputing] More »