cafecuriosity

When Monsters Lie Beneath

One of the constants emerging from the various Government responses to the War on Terror is their increased demands for access to hitherto private information and their assurances that they can be trusted. Here's a blast from the past that gives cause to pause. During the years 1946 through to 1972, Government and their militaries around the world dumped 300,000 tonnes of active chemical weapons into the oceans. Unfortunately, over the years, various militaries appear to have lost touch with much of these weapons dumps. Shambolic record keeping, dodge locations, inaccurate navigation dog the development of precise maps showing the locations of the major dumping sites. In theory, if the weapons leak, the chemical will dissolve in the seawater until they become so diluted they pose no threat - in theory! Result - a series of Easter egg hunts for the submerged menaces. Latest in to join the undersea hunt are researchers from the University of Hawaii who are looking for munitions dumped "about five miles south of Pear Harbour," a search involving 60 square miles of ocean. Anyone for some tropical sea air and a spot of adventure diving?

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19726482.800-dumped-chemical-weapons-missing-at-sea.html   Image: 1. Inspectling World War II vintage chemical weapons, 2. Post World War II chemical weapon stockpile, www.aliciapatterson.org

Putting the Bite on A Migration Theory

Paleontologists are odd creatures. They look for windows onto the past in remote rock deposits; take years to excavate a site then prize the fossils from rock only to have to make sense of a jumble of bones or in this case just a skull. Such are the foundations for many closely clenched scientific theories. Dinosaurs are now part of our vocabulary and one iconic media image is a stately migration of duck-billed dinosaurs wandering into the sunset. 75 million years ago, the U.S. was cut in two by a warm shallow sea. Utah, home of the Grand Staircase fossil deposits was hemmed in by sea to its east and towering mountains to the west, so any migration didn't take long. The preconceptions about the Late Cretaceous ecology increasingly didn't fit with the evidence emerging from the Utah badlands. The discovery of Gryposaurus monumentensis along with a dozen or so dinosaur species new to science caused paleontologists to pose a new question, "How did so many big vegetarian dinosaurs coexist in such a compact area." As with any good dinosaur story, serendipity and paradox caught part of the action. G. monumentensis' skull was found by in 2002 a Pennsylvania furniture maker volunteer doing field work for the Alf Museum - notable for being the only nationally accredited paleontology museum located on a high school campus! By 2004, they'd excavated G. monumentensis' massive skull. By 2005, researchers realised they had a unique beastie on their benches - the T. Rex of vegetarians - one paleontologist even described it as, "the Arnold Schwarzenegger of duck-billed dinosaurs!" With over 300 teeth good to go and another 500 ready if needed, no shrub was safe from this vegie bandit! Question, "What kind of vegetation demanded that amount of chewing power?" I'm guessing it wasn't clover!   http://unews.utah.edu/p/?r=092707-1   Image: 1. Reconstruction of Gryposaurus monumentensis, University of Utah, Larry Felder 2. Gryposaurus monumentensis skull, University of Utah

Under a Spooky Southern Sky

An interesting aspect of serendipity's role in fostering discovery is its interdependencies with human perception and timing. Breakthroughs are often missed (or dismissed) at first blush, or lie obscured in a swamp of information. Astronomers have been messing about with the Parks radio telescope since it was commissioned in 1961. Known to locals as 'The Dish', it provides a flood of raw data which waits patiently for analysis. Just how dependent we are on fortune and a prepared mind surfaced recently when an undergraduate at the Western Virginia University was trawling through six year old data. He came across a massive burst of radio energy. Given the distance from the star, (one and a half billion light years - or a lot!), the burst was startlingly strong. At the time, less imaginative minds mistook it for man-made interference, the data was quietly archived and nothing more was heard about it - until now! Such is the stuff of scientific discovery. This latest discovery has eerie similarities with how we tripped over the existence of gamma-ray radiation in the 1970's. It was the time of the nuclear test ban treaty and the U.S. launched a gaggle of satellites to sniff out Soviet breaches of the treaty. The satellites didn't detect any radiation emanating from Earth but uncovered a blizzard of gamma-ray radiation flashes in outer space. This discovery spawned the field of astrophysics and lead to theories explaining the formation of black holes.  This latest accidental discovery is itself tipped to kick off a whole new field of astrophysics! So much for targeted research spending. How many more discoveries are lurking about under terabytes of data?   http://www.csiro.au/news/EnergyBurst.html   Image: CSIRO Australia

When Too Much Is Enough

Maybe it's me but news that the Cassini spacecraft had discovered Saturn's sixtieth moon didn't exactly rock me. This was Cassini's fifth moon. Let's be honest, after the first few moons, its all downhill. At Cassin's launch in 1997, we knew of just 18 moons orbiting Saturn. By any definition, that's a knowledge explosion! Question is, how long will it be before all the data and information gathered is analysed? Does data take on a life of its' own? Having discovered these moons, are we now honour bound to explore all 42 new moons? What is more important, the individual moons or how the Saturn's rings and moon interact and influence each other on a system basis? That's a lot of complexity to sift through considering they're just ice and rock. On the other hand, keeping tabs on each moon's location does make for a less eventful space mission. Collisions being all very untidy and such.  http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassinif-20070719.html   Image: Saturn's sixtieth moon (red), NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Virtual Fencing

As a little takker growing up on the family farm, one of my chores was to bring the milking cows up from the bottom paddock each evening. Luckily, the girls knew the way better than I did and wandered along at their own sweet pace, oblivious to my encouragement or the stick I brandished (which was usually bigger than I was). It was one of those virtual jobs you do when you're four and living on a farm. The CSIRO however have taken livestock control to a new level with their new virtual fencing system. The prototype uses software driven electronic collars linked to a GPS unit. The collars emit a sound (kind of like I did!) when the unit's program determines the cattle are approaching a designated boundary. In about an hour, the cattle learn where their virtual limits are, as cattle do and avoid the boundary line. Its an interesting example of how technology can transform the nature of work and shift the underlying economics in industries undergoing transition. You can also understand why the Bush wants decent comm links - bandwidth matters. Fencing paddocks is hard, tough work; it's expensive and requires maintenance and replacement over time - particularly after a bushfire. It will be interesting to see if the collars prove to be cost effective. Only downside is that a beeping collar lacks the aesthetics of Swiss cow bells!   http://www.csiro.au/news/VirtualFencingMediaRelease.html   Image: 1. Dr Caroline Lee and Dr Andrew Fisher with an electronic collar, The Land 2. CSIRO's satellite based 'virtual fencing' system, CSIRO

Flat Power

Discovery is often depicted as a self-perpetuating surge, each emergent phase stimulated by advances across related and unrelated fields or by the lateral application of existing technologies or ideas. Our post-industrial cultures have been defined by our enduring lust for reliable sources of power. The potential offered by the next generation (or 2) of portable electronic devices inspired researchers at Waseda University in Japan to design a new flexible battery. The thing actually flexes like a sheet of paper! At the core of their design is a 200 nanometre thick redox-active organic polymer film with nitroxide radical groups acting as charge carriers. (Yep, I have no idea what that means but it sounds suitably complicated). It takes about 1 minute to fully recharge and the lab has achieved a life of over 1,000 cycles. So far, so good. Now stay with me for this; the thin polymer film is made using "a soluble polymer with the radical groups attached is 'spin-coated' onto a surface. After UV radiation, the polymer then becomes crosslinked with the help of a bisazide coating agent." Expect to see the organic radical battery popping up in pocket-sized integrated circuit cards for memory storage and micro-processing within the next three years, assuming they can commercialise the design and get the production economics right. http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2007/flexiblebatterypower.asp

Image: Paper-like polymer based rechargeable battery, Waseda University

They Said It Wouldn't Work

Data storage appears set to just keep on expanding. Simon Bending and Simon Crampin of University of Bath have discovered a way to precisely control magnetic field patterns in very thin magnetic films. Their 'spintronic' devices, using high energy beams of gallium ions to precisely control the direction of magnetic fields in cobalt film just a few atoms thick. For the first time, data will be written and read using only electrical currents meaning computers will never lose memory even if it suffers a power cut. Ironically, the team was told their method probably wouldn't work, but they persevered and it did! How often have we heard that! For baffling boffin talk, explaining just how the gadget works, visit: http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/articles/releases/spintronic061206.html

Image: Professor Simon Bending and Dr Simon Crampin, University of Bath

Two-Photon 3-D Optical Data Storage

Records management folk and librarians the world over were looking all misty and dreamy after news that a University of Central Florida Chemistry Professor Kevin Belfield and his team had developed a technology that would allow entire libraries to be recorded and stored on a single disk or small cube. Belfield's Two-Photon 3-D Optical Data Storage system (the marketing people are onto the name thing), both records and reads data in photochromatic materials. Previously, techies could record the data but not read it, which even for chemists seemed less than useful! Belfield's process involves shooting 2 different wavelengths of light onto the recording surface, creating a sharp image while compacting the data. Belfield's team cracked the readability issue by tuning light to specific colours to read the data. Blu-Ray technology touted as the next generation optical format stores 25 GB on a single layer disk and 50GB on dual layers. Belfield's technology enables recording on multiple layers giving a capacity of 1,000 GB with high-definition quality! Even for me that's a lot of stuff - problem is, how are they going to jam a cube into an iPod? http://news.ucf.edu/UCFnews/index?page=article&id=0024004105bd60439010c0c76ce2f00409b

Image: Professor Kevin Belfield, Jerry Klein

Screaming Jets

We all like to make sense of what happens to us. It's almost a physical need.  This is especially in cases involving highly traumatic experiences. For all our technology, we still in our heart of hearts need to KNOW! So it was interesting to read an account of a Purdue University team's advanced simulation of the effects of a jet airliner crashing into the World Trade Center's North Tower on September 11, 2001. The simulation took 80 hours to produce and required the equivalent of 128 personal computers in a 'nano-regatta' computer developed by IBM. It analyses in aching detail how many I-beam columns were destroyed in the crash and how the structure reacted to the extreme heat generated by the post-crash fires. On an emotive level, there is something eerie in seeing the physical structures of a plane and a tower reduced to mathematical representations before being whanged together. On a theoretical level, the researchers believe, "we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity." Now I can't help thinking that at a macro level we already knew that. However, it illustrates just how powerful our belief in causality is and just how strong is the human need to know the "why" of what happens to us. http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2006/060911.Sozen.WTC.html

Image: Purdue University Department of Computer Science

Perils of Information Storage

In an era of information super abundance, it's easy to under-estimate the long term implications of archiving, storage and conservation. How much of our social and corporate history has vanished simply because we lack the readers to access information stored on obsolete mediums or has allowed information to degrade due to budgetary or resource constraints? This issue was put into perspective for CafeCuriosity by the simple story of a team from Rochester University of Technology who digitally restored a 700-year old Hindu sacred text written by Shri Madvacharya (1238-1317) in Sanskrit on palm-leaf. Known as the Sarvamoola granthas it is a collection of 36 works outlining Madvacharya's Dvaita philosophy of the meaning of life and the role of God. Sadly, 15% of the manuscript is missing and every time the book is opened, part of it crumbles into dust. The processed images will be stored electronically, published in books and stored on silicon wafers. Both fire and water-proof, silicon wafers are ideal archival media and can be read using a (very strong) magnifying glass if push comes to shove! As a final tease, no one knows just how accurate existing translations of the Sarvamoola granthas are. Talk about experiencing eerie echoes of past bad corporate decision making! Wonder what our descendents will inherit in 700 years? http://www.thetigerbeat.com/news/?r=imaging-technology-restores-700-year-old-sacred-hi

Image: Roger Easton, Rochester Institute of Technology and Keith Knox, Boeing LTS.